Some painters with an excellent eye soften their art, choose slightly errant execution to secure a client's approbation, and in so compromising their perception suffer silent remorse. A certain portraitist was saddled with such clarity of insight and integrity of stroke that her efforts to temper the shocking precision with which she transposed her subject's character to the canvas were insufficient to permit of commercial success. Responsible for dependent children, and burdened with a monstrous talent for exactitude, the artist resorted to guile. She set out to find a method whereby she could satisfy her exigent patrons, navigate serenely the fearsome deeps of wealthy women's vanities, cater gracefully to the unspoken need for reassurance of those who had inherited whatever they had in the world, and temporarily submit to the mental grip of clever men made uneasy by lack of control. She enlisted the aid of physical science, explored the chemistry of pigment and the structure of solvents, and once adept at tinkering with suspensions and precipitates, turned again to the search for commissions.    

She had decided to double up her paintings. Before commencing a formal sitting, she took a fresh canvas, and brushed there from memory whatever notes in the human scale she esteemed were at play in her subject. Stretched chords, blocks of dissonance, and subtle harmonies resolved or gone astray found definition through her palette, body within her chromatic range. So sure was her intuition, so telling the detail of these physiognomies projected in imagination, that the secret depictions decanted her clients embedded traits to become strange, bold sisters to the summary of features from which they were inferred. A hint of greed in a puffy cheek distilled into crapulence. Innocence cast in the lid-line of an eye modulated between quiet acceptance and veneration. The tight purse grooving a naturally sensitive mouth constricted to gouge crevices where desire had burned and dried above the lips. The loft of a forehead balanced a cranial arch, and encasing mental faculties at ease with abstraction, showed humility, grains of sadness in creases across the frontal expanse. Over the first layer she applied a pellucid varnish, intending it to last for one hundred years. She covered this during subsequent sittings with a slightly idealised version of the one whose money paid for her work. The surface representations were expressive renderings of the sitter's face, carefully expunged of the more disconcerting qualities in the painter's vision.

Her success was immediate and unrivalled, soon banishing penury. The double-surfaced contrivance, while somewhat duplicitous, forged a permanent truce between her talent and its sale. The century's grace before the surreptitious portrait would leak through, before pigments would dissolve to expose the subterfuge, had at least the trappings of ethical conduct. It was perhaps unfortunate that there was more capability in her painting than in her chemistry.

After a lapse of just twenty-five years, the covering portraits began to decompose. The powerful, subjacent sisters impregnated the surface. Emergent impressions created havoc in ancestral halls. A fracas of outrage and delight welled up at the secret incantations abruptly revealed. The painter met the hue and cry with mischievous grins and sly confessions of alchemical incompetence. Why shouldn't portraits contain the dynamic of the features they enshrined; and who could complain of receiving two after having paid but for one?

Her craft was sufficiently mysterious and profound to set disquieting rumours flying, to let loose even the mad whisper that her art invoked the supernatural. It was widely held that the nascent apparition, soaking through the surface paint, tolled a death knell for the person so unveiled. The idea of a secret, vital vision underpinning once familiar features had the subjects themselves musing before the frames; and morbid attacks, whether from superstition or from dismay at sudden, startling recognition, were not infrequent as the nether portraits met the light of day.

Yet magisterial beauty still was embodied in the portraits that survived the initial furore and its complex aftermath. Patrons who left intact for the view of successive generations their striking, pictorial characterisations might have been pleased to see that as long as their line endured, a portrait never seemed to stabilise. Among a subject's progeny, one child would find his individual imprint changing the pattern on the canvas, reconfiguring the oils. The power of the painter, left to work towards truth unclouded, was ever more exact than a mere moment's vision.