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Updated: May 10, 2025
It had been offered, he remembered, at a price he had been instructed to believe the lowest ever named for a Lambinet, a price he had never felt so poor as on having to recognise, all the same, as beyond a dream of possibility. He had dreamed had turned and twisted possibilities for an hour: it had been the only adventure of his life in connexion with the purchase of a work of art.
The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars and willows, the reeds and river a river of which he didn't know, and didn't want to know, the name fell into a composition, full of felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet.
The adventure, it will be perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he WOULD have bought the particular production that had made him for the moment overstep the modesty of nature.
Three copies are known of his work called the 'Penitence of Adam. One belonged to the Royal Library of France: another was borrowed from a monastery by the Duc d'Isenghien, an enthusiastic but somewhat unscrupulous collector, and this copy was sold at the Gaignat sale in 1769; the third was the property of M. Lambinet of Brussels, and is remarkable for the miniature in which Mansion is represented as offering the book to his patron in the garden of La Gruthuyse.
"Tell me who this sketch is by," he asked, stopping before Margaret, and pointing to a small Lambinet, glowing like an opal on the dull-green wall of the studio. "I so seldom see good pictures that a gem like this is a delight. By a Frenchman! Ah! Yes, I see the subtlety of coloring. Marvellous people, these Frenchmen. And this little jewel you have here? This bit of mezzo in color.
His criticisms of her own work for he had insisted on seeing her latest picture and had even been more enthusiastic over it than he had been over Oliver's and his instant appreciation of the Lambinet, convinced her, even before he had finished the tour of the room, that the quaint old gentleman was as much at home in her atmosphere as he was in that of his shop at home discussing scientific problems with some savant.
Romance could weave itself, for Strether's sense, out of elements mild enough; and even after what he had, as he felt, lately "been through," he could thrill a little at the chance of seeing something somewhere that would remind him of a certain small Lambinet that had charmed him, long years before, at a Boston dealer's and that he had quite absurdly never forgotten.
William Hunt, the New Englander of genius, the "Boston painter" whose authority was greatest during the thirty years from 1857 or so, and with whom for a time in the early period W. J. was to work all devotedly, had prolonged his studies in Paris under the inspiration of Couture and of Edouard Frère; masters in a group completed by three or four of the so finely interesting landscapists of that and the directly previous age, Troyon, Rousseau, Daubigny, even Lambinet and others, and which summed up for the American collector and in the New York and Boston markets the idea of the modern in the masterly.
Normandy is Norman, Gascony is Gascon, but this is France itself the typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art of art, of landscape art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look in the country I seem to see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz.
It fairly, for half an hour, sent him to sleep; he pulled his straw hat over his eyes he had bought it the day before with a reminiscence of Waymarsh's and lost himself anew in Lambinet. It was as if he had found out he was tired tired not from his walk, but from that inward exercise which had known, on the whole, for three months, so little intermission.
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