While Lilly daubed on a window pane, he stood smoking Turkish tobacco or chewing ginger before one of the modelling stands that took up the centre of the room and "pottered" at his work.
The artistic creations that he "fetched out of the depths of his soul" were usually human figures half or third life size: knights in armour bearing banners, maidens in old German costumes aimlessly stretching out their hands, allegoric women's figures doing the same, heralds blowing trumpets, and now and then secession shapes, long, slim, swirly limbs which trailed off like a nixy's body into a fish's tail into ash trays, finger bowls, or other such pleasing and useful objects.
And all the while that he was turning out factory models, dusty, half-completed paintings and sketches hung on the walls, or stood on the floor leaning against the walls. They showed a bold inventiveness, a riotous joy in colour. Each seemed to bear the mark of a reckless conception and a laughing ability to execute.
One was a picture of a half-ruined church in a tropical forest with a pack of monkeys chasing over the altar; another, a group of stupid camels in a depressing desert scene snuffling at the corpse of a dead lion. The best was a painting of a naked woman weighed down by heavy chains, which bound her blooming, lustrous body to a parched rock, while a flock of black, red-eyed vultures hovered about her head.
There was much else which testified to force and originality, but the woman in chains remained Lilly's favourite.
One day she ventured to ask her teacher why he permitted all these paintings to go to ruin instead of finishing them and placing them on exhibit.
"Because I have to produce pot-boilers, you innocent angel, you," he replied, and splashed a clod of clay against the leg of the allegoric lady he was working on. "Because the world requires lamps and vases, but not an eternal beauty with mother-wit inside her lovely body. Because there are 'manufacturers of imitation bronze ware,' who keep you from dropping by the roadside. And because I'm a fellow with sound teeth who must have a few morsels of life to crunch, and, after starving for twenty years, would like to join the great band of Dionysus worshippers. Do you understand, you afternoon-tea-soul, you?"