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The Premier and the Painter; A Fantastic Romance
The Premier and the Painter A Fantastic Romance Author:Israel Zangwill General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1899 Original Publisher: W. Heinemann Subjects: English fiction Fiction / Romance / General Fiction / Romance / Adult Fiction / Romance / Contemporary Fiction / Romance / Historical Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations... more » and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: BOOK IT. CHAPTER I. MRS, DAWK ON POLITICS AND MATRIMONY. Jack Dawe, as the reader already knows, occupied the humble yet occasionally lofty position of a house-and-sign painter. His earnings were sufficiently large to prevent him crossing the boundary-line between Ultra-Radicalism and Socialism, even if he had not been the sole heir of an ancient demesne. His professional reputation was unsullied by a single blotch of paint in the wrong place, and it was achieved after a long and arduous preparation in youth. A touch of artistic instinct lifted his lions and cows far above the vulgar herd. His griffins and unicorns seemed to have been photographed from life, and their air of vitality was such as to vindicate their originals'claims to reality, and to the right of sending representatives to the International Assembly at the Zoo. His letters over shop-windows were remarkable for bold experiment in perspective. His native road contained many illustrations of his genius, notably a blue beer-barrel, which occupied the centre of a white-painted wall. The magnificent scale of the work called forth all his powers. Of him, as of Shakespeare, no man can say that he had a great opportunity without rising to the height of it. An eminent art critic, to whom it was pointed out as an early work of Turner's, said of it (" Modern Sign-Painters," Vol. VI., pp. 35-6), "It would be impossible to overpraise the wholly admirable chiaroscuro, ...« less