The Moon and Sixpence

Chapter XLIV
A 
CERTAIN
IMPORTANCE
attaches to the views on art
of painters, and this is the natural place for me
to set down what I know of Strickland’s opin-
ions of the great artists of the past. I am afraid I
have very little worth noting. Strickland was not
a conversationalist, and he had no gift for put-
ting what he had to say in the striking phrase
that the listener remembers. He had no wit. His
humour, as will be seen if I have in any way suc-
ceeded in reproducing the manner of his conver-
sation, was sardonic. His repartee was rude. He
made one laugh sometimes by speaking the
truth, but this is a form of humour which gains
its force only by its unusualness; it would cease
to amuse if it were commonly practised.
Strickland was not, I should say, a man of great
intelligence, and his views on painting were by
no means out of the ordinary. I never heard him
speak of those whose work had a certain anal-
ogy with his own — of Cezanne, for instance, or
of Van Gogh; and I doubt very much if he had
ever seen their pictures. He was not greatly in-
terested in the Impressionists. Their technique
impressed him, but I fancy that he thought their
attitude commonplace. When Stroeve was hold-
ing forth at length on the excellence of Monet,
he said: “I prefer Winterhalter.” But I dare say
he said it to annoy, and if he did he certainly
succeeded.
I am disappointed that I cannot report any ex-
travagances in his opinions on the old masters.
There is so much in his character which is strange
that I feel it would complete the picture if his
views were outrageous. I feel the need to ascribe
to him fantastic theories about his predecessors,
and it is with a certain sense of disillusion that I
confess he thought about them pretty much as
does everybody else. I do not believe he knew El
Greco. He had a great but somewhat impatient
admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him,

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172
The Moon and Sixpence
and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He de-
scribed the impression that Rembrandt made on
him with a coarseness I cannot repeat. The only
painter that interested him who was at all unex-
pected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little
about him at that time, and Strickland had no
power to explain himself. I remember what he
said about him because it was so unsatisfactory.
“He’s all right,” said Strickland. “I bet he
found it hell to paint.”
When later, in Vienna, I saw several of Peter
Brueghel’s pictures, I thought I understood why
he had attracted Strickland’s attention. Here, too,
was a man with a vision of the world peculiar to
himself. I made somewhat copious notes at the
time, intending to write something about him,
but I have lost them, and have now only the rec-
ollection of an emotion. He seemed to see his fel-
low-creatures grotesquely, and he was angry with
them because they were grotesque; life was a
confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit
subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrow-
ful to laugh. Brueghel gave me the impression of
a man striving to express in one medium feelings
more appropriate to expression in another, and it
may be that it was the obscure consciousness of
this that excited Strickland’s sympathy. Perhaps
both were trying to put down in paint ideas which
were more suitable to literature.
Strickland at this time must have been nearly
forty-seven.

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Somerset Maugham