The Lost Art of Gratitude

Guy was summoned from the back office when Isabel came into the gallery.

“I don’t suppose …,” Isabel began.

“I do,” said Guy. “I’ve got Lyon & Turnbull’s catalogue. And one of the London catalogues too.”

They went downstairs and into the small garden at the back of the gallery. Seating themselves on two French ironwork chairs, they began to page through the London catalogue. It was the usual mixture for the day sale, where the cheaper pictures were offered; the evening sale brought out the higher bidders, the collectors who would pay hundreds of thousands, or even millions, for pictures which the artists might well have exchanged for a square meal. Isabel was not in that league; she was interested in the day sale, and the less expensive end of it too.

“Elegant company enjoying themselves again,” said Isabel, pointing to a French picture of a well-dressed group of people picnicking under a tree.

Guy read out the description that the cataloguer had prepared. “Circle of Francois Boucher. Elegant company at ease under a tree, musicians in the background.”

“I love the term elegant company,” said Isabel. “I wonder how one qualifies? And here, look at this. This is the opposite. Roughs drinking in a tavern. Frankly, the roughs seem to be having a better time.”

Guy laughed. Turning the page, he came across another allegorical work. “Big,” he said. “Seventy-two inches by fifty-four. And not a bad frame. But look what it is.”

Isabel studied the painting in the photograph. “The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Oh look, Guy. See the wise virgins. Look at them.”

The painting, by an obscure Flemish artist of the late seventeenth century, showed two groups of young women in a landscape. Six wise virgins, seated on the left, were demurely occupied in reading and sewing, while behind them a number of lissom figures danced on a patch of grass before a church. In the sky above the church, a small group of angels, illuminated by convenient shafts of light, looked down benignly on the edifying scene below. Had these angels turned their heads slightly and glanced to their left, they would have seen a very different set of young women—six patently foolish virgins—drinking, playing cards and enjoying the courtship of sundry young males. Behind this group was a town clearly dedicated to easy living, vice and disorder.

“There are some paintings which are unambiguously didactic,” Guy observed drily.

Isabel smiled. “The wise virgins look very dull,” she said. “I rather suspect I should have preferred the company of their foolish sisters.”

Guy turned the page, to reveal a display of three portraits. “Pieter Nason,” he said, pointing to the first of the paintings. “He did some very fine portraits. There’s one in the National Gallery on the Mound. And what have we here …”

He pointed to the painting below—a much smaller photograph, and consequently less detailed.

As Isabel gazed at the painting, she felt a sudden flutter of excitement. The face was unmistakable—that proud but ultimately rather weak face: Charles Edward Stuart, none other than Bonnie Prince Charlie.

“It’s him,” said Isabel quietly. “The Young Pretender.” Her eye went to the description under the photograph. “Circle of Domenico Dupra, Turin, Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart.”

“Dupra was a reasonably well-known Italian portrait painter,” said Guy. “He was first half of the eighteenth century, which would have made him a contemporary of Charlie’s.”

Isabel looked at the estimate. “Should we go for this, Guy? The estimate is low. Look. It starts at two thousand pounds.”

Guy thought for a moment. “It would complement your portrait of James VI,” he said. “We could have a tilt at it. You never know with these Stuart portraits. There might just be somebody who’s very keen.”

“Jacobites,” said Isabel.

Guy agreed. Historical enthusiasm kept the market in portraits alive: people had their heroes, likely and unlikely, he explained. “Somebody recently offered Gandhi’s spectacles at an auction in New York,” he said. “They were eventually withdrawn, but had they not been, they would have brought in a tremendous sum.”

Isabel thought about this. Gandhi’s spectacles. She remembered seeing a photograph of his possessions at the time of his death: those small, oval spectacles, a pair of sandals, a dhoti; a photograph that had moved her almost to tears. That tiny patrimony spoke more powerfully of the greatness of his soul than any words could. And she reflected upon how curious it was that the people bidding for them could compete to pay thousands of dollars for things that proclaimed the ultimate unimportance of those very dollars.

She looked more closely at the picture of Bonnie Prince Charlie. She did not like him—he was vain, a chancer really, who must have shared the inflated notions of entitlement that infected all those exiled Stuarts. Yet no matter how outrageous his claims, there was an undoubted romance in his story, and it was for this reason that she was prepared to have him on her wall. Scotland had not been well treated by the English at the time; the Scottish parliament had not been consulted by Westminster in the choice of the Hanoverians, and the Stuart cause had become synonymous with the resentment of a put-upon nation. This weak and rather effete Frenchman, bedecked in tartan, had become the focal point of Scottish resistance to London’s diktats, and that still resonated.

“Will you bid for me?” Isabel asked. “Let’s try to get it below the estimate. Twelve hundred?”

Guy made a note in the margins. “Good as done,” he said.

They finished their perusal of the catalogue and went back upstairs. Jamie arrived a few minutes later; she saw him coming up Dundas Street, with Charlie clearly asleep, tucked up in the pushchair.

“We went all the way down to Canonmills,” he said as she went out to join them. “He’s sleeping the sleep of the just.”

Isabel bent down and looked at Charlie. The tiny features were in repose, the mouth slightly open to allow the passage of air. Such an intricate collection of cells, she thought, all miraculously put together to produce a centre of human consciousness, so fragile, so infinitely precious to those whose life was transformed by it. She straightened up. The summer sun was riding high now, gilding the hills of Fife across the Forth. A bus laboured up the hill, bound for Princes Street and the Mound, the passengers in shirtsleeves for the unaccustomed heat. For a moment, Isabel’s eyes met those of someone looking out of the window, a thin-faced woman with her hair done up in a bun. The