The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  The translation of the guidebook has its own poetry, and I was delighted to find that it draws a direct parallel with the art of the puzzle.

  The kind of processing which was mainly perfectioned in Florence, and to which the fame of the Granducal manufacturing was entrusted, was the one of mosaics or 'commessi', as they were defined in order to indicate they were semi-precious stones mosaic works, which were cutting those stones in different shape sections that, later, were so precisely assembled together that the contact zones between each section practically resulted as invisible. That sort of creations, which could be utilized as wall pictures, table, chess-boards, cabinets, caskets of jewel boxes as well as the various pieces of furniture, were poetically defined as 'stone paintings', while nowadays we could call them puzzles, using a quicker but immediately understandable term [noi oggi, con termino più sbrigativo ma immediatamente comprehensibile, le chiameremmo 'puzzles'].

  'Termino più sbrigativo ma immediatamente comprehensibile' is good. The word 'puzzle' does good service here.

  Arthur Gilbert's eye was drawn to mosaics and micromosaics by a less orthodox route than a visit to the Opificio in Florence. It is an odd story. The first two micromosaics that he purchased were of a particularly dubious aesthetic quality. When he bought them at an auction house in Los Angeles in 1965, he thought they were cracked paintings, and presumably it was as cracked paintings that he first admired them. They were made in Rome c.1875, at a period when nearly a hundred commercial mosaicists were working in the city, selling to connoisseurs and gullible amateurs. Each painting shows a cavalier and a lady, but the costumes, hairstyles and furnishings are incongruous and from incompatible historical periods, and the artistic effect would have been dismissed by Mary Russell Mitford and Arnold Bennett as unacceptable. They are calendar art, jigsaw art, but they have been assembled with enormous labour.

  Nevertheless, there is something fascinating about the spectacle of so much labour devoted to such secondary products, and most of the objects in the Gilbert Collection are aesthetically more satisfactory. Gilbert, a dedicated collector, trained his own eye, and he trained it well. Reproductive effort reaches a dignified apotheosis in Antonio Testa's Panorama of Rome, a huge view from the Janiculum on which the artist worked for twenty years. It was taken and adapted from a 1765 etching by Giuseppe Vasi, and it is of great delicacy. This was a labour of love and a way of life: La Vie: Mode d'Emploi. The thought of the patient fitting together of so many tesserae over so many years into so useless but so beautiful an imitative object is curiously moving.

  Imitation, appropriation, copyright, authenticity: the doves of Sosus, perhaps themselves a copy, have been copied endlessly, and the mosaic tigress in the Gilbert Collection's 'Tigress Lying Below Rocks' was taken from an engraving of the Stubbs oil painting of 1769, which hangs in Blenheim Palace. (This is also available, as noted, in a charming small jigsaw, which cannot, however, do justice to the extraordinarily tactile rendering of the feathery fur of this mosaic beast's striped chest; the little hard grains of mosaic uncannily mimic a velvety softness that the hand longs to reach out to stroke.) Mosaicists copied works by Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa, Reni and Raphael, and the workshops of the Vatican produced mosaic copies of sacred masterpieces that took several years to produce. Some artists were attracted by the idea of their work being made more durable in stone painting. Others would perhaps have been appalled by it.

  Arthur Gilbert, like the dukes of Tuscany before him, had an eye for riches and colour, although he had not been brought up in luxurious surroundings. He was born in Dalston in 1913, the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant who became a furrier in Aldersgate. Gilbert's wife Rosalinde, whom he married in 1934, was a designer with whom he set up a successful wholesale dressmaking business, selling ball gowns and wedding dresses. They prospered, in ball gowns and in property. His life as a collector took off when they moved to Beverly Hills and began to furnish their 'Italian-Greco-Jewish Villa' with a theatrical and eclectic assortment of antiques. He made himself into a scholar and the world expert on 'micromosaic' art, coining the word to describe the objects of his passion, and until recently we could all see them for a small entrance fee in Somerset House. We were even able to dine amongst them, if we had the corporate money to do so. And the less well-off amongst us can continue to buy the jigsaws.

  XLVI

  I too have a liking for opulence, despite my Quaker schooling. I like the look of opulence. I like red and gold. I was taught to suspect any form of opulence as vulgar bad taste, but when I first went to Italy, at the age of seventeen, I realized I had been falsely indoctrinated. Plainness is not the only virtue.

  Many decades ago, my mother-in-law gave me a tiny hand mirror with a little handle, an ornate gilt frame, and a French, eighteenth-century-style, faux-shepherdess painting on the back. It wasn't valuable, it was just a trinket, a stocking-filler gift, but I loved it. (My Jewish in-laws didn't do stockings and Christmas, as such, but they did presents in a very big way.) My sister, when she saw this small gift, eyed it with a mixture of censure and envy, and said, 'We don't give one another pretty things like that in our family, do we?'

  No, we didn't. We weren't very good at gifts of any sort.

  I still have the mirror, but the painting has come unstuck and mislaid itself.

  I occasionally bought what I thought were pretty gifts for my mother-in-law, in reciprocity. It was a pleasure to do so, and I wish I had dared to buy her more. I once bought her a beautiful silver serving spoon embossed with fruit from Shrubsole's famous shop in Museum Street. And a Venetian lace handkerchief in Venice. These were ceremonial objects, expensive and delightful.

  Opulence moves me. When I started to leaf through a book on the restoration of Federico da Montefeltro's studiolo in Gubbio, I was astonished to find tears starting to my eyes. There I sat, in Humanities Two at the British Library, weeping. My quest for jigsaws and mosaics had by now meandered to a search for marquetry images of cabinets within cabinets, for trompe l'oeil bookshelves, for benches and cupboards, for intricate geometry and perspectives, for cunning woodwork. And they are all there, in the Gubbio studiolo, in abundance – fictive niches of illusionistic intarsia, musical scores and instruments, birds in birdcages, lecterns and books, hunting horns and candlesticks, some of them so convincingly three-dimensional that the eye cannot persuade itself that it is seeing a flat surface.

  But what brought the tears of joy to my eyes was a photograph of a coffered ceiling.

  The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation shows photographs of the main ceiling and of a ceiling in a window niche of the Gubbio studiolo, and ceilings from the Palazzo Vecchio and the Chapel of the Palazzo Medici in Florence. These ceilings, with their glorious symmetries of gold, scarlet, silver and azure, with their mix of patterned surface and rich embossed depth, are astonishing works of art, which satisfy something profound in our desire for ornamentation and control, for exuberance and majestic regularity. Lowered as I was by ill health, and by a journey on the underground, and by the habitual stress of negotiating what was then the building site of King's Cross station, with its steps and its barriers and its ever-changing grey congeries of exits and entrances, I was overcome by this small vision of ordered polychrome splendour on my library desk. These were only photographs in a book, but they made me weep.

  Had I ever seen any of these ceilings, had I ever bothered to look upwards? I'd been to Florence, I'd been to Gubbio, but I couldn't recall that I had noticed any ceilings. (The Gubbio ceilings are now in New York, but I haven't seen them there, either, and as I'm very unlikely to go to New York again, I never will.) The designs of palmettes and acanthus leaves, of five-petalled gilded flowers and flower buds, of octagons and trapezoids, of panels painted to resemble green, red and purple porphyry, seem to unite the natural and the unnatural, the organic and the mathematical, in the great artifice of eternity. These ceilings are the starry vaults of the heavens themselves, re-created upon earth.

  Are the Gub
bio ceilings still the Gubbio ceilings, now that they have been relocated and restored in America? This is not an idle question. They were purchased in Italy in 1937 by the international dealer Adolph Loewi, who found them not in Gubbio but in the Villa Lancellotti in Frascati, whither they had been transported during the 1870s. Loewi bought them from their (disputed) owner Prince Lancellotti, and shipped them to America for their better health in 1939, along with all the marquetry panelling of the studiolo.They arrived in their crates in New York on 15 May 1939, were purchased by and eventually delivered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 30 November, and the restored studiolo was unveiled on the first floor of the museum in January 1941, amidst much wonder and acclaim, and learned reference to the hyperrealist and surrealist spirit of the marquetry. Then, in 1966, the studiolo disappeared once more from public view, this time for thirty years, to re-appear after a second and much longer process of restoration and conservation (1987–96) in May 1996. And there, in the Metropolitan, the studiolo remains. It is of Gubbio, and not of Gubbio. It is even less likely than the Elgin marbles to make its way home.

  You can't buy it in jigsaw format in the Met Store, which is a pity, but you can buy a reproduction wood-inlay copy of one of the panels for $125, including hanging hardware.

  America, like the British Museum, is full of expatriated treasures. Would it be a good idea to try to repatriate at vast expense the cloister of Saint Michel de Cuxa from the Cloisters of Fort Tryon Park in New York to its original site in the Abbey of Saint Michel de Cuxa in the French Pyrenees? Baudrillard thought not, arguing in Simulacra and Simulation that

  if the exportation of the cornices was in effect an arbitrary act, if the Cloisters in New York are an artificial mosaic of all cultures (following the logic of the capitalist centralization of value), their reimportation to the original site is even more artificial: it is a total simulacrum that links up with 'reality' through a complete circumvention. The cloister should have stayed in New York in its simulated environment, which at least fooled no one.

  I see what he means, which, with Baudrillard, is not always the case. But I think I am happier with the concept of second-hand representations than he is. I can burst into tears over a picture or a photograph in a book. I can do a Clementoni jigsaw of Botticelli's Primavera and feel that I am paying homage to the painting rather than insulting it. I am quite humble in that way. Goethe might have agreed with Baudrillard. But then again, he might not.

  When I was first in Florence, aged seventeen, encouraged by a sophisticated young man called Geoffrey who said it was 'all right' to do this, I bought a cheap reproduction of the head of Flora from the Primavera. It was painted on wood, with a gilt edging, and I thought it was beautiful. It can't have cost more than a few shillings, because that was all I would have had to spend in those days. It had a very 'antique' look to it, and I was pleased on my way home when the Customs Officer at Dover detained me to look at it quite carefully. I kept it for years, but I always thought of it as a cheap copy, and I must have thrown it away when I sold the house in Hampstead. How could I have done that? My daughter now tells me that it was in her Hampstead bedroom for years when she was a child. I wish she had told me to hang on to it. I wish I had hung on to a lot of the things that I took to Oxfam.

  The original transportation of the cloister of Saint Michel de Cuxa from France to America did not go unremarked. Englishman Alfred Emberson, in an English guidebook to the fashionable spa of Vernet-les-Bains (All about Vernet-les-Bains, 1913), commented on the threatened appropriation with indignation. He wrote, in 1913, just before its removal:

  One experiences a sort of shock when one reads in all the papers of the efforts of an American sculptor to capture and carry off to his own country the ruins of the ancient Abbaye of Saint Michel de Cuxa, near Prades ... The incident recalls the alarm I experienced when a charming American and his wife and daughter, who were staying here, quietly announced at lunch how disappointed they were that they had not been able to buy the quaint old church bell at Casteil to take home with them.

  It always impresses me.how regardless our cousins from across the Atlantic are of the terrors of 'extra luggage'...

  It would require a Shakespeare to adequately describe the sensations – if they could only 'sensate' – of these mediaeval stone-built structures, which withstood not only the raids of the Visigoths, Moors and Romans, but more wonderfully still the ravages of Time, when they find themselves helpless before the power of Money and the relentless disregard of their feelings of Modern Barbarity.

  The French government tried but failed to save the cloisters for France. Thirty-seven capitals, nineteen abaci, seven arches and various bits of parapet and doorway were bought, transported and eventually re-erected in New York. I have seen them there. Other fragments made their way to the Louvre, to Boston, to Philadelphia and to Eze-Village on the Riviera. Some have now made their way home to Prades, but yet more are no doubt standing as ornaments in private gardens or serving humbly and unrecognized as doorstops or cattle troughs all over the department of Roussillon. Perhaps on the Day of judgement they will all rush together again, at vast destructive speed, like a disaster movie being played backwards.

  Rediviva saxa.

  The cloisters and the studiolo went to New York, but the horseshoes of Scarrington stayed at home, saved from American purchasers by a preservation order and Nottinghamshire County Council.

  The American novelist Booth Tarkington wrote an amusing parody of American collectors titled The Collector's Whatnot (1923), in which he satirizes the habit of acquiring frying pans and sow scrapers and hooked rugs and camping stools and bits of wood full of wormholes, as well as the practice of hanging agricultural implements as decorations on restaurant walls. There is a chapter on how to avoid being cheated in Europe, which makes it clear that the antique dealers usually have the upper hand.

  XLVII

  I have strayed far from my plan, which was to write a brief illustrated history of the jigsaw puzzle. I find myself with a bucket full of leftover tesserae, some with jagged and uneven edges encrusted with old mastic and resin, which do not fit into my original design. Nick Tucker wrote to me that one of the lessons of the jigsaw is that 'order is always attainable in the end so long as one works hard for it', but of course I have made things difficult for myself by straying out of my frame and finding new pieces as I go along. This is not the book I meant to write.

  I think I have been trying to write about authenticity and family and folk memory, and how these concepts affect our view of the idyll of the Cider with Rosie, Teas-with-Hovis, Golden Legend past. I have been trying to recapture my aunt and my childhood. I have been trying to use simpler shapes and brighter colours than I have used in my work of late. I have been trying to fit the simple building blocks together. Bryn stands for the house the child draws, the simple solid village house on a main thoroughfare in the middle of England.

  I have long been uneasy about the Uttley-style fetishization of the past. I was wary of it long before I read Raphael Samuel, Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard. (I don't think any of them would have read Alison Uttley, though one can never be sure with Perec.) They articulated my sense of the overlay and appropriation of 'real' objects by fashion and nostalgia, and the concomitant fear of 'inauthenticity'. A fear, one might posit, of horse brasses and crinoline ladies embroidered on tablecloths. This is akin to the more solemn and political mauvaise foi, which exercised us in the 1960s, but it is more object-based, more materialistic. It is more concerned with 'Things'.

  Let me return to the warming-pan from Bryn. It has a very dark wooden handle, thirty-four inches long. Its circular copper pan has a diameter of just under a foot and is about three inches deep. The copper cover is engraved – one might say scratched – with a very simple and basic design of five leaves and five sprays of flowers. I cannot see any manufacturer's name on it and I do not know how old it is. It was not made as a replica, and it was certainly not a unicum, so there may be many
almost-identical objects surviving in Britain. It is, in this sense, the real thing, and was once filled with hot coals to warm damp beds.

  I do not think it was given to my grandmother as part of her brass collection. When it came 'into the family' I do not know, nor do I know how it came to me rather than to anyone else in the family. Maybe I appropriated it, maybe nobody else wanted it, maybe Joyce rescued it for me and made me take it away before it got lost or was put in the house sale (into which, to my regret, the grandfather clock vanished). Now it stands, ornamentally, decoratively, non-functionally, in my study, inside the brass fender of the tiled fireplace in my husband's house in North Kensington. The fireplace may or may not be an original feature of this London house. The copper has a soft, yellow-gold, burnished glow.

  What does this object mean? It has come to me, for better or worse, but it is not very intimately connected with my evenings playing Belisha or pegging rugs or making spills and lavender bags or going to bed in the apple loft by the Kelly light. The Kelly light and the Campbell tile from Stoke-on-Trent have much more powerful associations for me. The warming-pan was as decorative and non-functional at Bryn as it is now in London. But it is durable, and too good to throw away.

  My mother discovered electric blankets. I was converted to them for a while, but began some twenty or thirty years ago to consider them a fire risk. They heated the bed, fine, but what if you fell asleep on top of all that unreliable and prickly wiring? And I didn't like the fuzzy, felted texture of the covering. So I returned to the safety, the traditional comfort, of the hot-water bottle. You really can't do yourself much damage with a hot-water bottle, apart from mottling yourself with red blotches, and the fact that they are still so widely available means that others agree with me. You'd have thought they might have gone out of production by now, but they haven't.