Washington Without a Wig

A Newly Discovered Portrait Declared to Have Been Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds

MAX EASTMAN

ONE of the most romantic spots in the I world to poke around in, is that high rise of hill and old houses in Paris known as Montmartre. It is the capital of the world's Bohemia—the native home of poor artists and poor poets and courtesans not quite so poor. It is a place where beauty is for sale, and a free and gay and friendly, if not a very luxurious life is lived upon the proceeds of it. This has been so for so many years that Montmartre is full now of priceless relics of the artistic life of the past. The most extraordinary kinds of buried treasure may be found there.

If you pass along the right side of the Old Theatre of Montmartre, your street will end after about a half a block in a dead wall with a house rising above it. In the wall a door will open to your touch, and let you pass through the roots of that house, and out into a little, shadowy back alley. Here among several tiny doorways, the tiniest bears the painted card of M. Paul Ragenau, Artist and Connoisseur of Art. And M. Ragenau sits inside amid a drift of old paintings and drawings and statuary, arranged somewhat as though they had been cast up around him by the sea. He is teaching the art of painting, and also one supposes a little of the art of life, to a very slim and dark-eyed young French girl with an extraordinary appreciation of his talents. At least he was when I came there, and it was from her that I learned what a great man he is.

The other character in this story— aside from George Washington who will appear in due time—is Mr.

William Tudor Wilkinson, a Parisian American, well known for the charming ways in which he spends a whole

lot of superfluous time and money.

He came over to France during the war to be an aviator, and after the war he stayed in France and did nothing, because there seemed to be nothing sufficiently exciting left to do. He lives in an apartment once occupied by Madame de Maintenon, the fascinating mistress of Louis the Fourteenth. And he loves to find historic and fascinating things to put in it. That is how he came to be poking around in the Old Curiosity Shops on Montmartre. And that is how he came to pass through the magic door behind the Old Theatre, and arrive at the obscure and tiny boutique of M. Paul Ragenau.

And M. Ragenau in making room for him among the wreckage, or in trying to dig up out of it some swimming nymphs and spying satyrs of the classic period of French art, exposed to view a torn and stained and mangled, and yet still very startling portrait entitled Washington By Reynolds. It seemed impossible to believe that a portrait of George Washington could have been painted by the great English artist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and remain unknown. And yet when Mr. Wilkinson turned it over, he found written with a brush, in what experts have since declared to be the hand of the artist himself, the words, "Presdt. U. S. A. Washington J. Reynolds pinxit 1791"

Mr. Wilkinson put the portrait back in its place, entered into a lively argument with M. Ragenau as to the proper price for nymphs and satyrs, and then when he had bought a few of these, asked him to add this old por-

trait to the bundle. He got it for 500 francs.

It was some days later that we came together to visit M. Ragenau, and inquire into the history of the portrait. It seems that he came into possession of it along with a large quantity of paintings that were left by an aged artist named Dutterhofer, who died in the Faubourg St. Martin in 1918. He said that he had pasted the title on the frame himself at the time of the National Holiday, when he exposed it for sale in his little show window on the Place Pigail, farther down the hill. It was there on view for a week, and to be had for the price of a suit of clothes.

Gunman and Connoisseur

RAGENAU'S innocence in this matter was somewhat explained and justified, when we came to learn from his adoring pupil in art what a very extraordinarily talented man he is. For it appears that M. Ragenau is not a mere Artist and Connoisseur of Art. That is but a pastime of his advancing years. M. Ragenau is none other than "Creek The Revolver King," formerly attached to Barnum's Circus, and for fifteen years the most celebrated crack shot in the world. He still wears a black sombrero and a moustache like Pancho Villa's, and he has a small, sharp, quick eye like a wild bird. He told us that his gilt was unconscious and incredible to him. His wife would sail a playing card through the air, and he would raise his revolver without any effort of attention and hit that card edgeways almost every time! He could also do wonderful things with a rifle. And under the stimulus of our admiration he brought one out, and showed us the position in which he used to shoot cigarettes out of his wife's mouth from behind his back with the gun upside down. He did not shoot because he can't reach round himself any longer. But he convinced us with such unimpeachable documents as handbills and newspaper clippings that as a connoisseur of art he is a remarkable gunman, and well qualified to give away for 500 francs a portrait that is worth a fortune.

It is hardly possible that Joshua Reynolds ever saw George Washington, but the American general's features were no doubt familiar in England. He was the outstanding personality of the world during his time, and portraits and copies of portraits and drawings more or less accurate must have been in circulation. Moreover, Sir Joshua was a very lively-minded old gentleman, and he knew the intimate gossip of all the great men of his day. Mr. Wilkinson thinks that he formed his own idea of the character of the revolutionary leader, and amused himself in old age when his sight was failing by putting it upon canvas. It is one of the two or three paintings that he took the trouble to sign.

The Washington Portrait

HOW much this portrait may actually resemble Washington will be hard to tell. It is at least a living and real human being. The General appears in rather plain cloth and without his wig, and he is not at all the kind of George Washington that would fit into the text-books of American history that have been censored by some of our super-patriotic Boards of Education. It accords better with the fact that Washington habitually gave out false communiques about the number and condition of his forces, than with the little story about the hatchet.

The mouth lacks altogether that expression of set and inflexible saintliness made familiar in the portraits of Gilbert Stuart, and probably imparted by a brand new set of false teeth. In the brown and the hazel eyes, too, there is an expression of worldly knowingness rather than divine wisdom.

A cool, aloof, experienced, slightly ironical, sensually sophisticated old gentleman with a bald head, who might be saying, "Come to me, boys! I've been there. I know!" That is the first impression. Anyone who has ever met an army can understand from those eyes why George Washington's army loved him.

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But in the mouth there appears a certain firmness, a hesitant primness as of a man afflicted with puritanical scruples and consideration of etiquette. The mouth seems very small, too, and almost feminine. Only the big irregular nose— the mark by which Napoleon said that he chose his generals—suggests the man of powerful action. Mr. Wilkinson intends to take his treasure to London to be restored, and he has not decided what to do with it in the future. His line is racehorses rather than portraits, and

he is very modest about this discovery, "I don't know very much about painting," he told me, "but when I saw the patched and battered old thing with that look of ghostly reality, I had a hunch that it was a thoroughbred." Mr. Wilkinson's hunch has been absolutely verified by the leading experts in Paris, and he has already received an offer of $50,000 for his picture, which cost him about $45. The only thing he has to worry about, it seems to me, .S3 .59 that Paul Ragenau, who got the $45, such a remarkably good shot.