Swami Vivekananda - Pastel Drawing

This is a photograph of a pastel drawing of Swamiji au Bedouin by Maud Stumm, a young artist who was one of the Leggett’s house guests during the “great summer.” “On a hot summer day Miss Stumm and others asked Swamiji to show how he wound his turban—a demonstration he had given perhaps countless times in the West for fascinated children and grownups alike. Now at Ridgely Manor he wound and unwound the length of silk, disclosing the mysteries not only of his own turban but of other kinds as well. ‘When he arranged it as the desert people do, to keep the neck from the great heat,’ Miss Stumm recounted, ‘I asked him to pose, and he did, talking all the time. That was the day he talked to us of purity and truth.’ ”4 “ ‘The lines of the mouth were so simple and lovely and yet so very difficult!’ Miss Stumm wrote of her attempts to draw him.” 5 A charming sequel to this account is that Swamiji himself took drawing lessons from Miss Stumm. She recalled: At an appointed hour he came, promptly, bringing to me, with a curious little air of submission, a huge red apple, which he laid in my hands, bowing gravely. I asked him the significance of this gift, and he said, “in token that the lessons may be fruitful”—and such a pupil as he proved to be! Once only did I have to tell him anything; his memory and concentration were marvelous, and his drawings strangely perfect and intelligent for a beginner. By the time he had taken his fourth lesson, he felt quite equal to a portrait; so . . . Turiyananda posed, like any bronze image, and was drawn capitally—all in the study of Mr. Leggett, with its divan for our seat, and its fine light to aid us.6 ❊ ❊ ❊ [From Maud Stumm’s reminiscences] “Nearly every day Swami was wonderful in a new way! And now it would be music that he dwelt upon, now art, and once he burst into the morning room, declaring for ‘liberty.’ ‘What do I care if Mohammed was a good man, or Buddha! Does that alter my own goodness or evil? Let us be good for our own sake on our own responsibility! Not because somebody way back there was good!’ ” (RSV, 265-66)