Great Art? ... Great Love!

Among the men of art are those who took nature as their inspirer; others took war, or the sea, or toyed with light and shadow. But among them too are many who drew their inspiration from woman in what they painted, and their canvases came as the fruit of their relations with a company of women at whose characters and identities the prudish bare their teeth and knit their brows whenever these are mentioned in their hearing.

For the artists' relations with the inspiring "models," who were to them not wives but mistresses, were in most cases not innocent... and the artists did not seek to hide this truth or disguise it. Yet some of them, like Rembrandt, would not have hesitated to marry his mistress had circumstances allowed.

Still, there is in the canvases, in spite of all that, an innocence and a purity which we — and the prudish themselves as well — cannot but acknowledge and savor. For this reason the canvases have lived immeasurably longer than the glib tattle about the women who inspired them; and for this reason those mortal women have been made immortal, and will remain immortal so long as there is in the universe a color to be seen and a taste to be felt...

The custom, in the history of art and the lives of artists, is that these men suffer every kind of torment and disappointment for years, long or short, after which they reach the threshold of glory, and fame rises in their sensitive hands.

With Rembrandt the pattern was reversed. After enjoying a brief spell of fame, he had to spend the rest of his life wretched and miserable.

By the year 1656 Rembrandt had lost his first wife, his stately mansion, and his friends and patrons in Amsterdam, and was living in the filthy poor quarters. There was no one with him, to share that life of misery, but a dark-complexioned country girl, with a fresh face and a full figure, sadness traced in her eyes, named Hendrickje Stoffels. She came to his house a servant, and settled in it a mistress. She was illiterate, and in large measure simple and silly, but she understood the reach of Rembrandt's genius, and she was faithful as a saint, and consecrated herself to him.

Rembrandt loved her more than he loved fame and more than he loved money, and he painted her over and over again: he painted her in the guise of Venus, of Flora, and of Bathsheba, and he took her as the model for his two masterpieces, "A Woman Bathing" and "The Painter's Studio." In her he was painting the woman whose beauty is not confined to outward appearances — the woman in whom tranquility is embodied, and from whom the fears of life fall back slain.

And Hendrickje stayed with him, caring for him, nursing him, washing the dirty clothes on which he used to wipe his brushes! She bore him a daughter. And it is worth recording that her love for the artist, and her esteem for him, reached such a point that it moved Rembrandt's son by his first wife to respect his father's mistress and grow attached to her, just as his father respected her and was attached to her.

As moths hover about candles, so do tales hover about the life of Francisco Goya. His life, from his birth in Spain to his death in France at the age of 82, was a chain of events and adventures: in it were duels, and street brawls, and flights from the authorities, and affairs of the heart. But the outstanding event of his whole life was his love for the Duchess of Alba, the greatest woman in the Spain of her age, who possessed a benumbing beauty, a fortune beyond reckoning, a string of titles, and a spirit that was all freedom and abandon. A contemporary French marquis described her in these words: "There is not one hair on the Duchess of Alba's head that does not stir desire! And there is not a woman on earth who has attained, or could attain, the beauty she has attained!"

Goya painted her for the first time in 1795, when she was in her thirty-third year, with a pair of eyes that struck men down, and clouds of jet-black hair upon her; Goya was then nearing fifty, with a wife and children, and deafness was about to take possession of him.

A little after that Goya painted the greatest of his canvases: "The Naked Maja" (by the word maja is meant: the merry flirt — or a little more than that...!) — and all who saw the picture realized that the woman reclining so seductively on the silken couches was none other than the Duchess of Alba! And when, shortly afterward, another canvas by Goya appeared, of the same woman and in the same pose, only dressed in garments so nearly transparent that they veiled nothing of her charms, the tongues of the court began to wag...! Especially since the duchess used to go to Goya's studio herself, and alone — a thing that was not customary in Spain, and that invited contempt and disapproval.

It is told that the Duke of Alba heard of the nude painting without having seen it; rage took full hold of him, and he rushed off to the insolent artist, sword in hand. But word had already reached Goya's ears that the duke was furious, so he made haste and painted the second canvas; and when the duke came to him, he showed him the new painting, claiming he had painted no other, and insisting that whoever examined the face closely would see that its features did not altogether match the features of the duchess!

When the duke died in 1796, Goya deserted his wife and spent long months with the duchess in her palace. Six years later the duchess died a sudden death — and the tale has it that Queen Maria Luisa, eaten up with envy, poisoned her...! It is also recalled that Goya made a picture portraying Maria Luisa, and put into her features the ugliest meanings that can pass through an imagination — so that many wondered how he was not killed or punished afterward. He gave that picture of his the name "She Who Says: Yes — to Everyone"...!

...And among the duchess's precious effects there was found a genuine treasure which she had surrounded with every care and attention: the twin rarities, Goya's two canvases — the naked, and the clothed as if naked...!

Once only did fortune smile materially on the outcast artist Paul Gauguin: on his arrival in France in 1893, returning from Tahiti. He learned that an uncle of his had died (at the right moment, as Gauguin said!) and had left him thirteen thousand francs. Gauguin sent part of the money to his wife and children in Denmark, and set up a studio for himself in Paris, decorating its walls with implements of hunting and combat.

And in the studio he installed a Javanese girl, named Anna, with bronze skin, whom he had met in Montmartre. Gauguin painted her as a queen of the South Seas, mounted on a blue throne, while his little monkey leapt from place to place about the room, on whose door he had carved, in the language of Tahiti: "Here is love...!"

After a time Gauguin carried Anna and the monkey off to the province of Brittany. There a brawl broke out in which the artist tangled with some sailors, and in it he was wounded. Gauguin was still on his sickbed when Anna fled from him and made for Paris, where she plundered everything of value in Gauguin's studio, and vanished...!

And so Gauguin's accustomed poverty came back to him. He traveled afterward to Tahiti, where he died eight years later, alone, hurried to his end by disease.

Andrea del Sarto grew up poor, a tailor's son in Florence. From his boyhood he was placed with a well-known artist, and his gifts soon began to show themselves; he was able to win a name for himself and to secure for his family their bread and their needs.

Until he met Lucrezia del Fede...!

She was the wife of a hatter, and she was young, all allure and temptation; one contemporary described her by saying that her greatest pleasure was to captivate the hearts of men!

And Andrea allowed himself to be captivated...! He abandoned his art, left his parents, and consecrated himself to his mistress.

Not much time passed before the husband died suddenly, and without anyone knowing of what disease; and Andrea married his widow.

At that point Lucrezia began to reveal her true nature. She set about inflicting on her artist husband the cruelest kinds of torment, took to attacking his pupils and mocking them, and began to form liaisons