There was, in a once upon another time a man
(His name and work
Being lost to the boot sales and dustbins of time)
Who made a reputation as a portrait painter,
One transcending his small town in Schleswig-Holstein,
Spreading among the surrounding principalities.
Gifted with curious abilities (although he would demur,
Protesting that he was simply a man with a brush and a palette)
Allowing him to secure the favor
Of the area’s more substantial citizens,
Providing him leisure to commit to canvas
The faces of the ordinary
And, if some cases, somewhat iniquitous.
His portfolio a crazy-quilt of his milieu,
Subjects back-to-back in no particular order:
Princes and flower girls, priests and ******.
The sterling reputation the painter enjoyed
Was not due simply to technical skill
(He was, to be sure, expert in matters of shading and line,
And his eye for color and detail no less than remarkable)
But also an eye for those things
Revealed in the curve of the lips or the set of the eyes
And, more importantly for fame and purse,
The virtuosity to enhance the understated gifts
Or veil those unpleasant secrets they suggested.
And so, the venality in the banker’s sneer
Was softened to intimate nothing more
Than levelheaded concern for the sanctity of the mark and guilder,
Or the gentle smile of the prince’s youngest daughter
Augmented to evoke the beatitudes of the angels themselves.
The craft and subtlety of his work
Combined to engender the most curious effects;
Oftentimes his subjects, surely without consciousness or intent,
Began to assume those qualities
Bestowed upon them by the nuances of line and pigment,
Becoming less parsimonious or more humane,
As dictated by the brush strokes,
Carrying on from that time forward as the finest embodiments
Of that visage captured inside the gilding of the frame.
At some point in time,
Whether through the onset of some trickle of madness,
Or perhaps just sheer whimsy,
The painter made a peculiar change in his methodology,
Beginning to graft qualities onto his subjects
Which they never embodied nor hoped to possess,
Perhaps in the hope that, having pinned them to the corkboard,
His butterflies might take wing,
But his command of light and pigment
Combined power and understatement in such a manner
That no one who sat for him ever noticed
They were being mocked or enriched, as the case might be;
And still the canvases acted as tails wagging the dog about;
Priests were found dead in their rectories,
In the midst of tableaus of unspeakable debauchery,
While courtesans lit candles and kneeled in pews
Until their backs and thighs screamed
In the service of such highly unusual positions,
Or the banker flipped the urchin a coin
While gently petting the boy’s undernourished cur,
And perhaps it was all due to the machinations of the painter,
But he would, with just a hint of slyness
Playing about the corners of his eyes and mouth,
Deny any measure of culpability.
He was, after all, just a man with a brush.