Paris

Paris is both a place of artistic apprenticeship and a lasting education in perception for Philip Carey. His time there begins with the hope of becoming a painter, unfolds amid arguments over modern art and the judgments of teachers, and ends with his abandonment of the profession. The city’s importance does not depend on that career succeeding: Philip later defends the experience as the source of ways of seeing that he could not have acquired elsewhere.

Arrival and the student’s life

When Philip reaches Paris, he is already looking toward the future. He has arranged to meet Mrs. Otter, a masseuse introduced to him by Hayward, and has chosen a room at the Hotel des Deux Ecoles, in a shabby street off the Boulevard du Montparnasse, for its convenience to Amitrano’s School. The narrow room, reached by five flights of stairs, is dominated by a large wooden bed beneath a canopy. The practical details of lodging and school make his new life less a romantic escape than a concrete effort to begin again as an art student.

Before his first day, Philip buys drawing materials. He arrives at the school at nine the next morning, trying to appear self-assured while anxious about the rough joking that, he has read, may greet newcomers in studios. Mrs. Otter has reassured him and is there to welcome him with a friendly smile. His arrival thus carries both the vulnerability of a novice and the promise of entry into a community where artistic standing will be argued over and tested.

Paris soon proves more expensive than Philip expected. By February he has spent most of the money with which he arrived, but pride keeps him from asking his guardian for help. He also conceals his straitened circumstances from Aunt Louisa, knowing she might try to give him money she could scarcely spare. With three months remaining before he comes of age and gains access to his small inheritance, he sells the few trinkets inherited from his father to bridge the gap. The financial pressure shadows his artistic independence: preserving it means accepting a personal cost rather than seeking support.

A city arguing about art

Philip’s artistic education takes place amid a lively contest between established and emerging standards. Impressionism has triumphed in the Latin Quarter, but its victory is recent, and artists such as Carolus-Duran and Bouguereau are set against Manet, Monet, and Degas. Whistler strongly influences English artists and their compatriots, while Japanese prints attract collectors. Young connoisseurs treat reverence for Raphael as an old-fashioned position and elevate Velasquez by comparison. These disputes show Philip entering a world in which judgments of art are also judgments about taste, knowledge, and what counts as modern.

At first, Philip is amazed by Impressionist work; gradually that amazement turns into admiration, and he begins to speak emphatically about Manet, Monet, and Degas. He puts photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia side by side above his washstand, where he can look at them while shaving. He comes to believe that landscape painting did not exist before Monet, and feels a strong response before Rembrandt’s The Disciples at Emmaus and Velasquez’s Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose. The pictures and the arguments around them mark a change in his eye: the standards he brought with him no longer determine what he can see.

This change is not merely allegiance to a fashionable movement. Philip’s new attention is expressed through looking, comparison, and the daily presence of reproductions in his room. The two pictures above the washstand make art part of ordinary routine, while his changed response to old and new masters shows that his aesthetic education is an active revision of habit. Paris teaches him to treat seeing as something that can be learned and altered.

Judgment, failure, and departure

The education is demanding as well as liberating. One authority dismisses Philip’s submitted work in uncompromising terms, finding it badly drawn and without merit and telling him to tear it up. Later, Foinet gives a more measured but still severe assessment: Philip has manual dexterity, industry, and intelligence, and could, through hard work and perseverance, become a careful painter who is not incompetent. But Foinet sees no talent in what Philip has shown and predicts that he will remain mediocre. The distinction between technical capacity and artistic promise turns Philip’s uncertainty into a confrontation with the possibility that effort will not make him exceptional.

The city’s appeal eventually recedes. A life Philip once found so charming becomes, to him, inept; he grows tired of the cafes, the restaurants and their ill-cooked food, and the shabby conditions in which he and his companions live. He feels revulsion not only toward the surroundings but toward the artistic circle that had helped define his Paris life: Cronshaw’s rhetoric, Mrs. Otter’s respectability, Ruth Chalice’s affectations, and the quarrels between Lawson and Clutton. He asks Lawson to send his belongings. When they arrive a week later, Philip examines his canvases without emotion, and notices his detachment with interest. His departure from painting is therefore not a sudden verdict alone; it follows a broader loss of attachment to the life and community that had sustained the ambition.

Paris remembered and put to use

Paris remains important after Philip has left it. When Hayward suggests that his two years there were wasted, Philip rejects the judgment by pointing to the movement of a child, the pattern of sunlight on the ground beneath trees, and the sky. He says that without Paris he would never have seen that sky. The answer recasts the value of study: even without becoming a painter, he has acquired a more attentive way of perceiving movement, light, and pattern. The experience’s lasting return is not professional success but an altered capacity to notice.

That education also informs Philip’s later encounter with clothing as a field of design. When he works in the costume department, he gradually develops a technical interest in women’s clothes. His eye for colour is more highly trained than anyone else’s there, and he retains some knowledge of line from his student days in Paris. He buys a cheap box of watercolours and sketches a costume adapted from one he remembers seeing in Paris, building the effect through a combination of violent, unusual colours. He shows the result to Mrs. Hodges, who takes it to the buyer. The scene shows Parisian training surviving outside the career Philip abandoned: the city’s visual lessons can be applied to practical work and recognized by others.

The city as experience and perspective

Philip’s later reflections place travel in relation to both belief and perception. His year in Germany and long stay in Paris have prepared him to receive sceptical teaching with a sense of relief. Contact with other manners and customs has helped him see that beliefs taken as self-evident at home are not necessarily universal; practices can appear necessary to those who follow them and absurd to outsiders. Paris is therefore not just a studio address but part of a wider education in viewing familiar assumptions from a distance.

The city’s significance rests on this double effect. It exposes Philip to changing artistic standards, makes his ambitions answerable to criticism, and brings him into contact with a demanding and precarious way of life. Yet even as he turns away from the cafes, companions, and career he once valued, Paris remains in his eye: the remembered movement, light, colour, and pattern continue to shape what he can notice and what he can do. Its legacy is the lasting perception he carries away, not the identity of a successful painter.