Sheet
1892-11-12

1

The exhibition opened on 5 November 1892. On the twelfth an extraordinary meeting carried a motion to close it, one hundred and twenty to one hundred and five. The pictures were off the walls on the morning of the thirteenth. It had been intended to run to the nineteenth.

2

A fifteen-vote margin is not a verdict. A hundred and five people voted the other way, and the room was still arguing when the pictures came down. No individual closed it; a membership did, by counting.

3

The offer that followed had two shapes: two hundred Marks in cash, or a third of the income. He took the third. That decision is the whole premise of this sheet, and it is the part he set down in his own hand within days.

4

He did not arrange any of it. He wrote at the time that better advertising could not be had, which is a different statement — the first is a plan and the second is a man noticing his luck about a week late.

5

Eighteen hundred Marks came in at the door of his own hall. The surplus was not large and the expenses were, in his own account, extremely high. Both halves sit in the same letter a few lines apart, and only the first half is ever quoted.

6

Determination: the closure was worth more than the exhibition, and neither of them made him rich. A week, a fifteen-vote margin, a third of the door, and a surplus that fitted in one hand. The foot of this sheet is where that arithmetic ends up.