Tricks

"I went up to one of them," he began, "just to see how it was done. I stuck my nose into it. Well it's just not true! Impossible to say whether it was done with glue, with rubies, with soap, with sunshine, with leaven, with cack!"
...
"It looks as though it was done with nothing at all," resumed the painter. "No more chance of discovering the trick than there is in the 'Night Watch' or the 'Female Regents,' and technically it's even better than Rembrandt or Hals. It's all there–but really, I swear it."
I would not want to be too much like Proust's grotesque Mme Verdurin in adoring Night Watch, so I will leave her and that painting to look at Hals' 1664 Women Regents at the Men's Almshouse. This is precisely the sort of group portrait that I despised on museum visits as a little girl, not understanding why anyone would paint such a group of sour, dour, unpleasant and undoubtedly demanding old ladies. Now, however, despite what else there is to say about them I can look at their hands or their repressed smiles that slip through their efforts to submerge feeling.

Elstir was not at the time much respected in Mme Verdurin's group when he makes the comment about another artist's work which he has seen that day, who has died recently. Tricks, he says, he was looking for. He will in due course, learn those tricks, make up his own, leave this coterie for the dedication his studio requires and become a great and successful artist. Not everyone will understand what he has done.

“It seems that Emperor William is highly intelligent, but he doesn’t care for Elstir’s painting. Not that that’s anything against him,” said the Duchesse, “I quite share his point of view. Although Elstir has done a fine portrait of me. You don’t know it? It’s not in the least like me, but it’s an intriguing piece of work.... He has made me like a little old woman. It’s modeled on ‘The Women’s Regents of the Hospice,’ by Hals. I expect you know those sublimities, to borrow one of my nephew’s favorite expressions,” the Duchesse turned to me, gently flapping her black feather fan.

No matter. Elstir by then knows that his work is good and knows to paint what he must paint, not necessarily what is expected of him. The portrait is not a commission piece, but rather a portrait he chose to do. She was his model, her face merely a loose hold on this world as he produced work that was out of this world.

Tricks trick us into believing in ourselves.