The Clesinger head I have seen at Pere la Chaise. It
is mediocre and lifeless. Kwiatowski has caught some of the
Chopin spirit in the etching that may be found in volume one of
Niecks' biography. The Winterhalter portrait in Mr. Hadow's
volume is too Hebraic, and the Graefle is a trifle ghastly. It is
the dead Chopin, but the nose is that of a predaceous bird,
painfully aquiline. The "Echo Muzyczne" Warsaw, of October 1899--
in Polish "17 Pazdziernika"--printed a picture of the composer at
the age of seventeen. It is that of a thoughtful, poetic, but not
handsome lad, his hair waving over a fine forehead, a feminine
mouth, large, aquiline nose, the nostrils delicately cut, and
about his slender neck a Byronic collar. Altogether a novel
likeness. Like the Chopin interpretation, a satisfactory Chopin
portrait is extremely rare.
As some difficulty was experienced in discovering the identity of
Countess Delphine Potocka, I applied in 1899 to Mr. Jaraslow de
Zielinski, a pianist of Buffalo, New York, for assistance; he is
an authority on Polish and Russian music and musicians.
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