The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  According to Chris McCann, author of Master Pieces: The Art History of Jigsaw Puzzles (1998), the miracle began in 1931, when

  a customer asked the Einson-Freeman company in Long Island, NY, to make a new product, a die-cut puzzle that the customer could give away with toothbrushes. The puzzle was an outstanding success. Other customers liked the idea, and more orders followed. Then, the next year, somebody thought people might actually pay money for a cardboard puzzle, and began making them for sale. They were distributed one at a time, once a week. This event marked the beginning of the weekly puzzle, and the puzzle industry was never the same again.

  In a similar kind of promotion, mini-jigsaws were given away in England in the mid-1930s to any customer who bought two bars of Knight’s Castile soap.

  The twentieth-century connection of jigsaws with advertising is in itself a bit of a mystery. The British-born artist Derek Boshier, born in 1937, painted several paintings showing jigsaw-shaped pieces and cut-out paper men during his pop-art phase in the 1960s, and seems to have intended them as a satiric commentary on the power of ‘the culture of commodities’ – a theme also dear at this period to Perec. Identi-Kit Man, in Tate Britain, shows giant toothbrushes and a man whose right arm is composed of a giant tube of red-and-white-striped toothpaste. His body is punched by a jigsaw-piece-shaped hole, and other jigsaw shapes float elsewhere in the frame. The Tate’s caption reminds us that the first advertisement ever shown on British TV was for toothpaste – in 1955, for Gibbs SR. The jigsaw shapes are instantly and uncannily recognizable. Do they suggest that we are all composed of nothing but little interlocking blocks of manufactured desire?

  Chris McCann claims that the 1930s spin-off jigsaw boom in America created hundreds of new companies and rescued many commercial artists, at least temporarily, from destitution. By early 1933, over $1 million a week was being spent on jigsaws, and a whole new art form of jigsaw art, a new version of calendar art, was in demand. This was the ‘Golden Age of Puzzle Art’. McCann presents many highly coloured images, giving the current market price of each (which varies from $5 to $75 and more), and lists brief biographies of the artists. McCann’s account of the boom and what he describes as the subsequent ‘Great Jigsaw Puzzle Panic’ is as highly coloured as the paintings themselves. The panic was caused by excess demand, which resulted in December 1932 in a forty-eight-hour jigsaw ‘famine’, followed by increased production during which six million puzzles were sold weekly. This hysteria, we are told, came to an abrupt end when Franklin Roosevelt closed the banks for nearly two weeks, and people began to think more seriously about how to spend their money. The lust for puzzles was over, and the jigsaw began to go the way of the Harlequinade and the diabolo.

  People suffered during the famine of the Depression without their daily jigsaw fix, just as crossword puzzlers today suffer without a daily crossword. Playwright Ronald Harwood and his wife Natasha do a crossword every day and feel deprived if they can’t get hold of one. And there are many who are still addicted to jigsaws. Theatre producer Michael Codron does a jigsaw, or part of a jigsaw, every day. Actor Sir Donald Sinden is proud of his three-dimensional jigsaw version of the Duomo in Florence, constructed while he was working on a film that was set in the Uffizi. The film was never shown, but his puzzle survives. Perhaps the intermittent nature and the time-wasting and hanging about of theatrical employment encourage actors to take up these time-filling pursuits. Maroussia Frank, wife of the late Ian Richardson, is famous throughout the profession for her formidable Green Room skills at Scrabble, and many actors, less competitively, take up crochet or knitting or rug-making. For many years I cherished a circular rug decorated with the signs of the Zodiac pegged for me by a walk-on friend at Stratford-upon-Avon.

  It was Michael Codron who disposed of my theory that most adults who do jigsaws were introduced to them by kind aunts in their childhood. He says that one Christmas he bought a jigsaw of Canterbury cathedral in a village shop in Kent as a stocking-filler for a friend, but the friend showed no interest in it, so he took pity on it and did it himself. And thus, already well into middle age, he caught the habit. He did all the cathedrals, one after another, and then embarked on other motifs. Now he says he usually does one a day. When he has finished a jigsaw, he needs somebody to admire his handiwork before he puts it back in its box, and then, after two or three days, it goes up to the attic, where he has thousands stored away. He says he likes making order out of chaos, and he likes the solipsism of living inside the world of the jigsaw. He was full of advice about where to buy puzzles. Some manufacturers I knew, others I had never heard of. At his prompting I have now ordered more jigsaws than I can ever finish.

  He is the kind of client who keeps the puzzle manufacturers in business. He makes his way through the catalogues.

  XXXVI

  The artwork of the American ‘Golden Age’ of the compulsive 1930s in Master Pieces is extraordinary, and some of it is repulsive. It deserves a page or two to itself. The subjects are largely traditional and familiar – hunting scenes, dogs, cottage gardens, ships at sea, life in the American West, children blowing bubbles and clutching kittens. We recognize reproductions from Rubens and Hobbema, Joshua Reynolds and Millais, Rosa Bonheur and Norman Rockwell. Thomas Moran, famous for his vast views of Colorado, is well represented. But many of the paintings are by artists otherwise unknown or little documented. The phrase ‘the archives were silent on this illustrator’ recurs frequently in the biographical listing, but nevertheless there are some intriguing brief lives here, and Chris McCann, an energetic man of multiple talents (which he has employed variously in management with General Electric, in computing and in community theatre), has clearly enjoyed his detective work.

  A few of the artists, like R. Atkinson Fox (1860–1935), now have a committed following of fans and collectors. Fox, who emigrated from Toronto to the United States to pursue a highly successful commercial career, is represented in McCann’s book by hunting dogs, a sailing ship, a girl with a pony, a principal-boy-style female pirate with magnificent legs, and a painting in which a maiden in an orange-and-blue Oriental robe stands precariously on a window ledge with a large bowl of chrysanthemums, overlooking a bright-blue lake, some snowy Rocky Mountains and an orange sunrise.

  Robert Atkinson Fox’s career trajectory is more conventional than that of Abd’el Kader (1852–1940), said to have been born in Germany, the grandson of Hussein Pasha, the Dey of Algiers. He abandoned his life in Europe as an opera singer, signed up with Oscar Hammerstein to sing in America, was injured in a train crash, lost all his money, and ended up ‘living free in part of an airplane hangar at Municipal Airport in Atlantic City, where he painted and gave art lessons for the next eleven years’. His jigsaw work is represented in McCann by two rustic cottage images, one with snow, the other with a small dog and lupins, and a village scene of sheep going to pasture. His signature, we are told, has ‘always fascinated and mystified collectors’, and, if half of this story is true, one can see why.

  Some of the pictures of children are, by today’s more fastidious standards, pornographic. Mabel Rollins Harris’s Look Who’s Here shows two small, fat girls, one naked except for shoes and socks, the other wearing shoes, socks and vest, gazing out of a window at two plumply suggestive lovebirds. In her Dinner for Six another little girl is lifting her skirt to show her knickers as she feeds a family of ducks. Nothing is known of Mabel Rollins Harris, not even her dates.

  The oddest jigsaw in the whole collection is a bizarre work by an English painter, Briton Rivière (1840–1920), titled Daniel in the Lion’s Den. This shows a white-haired Daniel, dressed in a red, gold-embroidered caftan, looking away from the artist with his hands clasped (and presumably shackled) behind his back, calmly confronting a group of seven orange lions. The lions crouch and snarl and lour at him in a surge of seething orange. Bones litter the foreground. We are not told when it was manufactured as a puzzle, but Rivière died in 1920 so we know he did not live to enjoy the profi
ts of the American Golden Age. The lions may have been pirated, and they are very ill painted, with strange facial expressions, caught between cringe and attack.

  It is surprising to learn that Briton Rivière RA was considered one of the finest of nineteenth-century British painters of animals, second in reputation only to Landseer. (His most famous work is a picture of a barefoot Dickensian waif lying by a milestone and clutching a large dog, titled His Only Friend. This, too, must once have been made into a jigsaw.) It is unwise to judge the quality of a painting from a reproduction of a photograph of a jigsaw of a painting, and it would be interesting, though perhaps not sufficiently interesting, to try to track down this peculiar and arresting work, to see what it looks like in its original state.

  As a jigsaw illustration, Daniel in the Lion’s Den is both startling and memorable. It is so very orange.

  Alan Sillitoe, in his late novel The Broken Chariot, invokes the art of Briton Rivière, who goes largely unmentioned these days. His novelist hero, sitting in a cheap rented room in south London, is inspired by a Rivière reproduction from a second-hand album of prints, which shows, curiously, Phoebus Apollo driving the chariot of the sun, which is drawn not by the more customary horses but by a ‘sullen pack of lions in long shafts gnashing their teeth’. This reproduction, Sillitoe’s hero reflects, provides ‘another stitch in the tapestry of his progress’. It would have been better, from the point of view of my thesis on the ubiquity of the jigsaw, if he’d called it ‘another piece of the jigsaw puzzle’, but it’s near enough. Tapestries and jigsaws connect. Rivière studied his lions in the London Zoo, and Sillitoe says he bought the reproduction he describes in his novel from a print-seller in North Kensington.

  The phenomenon of the American jigsaw as a collector’s item, regardless of its aesthetic merit, is well documented by McCann, who appeals for information about ‘America’s Ten Most Wanted Puzzle Artists’, about whom ‘little or nothing is known’. These are listed as J. Adams, Edwin Bolenbaugh, C. B. Colby, Thomas Crane, Anthony Cucchi, Arthur Frahm, Frederick D. Ogden, Irene and Laurette Patten and Hy Whitroy, and their subjects include sporting pictures, children at play, historic monuments, fat babies, comic genre scenes and Santa Claus in an aeroplane – this last a very popular item. (Georges Perec would have loved this list.) Why these are more wanted than some other artists about whom the archives are silent is not immediately evident, but would no doubt become so if one allowed oneself to be led down this path. Are Irene and Laurette Patten sisters? Why not? And is Hy or Henry Whitroy a pseudonym of the prolific R. Atkinson Fox, reserved perhaps for his more ambitious and less vulgar work?

  Not all jigsaw artists sign their work, but many do. I had not known this. Nor had I known that Greek and Roman mosaic artists sometimes signed their work. I suppose everybody else in the world knew this, but I didn’t. The creator of the magnificent mosaic representing a stag hunt in the House of the Abduction of Helen at Pella in Greece, dating from the late fourth century BC, is signed by someone called Gnosis. Gnosis epoesen. ‘Gnosis made this.’ He wrote his name in white pebbles. That to me is very unlikely, and very poignant.

  XXXVII

  A non-geographical, quasi-educational apologia for the doing of jigsaws lies in the ‘Old Master’ theory, which also raises the question of signature and copyright. Jigsaws reproducing famous works of art may now be purchased on line, as well as in many museum and gallery shops. (In the Matisse gallery in Nice in 2005, you could buy a jigsaw of Matisse’s Dance, although you could not then find a copy of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Matisse.) And there is no question but that in ‘doing’ a famous painting, as Jill Shefrin said in her letter of 23 September 2006, you learn a great deal about it. ‘Assembling a puzzle of, say, a Brueghel painting, reveals all sorts of details.’

  From jigsaws, you learn about the brush strokes of Van Gogh, the clouds of Constable, the reflections and shadows of Manet, the stripes of Tissot and Rousseau, the brickwork and tiles of the Dutch masters, the flesh tones of Titian, the undulating fabrics and limbs of Botticelli, the business of Bosch and Brueghel. While struggling to re-create Titian’s Venus of Urbino, you discover that the little dog at her feet is painted in almost exactly the same shades of apricot and russet as the naked Venus herself. According to Julian Mitchell, himself a master puzzle solver, the dog represents her politely concealed pubic hair.

  Doing jigsaws stimulates bizarre theories of art history.

  The same little dog appears, less suggestively, in Titian’s large portrait of the Vendramin family. Everybody had a little dog like that.

  I learned more about the appreciation of clouds and of Constable from doing jigsaws of The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral than I learned from my first encounters with the original paintings. Now, when I see clouds, I see clouds and Constable, not clouds and the shapes of a jigsaw puzzle, but the puzzle was the medium that introduced me, that fixed my attention, that made me pause. This may sound ridiculous, but it is true. I could have learned about clouds at the Courtauld, but I didn’t have the opportunity. I learned through Clementoni. The cumulus and the cirrus and the mackerel, the greys and mauves, the sullen purples, the swelling yellow bruises, the cream and sallow swathes, the white crests and mountains, the bright linings, the tints of pink and red – I studied all of these through assembling the pieces of jigsaws. Constable was very good at clouds. They are difficult, for painters and puzzle solvers alike. (And the jigsaw stonework of Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral, although it looks much easier, was very difficult too; I was pleased to note that Constable himself commented on this 1823 painting in a letter to his friend Archdeacon John Fisher that it was ‘the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had on my easel’.)

  You become intimate with the painting, like those students who used patiently to copy masterpieces onto canvases on easels in the National Gallery. You rarely see these copy-makers now. Before the age of cheap reproduction, copyists used to work for profit, like Mlle Noémie Nioche in Henry James’s The American, who is discovered by James’s hero Christopher Newman as she works on a copy of Murillo’s Madonna in the Louvre. The untutored Newman is more taken with the pretty young copyist than with the painting, and prefers the copy of the painting to the original. Unlike David Teniers, Mlle Nioche clearly prefers a lighter, brighter version, and gives her works a high finish. (As noted, some of the reproductions in Linda Hannas’s book on jigsaws look more glossily attractive than the originals, and those in McCann’s book are dazzling.)

  The market for Old Master copies in Europe has more or less vanished, although we are told it still flourishes in China, but, more ephemerally, pavement artists in Europe continue to produce chalk and pastel versions of Botticelli and Vermeer, and to collect small sums in token appreciation from passers-by. Like the Tibetan monks, they work from a pattern. Doing a jigsaw is less arduous and more pointless than making a copy, but it can give you a similar sense of familiarity. Once you have ‘done’ a painting, you feel a more personal connection with it, for better or worse. Michael Codron told me that you feel you are ‘inside the mind of the painter’, and this is true. It is an escape from the self and into another mindset.

  Most paintings gain from this intimacy, but I began to dislike the Venus of Urbino as I struggled with her in jigsaw form. I took against the murky drapes and tapestries in green and dark red and beige and brown, and the background figure on her knees rummaging in a dark coffer, and the dingy slanting repetitive tiles of the floor, and the silly little floppy-eared silky pubic dog. Above all I began to dislike the woman’s sprawling, basking, seal-like, solid, self-satisfied figure, her smooth mounds of naked flesh, her hazy pink nipples, her big fat sausage-like fingers. Only as I neared the end did it occur to me that what I was disliking was not Titian’s masterpiece, but the poor and fuzzy quality of the jigsaw reproduction, credited to the ‘Clementoni Museum Collection – the Art of Art!’ If ever I get to the Uffizi again and can face the queues, I must go to pay my respects to the r
eal Venus. Clementoni didn’t do her justice. Their version of Botticelli’s Primavera, though it lopped off a few limbs round the edges, had a much better and sharper finish.

  I employed an unusual technique when constructing the Venus. I did the frame first, of course, but then I imposed upon myself the constraint of finishing all the background before I embarked on her body. The empty unfilled outline of her body looked very striking and strangely meaningful on the dark lacquer table. I wish now I had asked Michael to take a photograph of it in this state. I will never be able to bring myself to repeat the experiment. I don’t know what the empty space suggested, but it looked in some way significant. I am sure the Oulipo painters would have had a theory about it.

  My Oxford grandchildren, knowing my weakness for this seemingly pointless employment, purchased for me one Christmas a 2,000 piece reproduction of a work titled The Battle of Valmy (1792), which clearly says on its box that it is by Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse (d.1844). (I now know exactly where in Oxford they bought this unusual item, thanks to information provided by Michael Codron; he rumbled them.) It is a Falcon Imperial de Luxe Puzzle, and the box credit reads: ‘Louvre, Paris/Giraudin/Bridgeman Art Gallery, London’. The painting portrays, in the foreground, a number of mounted officers, several dying horses, and a field hospital full of wounded and dying men. The field hospital has picturesque tiles and woodwork. Further off, in the middle ground, we see the windmill of Valmy and a line of infantry and, beyond the infantry, the cavalry. There are large explosions of shellfire from what I take to be the enemy line, and the high horizon is marked by puffs of smoke. The revolutionary French are apparently about to defeat the Prussians in a famous victory.