Philip abandons accountancy to pursue art in Paris

Philip Carey’s decision to abandon accountancy and study art in Paris turns a year of London frustration into a risky pursuit of beauty and vocation. Encouraged by the romance of artistic life and by friends who see talent in him, he leaves his articles convinced that he may become a painter; the Paris years then test that conviction against instruction, artistic fashion, and the limits of his ability.

The office and the opening

Philip’s apprenticeship at Herbert Carter & Co. increasingly feels like a life sentence. An agreement permits him to leave after a year if the work does not suit him, with half the money paid for his articles returned. He believes he is meant for something better than adding accounts, yet finds the work humiliating precisely because he performs poorly at something he regards as contemptible. The vulgar scenes with Thompson fray his patience, and the prospect of spending more than four additional years among the clerks makes his heart sink. London, once associated with possibility, has yielded loneliness, dreary lodgings, and an office from which he longs to escape.

The isolation is intellectual as well as social. Philip has been reading and thinking, but knows no one willing to discuss abstract ideas with him. He eagerly anticipates seeing Hayward, whose promised visit would offer a companion for such conversation; when Hayward stays in Italy instead, the disappointment deepens Philip’s sense that his present life has closed around him. Hayward’s letter supplies a sharp counter-image to the ledger and office: it urges Philip to treat life as an adventure, take risks, and go to Paris to study art. Its ideal of love and art gives a name and direction to a possibility Philip had only vaguely entertained.

Paris as promise

The suggestion takes hold partly because Philip has been collecting evidence, or what he takes for evidence, that he can paint. People at Heidelberg admired his watercolours, Miss Wilkinson repeatedly praised them, and the Watsons had noticed his sketches. His reading of La Vie de Bohème has made the Parisian artists’ life vivid to him: when depressed, he can return in imagination to its attics, where Rodolphe and his companions dance, love, and sing. Paris seems to offer romance, beauty, and love together, and Philip reasons that his passion for pictures might become the basis of a career. Miss Wilkinson encourages him and estimates that he could live there on eighty pounds a year, though his cautious nature keeps him from accepting her confidence at once. Hayward can advocate risk from the security of three hundred pounds a year in investments; Philip’s whole fortune is eighteen hundred pounds.

A business trip makes the imagined city briefly tangible. Goodworthy invites Philip to accompany him to Paris because the usual clerk is ill and Philip can be spared. The work will occupy their days, but the hotel supplies meals, leaving the evenings free. At Calais, the gesticulating porters make Philip’s heart leap; passing through the French countryside, he is captivated by the sand dunes, canals, and poplar-lined roads. The noisy cab from the Gare du Nord and dinner at the hotel seem to confirm that he has entered a new world.

Goodworthy shows him a very different Paris from the one in his books. He seeks out entertainments he considers indecent, taking Philip to the Moulin Rouge and the Folies Bergères and pointing out the spectacle and courtesans with a sly, sensual delight. Philip nevertheless sees the city through his own illusion. At dawn he rushes to the Champs-Élysées and stands at the Place de la Concorde; in the June air he feels his heart go out to the people and thinks that at last he has found romance. The contrast between Goodworthy’s vulgar tour and Philip’s idealized vision reveals how little the decision depends on a settled knowledge of artistic life: Paris matters first as the setting of his longing.

Leaving the articles

After less than a week in Paris, Philip returns late at night to his dingy rooms in Barnes with his mind made up. He will surrender his articles and study art, but plans to remain at the office until his year is complete so that his departure will not appear unreasonable. He uses the time remaining to read about Paris and painting, spends time at the National Gallery under the pretext of attending lectures for his first examination, and immerses himself in Ruskin and Vasari. The story of Correggio imagining himself before a masterpiece and declaring that he too is a painter becomes a model for Philip’s own ambition. His hesitation gives way to the belief that he has the makings of a great painter, and he tells himself that the essential thing is to try and take risks.

When he informs the firm that he will not return, Philip explains that the agreement allows him to leave at the end of the year and recover half the money paid for his articles. He says he has loathed the work, the office, and London for ten months, and would rather sweep a crossing than continue there. The reply that accountancy does not seem to fit him confirms what he already suspects. Philip offers a courteous farewell and thanks his employer for his kindness, while acknowledging that he had known almost from the beginning that he was no good at the work. The departure is not a triumphant rejection of a successful career; it is an exit from a profession in which he feels both misplaced and diminished.

Paris and the test of talent

Once in Paris, Philip enters an artistic world shaped by disputes over taste and authority. At Gravier’s, he encounters arguments about impressionism and the old masters: young artists set Manet, Monet, and Degas against academic painters, while Raphael’s inherited prestige is treated with derision. The judgments are delivered as signs of discernment, and Philip begins to absorb the new standards along with the community that voices them. Art is not simply a private calling in this world; it is also a social language through which artists mark out allegiance and sophistication.

His encounters with teaching expose a harsher side of that world. Foinet tells Fanny Price that her drawing is not good, not well drawn, and has no merit, and orders her to tear it up in front of Mrs. Otter. Price protests that she pays for instruction and is not being taught. Philip later receives a less theatrical but more consequential verdict from Foinet: he has manual dexterity and may, through hard work, become a careful, competent painter, but Foinet sees no talent in what he has shown and predicts that he will remain mediocre. Philip thanks him steadily. The judgment contradicts the confidence on which he based his departure, and distinguishes diligence from the imaginative gift he hoped to possess.

Philip’s taste changes before his career does. He comes to admire impressionism and takes up the confident language of its advocates. Photographs of Ingres’s Odalisque and Manet’s Olympia hang beside each other over his washing-stand, where he can contemplate them while shaving. He now insists that landscape painting began with Monet, while standing before Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus or Velázquez’s portrait known among the artists as the Lady with the Flea-bitten Nose still gives him a thrill. His clothes and habits change with his artistic identity: he exchanges the bowler hat and neat blue tie he brought to Paris for a broad-brimmed hat, flowing black cravat, and romantic cape, and learns to drink absinthe without distaste. These outward transformations show how thoroughly he inhabits the artist’s life even as the question of his actual ability remains unsettled.

From artistic ambition to another vocation

Art continues to matter to Philip even after his confidence in his own painting has been shaken. Fanny Price’s insistence on the authority of great works gives him an encounter with Rembrandt’s Disciples at Emmaus that she treats as a test of whether he can feel beauty. Later, photographs of El Greco’s paintings, shown to him by Athelny, trouble and move him: their elongated figures and strange attitudes are not realistic, yet seem to possess a compelling reality. Philip cannot immediately say what meaning they offer, but the experience preserves art as a way of seeing that exceeds technical competence or fashionable judgment.

The practical consequence of Philip’s artistic crisis is his eventual turn to medicine. As a student at St. Luke’s, he discovers the dissecting room’s acrid smell, then works as an out-patients’ clerk among patients waiting in dim rooms, bottles and gallipots in hand. He finds the work absorbing: the patients’ faces and voices, their different responses to illness, and the need to ask questions that bring out the truth engage him more directly than the pursuit of colour, tone, and values had done. Their trust makes him feel at home with them, without the condescension he associates with pity. In the hospital he finds another form of attentive work, one grounded not in making beautiful objects but in contact with people.

That contact extends beyond the clinic. During his district duties, Philip attends an average of three confinements a day, often summoned at night to walk through the deserted streets of south London. He waits with women in labour and their families in cramped, stuffy rooms, sharing tea and sometimes bread and dripping. His experience among the poor helps him recognize their circumstances and small evasions; his kindness, gentle hands, and patience earn their confidence. The change does not erase the earlier Paris ambition. Instead, it redirects Philip’s search for a fitting life: the young man who left accountancy to become a painter finds professional purpose in the close observation and care of human lives.