Our own Set by Ossip Schubin — Read

A few days after the evening when Sempaly had given such brilliant proof of his talent as a caricaturist, General von Klinger was sitting in his studio on a divan covered with a picturesque Persian rug and endeavoring -- having for the moment nothing better to do -- to teach his parrot to sing the Austrian anthem -- a loyal task which the bird, perched on the top of its cage, persistently refused to learn. It was a gorgeous studio, with a coved ceiling painted in fresco and a _rococo_ plaster cornice, the walls hung with old tapestry, eastern stuffs and other "properties. " It was so large that men looked like dwarfs in it, and the general's works of art like illustrations cut out of a picture book. The scirocco brooded in the atmosphere and the general was out of sorts; he could not get on with his painting, and though it was now a quarter to five not a visitor had he seen. Usually by this hour he had a number -- nay sometimes too many. The general often grumbled -- to himself of course -- at the interruption; but he always enjoyed the little dissipation; it made him melancholy to be left to himself.

He was thinking just now how difficult it was to get on as a painter; his coloring was capital -- so all his artist friends assured him; but that his drawing left much to be desired he himself confessed. His two strong points were a harmonious effect of grey tone and horses seen from behind. All his pictures returned to him from the exhibitions unsold, excepting one which was purchased by the emperor in consideration of the general's former merits as a soldier rather than of his talents as an artist. The painters who came to smoke his cigarettes accounted for this by saying that his artistic aims were too independent, that he made no concessions to public taste and so could not hope for popularity.