Rebecca Wentworth's Distraction

by Robert J. Begiebing

  This commission seemed auspicious to him, as if his life was about to turn.

  “Oh, I’ve never had any real lessons, only a little help from my tutor,” she was saying. “Nor do I think I’d like any lessons, Mr. Sanborn. But I’m very interested in how a painter such as yourself accomplishes his work.”

  Saucy little thing, he thought. He did not respond right away, and she remained quiet.

  Perhaps two or three minutes passed before he said, “Is that so?”

  “Yes, Mr. Sanborn.”

  “Well, if you promise to say nothing, I suppose there’s no harm in it. If you’re so keen on seeing my artifice.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir!” she blurted, more like the girl she was now.

  He always engaged his sitters in conversation, but he found this child unsettling—whether she saw his depiction of her or not. He shook off his feelings as foolish.

  “Do you always dress in white, Rebecca?”

  “Spring and summer.”

  “And what about fall and winter?”

  “Oh, then I dress in colors. But Mother allows only the deeper hues, nothing so bright as I might wish.”

  A garden fairy. The idea amused him. Perhaps he should paint her in a garden instead of conventional interiors. But he recalled his patron’s request and gave up the idea. She would look like a flower within doors nonetheless. And a rare flower to boot, rather exotic, by the look and sound of her.

  He began to apply his brush to the canvas and the conversation went on in a somewhat more aimless fashion. She loved to read. She loved to arrange flowers. She loved to paint. Then finally more questions: Did he like New England? With whom had he studied in London? What was his source of this pigment or that? What was his first impression of Portsmouth? And so on. She rambled without the decorous reticence more typical of well-bred children, but her queries seemed pointed and purposeful. He didn’t know what to make of her.

  She had, as promised, said not a word upon looking over his work for that day. But her quiet study of his technique, even his fumbling here and there, disarmed him nonetheless. Before he realized what he had said, he asked whether she might in turn show him something of her own. She was delighted. She bid him sit in a chair while she fetched two specimens for him.

  He sat down, tired from his labors. Within several minutes she returned bearing two canvasses. They were conventional subjects—flowers in urns (almost Italianate in spirit) and two small dogs lying upon a floral-patterned rug. But they were so strikingly executed, even in their untutored way, that he could not believe she had done them herself.

  “These are quite extraordinary,” he said as he held the canvasses up one at a time. “And you say you’ve never had lessons?”

  “Not proper lessons or study, Mr. Sanborn. You like them?”

  “Well, I don’t know if ‘like’ is the right word, but they are extraordinary. Let’s say I appreciate them.”

  He was being honest now, but there was something more about the paintings he could not yet understand. Some energy expressed in them: the flowers and the little dogs presenting an unusual animation and verve. They were more like the work of previous centuries or distant lands. There was nothing of the painting master in them, nor the schoolmaster. They were proudly independent, but true and powerful in a completely unfamiliar way for all that. Most of his own masters would not approve. He did not allow himself to believe she had done them herself. Still, she was his sitter and he was being well paid. They would have to get along for several days. As for his misgivings, he kept his mouth shut. But whoever had painted these two was alarmingly gifted in some incomprehensible way.

  He painted into the afternoon, when they stopped for dinner. Sanborn cleaned up and walked out into the sunshine. He squinted into the streets, trying to get his bearings. Above the roofs, ship masts swayed and flashed and flickered like silver in the golden light of early afternoon. Would it be possible to paint just what he saw, he wondered, as his eyes began to adjust. He did not allow his mind to think about how it might be done. He was hungry. Moreover, people would not pay for paintings of town or harbor before they would pay for portraits. He had better heed his own true interests; he had better garner more portrait commissions soon if he wished to survive here. He wandered down to the waterfront where he found a huckster selling quick meals of sausage and bread out of his cookshop.

  When he returned to the manse, he tinkered with the portrait for an hour more and then quit out of fatigue. His long journey and his careful painting had left him exhausted still. Yet after a few hours of sleep that night he awoke fretful. He kept seeing the paintings behind his closed eyes. As he dozed he dreamed of them. At times he grew angry for her apparent lying to him. A certain trust must be established between the painter and the sitter. If she was a sweet little flower, might there be some bitterness to be discovered behind the floriferousness as well?

  Chapter 2

  REBECCA, IN A NEW WHITE DRESS, sat for Sanborn the following morning. He had prepared his canvas and carefully arranged his smudgepan, pencils, and maulstick. On his palette were vermilion, burnt ocher, Indian red, pink, umber, black, and, finally, a stiff lake and, closest to his thumb, white.

  He tried to make pleasing conversation with her. The painting went very well, he thought, during the first hour or so. Despite his lack of sufficient sleep, he found he had energy and attention. They began to relax in one another’s company. Still, somewhere during the second hour the constraints of posture and labor began to wear on them and his mind turned to what he suspected were her betrayals. In the third hour both of them were feeling impatient. He decided to give up for the day.

  She looked at the painting, as they had agreed she might. She said, “Oh, yes. Now I see,” but made no other comment upon her face and form as it more clearly emerged from the canvas.

  “By next sitting this should be quite recognizable,” he said. “I’ve little more than dead colored the face.”

  “Oh, yes,” she repeated. But she kept her promise to make no comment or judgment. She seemed to wait for him to speak.

  “May I see more of yours?” he said as he cleaned up.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” she said. “I have sundry responsibilities this afternoon.”

  He found her way of speaking odd, too—not like a child’s speech, even a well-bred child. Maybe it was all that reading she spoke of. What he really wished to see was how she painted, or, more accurately, whether she herself actually painted such things. He would devise some ploy.

  THE NEXT DAY, he finally finished the portrait. Perhaps it was not his very best portrait to date, but certainly respectable and rather accomplished. Even his own mentors—Highmore, Hudson, Kent, and other masters of the Academy of St. Martin’s Lane—might have to agree. The Brownes would not be disappointed, surely. He might well garner other commissions hereabouts. He no longer felt tired or anxious.

  “What do you think, Rebecca?” He had to ask, finally.

  “What do I think, sir?”

  “Yes, how does it seem to you, now it’s finished?”

  “I promised not to comment, Mr. Sanborn.”

  He laughed. “That’s all right. I’ve completed my work, so it will not matter, to this painting, if you express your response to it.”

  “If it won’t matter, I should remain silent in any case.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. I mean it won’t distract me from the work. Not now.” He gave her his best avuncular smile. “Well?”

  She turned her full attention to the painting. “I think that it is quite good, Mr. Sanborn. I especially like the dress. The folds and color—your drapery is accomplished.” She seemed satisfied with that pronouncement.

  “And? What of yourself then?”

  “The face, you mean?”

  “And the form.”

  “Well, sir, the face is a good likeness, but I appear a little dull, unfeeling, perhaps a little drowned in cloth. I suppose it is the tedium of my sitting.” She look
ed at him, smiled, and then turned back to the picture. “And the hands, were they a little stiff, rather like a doll’s?” She held up her hands and inspected them. “Now I see that even my pose, precisely as I sat, is rather . . .”—she searched a moment for the best word—“derived.”

  He was taken aback. “I’m not sure what you mean, Rebecca. I paint according to the best principles, and within the tradition of my masters, and theirs before them.”

  “Oh yes, I see that.” She smiled pleasantly. “And I know that people of fashion wouldn’t hear of anything else. That they by nature chiefly consider the drapery of others, so that it is a necessary imitation of the best models.”

  “It is rather a kind of quotation,” he said, emphasizing the last word. “Each artist brings himself to the task, but mindful of his masters and the great tradition of his predecessors.” He looked to see if she attended to his words. “Correctness and order must take precedence over a sitter’s personal characteristics. Or eccentricities.” Perhaps he was being a little stern, he thought, or foolishly impatient with a child.

  “Of course,” she said, looking at the painting. “The hands are beautifully colored, that tone of the flesh, I mean. And I’m thankful you allowed my own costume. I think it is very good, sir, and that mother will be pleased.”

  “Thank you,” he said. Was that final compliment enough? Or had the child pointed out precisely his weakness: He had never quite learned to bring hands and faces to life. Mr. Highmore had said as much. But few patrons had expected him to vivify faces and hands individually. Some modest degree of characterization, particularly among the male sitters, was sufficient.

  “You paint well yourself,” he said, “for someone of your age and without training, who has not closely studied preceding artists.” He was cleaning up and being as matter-of-fact as he knew how to be. “I’m curious as to how you learned to do it. Perhaps you could show me?”

  “I taught myself, and Miss Norris, my tutor, has given me diverse instruction manuals. And I do observe, when opportunity arises, the work of others. But ever since I could walk, Mother tells me, I was known for standing before papers and boards applying crayon and paint. It has always been the most interesting thing for me to do, for some reason.”

  “May I see then?”

  “I had better consult with Miss Norris,” she said and left the room.

  She returned in a few minutes and directed him toward an odd little chamber on the first floor behind the kitchen where she and her tutor had rigged a classroom-studio for her lessons. As they passed through the kitchen, they offered their good-days to the cook and her assistant, and Rebecca introduced him to the governess, one Miss Norris, a small but not unappealing woman, who sat at a long table meditatively sipping her tea. Clearly, Rebecca had already explained their mission. She left the door wide, so that the tutor could look in on them from her seat. In the instruction room there were a number of paintings and drawings about, on walls, on tables and desks, on the floor. He hardly noticed them, however, in his desire to see her perform. Again, he asked her to show him how she painted. She went to a trunk and took out some of her implements and colors. She set a board on an easel, prepared herself and her colors, and then looked up at Sanborn.

  “Well, Mr. Sanborn,” she said. “What shall it be, then?”

  “Oh, whatever you like, surely.”

  “You’re not particular?”

  “Not at all, Rebecca. Please, suit yourself.”

  She began immediately with paint, not sketching anything out or experimenting in any way. She worked from the right side of the board toward the left, finishing as she went. It was very odd to watch. Another dog was taking shape, sitting in a garden surrounded by blossoms. Right to left, almost as if someone were slowly unveiling a completed painting. Almost as if she had seen it whole before her brush touched board.

  “What would happen if you had started from the left, and moved to the right?” he found himself asking before he had even thought to speak.

  “Happen, sir?” she asked, looking directly at him now.

  “Could you have done it that way, I mean?”

  “Oh.” She continued to paint now. “Well, yes, of course.”

  She put down the more than half completed board and picked up another.

  “Like this you mean?” She was painting from the left side now; a still life was being uncovered left to right. Brilliant oranges and deep yellow pears. Other fruit, grapes, beginning to appear. He couldn’t speak, even though Miss Norris walked in just then to observe Rebecca’s demonstration. He and the governess merely exchanged glances.

  It was the same untutored style, full of force—a dog, quick with canine life; fruit, full of succulence. Almost like unearthly objects, yet at the same time utterly recognizable for what they were. He could not imagine how she managed it. For all his living among painters and academies in England, no, he had never seen anything like this, in method or result. He found it a little frightening, but also wonderfully curious. It was as if between Rebecca and whatever she wanted to paint there were no difficult barriers of execution to be scaled. The heavy gates of perspicacity and technique had been thrown wide for her. It was as if she had penetrated the weight of the mundane world and a strange unnatural intensity were pouring onto her painted boards.

  He could not speak to her about it. What, after all, could he possibly say? She continued her still life while he stood there incapacitated. When she put down her brush and palette, he still could not speak.

  “Shall I finish the dog, sir?”

  “No,” he managed to say. “No. We’re both tired. Thank you. I’ll say good-bye to you tomorrow, after I present the portrait to your mother and father.” He gave a little bow toward Miss Norris and started to leave. Then he remembered himself. “Rebecca.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sanborn?”

  “Those are quite remarkable.” He gestured toward the paintings, one little better than half completed.

  “They are indeed,” Miss Norris said.

  “Thank you, sir. I’m honored by compliments from so accomplished a painter.”

  He turned again and walked out of the instruction room, offering a brisk good-day to the governess.

  Chapter 3

  REBECCA, WEARING A FRESH WHITE GOWN, came into the parlor the following morning before her parents arrived. Sanborn was delicately testing the slow progress of the drying oils with his brush on the completed portrait. Her father and mother had not seen it yet, but Sanborn was confident they would be pleased.

  She looked at the portrait and answered his query about her parents—yes, indeed, Mr. Sanborn, they were sure to approve the portrait.

  “Do you suppose they might like one of themselves, or of one another as well?” he asked.

  “It’s quite possible, I think. They perhaps first use my portrait to discover the suitability of your brush, Mr. Sanborn. Portsmouth has never had adequate limners.”

  He paused to consider her audacity. “I would be delighted to do them, but Madam Browne spoke only of yours.”

  “I suppose that may be because I’m going away soon, and it’s possible they want one to remember me by while I’m away.”

  “Away,” he said. It was a flat statement, almost as if he had not understood that she had spoken first.

  “To England. Or such is their misguided plan for me.”

  “Oh? For how long?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But for a proper schooling, it is. I think they are a little exasperated with me.” She giggled quietly.

  “Exasperated? Even your tutor?” She nodded. “How can you be exasperating to them?”

  “I don’t know. But from what they say, I believe that is the reason. A proper training is in order, however, all the same.” Her voice had changed as if she were, but just barely, imitating her mother.

  “Goodness,” he said. “I can’t think why. I can’t imagine such a thing, having met you and spoken to you myself.”

  “Still,” she s
aid and smiled. “There it is.”

  He ran out of words again, but soon Madam Browne and her husband, William, walked in. Just behind them came the governess.

  Sanborn put down his brush immediately and made a bow. “Sir,” he said, “Madam.” He invited them by gesture to look at the portrait. Squire William, a man of sixty, made an imposing figure. Much older than his second wife, he was tall and without the portliness of age. Sanborn had heard that he had once been a hero in certain campaigns against “the heathen and their Jesuitical brethren,” and as a result of his exploits he held the title of colonel. He was a man of grave dignity and rectitude.

  The mother and father were pleased. They had wanted a conventional portrait and he had given them a fine one. He had learned that he always gave satisfaction, after the proper English manner, here in New England. This was something he could do. Something he relished doing. Although he had enjoyed meeting Robert Feke, through Smibert in Boston, for his useful information and anecdotes of New England, he had judged him a self-taught dauber with none of the requisite polish of London society and academy. Now he happily assured himself that Mr. Feke would hardly have pleased a man of Colonel Browne’s urbanity and address. It suddenly occurred to him for the first time, however, that these people might have found Rebecca’s paintings troubling in some way.

  After light conversation expressing his approval, Colonel Browne paid Sanborn the remainder of the agreed-upon sum. They went so far as to suggest there would be others in the port who might require his services. Sanborn beamed. He forgot about Rebecca and her paintings. He imagined himself growing intimate with captains and owners, with weighty bewigged merchants and assemblymen. He would be toasted. He would accrue wealth and respect over the years. He would settle here after all. Why not? The Brownes would provide him entrée.

  Of course, he said nothing of all this. He prepared to leave. He went to his room to gather his things after giving the Brownes his card. He said that he would alert them to his new address as soon as he was in lodgings, in the event they should require his services in any way or have any further requests or queries regarding his portrait of Rebecca. He thanked them profusely for the commission, for their faith in him, and promised to return later next week to apply a coat of varnish.