Philip Carey and Foinet’s Mentorship

Foinet’s mentorship of Philip Carey turns on a distinction that Philip needs to hear plainly: industry is not talent, and competence is not artistic vocation. The small, sarcastic instructor first meets Philip as a novice in the Paris studio, but nearly two years later gives him the frank assessment that helps end his attempt to become a painter. His guidance is severe, yet its force comes from candor rather than contempt: he urges Philip to leave art before belated disappointment hardens into regret.

The Friday Instructor at Amitrano’s

At Amitrano’s School, Foinet was one of the masters who visited to criticise students’ work. He came on Fridays, in contrast to Michel Rollin, the helpful and encouraging teacher who attended on Tuesdays. Foinet was difficult to get on with: small and shrivelled, with a bilious air, untidy grey beard, bad teeth, and savage eyes, he spoke in a high, sarcastic voice. His manner belonged to a man who had little patience for the consolations of artistic aspiration.

His own career gave his judgments a particular edge. Foinet had once looked forward to a great future, and the Luxembourg had bought his pictures, but for twenty years he had repeated the landscape that brought him early success. When people reproached him with monotony, he defended himself by invoking Corot, who had painted only one thing. The contrast between his youthful promise and his long repetition shadows the advice he later gives Philip: an artist may continue working without becoming more than what his early ability permits.

First Encounters in the Studio

Foinet’s teaching was not simply indiscriminate harshness. He could recognise the work of students who understood his technical explanations, even when most of the class did not. On Philip’s first days at the studio, however, there was little to assess. When Mrs. Otter explained that Philip had arrived only two days earlier, was a beginner, and had never studied before, Foinet answered that this was evident and moved on. The exchange establishes the bluntness of his manner, but also the limited basis for any early judgment: Philip was still at the threshold of training.

The same severity became more damaging when directed at Fanny Price. After she complained that he paid too little attention to her, Foinet asked to see the drawing on which she had been working all week. In front of Mrs. Otter, he declared that it was neither good nor well drawn, had no merit, was wrong throughout, and should be torn up. Fanny was furious and humiliated; she protested that she paid him to teach her and that this was not teaching. The episode supplies a troubling precedent for Philip’s later consultation: Foinet’s honesty can be useful, but his blunt delivery can wound, and criticism alone does not amount to humane instruction.

Philip’s Education in Looking

Philip’s years in Paris also change the standards by which he understands art. At first he encounters a studio culture in which impressionism is ascendant but its victory over older schools remains recent. Students set Manet, Monet, and Degas against painters such as Carolus-Duran and Bouguereau, and treat admiration for the old masters by new standards. Raphael’s established prestige can even become an object of derision. Philip enters this world as a newcomer, learning not only to paint but to adopt the judgments and allegiances by which the artistic community distinguishes the discerning from the conventional.

His instruction in looking is not confined to Foinet’s Friday critiques. Fanny Price takes him through the Louvre, insisting that he attend to works she admires, including Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus; she tells him that feeling its beauty will mean he knows something about painting. Philip’s tastes subsequently shift. He sets aside his earlier artistic gods, admires impressionism, and pins photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia beside one another over his washing-stand. These details make his artistic formation a matter of repeated observation and changing allegiance, rather than a single teacher’s verdict. They also clarify what Foinet’s eventual assessment does—and does not—settle: Philip has learned to look and to work, but those capacities do not establish that he possesses a distinctive artistic gift.

The Private Assessment

After nearly two years studying under Foinet, Philip decides to ask whether it is worth continuing. His question grows from an increasingly sharp difference between art and life as possible ways of spending oneself. He suspects that true painters and other artists are driven to subordinate life to their work, while he wants to live experience directly and draw from each moment what it offers. The death of Fanny Price remains in his thoughts as he makes this decision. He remembers that Foinet’s brutal advice to her had been sound, and the studio feels changed by her absence; gestures and voices can recall her, and he wakes from dreams of her in terror at the suffering she must have endured.

Philip knows where to find Foinet after the Friday visit: he lunches at a small restaurant in the Rue d’Odessa. Philip hurries through his own meal and waits in the crowded street until he sees the master walking with his head bent. Nervous, he approaches and asks whether, after working under him for almost two years, he should continue. Foinet initially shows no visible response. When Philip says that the answer seems to imply he has little chance, Foinet has him lead the way to his studio and asks to see the work. The exchange moves the question from anxious speculation to an examination of Philip’s actual paintings.

Verdict, Advice, and Consequence

Foinet’s judgment is carefully qualified. Philip has manual dexterity, and hard work and perseverance could make him a careful, competent painter; there would be hundreds who painted worse and hundreds who painted as well. But Foinet sees industry and intelligence, not talent, and tells him that he will never be more than mediocre. He distinguishes the possibility of respectable craft from the promise of distinction, refusing to encourage Philip simply because he has already invested years of effort.

The advice that follows is personal as well as professional. Foinet tells Philip to take courage and try his luck at something else. He explains that he would give everything he had if someone had given him the same advice when he was young and if he had acted on it. For a moment, the severe instructor’s face changes: he forces a smile, but his eyes remain grave and sad. His own long career of repetition lends weight to the warning, even as it complicates his authority. Foinet is not speaking from the position of an untroubled master who has fulfilled his promise; he knows the cost of discovering mediocrity too late.

Philip answers steadily and thanks him for taking the trouble to judge the work. The assessment does not merely bruise his confidence; it gives him a basis on which to make a decision. He abandons painting and chooses medicine. Foinet’s importance in Philip’s life therefore lies less in sustained encouragement than in a single, hard-won act of professional honesty: by separating the ability to work from the gift to excel, he helps Philip stop mistaking perseverance for proof that art must be his vocation.