e my pen to explain what my brush failed to make clear,
it is because the criticism with which my picture of the Man of
Sorrows has been assailed drives me to this attempt at verbal
elucidation. My picture, let us suppose, is half-articulate; perhaps
my pen can manage to say the other half, especially as this other half
mainly consists of things told me and things seen.

And in the first place, let me explain that the conception of the
picture which now hangs in its gilded frame is far from the conception
with which I started--was, in fact, the ultimate stage of an
evolution--for I began with nothing deeper in my mind than to image a
realistic Christ, the Christ who sat in the synagogue of Jerusalem, or
walked about the shores of Galilee. As a painter in love with the
modern, it seemed to me that, despite the innumerable representations
of Him by the masters of all nations, few, if any, had sought their
inspiration in reality. Each nation had unconsciously given Him its
own national type, and though there was a subtle truth in this, for
what each nation worshipped was truly the God made over again in its
own highest image, this was not the truth after which I was seeking.

I started by rejecting the blonde, beardless type which Da Vinci and
others have imposed upon the world, for Christ, to begin with, must be
a Jew. And even when, in the course of my researches for a Jewish
model, I became aware that there were blonde types, too, these seemed
to me essentially Teutonic. A characteristic of the Oriental face, as
I figured it, was a sombre majesty, as of the rabbis of Rembrandt, the
very antithesis of the ruddy gods of Walhalla. The characteristic
Jewish face must suggest more of the Arab than of the Goth.

I do not know if the lay reader understands how momentous to the
artist is his model, how dependent he is on the accident of finding
his creation already anticipated, or at least shadowed forth, in
Nature. To me, as a realist, it was particularly necessary to find in
Nature the original, without which no artist can ever produce those
subtle _nuances_ which give the full sense of life. After which, if I
say, that my aim is not to copy, but to interpret and transfigure, I
suppose I shall again seem to be self-contradictory. But that, again,
must be put down to my fumbling pen-strokes.

Perhaps I ought to have gone to Palestine in search of the ideal
model, but then my father's failing health kept me within a brief
r