Martin visits the painter out of a vague desire to prevail morally and ends up chastened instead -- forced to acknowledge, in the beauty of the man's portraiture, his own failure to love his wife.
A painter out buying bleach, who gave only her surname, Guo, said she was disinfecting all surfaces of her apartment every two hours to prevent germs from coming in.
People said, well, of course, he is a painter working out movies.
On weekdays, the painter crawled out of his hole at seven sharp and began his daily journey through the city streets.
With such a rare masterpiece as the "Portrait of a Lady at a Window," a sitter whose identity remains enigmatic, the Florentine painter stands out as one of the early founders of the European school of psychological portraiture.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened its doors last fall, and the Clyfford Still Museum, scheduled to open in 2010 to house most of the works of that Abstract Expressionist painter, round out the claim to a critical mass of art institutions.
Miguel Reyes, a painter, stretched out on the couch with a drawing pad and sketched a portrait of Mr. Heureque's mother, Eloisa, who had spent the entire evening in the same chair, hands folded in her lap.
As Pat Steir, a painter, pointed out to me, this image echoes almost exactly a 1506 drawing of a young boy by Dürer, which he made as a study for his painting "Madonna with the Greenfinch".
Today, the town's tourist office arranges a Mondrian walking tour, led by a local guide named Plonie Krijgsman, who visits landmarks captured by the painter, points out the house (now a restaurant) where Toorop once stayed and scoffs at the high prices (over a million euros, according to Ms. Krijgsman, being paid for the luxury apartments in the grand 1889 Bath Pavilion).
As Eric Karpeles, a painter, points out, Proust names more than 100 artists, from Bellini to Whistler, in the novel and mentions dozens of actual works from the 14th through the 20th century, making the novel "one of the most profoundly visual works in Western literature".
One resident in the building, a painter, passed out face masks to whomever wanted one.
