The figure occupies an artifice, a room which either isn’t one, but a studio improvisation, or which is a room, shot from an angle giving a false compression by juxtaposition of incongruous planes and decorative elements. This pathetic, not to say hostile context underscores his posture and expression but with open causation, as so many punctures in a study of St Sebastian. We are aware of an agitation against the falsity that arrests us. This is pretty nervy picturewriting. Guests, escaping trades and guilds whose following frames the mind, may take heart in the sensible motto of the Bohemian Club, and visit as often as they like.
There's something very Melvillian in a man's resort to a club, which the founders of Bohemia understood very well. Sometimes more honoured in the breach than not, the motto is a sound one for our Ishmael. Immune from care on steep old Taylor Street, his lyric for that gathering, speaks of a true place no proud man ever knew.
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