Portrait of a Scotsman (A League of Extraordinary Women #3)(8)
His smile briefly edged out her troubles. He was so charming. In the brightly lit room, his fluffy golden hair glowed like a halo around his face. His lips were rosy and delicately drawn—if he were a girl, such a mouth would be described as a rosebud. He was very much how she imagined her favorite Austen character, Mr. Bingley, and it wasn’t a coincidence that she had chosen to work next to him during class.
“Let’s see.” He was tapping his index finger against his chin as he feigned contemplation. “Well, I know that not one painter of classical paintings has ever seen a Greek god in the flesh. Hence, I declare that no, no personal experience is required to create something delightful.”
She hesitated. Did he truly believe the purpose of art was to be delightful? But he looked so pleased with his answer … and she could feel the attention of the other students shifting their way again, like ants scurrying toward a fresh carcass. Today, it irritated her. It had taken the young men months to not murmur and stare when she showed up during the lectures. Ruskin’s general drawing class was open to the public and welcomed both men and women without further ado, but a woman properly enrolled in his actual art history lectures? Scandalous. Next she’d want the vote. She did, actually. And a woman with permission to attend the academic drawing courses in the galleries? Shocking, even with her chaperoning aunt stitched to her side. Aunty was presently taking a nap in a specially provided wicker chair, cozy in a shaft of sunlight by the nearest window, and in no position to dole out withering glances.
Hattie caught a glimpse of her Persephone, looking so boring and bored, and her stomach squirmed.
“You see,” she whispered to Lord Skeffington, ignoring the ears straining toward them, “I read an essay by John Dewey a little while ago. He argues that art is art only when it succeeds at creating a shared human experience—a communication, if you will—between the work and the audience. If it doesn’t, it’s just an object.”
His lordship was blinking rapidly; she must have spoken too fast.
“There is a sense of recognition,” she tried again, “between the artist, whose art embodies a universal experience, and the personal experiences of the observer. A moment of strangers’ minds meeting?”
“Dewey, Dewey,” Lord Skeffington said, his expression polite. “The name is familiar—isn’t he American?”
“He is.”
“Ah.” The corners of his mouth turned up. “They usually have funny ideas.”
Funny? To her ears, it had rung true. And with her limited experiences, she might well create something delightful, but how could she create something that was also moving and true? If one’s spirit happened to be born into a female body in the upper classes, the leash was short. The nosy men in this room could draw directly from the rawness of the world if they wished, from ill-reputed or far-flung places she could never go. Acclaimed contemporary female painters existed—Evelyn De Morgan and Marie Stillman came to mind—but they hailed from artistic families or had been allowed to study in Paris. Besides, there was an expectation that women depicted quaint motifs. And while she liked her dresses frilly and her novels swoony, Hattie wanted something different for her art …. She wanted …. She supposed she foremost wanted.
Lord Skeffington stepped in front of her painting. “Why, it’s fine work. Nice bit of scumbling technique here. Weren’t you planning to exhibit it at a family function?”
She groaned inwardly. “Yes. Next week. At a matinée.”
A dozen men of influence and their wives would attend the event in her parents’ St. James’s residence and stay for luncheon. She already knew she would rather exhibit nothing than this.
“It shall do nicely for a matinée,” said Lord Skeffington. “Though again you chose quite the grim subject matter.”
She smiled cautiously. “Grim?” Again?
“You seem to have a penchant for, how to put it, violent scenarios, Miss Greenfield.”
“I … wouldn’t say that I do.”
“I recall your Apollo hunting an unwilling Callisto.”
“Oh. That.”
“Then at the beginning of last term, there was your ravishment of the Cassandra.”
“Which is one of the most popular depictions in Greek art.”
“I was merely observing a theme,” Lord Skeffington said mildly.
She supposed there was a theme. She had painted Helen of Troy last term, her best work yet, but then again, in her interpretation, Helen had been the only one left standing against the smoking ruins of a ransacked city with both Paris and Menelaus broken at her feet.
“Well,” she said, “is there a subject in the classics that is not at least a little … violent?”
“Dancing nymphs?” Lord Skeffington suggested. “Demeter and her cornucopia, tending to the fields? Penelope weaving cloth? All perfectly wholesome, suitable subject matters.”
Suitable for a female artist were the unspoken words. Her mood turned mulish.
“I believe Hades was desperate when he snatched Persephone,” she said demurely, because she mustn’t repel the embodiment of Mr. Bingley in a fit of temper. “Being surrounded by darkness and death every day gave him the morbs. He needed company, someone who was … alive.”
Lord Skeffington tutted. “Making excuses for the villain, Miss Greenfield? Shocking. Though I suppose the tender female heart cannot help but hope for good in even the lowliest man, and that includes”—he raised his fine hands dramatically—“the king of the dead.” He chuckled again, and so she kept smiling, and her cheeks ached a little from the effort.