The Devotee of Art

“The Devotee of Art” is a short story by the English author H. G. Wells (1866–1946), first published in 1888 under one of his early pen names, Sosthenes Smith, in the Science Schools Journal, issues 24–25.^[1][a]Wells founded the Science Schools Journal in 1886, with the help of his friend and fellow student William Burton, and was its first editor.^[1][2]

The story, told as a third-person narrative, tells of an artist who dreams that he has neglected his dying wife in an effort to create the perfect picture.

Synopsis

While painting in his studio, Alec hears his wife Isabel begin to play the piano. He lays down his brushes and goes to join her. He sits down and distractedly listens to the music, until his wife accuses him of dropping off to sleep, which he denies. In an attempt to convince her, “he opens his eyes as wide as possible and fixed them unblinkingly on her face”, to which Isabel responds by saying “I don’t want you to stare like a hairdresser’s wig block”.^[3]

Alec begins to suspect that marriage is a mistake for an artist, and that Isabel is a life force antagonistic to art; his supreme love is to be found in his dimly lit studio, to which he retreats. He is working on a picture of a knight keeping vigil, but try as he might, the face retains a curiously sinister expression. In a “flash of passion”, he swipes bright red paint across the canvas, at which point the image becomes animated and wipes the colour off its face with its hand, saying “That was rather hasty of you”.^[4]

Unmoved, Alec begins to debate with the picture about his lack of inspiration, which Alec attributes to his being married. He begins to paint over the figure in the picture, and an idea develops. He stays up all night painting, and by morning the picture is largely complete, already beautiful. There is a knock on the studio door. It is the maid, Lizzie, telling Alec that Isabel slipped on the stairs last night and is ill, but he is set on completing his picture.

Days pass, until Alec learns from her doctor that Isabel is dying from internal injuries caused by her fall. But he is hell bent on getting his painting to the Royal Academy, and gets into a cab to take him to Burlington House, clutching his precious picture. But slowly the work he has painted over begins to reemerge, and the diabolical figure reappears.

The cab crashes. Alec comes to in a hospital ward, and learns that his hand is to be amputated. Standing over him is the red-eyed man of his painting, who stretches something black over Alec’s eyes, making him feel as if he is being sucked into an infinite, dark void. Then he hears his wife’s voice: “Alec, wake up!”. He finds himself sitting in the old velvet-covered armchair beside the piano, with his wife bending over him. She explains that when she saw him going to sleep again she stopped playing and left him, and she was surprised he did not wake when Lizzie dropped the tray downstairs.

Commentary

The motif of an image coming to life and criticising the artist’s work is repeated in Wells’s later short story “The Temptation of HarringayShort story by H. G. Wells, published in 1895, about an artist who paints a man's head that comes to life and criticises his work.“, published in 1895.

See also

• List of works by H. G. WellsList of publications written by H. G. Wells during the more than fifty years of his literary career.