often parted with a canvas for a few francs.  When Tanguy was hard up he would go to some discerning amateur and sell for two hundred francs pictures that to-day bring twenty thousand francs.  Tanguy hated to sell, especially his Cezannes.  Artists came to see them.  His shop was the scene of many a wordy critical battle.  Gauguin uttered the paradox, “Nothing so resembles a daub as a masterpiece,” and the novelist Elemir Bourges cried, “This is the painting of a vintager!” Alfred Stevens roared in the presence of the Cezannes, Anquetin admired; but, as Bernard adds, Jacques Blanche bought.  So did Durand-Ruel, who has informed me that a fine Cezanne to-day is a difficult fish to hook.  The great public won’t have him, and the amateurs who adore him jealously hold on to their prizes.

The socialism of Pere Tanguy was of a mild order.  He pitied with a Tolstoyan pity the sufferings of the poor.  He did not hate the rich, nor did he stand at street corners preaching the beauties of torch and bomb.  A simple soul, uneducated, not critical, yet with an instinctive flair for the coming triumphs of his young men, he espoused the cause of his clients because they were poverty-stricken, unknown, and revolutionists—­an aesthetic revolution was his wildest dream.  He said of Cezanne that “Papa Cezanne always quits a picture before he finishes it.  If he moves he lets his canvases lie in the vacated studio.”  He no doubt benefited by this carelessness of the painter.  Cezanne worked slowly, but he never stopped working; he left nothing to hazard, and, astonishing fact, he spent every morning at the Louvre.  There he practised his daily scales, optically speaking, before taking up the brush for the day’s work.  Many of Vincent von Gogh’s pictures Tanguy owned.  This was about 1886.  The eccentric, gifted Dutchman attracted the poor merchant by his ferocious socialism.  He was, indeed, a ferocious temperament, working like a madman, painting with his colour tubes when he had no brushes, and literally living in the boutique of Tanguy.  The latter always read Le Cri du Peuple and L’Intransigeant, and believed all he read.  He did not care much for Van Gogh’s compositions, no doubt agreeing with Cezanne, who, viewing them for the first time, calmly remarked to the youth, “Sincerely, you paint like a crazy man.”  A prophetic note!  Van Gogh frequented a tavern kept by an old model, an Italian woman.  It bore the romantic title of The Tambourine.  When he couldn’t pay his bills he would cover the walls with furious frescoes, flowers of tropical exuberance, landscapes that must have been seen in a nightmare.  He was painting at this time three pictures a day.  He would part with a canvas at the extortionate price of a franc.