human condition. Nothing to be done about it. We need to feel as though we are doing our best. We need to justify our ways, to ourselves even if to no-one else. But you are different. You smile at the accusation. Not in a dismissive way, either, as if to say, foolish man, you cannot touch me so easily. No; with you there is the slightest, smallest nod. Of agreement. Of course I am a charlatan, that little inclination of your head says. That is my profession. We live in an age when appearance is all, and I am the master of it. I am a purveyor of the new upon the public, the intermediary. I persuade people to love what they hate, buy what they do not want, despise what they love, and that can only be done with the techniques of the circus ring-master. But I am honest, nonetheless, and tell the truth. In that lies my integrity: I am a fraud with a purpose.
“What do all men desire, except fame?” That was the question you put to me one night in a pub in Chelsea. We were a little drunk, I recall, so I didn’t reply; I knew you were going to answer for me anyway. I liked those evenings; to talk of such things, surrounded by the boatmen drinking away their wages, the porters and the grocers getting louder and louder as the publican pocketed their children’s food for the next week. It still meant a lot to me, though I was beginning to touch my emancipation by then. Your words were no longer received uncritically, and I was coming to see myself as your equal in stature. Is that not what a good teacher does, after all, stands and watches his pupils grow through, then outgrow, his tutelage? But then I realised you did not want me to grow. Just as much as I needed you to teach me, you needed my worship and naïveté and were not prepared to do without. I often wonder what it must be like to be a father, to see your child no longer childish, losing that automatic tendency to adore. Does it come in a moment, or gradually? Is it a peaceful or a violent process? Is that why artists behave like children, needing to humiliate and denigrate their elders in order to feel sure of themselves?
I suppose I will never find out. I will not see forty-five again, and it is too late; children are a form of creation that I will not experience. My decline is imminent; already I feel my bones ache when I get out of bed, feel tired at the end of the day, have trouble seeing things as well as I once did. It is the great curse of the portraitist, to be so aware of one’s own decline. I have spent years looking at people’s faces and bodies, know which muscles need to sag to produce that look of diminution in the elderly. I see a face and can trace the lines creeping across the cheeks and forehead, the way the eyes sink and lose their lustre. I have to see my fate every time I look in a mirror. I can foresee the future. It was no shock to me when you arrived. I knew exactly what you would look like; knew the precise shade of grey that flicks your hair, how far the hairline had receded, what difference it would make when more of that high forehead was revealed. Nothing bad, by the way; it adds to the air of intellectuality. I also knew in advance that your hands have become more bony, so that the impression of claws is accentuated. The fates have reserved corpulence for my decrepitude; you are awarded an ever more skeletal appearance, the skin of the neck beginning to drag down in lines like a lace curtain. I also knew that age would not have lessened that angularity that makes you seem uncomfortable and ill at ease. It has made it worse, in fact; you now seem to have no patience for anyone in the world. If you get older, that will get more pronounced. You can look forward to no physical ease; your body will not permit it. The inevitable beckons already; time is short.
I still enjoyed your company, long after we came back to London. I looked forward to our evenings, when you would, as much as possible, stop being the critic, and I would stop being—whatever I was trying to be at the time. It all ended when you married, alas; then you became domestic and proper, and went to clubs instead of taverns, and dinner parties instead of whelk stands. You lost the last slither of your integrity in Mayfair, and learned to hide the earnest intensity that had always redeemed you. Slowly you said less that was good about people, more that was bad. Didn’t you miss it, though? On those night-time voyages we were adventurers in the dark lands of London, seeing subjects for paintings down dingy alleys, or huddled in doorways. We thought of ever more exotic places to meet: a tea shop in Islington; a chophouse at Billingsgate; a tavern in Wapping; a dance hall on a Saturday night in Shoreditch where we would watch the clerks and the cleaners, the cooks and the shop girls as they forgot their cares for a few inexpensive hours. There was something of magic in those places for me, something you do not get at the Athenaeum. A recklessness, and an energy, and a desperation. The very stuff of paintings, I think, if only a means can be found of persuading people to buy it.
And there was that pub in Chelsea, the only place we went more than once. Poorly lit, with terrible food and the air so heavy with tobacco smoke you could scarcely see the person across the table from you. So thick that a river fog outside was easier to see through. Stiflingly hot from so many bodies crammed in, and smelling dreadful from the sweat and beer, cheap food and pipes. But I remember looking at it, and suddenly saw the place come alive; not tobacco brown, but brilliant colours—the red of a neck scarf, the orange of an Irishman’s hair, the purple of a whore’s dress. The gold of the landlord’s cherished watch-chain, the ambers and browns and whites of the bottles on the shelves. And all those bodies, contorted and hustled together like a Renaissance battle scene. This is where the great tragedies and comedies of the modern world are played out. Not on an imagined medieval battlefield. And not in the South Seas, nor yet in Paris. There.
But do you remember how it all faded as we settled in? I do; I remember those conversations as though we were in an empty room, with no difficulty hearing or being heard, with no one bumping into us, as we sat and talked and drank and laughed, with you leaning over the table, your eyes blazing with the fire that came over you when you were fully engaged with an idea. You did not yet argue for pleasure, or merely to win. The truth still mattered to you.
“What do all men desire, except fame?” I did look around then, and you took the point. Did these people desire fame?
“Of course they do, in their little way,” you said. “Fame in their limited universe; the fame of being a good drunk, a generous fellow, one amongst everyone else. They wish their reputation to extend as far as their eyes can see. But as that is not too far from the end of their noses, then that is what they aim at. Artists see farther, so their ambitions are greater. They want the world to bow down before them, not just in this generation, but in the generations to come.
“But how to do it? Eh? Do you think that merit alone can achieve it? Do you think Michelangelo without Pope Julius, Turner without Ruskin, Manet without Baudelaire, would be so famous? Do you think merely painting good pictures is enough? You are a fool if you do.”
I suggested, I think, that poor Duncan, who you were then avidly promoting, could hardly be compared with Michelangelo.
“You are being obtuse,” you said. “Duncan transfers my ideas into physical form. I am not a painter, never was, never will be. I see the pictures I want in my mind, but cannot paint them. Duncan will do it for me. The time of the patron is long gone. It is not the people who buy paintings who matter, not even the artist who paints them. This is the age of the critic, of the thinker on art. The man who can say what art means, what it should be.”
I suggested that perhaps the public could make up its own mind. Not seriously, of course.
A snort of derision. “The public wants cheap filth. Over-painted nudes and pretty landscapes. We live in an unprecedented age, my friend. For the first time in history one group of people has the money, and another has the discernment. Admit it. You know it every day. How do you earn your money? You paint one thing to survive, and another to feel honest.”
You swept your arms around at the room, which had lost its colour and had become tobacco brown once more. “Look at these people! Hopeless. But at least they are poor. They are unlikely to put their hideous taste into practice, and besides, their money is not worth having, they have so little of it. All those people who dine at the Ritz are something else, more dangerous. They must be persuaded to buy something they do not like. And that is my job. Don’t look so disapproving. Without me, you’ll be painting big pink portraits of big pink women, of little girls on swings, for the rest of your life.”
This is what I am putting down now, if you must know; just before the light changes and I will have to stop for the day. I hope I can catch it, and turn it into light and shade, greens and blues. It is a darkness, your ambition, a shadow on your face, and I fear I will not get it just right. I will hint at it merely, and develop the theme later. Because it is not all there is. You believed in your ideas, after all, and merely used doubtful means to promote them. The magnificence of your arrogance, the exuberance of your daring, your sincerity and your cynicism, all these must find their place, translated into reality through the mixture of shadow and light, of colour and texture.
No theories here, you see. I am done with them, never believed in them anyway, really. We went our separate ways, after all. As you pointed out, I did not have enough money to paint things no-one would buy. The Banker’s Wife must be made to look like a pillar of society; only then will you get a banking price for your work. I
