The Collectors | Page 8

"The Curlews," where it bid fair to
become legendary once more, but at last had lent it with his other
pictures to the Prestonville Museum of Science and the Fine Arts, the
goal of my present quest. While the picture lay perdu at Brooks's, there
had been disquieting gossip; the Pretorian Club, which is often terribly
right in such matters, agreed that he had been badly sold. None of this I
believed for an instant. What could one doubt in a picture owned by
Mantovani and certified by Anitchkoff? Upon this point of rumination
the train stopped at Prestonville.
My approach to the masterpiece was reverently deliberate. At the
American House I actually lingered over the fried steak and dallied
long with the not impossible mince pie. Thus fortified, I followed Main
Street to the Museum--one of those depressingly correct new-Greek
buildings with which the country is being filled. Skirting with a shiver
the bleak casts from the antique in the atrium and mounting an absurdly
spacious staircase, I reached a doorway through which the chef

d'oeuvre of my dreams confronted me cheerlessly. Its nullity was
appalling; from afar I felt the physical uneasiness that an equivocal
picture will usually produce in a devotee. To approach and study it was
a civility I paid not to itself but to its worshipful provenance. A slight
inspection told all there was to tell. The paint was palpably modern; the
surface would not have resisted a pin. In style it was a distant echo of
the Giorgione at Berlin. Yet, as I gazed and wondered sadly, I
perceived it was not a vulgar forgery--indeed not a forgery at all. It had
been done to amuse some painter of antiquarian bent. I even thought,
too rashly, that I recognised the touch of the youthful Watts, and I
could imagine the studio revel at which he or another had valiantly laid
in a Giorgione before the punch, as his contribution to the evening's
merriment. The picture upon the pie wrought a black depression that
some excellent Japanese paintings were powerless to dispel. As my
train crawled up the tawny river, now inky, my thoughts moved
helplessly about the dark enigma--How could Mantovani have
possessed such rubbish? How could Anitchkoff, enjoying the use of his
eyes and mind, have credited it for a moment? My reflections
preposterously failed to rest upon the obvious clue, the mysterious
Marquesa del Puente, and it was not until I met Anitchkoff, some years
later, that I began to divine the woman in the case.
After ten years of absence he had come back to America on something
like a triumphal tour. I had promptly paid my respects and now through
a discreet persistency was to have a long evening with him at the
Pretorian. As I studied the dinner card, guessing at his gastronomic
tastes, my mind was naturally on his remarkable career. Anitchkoff,
brought from Russia in childhood, had grown up in decent poverty in a
small New England city. Very early he showed the intellectual
ambition that distinguished all the family. Our excellent public schools
made his way to the nearest country college easy and inevitable. There
began the struggle the traces of which might be read in an almost
melancholy gravity quite unnatural in a man become famous at
thirty-five. With the facility of his race he learned all the languages in
the curriculum and read ferociously in many literatures. In his junior
year the appearance of a great and genial work on psychology made
him the metaphysician he has remained through all digressions in the

connoisseurship and criticism of art. How his search for ultimate
principles involved a mastery of the minutiae of the Venetian school I
could only guess. But one could imagine the process. Seeking to
ground his personal preferences in a general esthetic, he would have
found his data absolutely untrustworthy. How could he presume to
interpret a Giorgione or a Titian when what they painted was
undetermined? Upon these shifting sands he declined to rear his
tabernacle. To the work of classifying the Venetians, accordingly, he
set himself with dogged honesty. As a matter of course Mantovani
became his chief preceptor--Mantovani who first discovered that the
highly complex organism we call a work of art has a morphology as
definite as that of a trilobite; that the artist may no more transcend his
own forms than a crustacean may become a vertebrate. For a matter of
ten years Anitchkoff, espousing a fairly Franciscan poverty, gave
himself to this ungrateful task. How he contrived to live in the shadow
of the great galleries was a mystery the solution of which one suspected
to be bitter and heroic. Gradually recognition as an expert came to him
and with it an irksome success. His fame had developed