CHARACTER GUIDE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 May 1940, Page 3

CHARACTER GUIDE

MOUTH CANNOT DISSEMBLE. Women have always attached a great deal of importance to the eye. From earliest times they have tried to heighten its charms by make-up of one sort or another, says a writer in the "Yorkshire Post." Beauty specialists have encouraged the belief that if the eyes are made lovely, the rest of the face will seem so to the beholder. Chemists have fos- (. tered it by endless preparations. Photographers have aided and abetted. Now a portrait painter disagrees. Sir John Lavery, in his autobiography, “The Life of a Painter,” writes: “It is a common fallacy to believe that the eye is the most revealing feature, or that the most striking features of a woman are her eyes and hair. As a matter of fact, it is her mouth. “Mahomet knew this when he had

nis womenKinu cover uieua up. “The eyes can dissemble, but not the mouth,” Sir John adds. “Every woman knows it to be her chief attraction. and today does her best with lip- ; stick to add to her sex and increase her power to dissemble and disarm. “A man cannot very well look into her eyes while they talk, without a certain feeling of embarrassment, but he may concentrate his eye on her lips.” Here, I must disagree. It is surelj less embarrassing to look someone in the eye than to look at the mouth when in conversation. The observed would certainly become confused before long. Try it and see. That, however, seems to fit in with the painter’s theory that the mouth cannot dissemble. “Lip-stick is, today, widely used in the strict sense of the word," Sir John writes. “For a time women aimed at a little button-hole of a mouth, or a cupid’s bow, but the;

movies have changed that to a large, sensual gash, which is easy to paint and obscures the character in a way that is pleasing to a female and passes muster as a likeness for the painter." Sii‘ John tells a very interesting story of the visit of King George V. and Queen Mary to his studio in 1912 to view the finished canvas of a picture he had been commissioned to paint of the Royal Family. "They were so pleased that the King said he would like to have a hand in it, and, thinking that royal blue might be an appropriate colour,” writes Sir John, "I mixed it on the palette, and. taking a brush, he applied it to the Garter ribbon.' Queen Mary followed his example. It is recorded that when Velasquez completed “Las Meninas," King Philip asked for a brush and colour and painted the Red Cross of the Knights of Calatrava on the breast of the painter in the picture.