The Paintings

His name was Desiderio Vincente and he was the greatest artist the world has never known. Even in the art world he was spoken of in hushed notes and whispers, a mirage of smoke that disappears in the breeze. If his works had survived he would be listed in the Pantheon of men who created staggering works of art, Picasso, Michelangelo, Rembrandt. He brought to canvas magnificent creations through bold and subtle strokes of wondrous color and passion. Brushes dipped in human courage, fear, seduction, kindness, horror, brutality, sex, loathing and compassion. An Italian by birth, he lived in Paris most of his life, and inhabited a large studio in the Latin Quarter in the late 1800's. We know of him only from a chance encounter with an eccentric French art dealer who found him in 1878.

Joseph-Marie Loisel spent much of his time around the Latin Quarter, always on the lookout for new and alluring works of art. He heard from the cousin of the proprietor of a small sidewalk cafe on the Rue de la Parcheminerie, where most mornings Vincente would spill out of his upstairs loft, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes and muse on the putrid affairs of men journaled in the newspaper Le Figaro. Disheveled, and splattered with paint, most mornings it looked as if he had not slept, but had painted the night away. He mumbled and ranted to himself, but always was kind, even shy with the waitress at the cafe, who where used to dealing with artists. This was Paris.

One cold, misty April morning Loisel sat in the same cafe as Vincente, waiting for him to leave. We know all of this from the art dealers diaries, discovered in 1924, some 20 years after he died, by his grand daughter. Loisel had to knock hard on the big wooden door, for five minutes before Vincente would open and peek his weary face outside. According to people who knew him, Joseph-Marie had a way with artists, a calming, disarming charm that let him get close to creative souls.

Once inside he could see that Vincente had just finished a big canvas, five feet wide by six feet high, he stood in stunned silence and awe and could not speak for a long time. "Monsieur, why this is magnificent" he said in a somber tone. The painter stood looking at the same painting, while cleaning a brush. It was a painting of a man's face contorted in what could be both pain and ecstasy at the same time, the art dealer could not say for sure. This painting moved him, but eventually he remembered he was a man of business, and this one painting could make him, and the artist rich. "Do you have more?" he turned to look at Vincente. "Yes, over there, and there" he pointed with the brush. Desiderio had first pointed to a stack of three smaller paintings leaning against the wall and then at the large Gothic fireplace, where it looked as if a painting fed the flames. "What are you doing?" Loisel blurted out. He ran to the fireplace, but the large canvas was fully engulfed. Desiderio went over to a big chair and fell into it, he looked bone weary. The art dealer looked at the other surviving paintings and they were all equally poignant and powerful works of art. "Sir you can not destroy this art, the world must see it, it is unlike any that I have seen." said the art dealer. "The world can not have them to buy and sell" was all the painter would say. He burned everything he painted.

Joseph-Marie would go back many times later and talk to Desiderio at the cafe, but he could never get back into the studio, and the artist would never surrender his art. Most in the art world thought Loisel an opportunist and his claims of Vincente's art that of a shrewd business man driving up the price of a future product. He eventually gave up and went back to making money, but he never forgot, and he often wondered if there where others out there like Desiderio.