these synopses
©
part of an edition of
The liar
on
the Ladder : a Henry James website
A portrait painter finds that a woman who refused his marriage proposal is now the wife of an habitual liar. It takes the couple’s reaction to his accurate painting of the man to make him realize that she will support her husband because she loves him enough to sacrifice her own truth standard.
Oliver Lyon has been invited to a country-house in Hertfordshire to paint the portrait of the nonagenarian head of the house. At dinner on his first evening he sees an extravagantly handsome man who, it turns out is now the husband of a woman he proposed to years before when a student in Munich. She is also at the table of course and his favourable impressions are renewed. During the port he gets talking to Colonel Capadose, as the gentleman is called, who tells a number of very unlikely stories and relates how in the early days of his marriage, he and his wife had to part with a portrait of her painted by Lyon to an insistent German Count, gaining a vase in exchange. When reunited with the ladies Mrs Capadose, reveals that they sold the painting for a large sum. In the smoking room, the Colonel regales Lyon with a story about a recent guest of the house who departed unexpectedly after a night in one of the rooms which he says in haunted; however, on starting for bed, Lyon’s host, Arthur Ashmore, claims there was not such man, nor indeed, ghost.
Old Sir David Ashmore, in chatting with Lyon during the sittings, reveals that Colonel Capadose is an inveterate liar, not usually about things that matter but just for the fund of it. Lyon confirms this from his own experience and feels sure from what he knows of Everina’s character when he knew her that she must feel mortified, especially if she has to cover up for her husband. Back in his London studio some weeks later Lyon starts a portrait of the Capadose’s little daughter Amy. Everina always brings her and he selfishly gains the impression that she sits contemplating what life might have been like if she had accepted his ‘honest’ life.
After Amy, Lyon paints a portrait of the Colonel, drawing him out during the sittings so that the finished work will capture the essence of the liar. The portrait is nearly complete when the summer holidays arrive. During the last session a tipsy woman appears in the studio seeking work as a model and the Colonel weaves a fantasy about his having had to break up a relationship between her and a friend some years earlier about which she is still angry. Lyon cannot resist making a day trip to London from his brother’s south-coast home, to make some additions to the painting. At his studio he finds the Colonel and Mrs Capadose sneaking a look at it, despite his having requested them not to. Unobserved himself, he sees her shocked reaction at the ‘truth’ of the result, and the Colonel’s destruction, after she leaves, of the canvas, using a knife left in the studio. At the end of the summer Lyon visits the couple, but has to volunteer information about the loss; the Colonel, supported by his wife, blame the tipsy woman’s supposed vendetta, leaving Lyon with the realization (at last) that she loves the man so much that she has changed her own moral values.