Pictor's Metamorphoses by Hermann Hesse

Author:Hermann Hesse
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Tale of the Wicker Chair

A YOUNG MAN sat in his lonely garret. He wanted to become a painter, but there were many serious obstacles to be overcome. At first he lived quietly in his garret, growing somewhat older. He had acquired the habit of sitting in front of a small mirror for hours and tentatively sketching his own likeness. He had already filled a whole notebook with these sketches, and with a few of them he was quite content.

“Considering that I have had no formal training,” he said to himself, “this sketch has actually come off quite well. And what an interesting crease that is over there by the nose. One can see there’s something of the intellectual in me, or at least something like that. All I need to do is extend the corners of the mouth a tiny bit farther down, then it will have such an individual expression—downright melancholy.”

But later, after some time had passed, when he looked at the sketches again, he discovered that most of them no longer pleased him at all. This was disagreeable, but he came to the conclusion that he was making progress and that he should make even greater demands on himself.

The young man did not live in the most desirable and intimate relationship with his garret and the things that stood and lay about it; nevertheless, this relationship was not a bad one. He did his things no greater and no lesser injustice than most people do; he scarcely saw them and knew them but poorly.

When a self-portrait again would fall short of the mark, from time to time he would read books, from which he learned how others had fared, other young unknowns who like him had started off from modest beginnings, only later to achieve wide renown. He delighted in reading such books, and in them he read his own future.

And so one day, when again he was somewhat sullen and depressed, he sat at home reading about an extremely famous Dutch painter. This painter had been in the throes of a genuine passion, one might even call it a frenzy, quite completely governed by the impulse to become a good painter. In reading further, he discovered various other things which were not quite applicable to his own case. He read how, during stormy weather, when he could not paint out of doors, the Dutchman steadfastly and passionately had copied every thing, even the lowliest, that came within his field of vision. Just so had he come to paint an old pair of wooden shoes. On another occasion he painted an old crooked chair, a coarse, crude kitchen or peasant chair made of ordinary wood, with a seat of woven straw that was pretty nearly worn to shreds. And he painted this chair—which otherwise would certainly never have been vouchsafed a single human glance—with so much love and fidelity, so much passion and devotion, that the painting had become one of his finest works. The book’s author had many candid and moving words to say about the painting of the straw chair.

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