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All About Our World

Imaginary Portraits
Walter Pater

Page 2 of 150


Valenciennes, September 1701. 

They have been renovating my father's large workroom.  That delightful,
tumble-down old place has lost its moss-grown tiles and the green
weather-stains we have known all our lives on the high whitewashed wall,
opposite which we sit, in the little sculptor's yard, for the coolness,
in summertime.  Among old Watteau's workpeople came his son, "the genius,"
my father's godson and namesake, a dark-haired youth, whose large, unquiet
eyes seemed perpetually wandering to the various drawings which lie exposed
here.  My father will have it that he is a genius indeed, and a painter born.
We have had our September Fair in the Grande Place, a wonderful stir of
sound and colour in the wide, open space beneath our windows.  And just where
the crowd was busiest young Antony was found, hoisted into one of those
empty niches of the old Hotel de Ville, sketching the scene to the life,
but with a kind of grace--a marvellous tact of omission, as my father
pointed out to us, in dealing with the vulgar reality seen from one's own
window--which has made trite old Harlequin, Clown, and Columbine, seem like
people in some fairyland; or like infinitely clever tragic actors, who, for
the humour of the thing, have put on motley for once, and are able to throw

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