The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  From jigsaws, you learn about the brush strokes of Van Gogh, the clouds of Constable, the reflections and shadows of Manet, the stripes of Tissot and Rousseau, the brickwork and tiles of the Dutch masters, the flesh tones of Titian, the undulating fabrics and limbs of Botticelli, the business of Bosch and Brueghel. While struggling to re-create Titian's Venus of Urbino, you discover that the little dog at her feet is painted in almost exactly the same shades of apricot and russet as the naked Venus herself. According to Julian Mitchell, himself a master puzzle solver, the dog represents her politely concealed pubic hair.

  Doing jigsaws stimulates bizarre theories of art history.

  The same little dog appears, less suggestively, in Titian's large portrait of the Vendramin family. Everybody had a little dog like that.

  I learned more about the appreciation of clouds and of Constable from doing jigsaws of The Hay Wain and Salisbury Cathedral than I learned from my first encounters with the original paintings. Now, when I see clouds, I see clouds and Constable, not clouds and the shapes of a jigsaw puzzle, but the puzzle was the medium that introduced me, that fixed my attention, that made me pause. This may sound ridiculous, but it is true. I could have learned about clouds at the Courtauld, but I didn't have the opportunity. I learned through Clementoni. The cumulus and the cirrus and the mackerel, the greys and mauves, the sullen purples, the swelling yellow bruises, the cream and sallow swathes, the white crests and mountains, the bright linings, the tints of pink and red – I studied all of these through assembling the pieces of jigsaws. Constable was very good at clouds. They are difficult, for painters and puzzle solvers alike. (And the jigsaw stonework of Constable's Salisbury Cathedral, although it looks much easier, was very difficult too; I was pleased to note that Constable himself commented on this 1823 painting in a letter to his friend Archdeacon John Fisher that it was 'the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had on my easel'.)

  You become intimate with the painting, like those students who used patiently to copy masterpieces onto canvases on easels in the National Gallery. You rarely see these copy-makers now. Before the age of cheap reproduction, copyists used to work for profit, like Mlle Noémie Nioche in Henry James's The American, who is discovered by James's hero Christopher Newman as she works on a copy of Murillo's Madonna in the Louvre. The untutored Newman is more taken with the pretty young copyist than with the painting, and prefers the copy of the painting to the original. Unlike David Teniers, Mlle Nioche clearly prefers a lighter, brighter version, and gives her works a high finish. (As noted, some of the reproductions in Linda Hannas's book on jigsaws look more glossily attractive than the originals, and those in McCann's book are dazzling.)

  The market for Old Master copies in Europe has more or less vanished, although we are told it still flourishes in China, but, more ephemerally, pavement artists in Europe continue to produce chalk and pastel versions of Botticelli and Vermeer, and to collect small sums in token appreciation from passers-by. Like the Tibetan monks, they work from a pattern. Doing a jigsaw is less arduous and more pointless than making a copy, but it can give you a similar sense of familiarity. Once you have 'done' a painting, you feel a more personal connection with it, for better or worse. Michael Codron told me that you feel you are 'inside the mind of the painter', and this is true. It is an escape from the self and into another mindset.

  Most paintings gain from this intimacy, but I began to dislike the Venus of Urbino as I struggled with her in jigsaw form. I took against the murky drapes and tapestries in green and dark red and beige and brown, and the background figure on her knees rummaging in a dark coffer, and the dingy slanting repetitive tiles of the floor, and the silly little floppy-eared silky pubic dog. Above all I began to dislike the woman's sprawling, basking, seal-like, solid, self-satisfied figure, her smooth mounds of naked flesh, her hazy pink nipples, her big fat sausage-like fingers. Only as I neared the end did it occur to me that what I was disliking was not Titian's masterpiece, but the poor and fuzzy quality of the jigsaw reproduction, credited to the 'Clementoni Museum Collection – the Art of Art!' If ever I get to the Uffizi again and can face the queues, I must go to pay my respects to the real Venus. Clementoni didn't do her justice. Their version of Botticelli's Primavera, though it lopped off a few limbs round the edges, had a much better and sharper finish.

  I employed an unusual technique when constructing the Venus. I did the frame first, of course, but then I imposed upon myself the constraint of finishing all the background before I embarked on her body. The empty unfilled outline of her body looked very striking and strangely meaningful on the dark lacquer table. I wish now I had asked Michael to take a photograph of it in this state. I will never be able to bring myself to repeat the experiment. I don't know what the empty space suggested, but it looked in some way significant. I am sure the Oulipo painters would have had a theory about it.

  My Oxford grandchildren, knowing my weakness for this seemingly pointless employment, purchased for me one Christmas a 2,000 piece reproduction of a work titled The Battle of Valmy (1792), which clearly says on its box that it is by Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse (d.1844). (I now know exactly where in Oxford they bought this unusual item, thanks to information provided by Michael Codron; he rumbled them.) It is a Falcon Imperial de Luxe Puzzle, and the box credit reads: 'Louvre, Paris/Giraudin/ Bridgeman Art Gallery, London'. The painting portrays, in the foreground, a number of mounted officers, several dying horses, and a field hospital full of wounded and dying men. The field hospital has picturesque tiles and woodwork. Further off, in the middle ground, we see the windmill of Valmy and a line of infantry and, beyond the infantry, the cavalry. There are large explosions of shellfire from what I take to be the enemy line, and the high horizon is marked by puffs of smoke. The revolutionary French are apparently about to defeat the Prussians in a famous victory.

  My grandchildren did not seem to consider the subject macabre or unsuitable for their Quaker-educated Granny Maggie. 'They all look in the pink to me,' protested Danny, inspecting the wounded officers more closely. It is not a painting before which I would have lingered. I doubt whether, in other circumstances, I would even have noticed it. But I got to know it well.

  Some curious coincidences attached themselves to this jigsaw. While I was in the course of labouring over its 2,000 pieces, in the year 2000, the windmill of Valmy, a famous revolutionary landmark, was blown down in the same violent storm that uprooted many thousands of trees at Versailles. I felt its destruction personally. The windmill has now been rebuilt, and in September 2006 it served as the site for far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen's launch of his presidential campaign. There, 'on the glorious ground of Valmy', he unsuccessfully invited the French to follow his nationalist agenda.

  The second incident involved a greater act of destruction than the fall of a windmill. On the day after the collapse of the Twin Towers (which began to disintegrate as I was quietly reading Thus Spake Zarathustra in the British Library) I went into the National Gallery. I think I went there to reassure myself that it and its paintings were still there, and to my astonishment I beheld, high on the wall above me, a massive version of my jigsaw. I stared at it, unbelieving. What was it doing there? What did it mean? Why was this vast French painting in London? Did it have a message for me? Was I dreaming?

  And The Battle of Valmy was not alone; three other huge canvases in a similar vein accompanied it, which I subsequently discovered portrayed the battles of Gemappes, Montmirail and Hanau.

  Valmy was unmistakable.

  One does not forget a jigsaw.

  (Danny and Lillie: I am not Auntie Phyl. I loved my Christmas present. I am not Auntie Phyl. I loved it, dying soldiers and all.)

  Now, some years later, I can clearly remember the sombre mood in which I had visited the National Gallery that day, a mood of mingled apprehension and defiance. We were afraid, in those immediate days after the Twin Towers, that something similar was about to happen in central London, and therefore we wished to show ourselves t
o be part of London, to show London that we valued it. So we went out into our city, to prove we were not afraid. And there, in the Gallery, I met this old friend.

  Recently, prompted by my new role as jigsaw historian, I went back to see whether those four battle paintings were still there. I had a hunch that they would have vanished, and they had. Nobody I knew had ever noticed them. More mysteriously, the helpful man on the information desk knew nothing of a painter called Mauzaisse. There was nothing in the gallery by a painter of this name and, as far as he could see, there never had been. He looked up The Battle of Valmy for me in the National Gallery catalogue, found the image, showed it to me, and told me that it was by a painter called Horace Vernet, and that it, with its three companions, was now hidden away in some storeroom. Was I mistaken about the image, he suggested? Was this another treatment of the same battle?

  No, I was not mistaken. I've admitted to a poor visual right-brain memory (though I have, or used to have, a good left-brain word memory) but there was no possibility that this field hospital, these officers, these horses, this heavy cloudy sky, these flashes of gunfire and clouds of smoke that were glimmering at me now from a small screen on the information desk were different from those in my jigsaw. I ordered a print, to prove to myself that I was not mistaken. It cost £10. You can print out any image at the National Gallery. I suspect I am the first person ever to have requested a print of The Battle of Valmy.

  There was, as I now know, a whole family of painters called Vernet, of whom Horace was the most successful. Baudelaire hated him because Baudelaire hated the army, and Vernet glorified it. Baudelaire also hated Vernet's popularity. Or so we are told.

  One does not forget a jigsaw.

  The Mauzaisse is a copy of the Vernet, but there is no indication of this on the Falcon box. This raises more questions about jigsaw image copyright. Who gives permission to the puzzle manufacturer? May it be withheld? The American jigsaw artists catalogued by McCann were paid for their original work by the manufacturers, but did they have a copyright agreement?

  I became more and more interested in the phenomenon of the art jigsaw, and asked around and about for an explanation of its genesis. When did it become popular, who first thought of it, and what about the question of copyright? Titian's 1,000 piece Bacchus and Ariadne is copyright of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery, 2002, all rights reserved, whereas Claude's 'JR de Luxe', 500-piece Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba has no copyright line, though the box tells us that the original of this work also hangs in the National Gallery. Claude has his dates on the box, but not on the puzzle. Brueghel's jumbo 1,500-piece Spreekwoorden, or Proverbs (mistranslated into French, oddly, as Scène Religieuse), is credited not on the box but on a slip of paper within the box: ©1990 by Koninklijke Hausemann en Hötte nv, under Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions. So some puzzle makers take copyright seriously. Not all jigsaws are pirated.

  Nobody seemed to know the answer to my query about the origins of museum and art gallery jigsaws until I happened upon a possible solution in a BBC Radio 4 programme by Alan Dein titled The World's Most Difficult Puzzle, first broadcast on 27 March 2004. This is an account of the 340-piece puzzle based on Jackson Pollock's Convergence, produced in 1964 by Springbok Editions in the United States, and it is an odd and interesting story. In the placid 1950s, the jigsaw industry in the US was at a low ebb; the craze of the Depression was forgotten, and the jigsaw had become unfashionable, stuck at the bottom end of the toy market. The images chosen by manufacturers were of scenic, snow-capped mountains, castles on the Rhine, fields of tulips, rose-wreathed cottages, English hunting scenes, and clippers at sea. Alison Lurie, the American novelist, recalls that during the summer holidays of her childhood there was always a jigsaw laid out on a table, always of traditional genre scenes of this nature – pictures on the Mary Russell Mitford, Helen Allingham, Barbara Trapido sickbed model. (It is well known that jigsaws are good for convalescence, and a Shakespeare scholar of my acquaintance claims that they are also a cure for the hangover.)

  Two American enthusiasts and entrepreneurs transformed this tranquil scene. American printing executive Bob Lewin, whose family and office staff had always enjoyed puzzles, was inspired while on a business trip to England in the 1950s to try to revitalize the home industry. He had been in the habit of taking home gifts of circular Waddington puzzles, then still a novelty; now, on a visit to Leeds, he saw a Waddington display in the Queen's Hotel and got in touch with the company. He went back to the United States and, with the help of Waddington's expertise, tried out some upmarket ideas of his own. ( John Waddington Ltd was a well-known firm of Leeds-based printers, which in the 1930s had branched out into playing cards and games such as Lexicon and Monopoly. It survived until 1995.)

  In 1963, Lewin founded a company called Springbok Editions, with his wife and business partner Katie. They pursued their new agenda: Katie, an art lover, went round the art galleries with 'jigsaw eyes', selecting and commissioning new work. She chose work by Salvador Dali and other celebrated artists, but her most sensational choice was Pollock's Convergence,painted in 1952. This represented everything that the snowy mountains and cottages and farmyard scenes had left out: turmoil, controversy, freedom, movement, modernity.

  Pollock had been killed in a car accident some seven years earlier, and his name and work were notorious. Convergence is one of the key works of Abstract Expressionism, a rich and complex patterning of blues and yellows and reds and oranges and white swirls and drips and squiggles, against a black background. It is a sprawl of primary colours on a large canvas (93½ × 155 inches). The jigsaw version is deeply puzzling and, as American jigsaw historian Anne Williams explains in Alan Dein's radio programme, even the cutting of the pieces was a puzzle. Most mass-produced puzzles are cut on a grid, with rows of repeating shapes, but the Springbok dies were irregularly curved and unpredictable, making the puzzle even more difficult.

  Convergence was a great success in its jigsaw format. It rapidly became a conversation piece and a status symbol. Those who completed it were so proud of their efforts that they converted their handiwork into coffee tables and wall plaques. Soon the jigsaw was better known than Pollock's original canvas (which is still to some the object of derision, and always at risk of parody), and visitors went to the gallery in Buffalo in search of the jigsaw, not the painting. It made Springbok prosperous. A replica of a Pollock seemed to evade the philistine suspicion with which the source work was regarded, and the kitsch art of the jigsaw had mysteriously made Abstract Expressionism popular with a middlebrow clientele. Convergence: The Jigsaw was featured in Newsweek in December 1964, and Katie Lewin did a jigsaw tour of thirty cities in thirty days, talking about it. This must have been much more fun than a book tour. It became more famous than Pollock himself. It also introduced a vogue for more and more difficult adult puzzles, some of them perversely difficult – all white, all black, all blue, or, like 'Little Red Riding Hood's Hood', all red. A new vogue for difficulty had begun.

  The Lewins sold their company to Hallmark in 1967, and it continued to thrive, but Convergence remains the most celebrated of Springbok's products. The original painting still hangs in Buffalo, in the Albright-Knox Gallery, and during the BBC Radio 4 programme we can hear presenter Alan Dein talking to Ken Wayne, the Curator of Modern Art, as he scatters the pieces of the puzzle on the gallery floor in front of it and then attempts to assemble them. Pollock painted with his canvas spread upon the floor, and Dein spread his cardboard pieces before the canvas in homage. ('It's so much bigger than the jigsaw puzzle version,' he says to his microphone, sounding somewhat daunted.) It took him seven hours and forty-six minutes to assemble the puzzle, with a little transatlantic advice and moral support over the phone from expert dissectologist Tom Tyler in Ipswich.

  My assembling of this puzzle took far longer than seven hours and forty-six minutes. I think it must have been easier to do it in front of the Real Thing. The image on the puzzle b
ox was not very helpful, as it was not complete, and I kept getting it upside down. This wouldn't have happened to me in Buffalo.

  Reproducing the free swirl and squirt and drip of rich oil in little dry hard discrete cardboard pieces is a paradoxical activity, but very satisfying. Why? I keep looking for the answer.

  XXXVIII

  I don't know whether Springbok's innovative approach to puzzles was the real starting point for the great leap forward in the international trade in dissected Old Masters. The story of the spectacular rise of the museum shop has not yet been told. I love museum shops, although I slightly despise myself for doing so, and chide myself for the need to appropriate bits and pieces of culture instead of relying on the purity of unaided memory. I indulge my weakness by buying Christmas presents for grandchildren in the British Museum and the Tate and the Science Museum. I'd just visited the National Gallery shop and was having a pre-Christmas lunch with my brother and my sister Helen in a wine bar off Trafalgar Square, loaded with parcels, when the idea for writing a book about jigsaws began to take shape. I remember telling them about it. I thought my little book would make the perfect stocking-filler. It would surely be as desirable as a Van Gogh calendar or a fake Sumerian necklace or a cardboard build-your-own dinosaur.

  Our need to buy souvenirs and replicas has been profitable to traders for thousands of years. St Paul railed at the silversmiths of Ephesus for turning out little silver replicas of the Temple of Diana, but Christians were not deterred from longing for their own little idols. Relics of saints succeeded little silver temples, and pilgrims, crusaders, curious travellers and rival ecclesiastical institutions purchased the bones and teeth and hair of saints, fragments of the True Cross, scraps from Jacob's coat, and walking sticks made from the rod of Moses. The Holy Vase or Grail was the source of many a legend and fabrication. Canterbury, as Chaucer told us, was a manufactory of sacred objects for commercial purposes, as were all places of artistic and religious pilgrimage. Calvin complained in his Treatise on Relics that there were so many bits of the True Cross scattered around the abbeys of Christendom that if they were gathered together they would make a great shipload, far too heavy for even Jesus to have carried. Mary Magdalen left at least five corpses, but, as her devotees protested, all things were possible to God.