MEN I HAVE PAINTED
is nothing more unpleasant than good drawing, so-called, which sweeps around a contour unerringly like a rigid wire, moved by a mechanical spirit that repels imagination. It is comparable only to a portrait that looks as if the epidermis had been removed. Before such an image one can only say, "This is a man with the bloom rubbed off." Why emulate a technique that only Van Eyck has mastered? In his really miraculous painting in the National Gallery, John Arnolfini and his Wife, the fine art lies in the face of the man, shadowed under the great hat; all the rest is just perfect mechanism and inimitable.
There are but few artists who have had tactful fingers—Rodin Whistler, Swan, Zorn. Many have had a bold fist, as Swan called it; the greatest of these is Peter Paul Rubens, that Prince of Painters whose comprehensive sweep includes all styles, all subjects, and whose achievement cannot be estimated or measured.
Swan was one of a trio of true artists, one of three minds bent upon the same ideal, the only ideal because it is the true, because it is Nature. He was happy in his friends. In Alfred Gilbert he found the bold and aspiring genius; in Onslow Ford the gentle and tender artist; and in a shrine of his own, a recluse in the hidden glades of the classic resort of the muse, there was that mysterious oracle, Matthew Maris, with whom he often sought to commune.
Swan was absent-minded, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, since his work was always uppermost in his thoughts, that he was present-minded. He took no count of time. I have never seen him look at a watch, and, like myself, he perhaps never carried one.
He would come in the morning to make me "a short call," stay on for lunch, linger over a cigar and glass of port
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