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Earlier that same siècle several prominent portraitists
had produced efforts, all commissioned by the same spinster
(though separately and under an assortment of pseudonyms),
of the fabled "Man Without a Heart," none with any
particular success, due partly to the general sparsity of knowledge
of him during that period, partly to the unwillingness of the last
of his surviving contemporaries to speak much about that
treacherous time. Known variously as Simone, Ms. Salmon,
Ms. Sullerton, Sally, as well as a number of names sounding
like Gretta or Gerta, the so-called "country spinster"
spent somewhere close to sixty thousand francs in her search
for the right likeness. But when Bradley's remarkable
Man With No Hat finally made its debut in Frankfurt--
its visage so similar in so many respects, however coincidentally,
to that of the original traitor--and after fifty or so years
of what can only be termed a fallowness in the art world--
even then there was suprisingly little interest among the fashionable
set, who by that time had turned their monocles Parisward
and therefore in the direction of (perhaps you guess correctly)
Der Dedderer, André Swingle, and the Blue Smoke Group,
which ten years previously had made its first impressions
in the salons. Now safe for general consumption,
the artwork of the Blue Smoke Group could in no way
be construed as seeking to save the by then century-old past,
but sought rather to sully it in aesthetic ash. "It must be new,"
rang the popular slogan, and served as a clarion call
(to say the least) to those of the country spinster's generation,
who at one time would have spent everything on even
the remotest possibility of resurrecting the Revolution intact.
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