"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - unam.

why these panels aren't famous; they aren't any good." But then I looked at another one,
and I said, "Wow! That's a good one." I looked at the others. "That's good too, so is that
one, but that one's lousy." I had never heard of these panels, but I decided that they were
all good except for two.
I went into a place called the Sala de Raphael ­­ the Raphael Room ­­ and I
noticed the same phenomenon. I thought to myself, "Raphael is irregular. He doesn't
always succeed. Sometimes he's very good. Sometimes it's just junk."
When I got back to my hotel, I looked at the guidebook. In the part about the
Sistine Chapel: "Below the paintings by Michelangelo there are fourteen panels by
Botticelli, Perugino" ­­ all these great artists ­­ "and two by So­and­so, which are of no
significance." This was a terrific excitement to me, that I also could tell the difference
between a beautiful work of art and one that's not, without being able to define it. As a
scientist you always think you know what you're doing, so you tend to distrust the artist
who says, "It's great," or "It's no good," and then is not able to explain to you why, as
Jerry did with those drawings I took him. But here I was, sunk: I could do it too!
In the Raphael Room the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings
were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by
Raphael. This was a big jab for my self­confidence in my ability to appreciate art.
Anyway, the guy from the art class and the nifty model came over to my house a
number of times and I tried to draw her and learn from him. After many attempts I finally
drew what I felt was a really nice picture ­­ it was a portrait of her head ­­ and I got very
excited about this first success.
I had enough confidence to ask an old friend of mine named Steve Demitriades if
his beautiful wife would pose for me, and in return I would give him the portrait. He
laughed. "If she wants to waste her time posing for you, it's all right with me, ha, ha, ha."
I worked very hard on her portrait, and when he saw it, he turned over to my side
completely: "It's just wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Can you get a photographer to make
copies of it? I want to send one to my mother in Greece!" His mother had never seen the
girl he married. That was very exciting to me, to think that I had improved to the point
where someone wanted one of my drawings.
A similar thing happened at a small art exhibit that some guy at Caltech had
arranged, where I contributed two drawings and a painting. He said, "We oughta put a
price on the drawings."
I thought, "That's silly! I'm not trying to sell them."
"It makes the exhibition more interesting. If you don't mind parting with them,
just put a price on."
After the show the guy told me that a girl had bought one of my drawings and
wanted to speak to me to find out more about it.
The drawing was called "The Magnetic Field of the Sun." For this particular
drawing I had borrowed one of those beautiful pictures of the solar prominences taken at
the solar laboratory in Colorado. Because I understood how the sun's magnetic field was
holding up the flames and had, by that time, developed some technique for drawing
magnetic field lines (it was similar to a girl's flowing hair), I wanted to draw something
beautiful that no artist would think to draw: the rather complicated and twisting lines of
the magnetic field, close together here and spreading out there.
I explained all this to her, and showed her the picture that gave me the idea.