by Iain Pears
Besides, it was a lie; my sins were never so elaborate. Even when my very soul is at stake I can’t resist the tendency to overpaint the subject. It is a weakness you pointed out to me years ago, and the Lord knows how hard I have tried to rein myself in, to stick to facts, to obey the law as laid down both by God and William Nasmyth. But I never succeed for long. Sooner or later, I heighten the colour, clutter the image or add an extra model to my memories.
JACKY WAS ONE of the figures in my sketch, of course, always my real favourite as a subject. She was so disgusting, so common, so vulgar, you couldn’t help admiring her. And a brilliant model, as well. A body like Aphrodite, a face like the Virgin and an ability to stand still for hours in any pose you cared to ask for. I’ve always preferred women on the Rubens scale, myself. None of these skinny Botticelli types for me, all points and angles. With Jacky you got the opulence of form, rounded and full, set off by a flawless skin that was almost like marble. She was the personification of fecundity itself; everything about her was sensual, fleshy. What else could anyone want?
I imagined initially she was thinking when she sat for me, but eventually I concluded there was nothing inside at all. A complete blank. Time had no meaning. A minute, an hour, a day, it was all the same to her. She had nothing better to do, and so she simply sat still. I think that was what she did when she was on her own; having me pay her to do what came naturally was an extra bonus. But when she did talk, my goodness! The contrast between that angelic expression and dull mouth was remarkable. “So I said to her, I said, if you think I’m going to give you tuppence-ha’penny for that, you got another think coming. I told her straight and do you know what she said to me. . . .” On and on she would drone, giving details about the price of tomatoes or cloth or how she burned some cake, or couldn’t find a stocking, until your head was spinning and you wanted to jump out of the window just to get away from her. I always thought it most perplexing, because I still, somewhere, held on to the old notion that character is reflected in the face. Not in the case of our Jacky, and the discovery fast killed off any desire. You could ask her to do anything, and she would meekly obey, but it was like making love to a cardboard box; movement but no passion, not even the pretence of any engagement. Just the same vacant stare. I knew, of course, that she had alternative sources of income, that she “entertained a gentleman,” as she put it in a show of primness—I always suspected that somewhere in there was a lower-middle-class housewife, who dreamed, perhaps, of her parlour and of washing day. I do not think the gentleman in question could have been greatly entertained. Nor did I wonder who the poor soul might be; just felt sorry for him.
A pity she went and killed herself, though; she deprived the world of many a fine picture by her selfishness. I never would have thought it possible, until I read about it in the paper. Part-time prosititute dragged from river, the papers said. She deserved a better memorial than that, despite her many failings. The best model in London, in my opinion, but stupid. Very stupid. Imagine killing herself just because she got herself pregnant! Who would have thought she was even capable of feeling shame? Let alone acting on it in such an extreme way. Very perplexing. She was silly when alive, and died as she had lived, it seems.
Ah! Such an impenetrable face you have, my friend! Such control. You are a painter’s nightmare, you know. It was something I once admired greatly. The stoicism of the English gentleman is a wonderful thing, unless you are trying to capture it on canvas, because emotions bounce off it and never reveal themselves. Tell you something shocking or wondrous, insult you or compliment you, and that same inscrutable expression comes back. It is like trying to peer through a dirty window: you do not see true, and end up seeing only your own faint reflection instead. That will not do. You must show some strong emotion for me before you leave or I will throw down my brushes and stamp out in a painterly rage. Haven’t had one of those for years.
Curiously, Evelyn took to Jacky. I passed her on when she came back to London in 1902. She needed a model, and eventually Jacky became her one and only sitter. It was a strange conjunction. Each supplied a lack in the other, I suppose; Evelyn must have liked Jacky’s simplicity, the domesticity of her mind, the vacuity of her tastes. Perhaps she wanted a refuge from all that aestheticism, needed an occasional antidote to the high seriousness of creation. Can you understand such a thing, William? Might it ever appeal to you? And Jacky responded to something in Evelyn; her independence and her silence, perhaps. The inner strength that belied the feeble frame. Or perhaps she saw more than I did, and realised how very fragile she truly was, and responded to her courage. She was laughed at, I know, when people like myself—who thought the low made suitable subjects for art but not for conversation—saw them together in the street. Arm in arm, sometimes. Friends. Not artist and model, or mistress and servant. There was a certain lack of decorum in being so familiar; a bit like taking the parlourmaid out to a restaurant.
And how they could spend so much time together was a mystery, especially as Jacky would scold her on occasion like some old shrew. I wouldn’t have put up with being talked to in such a way by a mere model, but Evelyn didn’t seem to mind, even showed signs of being properly apologetic. She found friendship in all sorts of odd places, and never really enjoyed the company of other artists. She was one of those people who could winkle out something interesting in almost anyone, if she chose. I thought that with Jacky the effort must have been almost superhuman, but it never looked that way when I saw them together. She seemed far more relaxed than ever she was with me. Not that I thought about it then.
I need no models now; I haven’t painted any woman under forty for some time. They guard their womenfolk carefully here, and it is a small island. Besides, I don’t find all these lacy coifs particularly appealing, and they don’t go about with their heads uncovered. Nor, for the most part, are they particularly appealing subjects, unless you like to paint weather-beaten faces and the effects of back-breaking work or scant food. Not the sort of subject matter that usually appeals, and they are not open-faced; you would have to know them much better to penetrate their minds and turn them into something worth looking at. Still, beauty can flourish in even the most inhospitable terrain. There is one girl I would love to paint; she has the eyes of the devil. But we have done no more than exchange glances over an expanse of church. I fascinate her, I know. I am to her what you were for me: a new world, full of opportunities, offering everything she wants and cannot win by herself unaided. She wants to leave this island, to see and be different things. She dreams at night of what it must be like, to be something other than she is. She longs for freedom, and is hated for it by many on this island. Her desires have made her difficult and unsympathetic. It will eat away at that beauty soon enough.
If I intervened, her fate would change: whatever happened, she would go, would not marry the honest fisherman who is her destiny, would not be aged before her time by hardship and pregnancy. Lord only knows how she would end up. But high or low, part of her wants to take the chance, to roll the dice. Anything but what is mapped out for her here. If only I would force her hand. Goodness, I see the temptation! But I won’t; it is not for me to change her future. All she has to do is get on the boat and not come back. It’s simple. If you change someone’s life you have a responsibility to them forever; it is a heavy burden which you must not shirk. Do you not agree, William?
I have painted one portrait, though. Still life might be a better term. It’s unfinished, like most of my work these days. But not through laziness; it cannot be completed. About a year ago, a boy was washed up at the place called Treac’h Salus, a fine sandy beach, about twenty minutes’ walk from here. No-one knew who he was; not from this island certainly. Perhaps he’d been swept off a fishing boat in a storm the week before, but no-one had heard of such a thing. Perhaps he was a cabin boy on one of the passing steam ships, a stowaway, even. Enquiries were made, but he came from the sea—that was all anyone ever discovered. Those who know such things t
hought he’d been in the water a week or so, not much longer. I was having a morning walk when I saw the small group of islanders gathered around him in the distance; there was something calm, reverential, about their pose; they were praying. You remember Millet’s Angelus? The way the woman’s head inclines to the ground, the way the man fiddles nervously with his hat, both lost in thought? The intensity of prayer depicted so simply and effectively?
My curiosity disturbed them as I approached over the sand, but I could not keep away; I needed to see what was producing that perfect pose. My reaction was quite different to theirs. They were reflective; I was fascinated. They were resigned; I was excited, stimulated. The brilliant colours of decay, the complex bundle of angles and curves on the twisted body, half-eaten and swollen. The green tint, reflecting purple and red in the sun that crept over an exposed leg, so recently young and strong. The way the majesty of the human form, God’s image, could be reduced so easily by the sea to the obscene and grotesque. And the eye—one only, for the other had been eaten out of its socket. One eye was preserved, a pale sky blue shining like hope in that jumble of mouldy, stinking carcass. It still had personality and life, something which seemed almost amused by its predicament. And not fearful or distressed; perfectly calm, almost serene. An echo of the soul which survived despite everything that had happened. I could see it watching me, seeing how I would react.
Haunting. Literally so, because I could think of nothing else for days; I felt I knew it, had seen it looking at me before. I came back in the afternoon with a sketchbook, but the disapproval would have been so intense it wasn’t worth trying to settle down. And for some reason I could not draw it properly without actually being there. All I could get down was that eye, which drowned out the rest of the scene like a brilliant light in darkness. Even though the image was fixed in my mind, the composition just so, the rest of the boy kept slipping away from me.
They buried him next day in the grim little graveyard, with a full funeral as if he had been one of their own. No small thing, that; funerals are expensive and these people have little enough to spare. But he could so easily have been one of their own children. A touching ceremony, really. Stark and austere like their own lives. The congregation gathered in the churchyard overlooking the sea, a genuine, heartfelt grief for someone they had never known, and never even suspected existed. They are good people, truly they are, though your expression as you listen to my tale shows how worthless they are to you.
One curious thing did happen a few days later, which even you might find intriguing. Maybe not. But the police heard about it and came over from Quiberon to find out what they could, and were properly cross that the boy had been buried already. Even threatened to dig him up again, although the priest soon put paid to that idea. The curiosity was that, to a man and a woman, they refused to say anything—not where the boy was found, nor what they did with him, nor any suspicions they might have had about who he was. They closed ranks completely, and responded to all questions with a sullen, stubborn silence. The boy was theirs, now. This was their business. Their obstinacy when confronted with anything to do with the outside world is extraordinary.
It brought back an old fascination of mine that had been lingering in the back of my mind for years. Do you remember those Sunday morning expeditions we used to do together in Paris? I found them so wonderful, getting up early, meeting in a café for some bread and coffee, then off for a day of talk and art. A close friendship, as close as it can be. My education, of more use to me in many ways than any time I spent in school or atelier. We saw Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon, and argued long whether his vast canvasses of saints were genius or mediocrity, triumph or disaster. I still haven’t made up my mind, but I have a love for them because they are forever associated with the bliss of friendship and the joy of experience. We had the whole of the Louvre at our disposal, medieval wall paintings, Renaissance architecture, the sculptures of Houdon and Rodin; we saw churches and monuments, art modern and ancient. Studied Italian paintings and German prints together, ate and drank and walked. We sat in parks and dusty squares, walked by rivers and canals until the light faded, and still we went on talking. I remember the way you would stab the air with your finger to make a point as you marched along, the way you collapsed on a park bench and fanned yourself with a guidebook as you finished some wordy peroration about the use of public sculpture. The way you could recite poetry at the drop of a hat in your perfect French to illustrate some painting or panorama. The way you could turn anything into the subject for a lecture.
I came back from these outings exhausted, but unable to sleep, my head spinning with all I’d seen. And, of course, went over everything we had talked about. Had I said something stupid? Of course I had, many times over; so had you, but with such confidence no-one dared call it so. That was one of the things I learned; one of the most important things. But even then I think the seeds of our divergence were germinating; I remember a brief flutter of slight annoyance—swiftly suppressed—when you made some sneering remark about Boucher. Well, alright, not to everyone’s taste, all those silly women dressed up as shepherdesses with those bouffant wigs perched on their heads. But look at the way the man painted! He could do anything; I couldn’t believe it when I first saw them. That didn’t matter to you at all, and maybe you were right. But you didn’t see the man’s sense of humour. Do you think he didn’t know he was making these grand aristocrats look faintly absurd? Didn’t you realise that was the point? No; humour was never your strong point. It was all too serious for you. Playfulness has always been absent in your life.
I remember the trip to Saint-Denis best of all, the great cathedral with the sepulchres of the kings in that grimy industrial suburb. It was one of those revelatory moments that come only rarely in a life, all the more so for being so very unexpected. Particularly Louis XII and his queen, those statues; showing both of them in their full glory, regal and powerful, and underneath as corpses, withered, naked and disgusting. As you are, so were we; as we are, so will you be. No sentimentality or hiding. No black crêpe or fine words to hide the reality. These people were able to confront the inevitable full on, and show that even kings must rot. It is our final destination, and something artists have shied away from for generations. We are young and agile; established and comfortable; dead and decayed. Hope, fear and peace. There are only three ages of man, not seven. I am painting the second now.
My failure with that boy on the beach, the most recent, annoyed me because the sculptors in that cathedral had succeeded. I could not understand it. It was a simple enough task, after all; a still-life composition no more complex than an arrangement of artefacts at Julien’s académie. But I failed; all I managed was a bundle of shapeless rags, a sentimental, incoherent mess. It was little better than the sort of thing I would have knocked out for the Evening Post. “Mystery Death of Boy on Beach.” Two paragraphs, page four, illustrated with a grotesque sketch by myself, printed in two garish colours—three if it was sufficiently horrible.
It festered; I am not used to such setbacks. Normally my technique would have sustained me, and allowed me to produce something tolerable enough to revolt the general public. But I no more wanted something accomplished than I wanted something sanitised and artistic. D’you remember that appalling painting by Wallis in the Tate, The Death of Chatterton? Pretty young poet lies sprawled in an elegant pose across the bed after taking arsenic. Ha! That’s not what you look like if you swallow arsenic! You’re covered in filth, you stink, you lie crouched on the floor from the agony, your face screwed up, hideously disfigured as the poison eats away your intestines. You don’t look as though you’ve just dropped off for a nap after too many cucumber sandwiches. But he couldn’t paint that. That wouldn’t have made people think sentimental tripe about doomed artists dying before their time. That’s what I wanted to get away from, and not by painting landscapes or the poor enjoying themselves at the music hall. Real death—which is the stuff of life, after all. I know;
I did quite a few suicides when I worked for those magazines. And murders and hangings. But it was always just work, and I only ever had about an hour to rush off a sketch, get back down to the office and help set up the copy. “Dreadful Death in Clapham.” “Shocking Murder in Wandsworth.” “Part-time Prostitute Found in River.” I would have been there when they fished poor Jacky out, had I not become a painter.
So, I took a leaf out of Michelangelo’s book and went to study corpses. There’s a morgue at Quiberon, and the doctor in charge has artistic pretensions and no-one to talk to. In exchange for a little scandalous conversation and a few paintings, he gave me free run of the place. Every corpse that came in, I looked at and studied. The more disfigured and decomposed the better. I became quite expert at depicting the effects of maggots, and of water, and of dog bites on tramps left too long in gutters; excellent in putting down in a few strokes of the pencil the beautiful red line that a knife across the throat will make. Of bones showing through green skin, of skulls beginning to surface through the face. The sort of detail even the most scurrilous of London magazines would not touch, let alone a patron of the arts.
But it still wasn’t good enough, and d’you know why? Because they were dead. They had no character, no personality. Obviously not, you say, and I don’t want to stress the obvious. But the only way you can depict the flight of character, of the soul, is if you have known the person in life. The man who sculpted Louis XII must have known him well. The absence of personality wells out of that statue like a great hole; you can know the man by what is no longer there.