Jury Duty - Part 9
The painting was in the retrospective. The one where Kitty sits on a couch, orange nasturtiums against a low-cut dress. She was about twenty-seven when she sat for the portrait. Tissot had painted her wearing makeup, and the critics at the time, when the painting was shown for the first time, assailed the use of cosmetics. What respectable woman wears eyeliner and rouge, they scoffed? One of them even asked, Where is the grace, the character, the excellence of the work with which modern life is to be redeemed if it is to pass into Art?
Melancholy raged inwardly at the memory. Meaningless drivel. Critics! Only academics, and his jaws clenched at the word, could compare in their stupidity and uselessness. He remembered how the curator of the retrospective had explained the use of cosmetics by referencing Baudelaire’s opinion that makeup “adds to the face of a beautiful woman the mysterious passion of the priestess.”
How could they be so stupid, he wondered. Didn’t they know? Kitty was dying of tuberculosis! Her lover wanted do one more painting, to remember her, and she wanted to look good. So before she sat for her final portrait, Kitty blued her eyelids, put rouge on her cheeks, and drew a bright red candy stripe across her lips, defiant and beautiful in the face of her imminent death.
