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Updated: September 30, 2025
The only decorations not in good taste were the screaming chromos which Don Timoteo had substituted for the old drawings and pictures of saints of Capitan Tiago. Simoun had been unable to dissuade him, for the merchant did not want oil-paintings some one might ascribe them to Filipino artists! He, a patron of Filipino artists, never!
The books were neatly arranged, and splendidly bound, many of them in Russia leather, as the odour of the room testified. Between the book-cases, the wall-paper was dark crimson, and there were a few really good oil-paintings. The fireplace was of white marble, handsomely carved, with Bacchantes, and Silenus on his donkey not very appropriate guardians of a sea-coal fire.
Marie Laurencin's painting is adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity so well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering it in an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist she is not even the best woman painter alive. His oil-paintings are another matter.
The hall, which used to be Moorish, was now hung with tapestry, and furnished in old oak; the drawing-room was yellow instead of blue, with a big brocade-covered couch and a Chappell piano; the dining-room had rows of book-cases and some good oil-paintings; the morning-room was a cheerful chintz boudoir with a gilt mirror and Chippendale chairs; the conservatory was full of choice flowers, and an aviary had been added to it.
At one time she had known a painter, a professor of painting in a school near her home. He adorned the walls of her drawing-room with five large oil-paintings, done on the plaster of the wall and reaching from the ceiling to very near the floor.
The doorway was a marvel of ornate sculpture, and he liked it. He liked, too, the effect of the oil-paintings mainly portraits on the walls, and the immensity of the brass fender, and the rugs, and the leather-work of the chairs. But there could be no question that the room was too dark for the taste of any householder clever enough to know the difference between a house and a church.
It was simply a manifestation of rage and a means of appeasement. Some people like cups and saucers: Cézanne preferred oil-paintings, and his own were always to hand. It is surprising that M. Vollard should not have made this more clear, for he certainly understood the genius and character of Cézanne.
They moved easily between Turkey carpets and sculptured ceilings; their eyes grew used to the eternal vision of themselves and other slow-moving dignities in gilt mirrors, to the heaviness of great oil-paintings of picturesque scenery, to the indications of surreptitious dirt behind massive furniture, to the grey-brown of the shirt-fronts of the waiters, to the litter of trays, boots and pails in long corridors; their ears were always awake to the sounds of gongs and bells.
Debrosses praises these mosaic altar-pieces extravagantly, and even expresses the opinion that they are probably superior in point of colour to the originals from which they are copied. In execution they are certainly wonderful, and many a stranger looks at them and passes on, believing them to be oil-paintings.
All the chairs had little lace squares where one's head should rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they had been read some and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision of the battered old library at home, with her father's huge medical books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still luxurious to dream in.
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