The Portrait

by Iain Pears

  So, eventually, I will have to leave. I will have to go back to Scotland, because if we do not have those conversations we wither a little every day. Oh, to be more portable! How convenient it must be to be Jewish, and carry your ancestors around with you, not needing lumps of dirty soil to strike up a conversation. They are reviled for it, but they are the fortunate ones, not us, who must pine away if we so much as move one country to the left or right.

  Ardnamurchan? Oh. Yes. I went to recover from a broken heart. I had been rejected. Don’t smile so; it is a bitter thing and to be avoided, as you always did avoid it. You never did love your wife, did you? I kept my own passion a secret. No-one wants their humiliations known, and I was refused when I went down on my knees and said my piece.

  Evelyn, of course; I see I have surprised you. How inappropriate, you are thinking. What a bizarre choice. You would never be so careless; were not. You picked your wife with the same care you pick your clothes or your painters. Someone who will reflect well on you, help you along. Love does not come into it. But I loved Evelyn, I think, and that made all the difference.

  You think? Don’t you know? Surely it is not something you can be unsure about?

  Well, yes. It is. If you have never felt the emotion before, and have had no practise. Love is not something that comes easily to people like me. It is too much bound up with sin. Love for God, that is simple. Love for your fellow man is also straightforward, if, generally speaking, quite unjustified. Love for a friend—quite easy although not without its complications. But love for a woman—ah, well now. That is the hardest, because it involves the carnal. Such feelings should surely be reserved for the low and the unworthy. To love a fine woman is to bring her down to the gutter.

  Don’t look at me like that! I’m not saying I approve, merely that this was how I was brought up. I am, after all, the only evidence that my parents ever even touched each other. When I grew up, when I was playing the painter, I bathed myself in all the lusts I could think of, to coat myself in sin and create a gulf between myself and my beginnings that was so wide I could never go back. But it was not with real pleasure; I did not truly enjoy sin, and that, of course, takes most of the point of it away. I sinned because I felt I ought to. Even fornication was turned into a duty. By running away from my origins, I found myself coming back to them, like an ant walking round the rim of a plate and ending up back where he started.

  Evelyn was different, hence the proposal. I think I knew it the moment I first talked to her in Paris. We were alone in the atelier, and she had been strenuously ignored by everyone there. That wasn’t unusual, I suppose; it was a sort of initiation rite, to test people out, see how tough they were. And she was a woman. At least we didn’t riot and burn her canvasses, like the French students did when women were first let into the Beaux-Arts. Many a man was treated in the same way for a month or so. We were a group, and mistrusted outsiders. But enough was enough, and she clearly wasn’t taking it very well, so I called over to her one evening, after everyone else had gone home.

  “What do you think?” I asked. I’d been working hard all day on a painting, building it up from sketches I’d been making for the last month. I’d persuaded myself it was good. I was not yet vain, but I was growing rapidly in self-confidence. Besides, you had already seen it and paid fulsome compliments. I was letting her see it to give her a little treat. Show her what good painting was. I didn’t want her opinion, and expected only her admiration and her thanks for including her, taking her seriously.

  Evelyn came over and looked. Very seriously, with a frown on her face. But not for long. “Not very good,” she said, eventually.

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s not very good. Is it? It’s too cluttered. What is it? A woman in a kitchen? She looks more as though she’s finding her way through a junk shop.” She paused, and thought some more. “Clean out the background, let the eye go to the woman herself. The pose is fine, but you’re wasting it. Where’s the centre? What’s the point? If you want the viewer to figure it out, you’ve got to give them a little help. What are you trying to do? Show how clever you are? How much you’re in charge of perspective and colour?”

  “That’s your opinion?”

  “It is. And you will no doubt disregard it completely. But then, you shouldn’t have asked.”

  And her eyes went back to the canvas, then flickered back to me, for a brief moment. There was laughter in them, even though her face was otherwise totally solemn. She knew full well she was being presumptuous considering I was both older and more experienced than she. She was testing me, seeing how I would react. Would I be pompous, take umbrage and start lecturing her about the fine qualities of my work? “No, no, you don’t understand it. If you look . . .”

  But that is not where my vanity lies. And the faint twinkle of amusement in her eyes touched me. I laughed myself. I wasn’t completely sure she was right, although cramming too much in has always been a weakness of mine. But we signed a contract with that glance. The complicated relationship of fawning and flattering she had seen when I was with you was not her way. She would give neither. And I wanted neither from her. From that moment on I liked her but was also a little disconcerted. For she had challenged you with those remarks, and bit by bit I saw how empty your compliments could be. You were being lazy with me; you did not take me so seriously after all. She was right about the picture; you were not. You were fallible.

  On the other hand, I rarely showed her any of my pictures again. Not the ones I cared about, anyway. I was too frightened of what she would see. A man can take only so much criticism. I never thought she might be equally wary of my opinion about her efforts.

  Do you know what it’s like to like someone, you who acknowledges no equal? Not to see all things in hierarchy, not to strain to be better, or more powerful, than the person you are with? Not to classify someone as friend or enemy, dependent or patron? Not to envy or be envied? It is friendship; I thought it might also be love. I still can’t tell them apart.

  I have had my passions and infatuations, although far fewer than my reputation might suggest, but there is enough of the Church of Scotland in me to have a suspicion of the fleshly thrall. Certainly I discovered that the magic always faded fast; no woman, however opulent, however seductive, interested me for very long. Not in the way that Evelyn did, and I was never attracted to her in that way at all. I think I wanted to know her, and the more my friendship with you faded and became bound by conditions and doubts, the more I craved her uncomplicated simplicity. I walked with her round London and Paris too; but it was a different experience. She didn’t want to teach, nor did she lecture. When she looked at a statue or building, she did not wish to classify and pigeonhole. There were none of the flat condemnations or soaring praise that you would deliver; she always tried to appreciate what the artist had been doing, however poor the result. She even found a good word for those pompous old goats from the Beaux-Arts. And above all, she took these walks because of companionship, nothing more. But there was always something in her which held back, which seemed afraid—I even thought seemed repelled—by my presence when I stood close to her. Yet she was so open at the same time. How could that be? It infuriated and frustrated me, and that, I decided, must be a symptom of love.

  Coming to a decision took a long time. I delayed till we both came back to England, then some more until my career began to prosper a little, but eventually, in spring 1904, I made up my mind and proposed. Abruptly, and with little romantic style, I must say. I hadn’t even seen much of her for some time when I went round to have my say. Flowers and gifts and all the sort of thing one should employ to create a special moment did not occur to me, which is just as well as it would have been wasted money. She turned me down flat; all I got was a look of shock and astonishment and, even worse, slight anger. Even the idea offended her. I could not see why, then. No-one else was going to make her an offer, and most women, so I had always believed, were at the very least flattered to be asked.


  I suppose she was right; I hardly made a good case for myself, and at the time I had little to offer except a vast selfishness and a small income. I had never learned courtship, had never needed to; I thought that directness spoke for itself, but hadn’t realised that the English like their ritual and distrust plain speaking as somehow mendacious. Everything has a hidden meaning, does it not? And the more direct the speech, the more carefully hidden the true meaning must be, the more effort must be expended to understand what is really being said. So much for my efforts at courtship, though, come to think of it, I have just summarised your philosophy as a sage of the modern. Your criticism is merely the sensibility of the English bourgeois applied to canvas. Nothing can be without explanation.

  “I will never marry,” she said, once the surprise had dissipated and she could speak again. At least she did not smile as she said it; that would have been too much. “I am not fitted for it. I do not desire children, and I believe I can look after my own needs, so I see little point in it. I can think of no man I like more than you,” she went on, “and no man whose company I enjoy more. But that is hardly sufficient. No, Henry MacAlpine. Find someone else. I would never make you happy, and you would never make me content. I’m sure someone else will do a better job for you than I ever could.”

  And that was that. She discouraged any return to the subject, and even avoided me for some time, just in case I was minded to take up the matter again. So off I went to walk in the rain of the Highlands. My pride was hurt, of course, whose would not be? But I discovered that the occasional pangs of jealousy I felt whenever I saw her in the company of some man—a rare enough event—faded soon enough. It took some time before we resumed our old friendship, before she felt safe enough in my presence and was sure I was not about to go down on my knees again, but eventually calm was restored. I didn’t know what she wanted, but soon enough I accepted that I was not it. And I easily persuaded myself that she would have been quite the wrong choice for me, as well. She was, after all, a very difficult person to be around. Moody, withdrawn, quixotic. No; it took only a short while to persuade myself I had been saved from a terrible mistake.

  Don’t think, by the way, that I didn’t notice the look of scorn on your face as I was talking of my beloved homeland. Oh, so poetic about Scotland, and so far away from it! If it is so wonderful what am I doing on a little island off the coast of Brittany? If so patriotic, why head south instead of north? True enough; the most rapturous Scots are the nostalgic ones. Scotland stifles me; the landscape gives you a sense of freedom, the civilisation oppresses. I cannot paint there, because I am too aware of God’s disapproval and of the impossibility of ever pleasing Him. Here I have at least persuaded myself He is a little more open to persuasion.

  YOU SEE that my style has changed? Of course you have; you never miss anything. Along with the brushes, I have jettisoned the method. What were we taught? Line, line, line. And the immediacy of the impression; the two great irreconcilables that have destroyed a generation or more of English painters. There we were, slopping down great gobs of paint trying to fix something glimpsed for a moment then half forgotten. As Monet had shown us, so we did. Well and good; it produced a few pretty things, although personally there was always some little Calvinist inside me tutting away about French corruption. By all means, try and capture that brilliant flash of light on the lily pond; the play of autumn sun on the cathedral façade. But we never get much sun in Scotland, you know. Not much light, either. We have fifty-nine different shades of grey. We are a nation en grisaille, and can see all of God’s creation in the difference between an overcast dawn and a threatening, squally morning. Even the green of the hills is grey, if you study it properly. The heather and the lochs, all on a grey ground. The sun itself is a grey sun. Grey is not an immediate colour. It makes no instant impression. You cannot paint it like that. You have to study grey for years—generations, I might say—before it will reveal its secrets. And then you have to paint deep, not on the surface. It would be like asking Tiepolo to paint his confections using the city councillors of Glasgow instead of the nobility of Venice. If you tried, the result would be laughable. Better not to try, and think of something else.

  Or leave, of course. There are some Scots who have reached that conclusion, abandoned the land of their birth and headed for the Mediterranean so they no longer have to use so much grey paint. I can imagine what they must say back in Dundee. “Och, mon, it’s sae very garish. Will ye just will look at that, noo? Have ye everr seen a girrul with an orrrange face before? I wouldnae hae’ that in ma hoose if ye paid me.” I used to sneer at the Jute merchants of Dundee as well, all import ledgers and profit tallies, living in a world of penny counting and constraint. But they are right, after all. You have to make sense of what is around you, not dream of something so far away it is unattainable. You never do get girls with orange faces in Dundee; never see the sun refracted on the clear blue water.

  So I have changed the style. Out with the brushes, out with the splodges. I want depth, not immediacy, so I have gone back to the methods taught me long ago and investigated others so long disused they have not been taught for generations. I build up the paint, layer by transparent layer. I have investigated glazes made of oil and egg yolk, different layers of transparency to add depth, to make the viewer work a little. Nothing now can be done or seen or understood instantly. Instead you have to look deep, as you do in a mist, slowly seeing what lies underneath the surface, making out the vaguest outline of—what? A hill, a skull, a hint of malice in an expression covered by the sheen of perfect manners.

  All this takes time, of course. It used to be that I could belt out a portrait in little more than an afternoon; then I would have to make my poor sitter rest immobile for hours while I doodled away, to clock up the hours and justify my fee. Or I would send them away, and the canvas—perfectly finished—would gather dust in a corner for months. Now they really do take a long time; I have become uneconomic; the prices I would have to charge would be extravagant indeed to maintain any lifestyle above the primitive.

  Money? Heavens, I have enough. It wouldn’t see you through a weekend, I’m sure, but my ancestors gave me that frugality which was so much of their character. I tried to fight against it; almost succeeded for a long period, but I’m afraid dissipation cannot withstand a good Scottish education in kirk and school forever. We try, some of us, but our hearts are never really in it. There is always some minister in the background, warning of eternal damnation. It makes me a particularly strenuous sort of Catholic. I am of a Jansenist disposition, half a step away from flagellation and birch rods. The Sacred Heart appeals, that wounded and bleeding organ, dripping with grief for the sins of others. It fills me with a guilty pleasure at the suffering and agony I have put our Saviour through.

  I take satisfaction from being cold, from having to bathe outside in icy water in winter. The people hereabouts think I am mad, but in truth the winters are not so harsh in comparison to Scotland; I earn my reputation on the cheap. Besides, I am not really concerned about the present; my eyes are fixed on the hereafter.

  You do look embarassed. You are convinced that I have lost my reason; that I have sunk into a religious mania which is but one stop from the asylum. Not so; I do not mean my place in heaven, because if that is not already lost to me, it will be, soon enough. I mean my posthumous reputation.

  Oh no! You’d prefer the religious fervour, wouldn’t you? Better that than the hopeless dreaming of the disappointed, convinced that posterity will see what the contemporary does not. I have been many things in my life, but never pathetic, never an object of sympathy. Is that what exile has reduced me to?

  I notice that you do not rush to reassure. You do not smile and say, “Of course! Sooner or later the world will see your true worth. Think of Cézanne, think of van Gogh. . . .” Because you know that is not the case; or you hope not, because that would mean defeat for you and all those very different people you champion. I would never be o
ne of your Post-Impressionists. I am further away from them now than ever. You would rather have your old friend consigned to a footnote in your own biography than have him accorded any recognition. You have decided where the high road of artistic progress is heading and I am merely a branch off it, a diversion slowly clogging with weeds from neglect, soon to be overgrown and forgotten entirely.

  But still, I am right, not you. And you are going to be the means of re-establishing my reputation. You said it yourself, did you not? All those years ago, when you were justifying your decision to become a critic. The painter without the critic is nothing. The good critic can make the mediocre famous, the great obscure. His power is limitless; the artist is his servant, and one day will recognise the fact. And you were right; you proved it in the way you straddled the galleries, the collectors, the patrons and the journals, whispering to each, hinting and guiding. Who dared stand against you? Who even thought they needed to?

  I am not accusing you. You never did me any harm, professionally speaking. Quite the contrary. You cosseted and protected me, encouraged me always. Take the great exhibition of 1910 when you introduced those wretched Post-Impressionists into England. The latest French fashion, brought over by yourself to whack the English in the eye, shock them out of their somnolence, shake them out of their complacency. Only a few—a very select few—English painters were invited to show their pictures alongside those august new masters. And I was one of them. How kind of you. How generous you were, always were.

  I still remember every detail of that evening when you came and asked me to take part. You sent my model packing, then got out a small hamper of food and champagne. Laid it out and opened the bottle.