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Updated: June 7, 2025
He couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay. But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by accident upon his grand discovery.
At Cherbourg, he set to work once more, no doubt painting more "pot-boilers" for the respectable shop-keepers of the neighbourhood complacent portraits, perhaps, of a stout gentleman with a large watch-chain fully displayed, and of a stout lady in a black silk dress and with a vacant smile; and by hook or by crook he managed to scrape together a few hundred francs, with which once more he might return to Paris.
Doing pot-boilers was easy after such a triumph as that. They even treated themselves to holidays they purchased a quart of ice-cream on one day, and hired a boat and went picnicking on another. Thyrsis got out his fiddle once again, and even became so reckless as to inquire about the price of a "practice-clavier" for Corydon.
I am told that some of them are masterpieces and the rest pot-boilers, but that no one is agreed which is which. Such an author makes an undue claim upon the little span of mortal years. Because he asks too much one is inclined to give him nothing at all. Dumas, too! I stand on the edge of him, and look at that huge crop, and content myself with a sample here and there.
Haydon yielded to her desire, but he never ceased to regret what he considered his degradation. He would have preferred to allow his friends and creditors to support himself and his family, while he worked at a canvas of unsaleable size, a proceeding that most men would regard as involving a deeper degradation than painting pot-boilers.
I have said it was long after I had read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers as they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came to know his poetry.
In Monsieur Bixiou there is, unquestionably, the makings of a great artist; but in the economy of his existence the belly has annihilated the heart and the head, and he is now and forever under the dominion of sensual appetites; he is riveted to the condition of a caricaturist, that is to say, to the condition of a man who from day to day discounts himself in petty products, regular galley-slave pot-boilers, which, to be sure, give him a lively living, but in themselves are worthless and have no future.
She knows that the men who are forced to paint these things growl contempt over their own creations, but the very growl is a tribute to woman's supremacy. It is a great thing when woman can wring from an artist a hundred "pot-boilers," while man can only give him an order for a single "Light of the World." One field of art, indeed, woman claims for her own.
He had written his book, and it was a great book, and they knew it. But all they told him was to go and write another book and to do pot-boilers in the meantime! But that was impossible, he could not do it. He would win with the book he had written! He would make them hear him he would make them read that book!
Further, he told his visitors that they would hear from him soon, and altogether they came home so much gratified that the mother began to lose her sense of being forestalled. She was hard at work in her own way on a set of models for dinner-table ornaments which had been ordered. "Pot-boilers" had unfortunately much more success than the imaginary groups she enjoyed.
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