Mrs Whistler

by Matthew Plampin

  ‘A notice has been published,’ Miss Corder announced, ‘and much circulated, in the art press and beyond. A famous critic, keen for attention it would seem, has penned something far beneath him, beneath any right-thinking person – an assault, essentially, intended to blind his readers to this painting’s obvious virtues. Fortunately, Charles has been on hand to offer Jimmy advice. If he hadn’t, I scarcely dare to imagine what might—’

  She stopped talking, distracted by a trio of young gentlemen, about their age – smart types, city fellows – who were grinning by her shoulder.

  ‘Custard,’ said one, indicating a falling rocket.

  ‘Gulls’ droppings,’ offered another.

  ‘Who was the critic?’ Maud asked.

  ‘Ruskin,’ said Miss Corder shortly. ‘And you can see right here what his authority has licensed. Stupidity Miss Franklin, has been allowed free rein.’

  With that she swivelled another quarter-circuit and launched herself into battle, informing the young gentlemen that they were plainly insensible to art, hopeless cases indeed, embarrassing themselves further with every utterance; that they might as well take their tweed and their watch-chains and their primped whiskers and go back to their desks, in whatever godforsaken office they scratched out their existences.

  Ruskin. Maud knew the name, of course; it had an association of stature, of the kind you might see spelt out on book spines in austere, golden letters, or heard being dropped into conversation as a display of knowledge. She hadn’t read any of it herself, but gaining the fellow’s ill opinion was surely a serious reversal. She wanted to ask what had been written, but Miss Corder was caught up entirely in her skirmish.

  Thrown at first by her vehemence, the young gentlemen had rallied, rather pleased to have any form of attention from such a woman. They declared that the Nocturne was plainly the work of a drunkard, a staggering sot, and not very much work at that. Pictures of this type, one of them continued, might well appeal to ladies of a – they exchanged glances, starting to laugh – bohemian persuasion, but to the wider population they were nothing but a joke, an act of imposture, as Mr What’s-his-name had asserted.

  Imposture, thought Maud. There it was.

  Miss Corder listened, nodding as if some deep suspicion was being confirmed, the orchid bobbing atop her vast hat. Then she gestured contemptuously at the opposite side of the gallery, towards a spread of large paintings with a good deal more people gathered before them. All by the same hand, they had the look, from a distance, of stained glass.

  ‘That is more to your taste, I suppose – old Ned Jones?’ she demanded. ‘That is excellence, is it, all that laboriousness, all that misspent labour? Is that English art? Is that honestly what we deserve?’

  Maud studied these paintings more closely. The colours had a delicate glow, as if the pictures were lit from behind; the forms were flawlessly arranged and drawn. She could see a row of beautiful angels bearing large crystal balls. Half a dozen women kneeling by a lake, gazing at their own reflections as if entranced. St George in his armour. Every one of them had virtually the same face – both the men and the women, and the ones who were neither men nor women. Their expressions held only the merest hints of thought or feeling. The effect was mildly unnerving. When considered next to the work of this Mr Jones, it could well be true that Jimmy’s pictures would not seem pure and peaceful, but crude. Lacking somehow. This notion came to Maud unbidden and it startled her with its disloyalty. She made to look back towards the Whistler display, for reassurance; and instead spotted attendants in livery, closing in on them from opposite sides, censorious glares on their faces.

  Miss Corder was growing yet more impassioned and voluble about the various deficiencies she’d observed in the other artworks of the Grosvenor display. Maud was wondering whether she should interrupt, to point out the attendants perhaps, when her companion withdrew abruptly from this somewhat one-sided debate, casting not so much as a parting glance at her chortling adversaries.

  ‘Come Miss Franklin,’ she said, starting towards the curtained entrance, and the wide stairway beyond. ‘I believe we’re due at the Café Royal.’

  *

  Outside, the heat was starting to lift, a breeze snapping the shop awnings taut in their frames. Miss Corder walked along New Bond Street with a pronounced, leisurely sway, her hips swinging out a couple of inches with each footstep, unperturbed by either the clash in the gallery or the manner of their exit.

  ‘Ned Jones,’ she said. ‘Good God. Or Burne-Jones, as we must call him now. Charles knows the fellow. Used to know him. Even back then his style was said to be ponderous and overworked. All those hard lines, all that intricacy. And for such a wretchedly insipid result. But I suppose I should hope that the popularity of his pictures grows yet further. The blasted things would be easy indeed to replicate.’

  Maud frowned a little, and began to ask what was meant by replicate, but Miss Corder was crossing a side street, moving around the back of a carriage, out of earshot. While Maud bent to gather up her hem, Miss Corder was just letting hers trail where it would, dragging through the summer dust. They were drawing stares – being unaccompanied and rather conspicuous – none too pleasant, some of them. The attention fell upon Miss Corder like sea spray on the prow of a gunboat.

  ‘I understand why you wished to leave so soon,’ she said, when Maud caught up. ‘To be honest, Miss Franklin, I can only stomach brief visits myself. The Grosvenor is a worthy venture, all things considered. It provides a place of exhibition to the occasional true talent, like your Jimmy. But I cannot help thinking it corrupt. They do it by invitation, you know, rather than merit. Amateurs, friends of Sir Coutts Lindsay and his wife, shown alongside proper artists. It is a game, a game for the rich.’ Her lip twitched. ‘But works are shifting nonetheless. They are going for hundreds of pounds, if Charles is to be believed. I am beginning to think that I should have tried to get something of my own in there.’

  There was a pause. Maud looked at a bolt of burnt-orange silk arranged in a draper’s window. ‘You’re an artist,’ she said.

  ‘More than that,’ replied Miss Corder, lifting her chin. ‘I am a professional, Miss Franklin. I make my living at it. But I am also a woman. And my father was a lighterman, down at Rotherhithe. And so I am kept always at the margins. Versatility is demanded of me, if I am to survive – a versatility that I’ll bet Mr Millais or Mr Leighton, or Lady Butler even, would struggle to summon.’ She stopped, checking the fervour that was returning to her voice. ‘But of course you know all this. You are an artist yourself. Charles says that Jimmy rates you highly – that he had you at work on the Peacock Room, in fact, repainting flowers. Before he brought the scheme to its final form.’

  ‘Before he covered them all up, you mean. Painted the whole thing blue.’

  Maud was embarrassed, and faintly annoyed; Jimmy knew she didn’t like him telling people about her attempts at art – boasting about them, as he couldn’t help but do, despite having obliterated her painstaking labour at Prince’s Gate with barely a second’s hesitation. She’d protested about this, just once, trying to sound as if she was joking.

  ‘I had to Maudie,’ he’d answered simply. ‘It didn’t go.’

  ‘That was necessary,’ Miss Corder told her. ‘A sacrifice, you might say. Charles tells me that Jimmy regards you as a pupil as much as a model. That he’ll have your pictures selling before the decade is out.’

  Maud felt herself colouring. She stared down at her boots. ‘I don’t know about that. I’ve barely begun.’

  ‘The best models,’ Miss Corder continued, ‘often have a painter in them as well. I have always thought this. It refines your sense of what’s needed. Of what it is to stand on the other side of the easel. And I must say that you are in the very best place. Jimmy Whistler is the finest teacher – the finest protector that you could ask for.’

  It was rare indeed for Maud’s situation to be met with such approval. Edie, so careful in her respectability,
didn’t even like to think of it. The other models she knew regarded it simply as a deft manoeuvre, a tidy bit of luck. How could she help feeling a flicker of affinity now with Miss Rosa Corder? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad to talk of art with a professional woman painter. Someone unmarried and young, and without social advantage. Someone who seemed interested in her, furthermore, and who could surely offer guidance when she felt able to work again. Questions began to occur also about Miss Corder and the way she lived. The pictures she’d painted, where they’d been shown and to whom they’d sold. Her own protector, the Owl.

  Miss Corder was talking herself, though, expanding upon her admiration for Jimmy and of her sense of the war that had begun, between the forces of artistic righteousness and a broad, determined coalition of enemies. It was being fought on the walls of the Grosvenor Gallery apparently, and in numerous other places besides, with this Ruskin review being merely the latest offensive launched against them. Maud thought of that strange moment down in the studio – the suggestion that there was fresh trouble with the Leylands. It had slipped her mind until she’d stood before the Harmony in Amber and Black. They started down a lane and the wind picked up, overturning a metal pail and sending it rolling noisily across the pavement. Miss Corder paused; Maud saw her chance.

  ‘What of the Leylands? What’s going on there?’

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Miss Corder replied, without much interest. ‘You mustn’t worry. A couple of accidental meetings between Jimmy and the wife, at the houses of mutual friends. The husband wasn’t best pleased. He still considers Jimmy and himself to be at odds, it seems.’

  Not a word had passed between Jimmy and Frederick Leyland since the previous winter. The shipbroker had responded to his reworked dining room – to the Prussian blue walls, and the mural, with its spilled silver shillings and puffed-up, befrilled peacock – only with silence. They had been left to wonder, a very deliberate form of torture. The decorative scheme remained intact – that much they knew. But no more.

  Maud had other questions, a long list of them; Miss Corder was back on the Grosvenor, though, and the dismal quality of so much of its display, a topic that sustained her without interruption until they reached Regent Street. It was packed solid, traffic inching and creaking around the dust-hazed Quadrant. Miss Corder weaved along the busy pavement, leading Maud beneath the red and white striped canopy that shivered above the entrance of the Café Royal. Jimmy’s preferred table was off to the side, next to one of the broad front windows, providing a commanding view of both the restaurant and the street. It was large, able to accommodate double their number, in case any notable passers-by were waved over to join them. Jimmy was at the head, listing things on his fingers; Owl sat to the right, nodding in understanding as he reached for his glass. The two women went in. A smart, portly waiter was there at once, asking their business in a heavy French accent.

  ‘We have come to meet our husbands,’ Miss Corder told him. ‘They are over there, by that window.’

  ‘Husbands,’ the waiter repeated. He took their hats, though, standing aside to admit them. Maud saw Miss Corder’s orchid smear pollen across his black silk waistcoat.

  Both men rose at their approach. Jimmy’s eyeglass dropped out; Owl set down his drink. There were kisses and embraces. Miss Corder sat on the seat opposite the Owl, with her back to the window. Maud joined her gratefully, nearly groaning aloud in relief, kneading her aching knees beneath the table. She’d walked further that afternoon than she had in the previous month.

  The Café Royal was decorated in the Parisian style, with tall mirrors in ornate, gilded frames, tabletops of veined marble and a black-and-white tiled floor. It was about a quarter full, perhaps slightly less; waiters roamed about the empty tables, polishing cutlery in the pre-supper lull. At that moment it seemed to Maud a haven of airy comfort and tranquillity. She smiled at Owl, at Miss Corder, and they smiled back at her; and there was a tiny flash of strangeness. The scene was that of four friends, four dear friends, settling in for a celebration. Yet she barely knew this pair. She’d met them only once before. Jimmy had mentioned that he and Owl had been on decent terms a few years previously, prior to her arrival at Lindsey Row, and had recently renewed their association. But this hardly justified all the confidences he appeared to be piling on the fellow.

  The flash faded. A flute was placed in front of her and filled with sparkling wine. The day’s exertions had left her utterly parched. It was nothing short of beautiful, that glass: tall and delicate, frosted with moisture, the wine golden in the light of the declining sun. She picked it up, chimed the rim against Miss Corder’s, and Owl’s, and Jimmy’s, and drank deep – almost half the contents in one gulp.

  ‘And now, Maudie,’ said Jimmy, ‘you must tell, in precise detail, sparing me nothing,’ – here he screwed the eyeglass back in, and fixed the blue eye behind upon her with semi-comical intensity – ‘What. You. Thought.’

  Maud had been furnishing Jimmy Whistler with opinions for a while now. For one who courted disfavour, who made out that he revelled in it, he could be acutely, damnably sensitive. Snide phrases penned in seconds by some newspaper critic were branded forever on his brain; there were a couple that Maud was pretty certain he would be reciting on his deathbed. Her actual views, therefore, were unimportant. She knew what he needed from her, and she supplied it without thinking.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said. ‘It was wonderful. The hall was yours, Jimmy. No contest.’

  The moustache bristled with satisfaction. Miss Corder spoke up as well, poised and formidably eloquent, reporting on the crowds, the regrettable popularity of Mr Burne-Jones, and in particular on the reception of the firework painting – the Nocturne in Black and Gold.

  ‘The philistines were out in force,’ she said. ‘They were reciting Ruskin’s words before the picture. He has given licence to ignorant disdain. A refusal to look, or to see.’

  Owl was shaking his head. ‘I tell you, Jimmy, the old goat’s been beyond the pale for a good while now. But this is a step further still. Ad hominem, as the lawyers say. Actionable.’

  Jimmy was grave. ‘You aren’t the first to say this,’ he said.

  ‘What was in it?’ Maud asked, by now rather anxious. ‘What did he write that could be so bad?’

  They shared a look; then three indulgent expressions were turned her way.

  ‘You deserve to know,’ Jimmy said. ‘I’d hoped I could spare you, but this may now be unavoidable. It was brief. Published in that peculiar private paper he puts out. But picked up since by everyone.’ He spoke slowly, assuming a terrifyingly steely smile. ‘The fellow wrote that my poor picture approached the aspect of wilful imposture.’

  Maud gripped the stem of her flute. This was Ruskin’s own phrase, she could tell. The dreadful notice had plainly been memorised in its entirety.

  ‘He wrote that I was a coxcomb, Maudie. A coxcomb. That I was asking two hundred guineas to – how was it put? – fling a pot of paint in the public’s face. That the Black and Gold displayed only what he felt qualified to term cockney impudence.’

  At this Maud let out an involuntary laugh, a flat, nervous whinny. ‘You’re no blessed cockney, Jimmy.’

  Owl was grinning too. ‘It is absurd,’ he said. ‘Completely absurd. And actionable, as I say. In the course of my life, I have learned a thing or two about the law, and there is no doubt in my mind that you have been libelled. He attacks your person, my friend. Your character.’

  ‘The rogue denies me my fundamental right,’ Jimmy stated, ‘to call myself an artist. He says my work is not art. This is why no one buys. But what right do they have to pass judgement in this manner? These self-appointed critics, these ignoramuses, these blasted fools? What goddamned right do they have?’

  ‘None,’ said Miss Corder. ‘None at all.’

  Owl nodded in sympathy. ‘You must go to court, Jimmy. I have said this to you several times now. The public chastisement of John Ruskin for the abuses of his pen is long overdue. And th
ere must be compensation for the damage he has sought to inflict.’

  ‘That he has inflicted already,’ said Jimmy.

  ‘Compensation?’ Maud asked. ‘You mean – you mean money?’

  The Owl turned to her in an attitude of apologetic explanation. ‘I know Ruskin, Miss Franklin. Better than any man alive, I should think. I was his – well, I suppose you might call it his private secretary, back before my association with Gabriel Rossetti. I undertook many missions on his behalf, and became familiar with every part of his affairs – some dark regions, Miss. And he has grown yet more strange since. The lunatic’s beard. The demented air that attends on his manners and his writings. It is said—’

  ‘Owl,’ Jimmy interrupted, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Not now.’

  ‘He must pay,’ said Owl, changing tack. ‘He can afford to, certainly. His father traded in wines, he traded very well, and left his only child rich indeed. The wretched fellow squats up north somewhere, among the Lakes, atop a veritable mountain of gold. It is your duty, old man, if you ask me, to have some clever lawyer relieve him of a portion of it.’

  Jimmy seemed to see the sense in this. ‘We are down, I won’t deny it. To be completely honest, mon cher, we suffer still from the lack of Leyland’s thousand. That is the root of the trouble. Most of what he paid was already owed, you see – it’s long gone.’

  Leyland. Maud sat up. ‘The Amber and Black,’ she said.

  Again all three of them looked her way, curious and vaguely condescending. A connection had been forming in the back of her mind, since the walk over from New Bond Street. While visiting Lindsey Row in the years before the Peacock Room, Frederick Leyland would surely have seen the Amber and Black when it had Florence’s features. And then he would have seen it again in the Grosvenor Gallery.

  ‘I saw what you did to it. To Leyland’s daughter. You scraped off her face.’

  They laughed hard at this, did Jimmy and the Owl, slapping their palms against the tabletop and stamping their boots upon the floor. It was more than Maud had expected, a lot more, and it knocked her off-course. She found herself smiling too, even as she tried to raise her voice over the uproar.