From Trilby to Tarr
France has quite a number of novels, stories dealing with painters and their studios, of which the most well-known are the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon, a story about a model, and Emile Zola’s L’Oeuvre, the tragic tale of the fated painter Claude Lantier. Within this stream are also found novels written by English writers about English artists living and working in Bohemian Paris. Trilby published serially in Harpers in 1894 was by the cartoonist George de Maurier; it sold 200,000 copies in the US alone. It’s eponymous heroine, Trilby O’Ferrall works as a model and is loved by a variety of painters. The novel famously features the character Svengali, a name which has become synonymous with the idea of the seducing, dominating guru. Apart from Svengali and Trilby, the novel also contains two thinly veiled portraits of Whistler and Poynter, one symbolising the indolent bohemian and the other the industrious apprentice. Trilby is steeped in the Paris of the late nineteenth-century; but the artist Tarr, in Wyndham- Lewis’s novel of the same name Tarr (1918) is disdainful of bohemian culture. Dedicated to rejecting humour, a stance he regarded as commensurate with the modern artist, Tarr is ambitious in a typically contemporary way. But perhaps the novel’s most famous character is the German artist Kreisler who with his Nietzschean eruptions and his disgust at his artistic failure has been seen as anticipating the personality of Hitler. Wyndham Lewis was to eventually write an appreciation of Hitler in 1931 which brought his career to a standstill, but it was to undergo something of re-start with a major retrospective in 1949 and the interest of young, engagé critics like John Berger who was his friend and exhibited with the older artist.
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