The Portrait

by Iain Pears

  I started looking at the pictures. Of course I did; who wouldn’t? It never occurred to me not to. Every painter who ever came into my studio in Hammersmith went through the canvasses as a matter of course to see what I was up to. I did the same myself, wherever I went. Nosiness is the great driving force of art. Think of Raphael sneaking into the Sistine Chapel to see what his great rival was up to. In Evelyn’s little room I was astonished by what I saw; truly I was. You weren’t there to guide me, and I had seen nothing by her hand for ages. She had achieved a remarkable simplicity. One particularly stayed with me: a picture of her little wicker chair against the window. That was it; nothing else in the image at all, but it was delightful, warm and lonely, confident and despairing, simple and subtle. Such a mixture of differing emotions and reflections it threw up, it was quite dazzling. And tiny as well—not more than ten inches square. As near to perfection as you can get. She’d taken the spirit of someone like Vermeer and turned it into something wholly modern and personal. Exquisite.

  I was looking at it when she came in, and instantly forgot all about wicker chairs. She was furious with me, and I had never seen her truly angry before. Nothing had ever got through the quiet, well-brought-up behaviour that made her so easy to underestimate. “How dare you go through my private things? Who do you think you are. . . .” Her rage was like a torrent that swept over me, terrifying in its intensity, the more so for being so completely unexpected.

  And much much more. She was deeply offended, but more than that: she was terrified. As she bustled about, collecting the few pictures I had looked at, carefully stacking them once more with their faces to the wall so they could not be seen, I suddenly realised she was embarrassed; she thought I might make some critical remark, might make fun of her for painting a chair in a bedroom. Good heavens, that was the last thing that occurred to me. But she would not listen to any of my attempts to reassure, or even apologise. She was near to tears with fury; anyone would have thought I had made an indecent advance. By her lights I suppose I had, far more than in Paris. I had violated her privacy, and exposed her weakness—she put everything into those pictures, and she was afraid of what others might see in them. Still, I wished I had seen more, wished I could have seen the ones she particularly did not want me to look at.

  She threw me out, and I had to write a grovelling letter—a long one—to win forgiveness. Even so, she didn’t speak to me for months and still wouldn’t talk about it, although I tried. “What’s the point of painting the wretched things if no-one ever sees them?” I tried saying once.

  “They’re not ready. They’re not good enough and I don’t want to talk about it. . . .”

  But eventually, she was forced to decide. I forced her. The Chenil gallery offered her a show, largely because I had enthused to them and piqued their interest. They decided to take a risk on a woman whose paintings they had never even seen. Imagine how good that made me feel! That I could exert such influence, that my word alone could conjure such things into existence. There was a bit of politics involved, of course. They wanted to put on an exhibition of Augustus John, but he had pulled out because the dates coincided with your big Post-Impressionism display. Not only was he mortally offended he’d not been invited by you, he was clever enough to realise that the furore you were going to cause would swamp everything else. So the Chenil had the prospect of blank walls for a couple of weeks. A little show by an unknown artist, which wouldn’t be seen as a defeat if it failed to get much attention, was just what they needed.

  So they came to her. She hesitated, because she knew what accepting meant. It meant dropping the pretence of disdaining the opinion of outsiders. An exhibition means you do care what other people think. You do want their good opinion. And in order to get it you make yourself public, and invite comments, good and bad. You cannot keep up the illusion that you are merely trying to satisfy yourself. You sign a pact with the devil.

  I pushed her, I admit it, and not for her sake. I had my own reputation to think of, and John Knewstub from the Chenil had made the approach on my recommendation. Besides, the couple of pictures I had seen were good. A damned sight better than many of the things that go on show. They were crying out to be seen, to have their chance. It was cruel to keep them locked up. Paintings are creatures of the open air; they need to breathe, to have attention to stop them withering. Crammed in the basement of a museum, or an art gallery or turned to face the wall in a studio, they die a little. It is not why they exist.

  YOU’VE MANAGED to make yourself unpopular on this island already, you know. I have had words. The priest asked when you were leaving. A raised eyebrow from one of the fishermen. They are subtle people here; they never say something if they can communicate it in any other way. I tried to figure out what you have done to irritate, then decided that your mere existence was probably enough, although refusing to pay court to Father Charles probably helped. Are you so great that you will not submit yourself to boredom for even half an hour in order to create the right impression? The air of disdain which is such a useful tool in a metropolis is of little use here. They do not want you to be ingratiating, to engage them in conversation, or show an interest in their lives, of course. It would be a mistake to offer them a drink; that is their privilege, not yours. They can spot the difference between friendliness and condescension before even a foot is placed on the quayside. I had to wait nearly a year before my patience was rewarded with a nod in the road or a muttered comment about the weather. If I stayed another twenty years they would still be suspicious of me. They are poor, largely uneducated, and simple, by your lights and mine. But you should not make the mistake of considering them inconsequential, and I fear that the way you habitually insulate yourself from the outside world, the manner in which you look at people as though they were contained in an ornate frame, has not been a great hit. Rather than inspiring awe and a little fear, of disconcerting people and making them more malleable, it has had the opposite effect. They are stiff-necked, and proud, and need to be courted.

  Deserve to be courted, I should say, because they can live in this place; you could not. They will not harm you, of course, you are not worth it to them. But you would never be able to go to them for help, or assistance. When you wish to go back to the mainland, it will be through my intercession, otherwise you would find that all the boats are much too busy. You are fed and lodged because I have requested it, otherwise you would starve on the beach. Should you fall ill or sustain an injury, any treatment you receive will be at my behest, not yours. You are alone here, and friendless. Apart from me. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, though. I was simply trying to alarm you, and remind you that your writ does not run everywhere. Your kingdom runs from Chelsea to Oxford Circus only. Outside that, you are powerless, and reliant on the goodwill of others.

  Did I ever tell you of the moment when I decided to become a painter? When I realised that was what I was, in fact? It was in the drawing office, in my third year of apprenticeship in Glasgow. You have no interest in such things, I know, but it was a comradely place; I was not unhappy there. My father had decided he wanted me off his hands, and that I should be put to work, as he put it, earning good money. A trade, in fact, and it says something of him that he chose the best one—despite his apparent lack of interest in me, he could be a thoughtful man to his children, if harsh and unforgiving as well. He is one of the few people I have ever missed. A lesser parent might have sent me to the shipyards, to become a boilermaker, or apprenticed me in a bank as a clerk. It would have been cheaper, the rewards more sure. Such a place would have killed me. I’m not being dramatic; I mean merely that I would have stayed there and never found the courage to leave. In due course I would have been given my gold watch, and died, and that would have been that.

  But he sent me to a drawing office instead, and I worked there until I was near twenty-three. I was absent in spirit for the last two, as I was by then spending every spare evening at the art school and passed the days dreaming of gran
der things. No matter; my moment of epiphany came at work, when I was not yet seventeen. I had been put to a design for a biscuit tin, a scene of elegant ladies taking tea in a drawing room, servants in the background. Bright and sunny and cheerful. No longer will you be in some little terraced house in the back streets of some grimy industrial suburb. One bite of what lies within and the good life will be yours. That was to be the message of my tin, eventually emblazoned on countless thousands of Messrs Huntley and Palmer’s best butter shortbreads. I’d been working on it steadily for days, and suddenly time stopped. At about a quarter past eleven on a cold November morning. When it started again, the tin was finished. My ladies breathed, you could smell the freshly brewed tea, the sun really did shine in through the broad windows, the fire in the grate had a real warmth. You could feel it.

  It was, dare I say it, a masterpiece, my first and perhaps only one. Not that that matters; what I am trying to say is that for the first time I knew what prayer was. Not the grim special pleading that still took place at the foot of my bed every night, but a true communion. My mind and my body and my soul all totally committed to the process. There was no difference between them at all. It was a special moment, that one; it may have lasted for a couple of hours in all, and when I was finished my eyes hurt and my back ached and my fingers were so cramped from holding the brush that I had to take them and straighten them out with my other hand. But I was more exhilarated than I had ever been in my life.

  There was no-one to tell about it; no-one in that office or at home could possibly understand. But I had changed irrevocably, and my days as a draughtsman and commercial painter were numbered. I knew the difference between painting and creating, the joy of doing something so perfectly that it made sense of everything else. Yes, yes. I see your smile. A biscuit tin. But don’t you see? It was a perfect biscuit tin. The most perfect biscuit tin ever created. More harmonious, more absolutely a biscuit tin than the mind of man had ever before contemplated. The illustration was in ideal proportion to the tin. The figures were the quintessence of the biscuits themselves, the colouring a summation of the whole and blending perfectly with it. And I had created it, with my hands and eyes and mind working together in absolute peace.

  Oh, they liked it, but I didn’t get the shilling bonus I’d expected because I had departed from my instructions. Four figures taking tea, they had said. And I had only put in three, because three was all that was needed. Four would have been excessive; would have ruined the whole. They merely thought I was trying to skimp on the work; so no shilling for me. Not that I cared. I knew how good it was, you see, and that was all that mattered then. For a brief moment, I really didn’t care what anyone else thought.

  And that is what a painter is. Someone who prays with his brush, something the critic can never do and can never properly understand. From that moment, I have wanted to recapture the moment of paradise that I found in that noisy, cold workroom. I’ve spent the rest of my life chasing it; sometimes coming close, but most of the time missing. For most of the time I have been no different to those journey-men I left behind me. They churn out the biscuit tins, I turned out paintings of rich women. Somewhere, I lost my innocence.

  YOU NEVER understood any of this. You thought I wished to escape from my past, put it all behind me and bathe in the fresh air of the cosmopolitan world. Rid myself of the stultifying, cramped pettiness of Scotland. Not so; not entirely. You thought that my progress—after I had met you—was one of growth, turning myself into an artist and a human being, my triumph being all the greater because I didn’t allow Scotland to crush me. Nothing is ever so simple, alas.

  Let me explain. I told you often about getting up at five every morning in the icy Gorbals lodgings I stayed in, going to work with a slice of dried porridge in my pocket for my lunch; of working with chilblains on my fingers in winter, of never seeing daylight for six months of the year. Working from seven in the morning to seven at night six days a week with four days holiday a year. Turning out drawings of cogs and machinery, architectural plans, biscuit tins, posters—anything that came in. Rarely even knowing what it was for or who it was for. Bleak and joyless, no? Well, no. To you, of course, it is so far removed from anything you have experienced that it must seem so, and I confess I made it sound as grim as possible. I wished to be like you in those days, to feel and think as I ought. But I wasn’t really telling the truth. I don’t look back on that time of my life with a shudder at all.

  Even working for the magazines in London had its enjoyable side, though the work was hard and the pay terrible. Spending an entire day outside the Old Bailey to catch a glimpse of a murder suspect so a sketch could appear to spice up the account, the faces distorted to look properly criminal, is a good training for the portraitist of an Impressionist tendency. You work fast, and there is no time for artistic vapours. You see, run off a sketch on the omnibus back to the office, have ten minutes to finish it off, if you’re lucky, then off on the next assignment. Not that anybody ever really looked at the result.

  There was one man, accused of killing his wife for her inheritance, who had a passing resemblance to the prime minister. Just to see what would happen, I put in a real sketch of Lord Salisbury, complete with hooded eyebrows, high-domed forehead and opulent beard. I even dressed him up in a proper frock coat. “Man Charged with Brutality and Theft,” was the headline, and my picture of the prime minister underneath. I waited for laughter, or at least to be dismissed from my post. Scarcely anyone noticed at all, except for my fellow journalists. Those illustrations were just decorations, to break up the monotony of the print. All my labour was there simply to give a little variety to the page, so the reader would not get too bored and start looking out of the window of the omnibus instead.

  Don’t you also regret the lost enthusiasm of youth? Look back to that time when all was new and fresh, when nothing was known, all was to be discovered? When every joke was classic, every piece of tomfoolery a delight?

  Perhaps not; your youth was so different to mine. Certainly I was afraid when I went to that drawing office in Glasgow, even though the relief of leaving home was so great that almost anything was preferable. The size and horror of the big city, the loneliness, the cold, all chilled me. But it was exciting to feel such intensity in the world. Before I had only had such extreme emotions from the inside; only guilt and the fear of God and mother had made me feel so alive.

  And I met people such as I never dreamed existed—wastrels always joking and blaspheming; drunks who could do a better job after half a bottle of whisky than most men sober; the occasional bully; the more frequent saint. I became the mascot of them all, just as I became your mascot when I came south. But the difference was that they wanted nothing from me.

  They taught me, too. The one thing I had been good at in school was drawing; I could do plans of complicated machines far beyond the capabilities of my fellows at school, but when I got to the workshop I realised I could do almost nothing; that my pride was misplaced. More than anything, it taught me never to think I was finished.

  I started learning, as I had never learned before or since. And if I am often scornful of the technical failings of others, it is because I know how hard it is to acquire good technique. I acquired mine by constant labour and study, year after year, day in and day out. It did not come naturally or easily, and it is the one thing I am truly proud of. Naturally I protect my skill against those who dismiss it as redundant, or old-fashioned. To get what you want—exactly the effect you have in your mind and no other—you have to have mastery, otherwise you are like a man trying to speak English with only a limited vocabulary. Unless you have that range, you end up saying what you can say, not what you mean. And once you do that you begin to tramp the road of dishonesty, persuading first others then yourself that there is no difference between the two.

  PERHAPS IT WAS the show that brought about such a change in you. The Show, I should call it, complete with capital letters, because it was the start of a revolution in
our poor little island, was it not? When the gales of revolution, the French revolution, swept over us all, violence unleashed, the reactionaries cast aside and consigned to history, where their poor bodies now rot, a-mouldering. With you as the Robespierre, pulling strings behind the scenes, rewarding some and condemning others to professional death.

  Even then, I was struck by your ruthlessness, the way you took control of the various artistic groups, rigged elections so that your creatures became the secretaries, the heads of the hanging committees, stamped out all dissent. The way you wrote manifestos and issued them in everyone’s name. The way you so consistently attacked those who dared disagree with you. Dear me! The polite world of English art had not seen anything like it before; was unprepared for such an assault. Pity the poor person who got in your way. Pity Evelyn, who became an object lesson in the dangers not of opposing you but merely of not supporting you.

  All this must go into my portrait, but it is difficult. In the first picture I caught it, simply because I painted what I saw but didn’t understand what I was looking at. But it is all there, in the way the shadows play across the face, the way I managed to give your eyes that slightly withdrawn, waiting look. Had you asked me at the time, I would have said I was showing up your reticence, a slight fear of the world that you normally hid. I would have congratulated myself on seeing the soft core of your being. But I would have been wrong; what I was painting was your patience; the way you were waiting for the right moment before you launched out; the contempt you had for everyone—painters and critics and patrons—who needed to be disciplined, and controlled. I was painting the burning desire for power curled within you.