Chapter 18 eighteen

In fact, I had not lived in Paris for two weeks before I saw Strickland. I took a small flat on the fifth floor of a house on the Rue Damme without much trouble.I bought a few pieces of furniture at a second-hand shop for two or three hundred francs, furnished the room, and arranged with the concierge to make me coffee every morning and tidy up my room.After that I went to see my friend Dirk Stroeve. Dirk Stroeve was one of those people who, according to their personalities, smiled contemptuously at the thought of him, or shrugged their shoulders in bewilderment.The Creator made him a comic character.He is a painter, but he is a very bad painter.I met him in Rome, and I still remember the pictures he painted at that time.He wholeheartedly prostrates himself at the feet of the ordinary and vulgar.His soul throbbed with the love of art, and he traced some of the paintings that hung over the Bernini staircase in Piazza di Spagna without feeling at all that they were too beautiful to be true.The paintings in his own studio showed small bearded, big-eyed peasants in peaked hats, ragged but well-dressed street urchins, and women in colorful skirts.The characters in these paintings sometimes stand idle on the steps of the church door, sometimes play among cypress trees under a cloudless blue sky, sometimes flirt by the fountain with Renaissance architectural style, and sometimes follow cattle The car walks past Italian fields.The figures are drawn in great detail and the colors are all too realistic.Even photographers cannot take more realistic photos.A painter who lived at the Villa Medici called Stroeve the master painter of the chocolate box.Looking at his paintings, you would think Monet, Manet and all the Impressionists never existed.

"I know I'm not a great painter," he said to me. "I'm not Michelangelo, no, but I have my own stuff. My paintings are bought. I bring romance into all kinds of people's lives." In the family. You know, not only in the Netherlands, but also in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. People who buy my paintings are mainly businessmen, rich businessmen. I’m afraid you can’t imagine what winter looks like in those countries. It's gloomy, cold, and endlessly long. They like to see my pictures of Italy. That's the Italy they want to see, and the Italy I imagined before I came here."

It seemed to me that it was a vision he could never get rid of, and that it dazzled his eyes and blinded him to the real scene.Regardless of the harsh reality in front of him, he always gazed with his fantasy eyes at an Italy full of romantic thieves and picturesque ruins.What he paints is his ideal state—an ideal, though childish, vulgar, and old-fashioned; and this gives his character a charming color. It is precisely because I feel this way that Dirk Stroeve is not in my eyes, as in other people's eyes, a mere object of ridicule and sarcasm.Some of his colleagues made no secret of their disdain for his work, but Stroeve made a lot of money, and these people had no scruples about using his wallet as if it were their own.He was generous; and the needy, while laughing at his naïveté for believing their tales of misfortune, had the audacity to lend him money.He's very affectionate, but there's something stupid in his easy-going affection that makes you accept his kind help without gratitude.Borrowing money from him is like taking something from a child; you look down on him a little because he's so easy to bully.I imagine a pickpocket who prides himself on his quick hands would be a little annoyed by a careless woman who leaves a purse full of valuable jewelry in her car.As for Stroeve, on the one hand the Creator made him a joke, and on the other hand he refused to give him dullness.People made jokes about him incessantly, making him miserable with both good-natured and mischievous sarcasm, but he never stopped giving people an opportunity for it, as if he meant it.He was constantly hurt by others, but his character was so kind, he never hated others; even if he was bitten by a poisonous snake, he didn't know how to learn from his experience, and once the pain was over, he would put the snake in his heart with compassion arms.His life seemed to be a tragedy written in the style of a farce full of slapstick.He was grateful to me for not laughing at him; he used to pour his train of troubles into my sympathetic ears.The saddest thing is that these grievances are always ridiculous, and the sadder he tells them, the more you can't help laughing.

But Stroeve, though a humble painter, had a keen eye for art, and it was a rare pleasure to visit the gallery with him.His enthusiasm is genuine and the comments are insightful.Stroeve was a Catholic. He not only admired the classical masters, but also sympathized with the modern painters.He is good at discovering talented newcomers and never hesitates to praise himself.I don't think anyone I've ever met has more sound judgments than his.He was more educated than most painters, and not as ignorant of other arts as they were.His appreciation of music and literature gave him a deep and eclectic understanding of painting.For a young man like me, his guidance was invaluable.

I continued to correspond with him after I left Rome, and every two months or so I received a long letter from him in weird English.His eagerness and enthusiasm, his hands waving, is always vivid on the page when he talks.Not long before I left for Paris, he married an Englishwoman and took up residence in a studio in the Montmartre district.I have not seen him for four years, and I have never seen her wife.