He remembered once reading a description of Rumour in Vergil’s Aeneid. As she ran around the city she grew in direct proportion to the speed at which she moved. Soon her head reached the sky. Her body was covered in feathers, and for each feather she had a corresponding eye, tongue and ear. That sense of endless eyes and jeering tongues seemed to him perfectly to evoke the scorn of cultured London as it picked at his reputation.
Often, during those early weeks, he would return to his studio and stare at other canvases on which he had tried the method. As if to perform an exorcism of what had happened he started to map out a second version of the Cicero, furiously sketching out in charcoal the details of the story. ‘This time,’ he whispered to himself savagely, ‘I shall colour it according to my own principles.’ He walked to the table where the glass containers of paint powder were contained. He was about to open the Burnt Umber when some instinct in him picked up the whole jar, and he threw it against the wall. The satisfaction was immense as it smashed – two more jars followed. After that the footsteps came running.
There are occasions when it is a relief just to be an insignificant detail in a larger picture, as slight as a blade of grass or a drop of water in the sea. One small consolation in the entire wretched affair was its occurrence at the same time as the marriage of Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Prince Frederick of Württemberg. Daily West anticipated the ire of the King. But because of the elaborate preparations for the wedding it never came. He gave thanks that he had been spared this final humiliation.
Other artists, he knew, had been less subtle in their response. Westall, he heard at an Academy dinner, had posted a parcel containing a dead rat through Provis’s door. Thomas Stothard and John Hoppner had confronted him one day after Chapel and held him up against a wall until his shouts led to the Serjeant of the Vestry ordering them to leave the Palace. Fuseli wanted Provis to be summoned to the Academy and ordered to account for his actions. His suggestion was greeted by many with cheers, and West was urged to set a date for the confrontation.
He wrote a letter and was on the point of sending it, when Farington and Smirke paid him a call. They had heard of Fuseli’s pronouncement, but to West’s astonishment they urged caution. Farington had continued to be praised for his work using the method. West flinched at the vanity of the man as he mentioned this. The diarist declared he had decided it would be best for all the Academicians to err on side of generosity towards the Provises.
West swallowed his cynicism.
‘Why do you think this, Mr Farington?’
‘If we denounce the man outright, we will concede that many of us have been fools. I believe we should send Mr Provis a straightforward letter asking for half our money back, in the light of the disappointing critical response. But to my mind it is far better to sustain an air of ambiguity over whether or not we were deceived outright. If we declare that we believe the Provises were simply a little misguided, and we showed them too much charity.’ He blinked.
‘Yet you have suffered far less than I,’ replied West with irritation. ‘I have been accused of being a criminal, when I was the chief victim of the crime.’ His voice rose.
‘Do you truly believe you will alleviate or perpetuate your suffering by pursuing this course?’ Farington replied coldly. ‘You do understand the complexity of the situation – of the huge number of reputations that are at stake here. The more of a stir you try to create, the more questions will be asked. Why do you remain as President? What really motivated you – and us – in entertaining the Provises? What is the point of the Royal Academy if we cannot spot charlatans when they are sitting in front of us?’
West went to his desk and ripped up the letter. He then told Farington and Smirke that he required their company no longer. Many times he considered going to challenge the Groom of the Vestry on his own at his apartment. But in those early weeks he did not know what kind of violence he might carry out should he find himself face to face with the agent of his public humiliation.
It was an early summer’s evening, after an audience with the King, when he found he could put off the confrontation no longer. There is no drum beat as sinister as the knock we make on a door when we do not wish to see who is on the other side, he thought to himself. He looked at the veins on his hand as he rapped grimly on Provis’s apartment door. When he heard the latch slide across, he was tempted to walk away. But he forced himself to stay there.
To his shock, it was the ghost of a man who peered out and beckoned him in with the words ‘I have been expecting you.’ West walked into the dark front room. He could not disguise his horror as Provis sat down on one side of the chimney and beckoned him to take the other chair. Even though it was early June a fire burnt in the fireplace. Though he was not discernibly thinner, Provis seemed frailer. His eyes peered out from parchment-dry skin and his hands trembled.
‘I had heard you had been ill,’ said West.
‘The physicians cannot concur on any diagnosis.’ Provis attempted a smile, but it slumped back in exhaustion after a couple of seconds. ‘I have been wanting to come and see you. I wanted to offer an explanation.’
West felt the anger rise in him like bile.
‘Have you heard from Ann Jemima?’ he asked after a moment.
Provis laughed bitterly. ‘Ann Jemima robbed me of all the money we received for the method.’
‘She robbed you?’ asked West incredulously.
Provis nodded.
‘She believed she had received the money for her own work. She saw no reason why she should share it.’
West pondered for a moment on what he had said.
‘The document…’
‘…. is false.’ Provis nodded. ‘But I had nothing to do with creating it. I confess I supported her knowing it was false. I was very much party to the crime.’ He laughed lugubriously. ‘Her teacher, Richard Cosway, was blackmailing me – and there was no other route to take. I had more to lose by not helping her than by doing so. In truth, I thought you would all perceive its weaknesses straight away.’
He looked directly at West, who dropped his head.
‘Then you did not. Matters became very complicated.’
West frowned.
‘How was Cosway blackmailing you?’ he asked.
‘She was not my daughter,’ Provis replied.
West nodded.
‘Of that I am aware.’
‘When she came to me with this scheme to make money, I told her there was no point in going ahead with it. She told me that if I did not help her, she would let it come to the attention of the King that I was living with a young woman to whom I was not related. That was the first moment I realised the mistake I had made.’
‘She blackmailed you, when you had saved her from poverty?’ said West incredulously.
‘I could not condemn her.’ Provis’s voice cracked. ‘She was a young girl who needed help and knew no better.’
He looked desolate. West was struck not so much by the sense of Provis’s grief as by the fact it was not the only time he had observed it. Farington, Rigaud, and even Smirke had been visibly upset as much for the fact that Ann Jemima had not been who they thought she was as for the fact they had been deceived over the method. ‘She seemed so in her element among the painters of the Academy,’ Farington had observed, ‘Smirke and I spent some delightful afternoons in her company.’ Rigaud had merely been uncharacteristically silent whenever she was mentioned. This, West knew from experience, spoke more about his feelings than any words could.
He looked once more at Provis, and observed yet again the decline in his physical condition. The tuber-like nose seemed to protrude more acutely from his face, his movements seemed painful. His suffering is genuine, he thought to himself. All the angry sentiments with which he had knocked on the door, all the accusations and recriminations, shrivelled on his lips and died. He leaned forward.
‘She had a talent for inspiring love, did she not?’ he found himself saying.
Provi
s took a deep breath.
‘I knew she was going to leave at some point. Just as all daughters leave their fathers, I knew she would leave me.’
West did not detect the observant gleam in Provis’s eyes just at the moment before he put his head in his hands.
‘Against my better judgement, I would have liked to have seen her again. To ask her why she did it. To ask if there was anything she took from our sessions…’ he hesitated, ‘if she saw me as more than a fool.’
Provis was silent.
‘I cannot pretend that I have not felt a great deal of anger towards you,’ West continued. ‘My humiliation over this has been considerable, and the thought that you should be punished has played often on my mind.’
‘Do what you will,’ said Provis quietly. ‘I personally would not hesitate to take revenge.’
West felt the rise and fall of his chest as he looked at the man once more. Observed once more the ashen exhausted face, the slumped shoulders, and trembling hands.
He took a deep breath.
‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ he said softly.
He stood up and moved towards the door. Briefly he watched Provis staring into the flames. Outside a blackbird sang its piercing hymn to the evening.
* This is from a genuine historic document. The Sandby ‘doodle-do’ song, along with the Gillray cartoon, is one of the main public responses to the incident.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Venice, November 1797
‘It is not without the impulse of a lofty spirit that some are moved to enter this profession, attractive to them through natural enthusiasm. Their intellect will take delight in drawing, provided their nature attracts them to it of themselves, without any master’s guidance, out of loftiness of spirit. And then, through this delight, they come to want to find a master; and they bind themselves to him with respect for authority, undergoing an apprenticeship in order to achieve perfection in all this. There are those who pursue it, because of poverty and domestic need, for profit and enthusiasm for the profession too; but above all these are to be extolled the ones who enter the profession through a sense of enthusiasm and exaltation.’
cennino cennini,
The Craftsman’s Handbook, c. 1400
The cold afternoon is steeped in sunshine. A boat carves a line up the coast of the Adriatic. There is a small party on it that has met in Rome, and then travelled up to Assisi before crossing to Ancona and taking the boat to Venice. A young woman sits near the prow of the boat, staring out at the water with a faraway look in her eyes. Around her the voices of the travelling party come in and out of focus.
‘There is a part of me that fears seeing Venice,’ one of the other women declares. She is in her late twenties, but her hair has turned grey early. Swept back into a stylish chignon, it is offset by a youthful, slightly over-pink complexion.
‘Napoleon’s victory there has brought most grievous harm,’ concurs her husband, who is some ten years older. ‘His soldiers have plundered and looted everything they can.’
‘My friend has written to me that they took the four bronze horses from the front of St Mark’s,’ the woman interrupts, keen to be perceived as the expert on this matter. ‘It was as if they wanted to tear out the very spirit of the Republic.’
The young woman has been trying to stay her tongue for a while now. ‘But the Venetians themselves stole the horses from Constantinople in the thirteenth century,’ she says, turning back to her travelling companions with an easy laugh. ‘The horses’ heads were severed so they could bring them more easily from Constantinople to Venice.’ Her pale blue eyes flash.
The slightly older woman, Mrs Allenby, surveys her. ‘My dear Emily – you never cease to surprise me with your distinctive observations. We have enjoyed your company greatly on this tour – how sad it is for all of us that your husband cannot also join us.’
A look of distress flickers across Emily’s face. ‘I will write to him tonight. Hopefully he will be in a position to join me soon,’ she replies softly, and looks away again. Around them the water turns molten gold in the sunset.
The young woman has been a source of fascination to the other members of the party – which consists of herself and two married couples – ever since their first encounter in Rome. She talks as eloquently as any man about art, but in company reveals very little about her own personal affairs. Mrs Allenby has made assiduous efforts to befriend her. The discovery of a hidden tragedy has been a triumph. ‘Her husband was taken ill in Paris,’ she has told her husband. The latter nods through his habitual fog of disinterest. ‘He may not live another year,’ she continues. ‘Yet he refused to let her stay in Paris to look after him, and begged her to go on to Rome. He had a business matter that he trusted only her to address.’
Emily, for that is now Ann Jemima’s name, has proved most agreeable company for a couple whose conversational resources were fully spent within minutes of leaving Dover. The other couple on the boat are only slightly better matched. The wife, Caroline, a handsome woman with black hair and lips painted a vivid red, has an astringent wit which is often directed at her husband, Mr Dornoch. A mature clergyman and amateur scientist with extraordinary empathy for humankind’s fallibility, he has so far proved the most interesting companion of the journey.
Despite the disparities in their characters, the five have agreed to embark together on a difficult expedition. It is but six months since Venice fell to Napoleon, and just one since he signed it over to Austria. Emily has met the Allenbys by chance at the Roman Forum, as they all stared at the faded grandeur of the Arch of Septimius Severus. Around them the sprawl of relics from an ancient empire seemed somehow more alive through the reports they were receiving of Bonaparte’s desire to reinvent himself as a latterday Caesar. Over dinner two nights later, Mrs Allenby proposed they should take the trip to Venice to see what had happened in the wake of his invasion there.
‘My friend Isabella Albrizzi has written very movingly of how difficult it has been since the French invaded,’ she said. ‘The soldiers have proved both drunken and brutish.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Many women have been violated. Napoleon denies such transgressions strongly.’
‘His intentions were brutal from the start,’ said Mr Dornoch. ‘He wanted not just victory but revenge. He told the Venetians, “You have murdered my children – the winged lion of St Mark must lick the dust.”’
‘Then it sounds as if we should not go,’ Mr Allenby said.
‘I believe the barbarity is starting to recede since the Austrians took over,’ Mrs Allenby replied. ‘Now that France has attempted to invade Britain, I know many Venetians would feel a certain fellowship with us. I think we should take up her invitation.’ Her eye lit on Emily. ‘She has asked my husband and myself to spend a week with her there. I am sure, if I sent word, that you would be most welcome too.’
Emily has now absorbed her new identity so fully that she would not even look round in the street should someone call out Ann Jemima. The invitation has proved the culmination to a trip that has been both less terrifying than she feared and more profitable than she had dared hope. The trip across the Channel did not initially bode well. Though it was a short crossing, the waters were choppy and the summer rain relentless. Few people paid heed to the girl scratching methodically in her notebook with a quill, mapping out the boundaries of her new life.
Since the grief she had brought to London had been compounded by the grief for those she left behind there, she considered that the title of recent widow might suit her. But a little more thought led her to decide that the device of a sick husband would be far better. It would create a haze of discomfort which would mean people would not ask her too much about her past. It would also deter proposals from men who might delude themselves that they could provide her with a new future on their own terms. In short, she concluded, an imaginary husband will allow me both freedom and protection. She determined she would write letters telling two people of her changed identity. O
ne was to Josiah Darton, who wrote back swiftly promising her introductions under this new identity to individuals he knew in Paris and Lausanne. The other was to Thomas Provis, from whom she received no reply.
From Lausanne she continued across the Alps through the St Bernard Pass. The roads felt treacherous – at one point a mule died of exhaustion. As she gazed out over the rocky landscape plunging towards the valley below Emily felt a strong sense of the perilous conditions that now circumscribed her existence. Yet gradually she was realising that she had the resources to survive on the Continent, just as she had in London. The shades of Darton’s other lives were proving more useful than she entirely wanted to admit. The people whom she had met in Paris had given her introductions for Turin, and Florence – and the new friends in Florence in turn sent letters to acquaintances in Rome who declared they would be very willing to have Emily to stay. In Rome she had finally started painting again, creating a small Alpine scene in oils for her delighted hostess.
On the day that she finally takes the boat up the Adriatic with the Inghams, Emily is somewhat distracted. After six letters to Thomas Provis without a reply, she has despaired of ever hearing from him again. Yet this morning a letter has finally arrived from London. She has been filled with contradictory emotions on seeing the familiar spiky handwriting. Carefully she has broken the seal, which she recognises as one from his collection of unusual designs. The red wax bears an imprint of Laocoön wrestling with snakes, and she smiles at the irony.
‘My dearest Ann Jemima,’ the letter begins.
‘Forgive me for what may seem an Inappropriate style of address by now. Hard-forg’d habit makes any other form of Approach seem wrong to me. I trust that you are in good health. It seems that Europe is proving every bit as Extraordinary as you anticipated, even under the constant threat of Napoleonic invasion. From your letters it seems you have turned the Vexatious circumstances of your departure into a Triumphant beginning for a journey that you have dreamt of for some while.
The Optickal Illusion Page 37