The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [105]
The purchaser of this work was Sir Lionel Sterne.
“Honest Sir Lionel,” said my father, as he saw the great canvas packed off to Kensington Palace Gardens. “I should dearly have liked to shake his hairy paw. I can see him well—a fine, meaty fellow with a great gold watch-chain across his belly, who’s been decently employed boiling soap or smelting copper all his life, with no time to read Clive Bell. In every age it has been men like him who kept painting alive.”
I tried to explain that Lionel Sterne was the youthful and elegant millionaire who for ten years had been a leader of aesthetic fashion. “Nonsense!” said my father. “Fellows like that collect disjointed Negresses by Gauguin. Only Philistines like my work and, by God, I only like Philistines.”
There was also another, rather less reputable side to my father’s business. He received a regular yearly retaining fee from Goodchild and Godley, the Duke Street dealers, for what was called “restoration.” This sum was a very important part of his income; without it the comfortable little dinners, the trips abroad, the cabs to and fro between St. John’s Wood and the Athenaeum, the faithful, predatory Jellabys, the orchid in his buttonhole—all the substantial comforts and refinements which endeared the world and provided him with his air of gentlemanly ease—would have been impossible to him. The truth was that, while excelling at Lely, my father could paint, very passably, in the manner of almost any of the masters of English portraiture and the private and public collections of the New World were richly representative of his versatility. Very few of his friends knew this traffic; to those who did, he defended it with complete candour. “Goodchild and Godley buy these pictures for what they are—my own work. They pay me no more than my dexterity merits. What they do with them afterwards is their own business. It would ill become me to go officiously about the markets identifying my own handicraft and upsetting a number of perfectly contented people. It is a great deal better for them to look at beautiful pictures and enjoy them under a misconception about the date, than to make themselves dizzy by goggling at genuine Picassos.”
It was largely on account of his work for Goodchild and Godley that his studio was strictly reserved as a workshop. It was a separate building approached through the garden and it was excluded from general use. Once a year, when he went abroad it was “done out”; once a year, on the Sunday before sending-in day at the Royal Academy it was open to his friends. He took a peculiar pleasure from the gloom of these annual tea parties and was at the same pains to make them dismal as he was on all other occasions to enliven his entertainments. There was a species of dry, bright yellow, caraway cake which was known to my childhood as “Academy cake,” which appeared then and only then, from a grocer in Praed Street; there was an enormous Worcester tea service—a wedding present—which was known as “Academy cups”; there were “Academy sandwiches”—tiny, triangular and quite tasteless. All these things were part of my earliest memories. I do not know at what date these parties changed from being a rather tedious convention to what they certainly were to my father at the end of his life, a huge, grim and solitary jest. If I was in England I was required to attend and to bring a friend or two. It was difficult, until the last two years when, as I have said, my father became the object of fashionable interest, to collect guests. “When I was a young man,” my father said, sardonically surveying the company, “there were twenty or more of these parties in St. John’s Wood alone. People of culture drove round from three in the afternoon to six, from