Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of May 21, 1877

Overview

Because R. cannot handle all the expenses, the writer has to ask the singers to lower their demands. She spends much of the day alone, including a visit to Watts’s studio where a portrait of Joachim strikes her as uncannily revealing despite, or because of, the painter’s intentions.

Content

Monday, May 21:

I have to speak to the singers, asking them (Hill, Frau Grün) to reduce their exorbitant demands somewhat, since R. will now have to pay them himself. R. is not well.

I go out alone to breakfast and dine, and visit the studio of the painter Watts, in which there hangs a quite amazing picture of Joachim. I can read the whole biography of this thoroughly bad person in this picture; that is not what the painter intended, but it is the very thing that reveals his talent, that he has depicted the truth without realizing it. Indeed, by trying to express something splendid.