The Accolade by Edmund Leighton

It wasn't really his kind of art, or his century for that matter, but a job was a job. Percy had a well-earned reputation in the trade for the ability to replicate any painting for a price. He could match the brush stroke style of any artist and give the surface a certain antiquity. It wasn't the sort of skill that was wise to advertise, but he'd made a good living copying old masters for collectors who, if they could not own the original, at least wanted one that could be mistaken for the original. Some investors on the east coast, who weren't particularly art lovers commissioned his work, as well. Percy didn't care what became of his paintings once he was paid. He was well compensated for his disinterest. His great masters were not hanging above mantles because they matched the sofa and he knew it. If one of his customers had fraud in mind, it was none of Percy's business. He was an artist and a businessman, not the moral police.

When the order came in for a copy of Edmund Leighton's The Accolade, Percy was not really interested. The sentimentalism of Leighton's work had never appealed to him personally. He took the job, though, because it came from Harry Fitzgerald, a steady customer who always paid up front. Percy was a proud man, too. To turn down a job from such a valued customer might be construed as a lack of confidence in his own ability.

He knew the painting, though, and it was not difficult to do the research necessary to begin. In less than a week he had begun laying out the work, referring to a reproduction on paper pinned up on the wall beside the easel.

He sketched in the background with great care. It was as important as the subject in his line of work. The job was routine until a weird thing happened when he began working on the figures in the painting. A torrent of mixed feelings flooded his mind and heart as he blocked in the two individuals who were the subject of Leighton's painting. His emotions began to crystallize as he turned his focus to the figure of the woman. Whenever his brush touched any part of her he was overcome with awe or something akin to it. The woman in the painting was stunning, but it wasn't her beauty that attracted him -- nor her femininity or anything remotely physical. Her eyes were barely visible, but there was something hypnotic about the whole of her. The feeling vanished, though, when Percy lifted the brush or worked on another part of the painting. He was a rational man, but he began to wonder if there was some magic afoot that accounted for the bizarre sensation.

It didn't make sense, but he continued painting. Percy found himself going over and over the folds of her dress with a dry brush even after that area had been finished. It began to feel almost like worship to him. He wasn't ready to leave her - to move on. Percy found himself overwhelmed with the desire to please the benevolent entity that dominated the image.

He could see that he would never finish the painting if he didn't get going, though, so he began serious work on the knight kneeling before her, whose shoulder she touched with the sword.

A different emotion, as strange as the first, began to grow as he worked on the figure of the knight. It was subtler, and came over him more slowly, but by the time he was working the details, the feeling was as strong as the other. He identified with the man being honored by this great lady - or more correctly, he envied the man. Oh, to be as strong, as true, as noble, as worthy of her notice and recognition. This feeling, however, persisted after he had quit working on the figure. Indeed, it lasted long after the knight was finished and Percy was putting the final touches on the painting.

All the years of turning his head to the corruption that whirled around his work began to haunt him. Why had he let money tempt him into laboring on the fringes of such a sleazy business? He had been an artist with great promise when first approached to copy an old master. He closed his eyes to the fraud he knew was a part of it all, and imagined that he could stay pure. He had become a part of it as surely as if he had claimed his paintings were original works of an old master.

Percy was glad when the painting was finally finished. He could be done with it and with all the shame and guilt it conjured up in his soul. He called Harry Fitzgerald and told him it would be dry in a day or so. Surely when the painting was out of the studio the feelings would leave, too.

The two days he waited for the customer to come were exquisite torment. The magic did not lessen when he turned the painting to the wall, nor when the buyer came to take it away -- not after a week or a month or a year. The spell cast on him by the act of copying the painting would never go away.

He turned down his "copy customers" after that and told them he was going "legit." And he did. He nearly starved trying to sell his own paintings, but he was happier than he had been for years. In time he developed a following and could pay his bills again. He never regretted the decision.

A news item caught Percy's attention one morning over coffee in his studio. A wealthy art dealer in Boston, a man Percy knew to be a colleague of Harry Fitzgerald, had turned himself into the authorities, and a whole ring of art forgers was exposed and dozens prosecuted. The art dealer's picture was in the paper standing in front of Edmund Leighton's painting, The Accolade.

The End