Rose VanDusenberg, parts 914 - 917

  914. The meeting between Rose and the hotel manager took place over dinner in the resort dining room. It was Coromo himself who had the honor of waiting on them, and the pleasure of listening to bits and pieces of their long conversation about everything from what sort of chairs and tables to buy, to why reproductions of neo-classical paintings do not belong on restaurant walls.

915. A great many of the considerations touched on by Rose would never have crossed Coromo's mind. For example, original oil paintings and copies on canvas were ruled out simply because you couldn't wash gravy off of them without damaging the surface.

916. All of Rembrandt's paintings were dismissed out of hand simply because they were brown. "When one puts up a work of art in an interior one is first of all putting up a spot of color,"  said Rose. "One may want a spot of red, provided by Matisse, or a big patch of blue provided by Rothko. Monochrome works have their place also to provide balance, but splashes of brown all over the place never work. 

917. This sort of talk was very upsetting to the hotel manager because he had never in his life imagined that anyone would write off the entire life's work of a great artist, works were worth tens of millions of dollars, paintings any museum would die to have in their permanent collection just because they were all somehow too excremental.