I HOPE YOU NOTICE that I have radically altered my technique since you last saw me. I have done away with those vastly long brushes that used to be my stock in trade. A pity, in some ways, as they looked so good. I remember the photograph that went with the review of my first big show at the Fine Art Society in 1905. I was more proud of the photograph than the reviews, I think, good though they were. Now there, I thought, there is a painter. And it was true. I was a handsome dog, and every inch the artist, standing so proud some three feet from the canvas, with that long thin brush extended before me. A bit like the conductor of an orchestra, forcing my colours to take on the shape and shades I required. Big brush strokes, very Impressionist. But it was all thirty years too late, wasn’t it? We were so proud of ourselves for challenging the establishment, bravely taking on the academicians, banishing the dusty and fusty, the conventional and the staid. But they were already dying on their feet anyway, those old codgers. We didn’t really have to fight; our generation never has. Never will, either; if there is a war now—and people tell me there may be one day—it won’t be us marching along, rifle in hand. We’re too old already. Besides, we were merely imitators, importers of foreign ware into England, with no more originality than the people we so greatly despised. Less, perhaps; you would never have mistaken one of their pictures for a French one; our radicalism consisted of making ourselves copyists.
Ah, but it looked good for a while, no doubt about it, and it was the way to make a living, win a reputation. The English cannot take too much novelty; thirty-year-old fashions are quite radical enough for them. Not a criticism; it’s comfortable and safe, but even then I think I was aware that our excitement and fervour were not quite genuine. There was always something of the amateur theatricals about us. So I went back to the beginning when I came here. I’d been a good enough painter, but not an entirely honest one, so I started again. Out went those long-handled brushes, in came perfectly ordinary ones, the sort you can get at any supplier’s. Change that, and you change everything. The movement of the brush on the canvas, how much paint you pick up, how you mix it. I am more precise, more considered and meticulous now. And I am more interested in what I am painting.
A big change. My inability to remember the name of that woman I so horribly insulted was no accident. I can scarcely remember any of my sitters; could hardly remember them then. I didn’t know them when they came into my studio for the first time, and knew them scarcely any better when they left clutching their finished portrait. I painted what I thought they looked like, how the light reflected off their clothes and skin, the interplay of colours around them. Character and personality played second fiddle to technique. And that was not good enough. Reynolds knew that, and said so. Rembrandt knew it so well he couldn’t even be bothered to mention it. He no doubt wanted to paint the soul, Reynolds wanted a psychological study, but it was the same thing they were after, really. What lies beneath; the skull beneath the skin, and the soul within the skull—or wherever it may be found.
And I was putting down a lazy, superficial glance, thinking that because it was my glance, put down in the latest French style, it was enough. All I was saying was: Look at me! Aren’t I clever? A very poor thing, that. I have concluded that unless you are humble before your subject, you are no good. And it doesn’t matter whether your subject is the King-Emperor of Britain and the Indies, or a cheap model, or a bowl of fruit.
You see the link, no doubt? Of course you do, you got there way before me; you were always cleverer than me. I am trying to justify why it is that most Sundays you will find me on my knees in the local church. I am trying to become a better painter, my friend, because if the Almighty doesn’t make me feel humble, the pasty face of William Nasmyth smirking before me in my best chair is hardly likely to do so either. I am trying to paint you, inside and out, and that is why I find it all so difficult. You are a hard one to fathom, always have been, because you have always been a bit of a charlatan.
There! That’s what I mean! Most people would look displeased at that, a little concerned at least. I have never met anyone, however despicable, who does not believe that they are fundamentally decent. It is part of the human condition. Nothing to be done about it. We need to feel as though we are doing our best. We need to justify our ways, to ourselves even if to no-one else. But you are different. You smile at the accusation. Not in a dismissive way, either, as if to say, foolish man, you cannot touch me so easily. No; with you there is the slightest, smallest nod. Of agreement. Of course I am a charlatan, that little inclination of your head says. That is my profession. We live in an age when appearance is all, and I am the master of it. I am a purveyor of the new upon the public, the intermediary. I persuade people to love what they hate, buy what they do not want, despise what they love, and that can only be done with the techniques of the circus ring-master. But I am honest, nonetheless, and tell the truth. In that lies my integrity: I am a fraud with a purpose.
“What do all men desire, except fame?” That was the question you put to me one night in a pub in Chelsea. We were a little drunk, I recall, so I didn’t reply; I knew you were going to answer for me anyway. I liked those evenings; to talk of such things, surrounded by the boatmen drinking away their wages, the porters and the grocers getting louder and louder as the publican pocketed their children’s food for the next week. It still meant a lot to me, though I was beginning to touch my emancipation by then. Your words were no longer received uncritically, and I was coming to see myself as your equal in stature. Is that not what a good teacher does, after all, stands and watches his pupils grow through, then outgrow, his tutelage? But then I realised you did not want me to grow. Just as much as I needed you to teach me, you needed my worship and naïveté and were not prepared to do without. I often wonder what it must be like to be a father, to see your child no longer childish, losing that automatic tendency to adore. Does it come in a moment, or gradually? Is it a peaceful or a violent process? Is that why artists behave like children, needing to humiliate and denigrate their elders in order to feel sure of themselves?
I suppose I will never find out. I will not see forty-five again, and it is too late; children are a form of creation that I will not experience. My decline is imminent; already I feel my bones ache when I get out of bed, feel tired at the end of the day, have trouble seeing things as well as I once did. It is the great curse of the portraitist, to be so aware of one’s own decline. I have spent years looking at people’s faces and bodies, know which muscles need to sag to produce that look of diminution in the elderly. I see a face and can trace the lines creeping across the cheeks and forehead, the way the eyes sink and lose their lustre. I have to see my fate every time I look in a mirror. I can foresee the future. It was no shock to me when you arrived. I knew exactly what you would look like; knew the precise shade of grey that flicks your hair, how far the hairline had receded, what difference it would make when more of that high forehead was revealed. Nothing bad, by the way; it adds to the air of intellectuality. I also knew in advance that your hands have become more bony, so that the impression of claws is accentuated. The fates have reserved corpulence for my decrepitude; you are awarded an ever more skeletal appearance, the skin of the neck beginning to drag down in lines like a lace curtain. I also knew that age would not have lessened that angularity that makes you seem uncomfortable and ill at ease. It has made it worse, in fact; you now seem to have no patience for anyone in the world. If you get older, that will get more pronounced. You can look forward to no physical ease; your body will not permit it. The inevitable beckons already; time is short.
I still enjoyed your company, long after we came back to London. I looked forward to our evenings, when you would, as much as possible, stop being the critic, and I would stop being—whatever I was trying to be at the time. It all ended when you married, alas; then you became domestic and proper, and went to clubs instead of taverns, and dinner parties instead of whelk stands. You lost the last slither of your integrity in Mayfair,
and learned to hide the earnest intensity that had always redeemed you. Slowly you said less that was good about people, more that was bad. Didn’t you miss it, though? On those night-time voyages we were adventurers in the dark lands of London, seeing subjects for paintings down dingy alleys, or huddled in doorways. We thought of ever more exotic places to meet: a tea shop in Islington; a chophouse at Billingsgate; a tavern in Wapping; a dance hall on a Saturday night in Shoreditch where we would watch the clerks and the cleaners, the cooks and the shop girls as they forgot their cares for a few inexpensive hours. There was something of magic in those places for me, something you do not get at the Athenaeum. A recklessness, and an energy, and a desperation. The very stuff of paintings, I think, if only a means can be found of persuading people to buy it.
And there was that pub in Chelsea, the only place we went more than once. Poorly lit, with terrible food and the air so heavy with tobacco smoke you could scarcely see the person across the table from you. So thick that a river fog outside was easier to see through. Stiflingly hot from so many bodies crammed in, and smelling dreadful from the sweat and beer, cheap food and pipes. But I remember looking at it, and suddenly saw the place come alive; not tobacco brown, but brilliant colours—the red of a neck scarf, the orange of an Irishman’s hair, the purple of a whore’s dress. The gold of the landlord’s cherished watch-chain, the ambers and browns and whites of the bottles on the shelves. And all those bodies, contorted and hustled together like a Renaissance battle scene. This is where the great tragedies and comedies of the modern world are played out. Not on an imagined medieval battlefield. And not in the South Seas, nor yet in Paris. There.
But do you remember how it all faded as we settled in? I do; I remember those conversations as though we were in an empty room, with no difficulty hearing or being heard, with no one bumping into us, as we sat and talked and drank and laughed, with you leaning over the table, your eyes blazing with the fire that came over you when you were fully engaged with an idea. You did not yet argue for pleasure, or merely to win. The truth still mattered to you.
“What do all men desire, except fame?” I did look around then, and you took the point. Did these people desire fame?
“Of course they do, in their little way,” you said. “Fame in their limited universe; the fame of being a good drunk, a generous fellow, one amongst everyone else. They wish their reputation to extend as far as their eyes can see. But as that is not too far from the end of their noses, then that is what they aim at. Artists see farther, so their ambitions are greater. They want the world to bow down before them, not just in this generation, but in the generations to come.
“But how to do it? Eh? Do you think that merit alone can achieve it? Do you think Michelangelo without Pope Julius, Turner without Ruskin, Manet without Baudelaire, would be so famous? Do you think merely painting good pictures is enough? You are a fool if you do.”
I suggested, I think, that poor Duncan, who you were then avidly promoting, could hardly be compared with Michelangelo.
“You are being obtuse,” you said. “Duncan transfers my ideas into physical form. I am not a painter, never was, never will be. I see the pictures I want in my mind, but cannot paint them. Duncan will do it for me. The time of the patron is long gone. It is not the people who buy paintings who matter, not even the artist who paints them. This is the age of the critic, of the thinker on art. The man who can say what art means, what it should be.”
I suggested that perhaps the public could make up its own mind. Not seriously, of course.
A snort of derision. “The public wants cheap filth. Over-painted nudes and pretty landscapes. We live in an unprecedented age, my friend. For the first time in history one group of people has the money, and another has the discernment. Admit it. You know it every day. How do you earn your money? You paint one thing to survive, and another to feel honest.”
You swept your arms around at the room, which had lost its colour and had become tobacco brown once more. “Look at these people! Hopeless. But at least they are poor. They are unlikely to put their hideous taste into practice, and besides, their money is not worth having, they have so little of it. All those people who dine at the Ritz are something else, more dangerous. They must be persuaded to buy something they do not like. And that is my job. Don’t look so disapproving. Without me, you’ll be painting big pink portraits of big pink women, of little girls on swings, for the rest of your life.”
This is what I am putting down now, if you must know; just before the light changes and I will have to stop for the day. I hope I can catch it, and turn it into light and shade, greens and blues. It is a darkness, your ambition, a shadow on your face, and I fear I will not get it just right. I will hint at it merely, and develop the theme later. Because it is not all there is. You believed in your ideas, after all, and merely used doubtful means to promote them. The magnificence of your arrogance, the exuberance of your daring, your sincerity and your cynicism, all these must find their place, translated into reality through the mixture of shadow and light, of colour and texture.
No theories here, you see. I am done with them, never believed in them anyway, really. We went our separate ways, after all. As you pointed out, I did not have enough money to paint things no-one would buy. The Banker’s Wife must be made to look like a pillar of society; only then will you get a banking price for your work. I lived a double life, running between drawing rooms and the dingy meetings of your art clubs, trying to reconcile the two, and failing, as you knew I must.
A man must eat, my friend! A man must eat. You could disdain those wealthy bankers because you were as rich as one, thanks to your wife. But I could not; I could either have success in the world or esteem from you. You urged me to have both, but it was another piece of your trickery. Because it could not be done.
And you don’t know the half of it. Do you want a confession? I turned faker too, in those days. You faked opinions on paintings; I faked the paintings themselves. People would not pay for my work, so I would produce things they would pay for. What was more, I duped you, once.
Ah! At last, I have got through those finely hewn defensive walls of yours. Thank heavens. It was my last throw. If that hadn’t worked, I would have had to resign myself to failure. You see, you are vulnerable as well. A little flicker, a momentary uncertainty; that was all I needed from you.
That’s enough. I’m not going to do any more today. So you have an afternoon free to vegetate, read, go for walks, write letters. Whatever you do with yourself. You may have noticed it is getting cooler these days as autumn approaches. The seasons change fast here. Better enjoy the sun while it lasts. Another day or so and the atmosphere will become violent.
SO MUCH FOR my prediction! A fine morning, again, although I detect the first touch of cold in the wind, which has switched to the northwest. Believe me; I know what I am talking about. You would not notice it, I imagine; you have to live here for a long time before you become sensitive to the minuscule changes in the weather. It’s a certain freshness just after dawn, the lightness of the wind, the sound of the sea that makes the difference and lets you know we are on the slide down into another winter. We really will have a storm in a day or so; I hope so, I want you to see one. The moods of the weather delight me; until I came here I never realised how much I hated the English winter. You become the weather you live in—I know, it’s a cliché, but I never realised quite how true it was. The drabness of the English climate produces drab people, wrapped up, desperate to keep the outside at bay. They wear an emotional overcoat throughout their lives and scowl upwards, wondering whether it is going to rain again. Quite right, too; it is. But it is not uplifting, to be enclosed by a feeling that if it isn’t raining now, it will be tomorrow. And we Scots . . . how can anyone understand colour when half the year it is only light six hours a day? You can crave it, of course, stand in front of a Claude Lorrain and wonder whether such blues truly exist in nature, dream of being in a place where the evening sun lights u
p poplar trees with such contrast and intensity. But that is not the same as understanding it, sinking into that brilliance and losing your fear of it. Such colours will always be foreign.
Here it is different, although I’m not sure why. We are only off the coast of Brittany, after all, not in the tropics or North Africa. But the weather gods are more direct here, unlike in England where they insinuate that it is summer so quietly that you could easily miss it, or ooze their way into winter so slowly you scarcely notice the change. Here they announce it with a trumpet blast, with tempests and heat-waves, cloudless blue skies or rainstorms that can batter you onto your knees, with howling winds or air so still and quiet you can hear a woman talking half a mile away.
Can I tell you my earliest memory? You are being my confessor, after all, after a fashion. I know you do not want to be one, but you have no choice. You are my prisoner, trapped by your bizarre desire for a portrait by my hand. And as I said, I have been practising confession of late, and find it pleasing. Do you know, I was talking to my doctor a year ago in Quiberon—I had gone for another potion to help me sleep, although few have had much effect except laudanum, which gives me such a headache I prefer not to use it—and he told me about this man in Vienna who has revived the confessional and turned it into medicine. He is a little cut off, my poor doctor, a small-town provincial physician on the fringes of civilisation, so he subscribes to all the latest journals and societies. Anyway, this Austrian Jew has come up with this idea which rather struck my medical friend. You go along with some ailment, talk for months and—poof !—you feel better. And that’s it, apart from paying over the money. You look sceptical; I am not. Of course it works, I am merely astonished that people will pay for it. My confession to you is making me feel better, as well, and do not think I am talking for no purpose. I have a very real purpose; I am confessing my sins in advance, before I have committed them. Explaining my painting to you, so you will understand it. See why I have chosen to do it in this way, rather than any other.