AllMovie

Before getting a "lock" on his "All-American Boy" screen persona, Charles Ray appeared in several films along the lines of A Painted Soul. Ray plays a young artist who, after gaining fame for a portrait titled "The Painted Soul," seeks inspiration for his next work, "The Fallen Woman." He finds it in the form of beautiful but downtrodden prostitute Bessie Barriscale. As work on the portrait progresses, the artist and his model fall in love -- whereupon Ray's mother, evidently inspired by Camille, begs the girl to break off the romance so as not to destroy her son's future. Tearfully conceding that she must be cruel to be kind, Barriscale runs out into the streets and deliberately propositions a detective, knowing that she will be arrested and thus disgraced in Ray's eyes. The Painted Soul was the tenth of Charles Ray's starring vehicles for 1915.