The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘The lingering interest in his work continued after his passing and came to a culmination a while ago when, in a private subscribers’ journal devoted to him, it was suggested that the carefully composed scene in his most pondered painting should be recreated, in the artist’s house, using pieces which were either the originals for the work or very similar to them, and at the same time of year as it was known to have been created.

  ‘At first the idea seemed a little curious, and somewhat off-beam, but gradually it came to seem just the sort of tribute to Hugh Kerwyn that he would have appreciated, in his quiet way. And, as it was now some ten years since his death, the reenactment could be seen as something like a secular memorial rite for him. Thus it was that I joined about a dozen others at Lanthorn Hall, walking to the house up the gentle incline a few miles from the town, enjoying a balmy day of brightness and occasional breezes.

  ‘I wandered in the four or five rooms of the gallery, pausing before his misty abstracts of merging, minute pastel squares, or noticing again the deceptive freshness of his flower paintings, at first sight so plainly naturalistic, but on further acquaintance suggestive of a quivering tenseness in the slim stalks and poised heads, that perhaps only the artist could have seen. As I dwelt before each work in those shaded rooms, enjoying too the brittle hush of the place, the occasional subdued murmuring of the other visitors, I sometimes seemed to feel that the same delicate watchspring tension was somehow held within the very place itself. And once, as I emerged into a quiet passageway, I caught a glimpse of a quick pale movement which seemed to vanish into one of the closed rooms—some volunteer servant of the house perhaps, whose flicker of existence in my vision seemed oddly reminiscent of the only-just-caught quivering in the paintings.

  ‘After we had all paid our respects to the work, the motley gathering came together for various colloquies: and several of them took the opportunity to try to convince others in the group of the validity of their insights into what Hugh Kerwyn had intended.

  ‘ “It is about emptiness,” one told me, a fervent young man dressed angrily in dull black labourer’s drill, though his accents and mannerisms denied any too close proximity to the experience of drudgery, “We are to identify ourselves with the separateness and remoteness of the objects. The vessels contain nothing, the others are unlit. It is a study in unattainment.”

  ‘ “It is hinting at the existence of a hidden liturgy,” said a wispily-bearded gentleman with the air of an absent-minded goat, “in which humble objects are used in place of the precious vessels of the church. The chalice, the paten, the pyx, the anointing vials, the offertory candle are all implied in the objects chosen for the picture. Old Kerwyn was aware of the existence of a secret church, nurtured by peasant priests in all the far-flung regions of Europe, amongst the Basques and the Welsh and the Lithuanians and the Bulgars, and even in some villages in the remoter parts of England. That is why the painting seems so transfigured—he is telling us these objects are far more than they seem.”

  ‘Mrs Helen Ammanthwale, his doughty champion and the presider over the governing body of his museum, a rotund, well-grounded woman, with her rook’s-nest of hair and shrewd stare, was less mystical. Observing my bemused attention to these others, she drew me aside: “I think Hugh just liked the idea that these were things people had used day after day, through the generations, in simple acts— pouring water, lighting a lamp, putting scented leaves and petals into a bowl—and each was in its way a little ritual of life. He wanted us to see them in that way too, so he painted them just ever so slightly embellished by the light. That’s all—but it’s enough, surely?” I nodded, but I was by no means sure that this was all of it.

  ‘In the late afternoon we began reverently to place the lamp, the jug, the two cruets, the candle-stick and the bowl together on the worn table in his studio room, just as they must have been when he began to transform them into careful, pliant strokes of oil paint.

  ‘There was a definite sense of expectancy amongst the small gathering, even though some of us, I think, felt rather abashed at the literalness of this gesture. We spent no little time in getting the placing, the juxtaposition of the pieces just so. An expert upon the technicalities of Kerwyn’s art had purported to work out what point in the day, what angle of light, the painter had chosen for the particular moment of the picture, and we had arranged things so that if the season were at all similar we could hope to see comparable influences upon the pieces we had recomposed.

  ‘A friend of the deceased artist made a short speech, lamenting that we should almost certainly not be able to see things through Kerwyn’s eyes, to invest them with the hesitant vision that he made manifest in the humble objects of “A Still Life”, and remembering with fondness some of his unworldly ways and utterances. Then, we all sat intently and regarded the tableau set out before us, thinking the while of our own time with Hugh.

  ‘After a few minutes, interspersed with the odd creaking of a chair or suppressed sigh, it seemed as if the fall of sunlight through the tall bright-paned window did linger with particular clarity upon the pieces on the table. If one observed cautiously, without forcing the gaze too much, there was a sense of an inward lustre to the old blue china jug, and a dim burnishing to the pewter candlestick; the vials glinted a little, the bowl was touched by a delicate glimmering bloom and the glass column of the lamp seemed to hold a faint echo of lost fire.

  ‘I could see that Hugh Kerwyn had caught a particular moment of light and that we had come close to recreating it, but we had missed some vital element. At least, that is the way it seemed to me. Perhaps, indeed, he himself was that element.

  ‘I looked around at my fellow watchers, some with their heads bowed, some looking at the window, others craning forward to scrutinise the scene. We preserved an attentive silence for a few minutes more, then at a pre-arranged point, people began to end the little ritual by murmuring to one another and eventually emerging from their places to begin the process of leave-taking. I heard some claim to have seen nothing much that equated to the potency of the painting—though they enjoyed the occasion as a restful and appropriate way of marking Kerwyn’s passing—and these thought that the light was not perhaps quite right. But others said they had sensed aureoles of gold around the objects on the table and one or two swore there was a presence of Hugh Kerwyn in the room—though as insubstantially as a breath or passing shadow.

  ‘We broke up rather as people do after a funeral, not quite sure how to end it, nor what it is seemly to say, still half-possessed by the gravumen of the occasion, yet wanting also to mark an emergence back into the daylight of the everyday.

  ‘At last, I left the party to disperse, and passed through the garden door of ancient green paint, slightly peeled here and there to reveal the bare wood beneath, into the half-acre wilderness beyond, which had often been the painter’s retreat. A cracked-flagged path led between tall grasses to an alcove where there was a plain wooden slatted bench and a cluster of broken, over-brimming and mildewed pots and urns. It had all been too solemn, I reflected, too figured, too freighted with expectation. That was not the way to understand the secret of so simple a painting, so modest an artist.

  ‘The late afternoon warmth and the quiet of the garden stole over me and I felt a sense of luxuriant blessedness enter my bones. A lime tree flickered its limbs in the slight breeze and I saw on the paving before me the faint shadow of its leaves. The moss on the upturned urns had a dizzying density of green which absorbed my attention for many moments. The empty square pediment where Kerwyn would habitually lean, since it afforded a sort of focus for the garden, and would become rapt in attention to the passing images before him, was now riven by clinging vines. Resting back on the bench, my eyes half-closed, a drifting fragrance insidiously pervading my awareness, I at length sensed, perhaps from some slight stirring in the air, some momentary movement in the light, the presence of another.

  ‘I looked up cautiously. A young woman was gravely regarding me w
ith dark eyes from a face escutcheon-shaped, pointed in the chin and with brown hair drawn back over the temples in two shallow curves. She wore a light summer frock that played a little around her calves, and scruffy sandals, and she bore an old pouched bag on her left shoulder. I scrambled to my feet and uttered some polite formula of greeting. She continued to stare at me with a slightly troubled look.

  ‘ “Did you come to do the still life?” she asked and in the simple question I recognised the futility of that little rite we had tried, well-meaning though it may have been. How can one “do” a still life?

  ‘I nodded and added that it didn’t work, it was a mistake, there was something missing. She looked startled and then with a set determination, strangely satisfied. Then, hesitantly, she withdrew something from the battered sack she carried, and offered it to me.

  ‘ “I didn’t intend to keep this. It’s one of the little jugs in the painting. I think it was one of the ones he used. I took it away just in case, when I heard what they were going to try. I put another one there instead. It’s nearly the same. But it’s not the actual one he used. I don’t know if that really matters. Does it?”

  ‘I tried to explain that this wasn’t what I had meant when I had said something was missing. She looked relieved, and doubtful, and seemed to feel the need to explain herself further, twisting her fingers in the dull hair around her ears.

  ‘She told me her name was Clare Gaulden: “I live down in the town. I come here whenever I can. Nobody minds very much. Mrs A. has shown me round and let’s me look after it sometimes. That’s how I knew where the real jug was.”

  ‘ “Do you believe, then, there was some sort of spell in the things in that picture?” I asked, half-jestingly. She shook her head, but then said: “Well, if there was, it’s also cast all over this place. Isn’t it?”

  ‘I looked at her. She settled herself on the bench, straightening her pale dress. I resumed my place, and she continued: “I sometimes wonder if people’s thoughts might stay in a place. You know, if they thought about something in a certain way so they were almost a part of it, whether that might stay behind when they are gone. We would sort-of know their thoughts were there but not quite. So we would feel strange about the place, or feel it was special somehow, but we couldn’t be sure why.”

  ‘I nodded thoughtfully and prodded the dust with the toe of my shoe. The drifting fragrance returned dimly to my senses. It was as if there was a palpitant ache in the air. We gazed at the tumbledown garden silently.

  ‘Suddenly I thought that I did not want these moments to end: the decaying garden, the earnestness of the young woman from the quiet town below, the frail glow of the late noon, the cracked stone flags, the slow flowing of the countryside beyond, the cool lustre of the little flagon in my hand, the merest possibility of some lingering presence of the thoughts, the whimsical meditations of Hugh Kerwyn: all these things seemed so finely, so perfectly poised before me; I did not want to emerge from them. I would gladly have stayed all the while that the long day dwindled into dusk, trying to stem its ebbing, to seize some moments of it, some few fragments, to try fiercely to prevent it all from disappearing into the darkness.

  ‘But: “I must go,” she said. The words descended like a first chill shiver across that strange onrush of bliss. I shook her hand somewhat awkwardly, told her I was sure she had acted rightly in saving the little jug from that foolish ritual, and said I hoped our paths might cross again whenever I revisited the museum. Then, settling back on the bench and watching her go through the blue wicket gate at the garden’s end, savouring the active, poignant vacancy caused by her leaving, I thought again of what she had said, comparing her impressions with what I remembered of Hugh Kerwyn’s art and thought.

  ‘In some of his other pictures, in one for example of an almost dissolved vase of freesias, he captures frailty and the fading: and in others still, of homely objects, he achieves a rested, rooted quality; but perhaps only in “A Still Life” does he get close to that cusp of the two potentialities which it seems to me he was constantly seeking. In that painting, the venerable objects are so very much there, present, yet just also transformed into vessels for light and conveyors of shadow. Whether the apparent attainment of his mind’s meeting with that moment had the effect of infusing the things of the picture with some charged significance, as the young woman perhaps believed, and so wanted to preserve, I am not so sure.

  ‘But I do think that in his work Hugh Kerwyn sought after the experience of the fleeting moment, as it is, with all its tremulousness, its latent possibilities, its sense of on-the-edge-of-something: and also yearned to keep it, to guard it, to hold it. Surely that is something we cannot do, yet in the reaching-out to try, in the attempt itself to fuse the transient and the eternal, we do perhaps leave some faint valence, some sign of our trying, the same that she sensed in the very air of Lanthorn Hall and its old, slumbering garden, and which possibly I too experienced.’

  The Connoisseur gently retrieved the little vessel, turning it thoughtfully over in his fingers. ‘I cannot quite shake off the witchery of that moment in Kerwyn’s garden,’ he concluded, ‘all my senses seemed strangely accentuated for a while. Even the whorl of my fingertips seemed to draw extra impressions from the dull grain of the wooden bench. And this jar—it was like handling unburning fire, it seemed almost to crackle to the touch. Is it something of her in it, or some residue of his working? Or just my own morbid synæsthesia?’

  The Nephoseum,

  or,

  The Play of Shadows

  The Connoisseur turned thoughtfully away from his arched windows as I entered his rooms one overcast day in March, when leaden clouds massed overhead like the outworks of some vast dark fortress. All within was engloomed by this suppression of the daylight, and a few feeble tapers made little mark upon the unnatural darkness.

  He beckoned me to his pale escritoire, with its curious carvings, and with a sigh passed me a drawing done in charcoal on thick rough paper, which he had evidently withdrawn from a writing-case of dark watered silk.

  I scrutinised the piece with some perplexity. It seemed at first to be a few curlicues of black calligraphy, ancient Moorish characters perhaps from some sacred Sufi text: or devices from the dead language of some older civilisation still. But as I gazed further I saw that there was a suggestion, a shadow, around each charcoal stroke, of dim shapes not fully discernible, as if the artist were trying to intimate the veiled presence of forms still trembling on the brink of becoming. The further I reflected upon the work before me, tilting it to catch the starved light from the window, the more I came to appreciate the poise, the tense sombre grace of those few stark, curving lines, and the implicit, ash-grey aura that emanated from them.

  At length, I replaced the sketch carefully and glanced across at my friend, who was staring at the faint, fitful shadows cast by the dim light of his pale candles. I perceived that he wished in his own time to tell me about one of those experiences of other possibilities than this, our diurnal world, which were his constant quest, his necessary elixir against all that was blatant in everyday existence.

  I took my place opposite him and waited for his story to unfold. He began to tell me, softly and with an air of abstraction, something about the sketch and how it had come into his possession.

  ‘It is seven years to the day since the vanishing of Nico Valdervane,’ he began. ‘Yet I see him clearly still: a fragile youth with a shock of wheaten hair, fair, fine and very expressive eyebrows, pale blue eyes, and a most red mouth that was often awry in concentration: tawny hands that twisted too as he followed through some knot of thought. I had known him for only a few years, but sufficiently to regard him as a companion of the soul.

  ‘We were both searchers after some glimpse of the Real, though our approaches were so very different: I, a roamer, a wanderer at the waste edges of the beyond, a seeker after the strange encounter that might illuminate all: he a recluse, a ponderer upon the depths, content to dwell upon th
e same potentiality for many hours and days.

  ‘He had whittled his life’s needs down to the simplest and paid little regard to the body’s physical requirements, taking the same repast at odd hours of the day when hunger beckoned sufficiently insistently; and drinking mostly cold spring water. He had endured for a few years the task of cataloguing the library of an old Victorian sect, which is how I chanced to make his acquaintance: and this, though it paid humbly enough, enabled him (with some further tasks he did from time to time) to seek out and acquire an old crumbling white-walled cottage on the coast of Pembrokeshire, the sole occupant of a low tongue of moorland dwindling into the sea, with no notable sands, coves or cliffs to tempt the visitor. The nearest village, as I found when I visited him there, was some four miles distant along a narrow stony track, and that only a gathering of a score or so of cottages.

  ‘Valdervane’s living quarters were all on the lower floor of his lonely home: the top floor he had converted into one long room with wide sloping windows in the attic space, and this he devoted to the particular focus of his studies.