Page:Anecdotes of painters, engravers, sculptors and architects, and curiosities of art (IA anecdotesofpaint01spoo).pdf/150

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own wayward fancy. He had a noble, generous, and disinterested heart, but he was eccentric, improvident, and extravagant, and consequently he was always in necessitous circumstances.



STUART AND WEST.


"I used often to provoke my good old master," said Stuart to Dunlap, "though, heaven knows, without intending it. You remember the color closet at the bottom of his painting-room. One day, Trumbull and I came into his room, and little suspecting that he was within hearing, I began to lecture on his pictures, and particularly upon one then on his easel. I was a giddy, foolish fellow then. He had begun a portrait of a child, and he had a way of making curly hair by a flourish of his brush, thus, like a figure of three. "Here, Trumbull," said I, "do you want to learn how to paint hair? There it is, my boy! Our master figures out a head of hair like a sum in arithmetic. Let us see—we may tell how many guineas he is to have for this head by simple addition,—three and three make six, and three are nine, and three are twelve—" How much the sum would have amounted to, I can't tell, for just then in stalked the master, with palette-knife and palette, and put to flight my calculations. "Very well, Mr. Stuart"—he always mistered me when he was angry, as a man's wife calls him my dear, when she wishes him to the d——l,—"Very well, Mr. Stuart! very well indeed!" You may