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Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2734, 12 February 1910, Page 3 (Supplement)

covered with dust. There must be at least two or three hundred of them. My private impression is that they are the work of some unhappy man whom you r father may have known and pitied, a starving artist, a man, perhaps, with a wife and large family and ■no talent, one of those who have fallen by the wayside, whom be desired to help. You know how generous be was. On the other band, they may be works

of value, so I think, .perhaps, yon had 'SJ? better see them at once, though if they / were valuable I feel sure that he would

have spoken to me about them.” “Yes,” said Buss, junior, “I think we may as well look at them. I have mo doubt they are rubbish. ‘Father’s taste was pretty had.” The lawyer, .who was familiar with the house, led the way. In a glass-roofed attic, which had sometimes served Buss, It.A., for a spare studio, were arranged symmetrically on the floor, and with a certain appearance of order, piles of canvases, all unframed as the lawyer had said, showing their white edges studded with pins. Buss, junior, lifted the topmost picture. His twitching eyelid began to twitch with frantic spasms that spread to his whole face. He had recognised his own last work for which Simkin had paid him two hundred and fifty dollars, an Impression of the Dieppe cliffs in pink and blue. He snatched eagerly at tho canvas underlying it. It was bis, too, a still-life which Cezanne himself, would have been proud to own—a bright red porcelain plate, on which in a rigid row were three perfectly flat purple apples. Simkin had said it was a masterpiece and would go to a museum. “Mine,” he gasped, “both mine!” Number three was “Notre Dame at Dieppe by Moonlight,” a heavy daub of gamboge, suggesting a haystack in flames. “All mine!” And Buss, junior, fell flat on his back in one of those dead fainting fits to which hi s mother, poor woman, had been so subject when laboring under special excitement. Tho last thing he was conscious of was hearing his father’s executor say in a tone of deep sympathy, “I am very, very sorry!” Some cold

water from a sponge soon brought him to, and then the ambiguity of these words, which was quite unintentional on the lawyer’s part, struck him with wounding force, for he was in a state of mind to be wounded bv anything. The solicitor discreetly left the room. Buss, junior, spent a couple of hours turning over the two hundred-odd canvasses the Impressionist witnesses of a lifetime’s effort. Not a single one was missing. Probably no such complete collection of an artist’s output had over been made before.