The Painter

by Will Davenport

  I had to bring things to a head because Lievens was due back in a week or two, and my secluded, private studio would once again become a place where two people worked. The opportunity would be gone. Cornelia was charmingly startled when I explained that to do full justice to her superb natural form, she should change behind the screen into a thin silk robe I had hung ready for her. To spare her embarrassment, this was as near as I could properly come to painting her body as it should be painted. I explained that I would be clothing her again with my paint, as soon as I had captured her true womanly form, that for propriety, I would mask her with my brush just as the clothes masked her. Only this would really make it a true portrait of her and, oh yes, she wanted a true portrait. She looked superb in the sheer silk but of course after a few minutes, I began to tut under my breath and wear a distracted look.

  'What is it?' she asked.

  'It's in the way,' I said forlornly. 'With other women I can do it, but with you, you approach perfection so closely that the slightest barrier, the slightest uncertainty prevents me catching the full wonder of you.'

  'What shall we do?' she asked, and I noted the 'we'.

  Tentatively, blushing a little, I asked if she would let me explore her shoulders with my hands just as I had explored her face.

  'Oh yes,' she said.

  I came close to her from behind her and ran my ringers slowly round her shoulders, up to her neck and back down her forearms and she shivered uncontrollably at my touch. With huge forbearance, I went back to my easel and pretended to paint for a minute or two then came back to her and she leant into me as I touched her. Slowly, slowly, I ran my hands down to her breasts and she breathed out in a low moan as the silk brushed her nipples. Still I held on to my self-control and walked with difficulty back to my easel. She was no longer in the proud pose in which I had arranged her. She was curved towards me, her head down, her eyes half closed, breathing deeply, If I could have painted her as she was then, her husband would have had me killed immediately.

  I went back to her and knelt in front of her, cupping her face between my hands and stroking my thumbs across her lips which parted to them in moist, breathy warmth.

  'I see you in my head,' I said, 'but to know you as I want to know you, to make the marvellous picture I want to make, I must feel you against my whole body. I must be inside you as well as outside. Is that what you want too?' And her answer was to reach her hands up under my shirt and pull me to her, her mouth opening and devouring me as her legs rose to grip me around my back. All in the interests of Art, of course.

  We had four more sessions like that, panting in passionate, groin-pounding ecstasy on the studio couch before Lievens returned from his foreign places and by doing so, luckily, made further assignations impracticable before her husband started to suspect anything. To tell the truth, it wasn't all that good a picture by the time I had camouflaged her expression and her body to the point where her husband might just pay for it instead of burning it. Without the give-away pout, she looked quite dull. Anyway, with Cornelia, there was nothing to be found out. I knew all there was to know the first time I looked at her and nothing more came however many times I ploughed her furrow. Lievens and I had to come to an arrangement after that, to the effect that one would absent himself from the studio whenever the other had reached that certain point with a new client. Looks or no looks, he had to leave that studio far more often than I did.

  I had plenty of time to think about all of that on the way to the town because my donkey saw no reason to hurry at all, however hard the man on the horse pulled at the rope. The countryside we rode through was very much the same as you see on the outskirts of Amsterdam, the land pressed flat under a huge sky, fields to each side below the level of the road, drained by ditches. These fields however were not at all like Dutch fields. Any Dutch farmer would have hung his head in shame to be found with his land in such a state. Most of the ditches were blocked by piles of mud and debris and broken fencing so that the water built up behind these dams and spilt across the earth. This was not good husbandry, not at all the way it would be done back home, but the man on the horse must have picked up that thought because he brought us both to a halt, and looked around at the mess.

  He said something in English, which sounded angry, then remembered he had an audience and started again in Dutch. 'They've had years to clear this up and just look at the mess it's all in. Good farmland going to waste.'

  'What happened to it? Was it a flood?'

  'A flood of their own making. The town leaders opened the sluices during the siege to wash away the King's men. Bloody mess they made of everything.'

  'Were you a King's man?' I asked. 'We played host to many of the King's men, the new King that is, in my country in the years when he was not welcome here.'

  'It is better not to ask questions like that,' he said shortly. Those who rake over the coals too fiercely may singe their own hands. I serve my country now and I served it then. I serve England whoever commands her.' He looked hard at me. 'Now, listen, in Hull you may attract some interest and there will be others who speak your language there.'

  'Really? Dutch folk?'

  'Certainly. It is at least in part a Dutch town when we're not fighting you. We have Dutch seamen, Dutch builders, Dutch drain diggers. You must remember to say the right thing if anyone asks. You joined Dahl's ship in Gottingbourg where you had been for, how long shall we say? How long ago is it that plague appeared in Amsterdam?'

  'Three weeks. But it's not plague. I think it is more likely to be plain panic.'

  'Never mind. People have died of panic before now when they've decided it was plague. Play it safe. Say three months. You have been in Gottingbourg for three months. Another thing. I was not on that ship. I simply met you at Paull Holme and came with you to town as your dragoman, your interpreter. Is that understood?'

  'Why the mystery?' I said.

  'I have private business,' was all he would say. Then he added, 'I also have ways of making your life most uncomfortable should you forget.'

  We plodded through a mass of hovels, the sort of shoddy buildings you see on the outskirts of my home town as well, until we came to the foot of a beast of a wall, stretching across our path and towering over us. It stretched away to our left, towards the great river, ending in a blockhouse groaning with cannon, their muzzles glinting in the embrasures. Our road curved inland to bring us to an even larger fort in the centre of the wall. Above it, a great flag was flying, 'The man who made that never saw a real lion,' I said.

  'The Royal Standard,' he replied, 'Take note of it. We're very loyal these days. We have been for ages. Loyal to Parliament, loyal to Cromwell, now loyal to the King. We've had lots of practice at being loyal.'

  I looked at the river. As big as the Rhine it might be, but it was nowhere near so fine. The Rhine rarely ran quite so thickly with mud. 'Do you like the Humber?' he asked.

  'Humber,' I said, 'and its colour is omber. The omber Humber.'

  He seemed pleased to see that so brown a flood should have such a suitable name. 'It is even better in English,' he said. 'Omber is umber. The umber Humber.'

  After that, he kept trying to teach me a silly English rhyme he had made up, The umber Humber never slumbers.'

  To shut him up, I revealed the only English poetry I had ever learned by heart, saying it as carefully as I could:' "Who zees God's face, that is self-life, must die. Vot a death vere it then to zee God die?" '

  It certainly stopped him and his horse in their tracks and my donkey, who was not paying much attention, blundered in to the back of his horse and got a kick for its pains.

  'John Donne,' he said, amazed. 'You know the poetry of John Donne?'

  'I have read it in translation,' I said. 'Meinheer Huygens translates it. I painted a picture on the theme of that poem, the saviour dying on the cross as the horseman watches. Those two lines are the heart of it, I think, so I learnt them in the English.'

  'Astonishing,' he said, 'Why did
you learn it?'

  'It was the very crux of the painting, more than the cross itself, I needed the words to ring in my head and out of my brush on to the canvas.'

  'In English? A language you do not even speak?'

  'All the better. I had the sound of the words in part of my head and the image of them in a different part. The more I repeated those sounds, the stronger the image became.'

  'You like poetry, do you?' he asked. 'I write poetry, you know.'

  I had a certain prescient fear that he might be about to offer for my appreciation reams of his own verse that he had penned himself. 'Umber, Humber, slumbers,' I said, trying to copy his English. 'Is that a good example of your verse?'

  'That is not verse,' he said. 'Verse can measure the weight of the human soul. It is the greatest of the arts.'

  'You believe you practise the greatest of the arts?' I said. I was about to add that I would need evidence of that, but I realized just in time that he might well try to give me some. 'I don't think so,' I said. Painting can change the weight of the human soul. Your verse may be misunderstood. A painting is never misunderstood. A good painting changes all who look at it.'

  'Only bad verse is misunderstood,' he said, 'or verse that is written by gentlemen and read by peasants.' Such as yourself, he might just as well have added. The words were hanging there in the air.

  'A painting is a transaction between two people,' I said, hoping that a resort to logic would keep my temper at bay. My father was not a peasant, he was a miller. There is a world of difference. No one in Amsterdam, even these days, would describe me as a peasant. I live where I have to and I have many fascinating neighbours in the Jordaan. I may have come down in the world but the conversation on the street where I live now is infinitely more interesting. He was looking at me with incomprehension on his face. 'A portrait painting,' I went on, 'either has or does not have an absolute validity. It is a two-way flow between artist and sitter in which the emerging picture may find and awaken slumbering elements of the sitter. A poem is no more than an assertion, a one-way business, a claim made by the poet with no possibility of substantiation. Mere politics. That is why great art is better than great poetry.' I was not entirely sure I was right as the thought had only just come to me, mostly because of my musings on the subject of Cornelia, but it would never do to seem anything less than certain with this arrogant fellow.

  'Don't put yourself above me,' he said. 'You're a high-toned man for such a draggle. I'll judge you when I see what you do with your brush.'

  'And I'll judge you when …' I stopped, not wanting to invite a flood of poetry, but he interposed.

  'You can't judge, can you?' he said. 'You can't read my poetry. You haven't the language.'

  'Another proof that my art is higher,' I exclaimed. 'It is beyond language.'

  'You can't say that,' he snorted. 'It has its language. I have seen painted Dutch women who may appeal to a Dutch eye but not to mine. That adds up to a different tongue.'

  And there, for now, he had me because I was minded for the first time to agree.

  We had to ride inland along the wall to find a way past and this section showed a tatty dereliction about the stonework which would never have been permitted in Amsterdam. I had taken it for the town wall but I was wrong because it stopped at the inland end. This last blockhouse showed that the wall was just that, only a wall. It was now a complete disgrace with gaping holes in its stonework and we had to skirt round piles of tumbled blocks to get around the end of it. As soon as we rounded the remains of this fortress, I could understand the lie of the land for the first time.

  This wall we had just passed guarded another smaller river which ran behind it, heading under its shadow into the Humber. Our road took us across it on a bridge ahead of us. On its far side lay the port, with a crowd of ships tied up two or three deep at the sheltered wharves of the lesser river. Beyond that was the city, with the tall spire of a great church in the middle. We stopped on the bridge and my poet pointed to the dense mass of masts, packed tight in the river.

  'This is the River Hull, our safe harbour,' he said, 'and those masts are its forest and we all live from the fruits of that forest.'

  We entered the city through a gate at its north-east comer where guards displayed extraordinary respect to my companion, despite which they asked him what were clearly a series of searching questions about me. The far side of the street was as busy a place as I have ever seen. Old buildings leant their upper floors further and further out over it as if to meet at the top and exclude the sky. Alleys to our left led down the sides of great warehouses to the wharves and, my goodness, some of the grand houses were just what you might see in Amsterdam, the same decoration, the same tiles, everything! Shops sold whatever a man might need, except, it soon became clear, most of what we wanted.

  It was easy to buy the most basic pigments, even if the quality was far from what I am used to. They are the same pigments used in this city for painting interior walls. It was the reds and the blues, the scarcer, costlier colours, which were not to be found, A ships' chandlers supplied oil and the joiners' shop next door had thin sheets of elm wood on which I marked out the shape of a palette. Under my supervision, they quickly cut and sanded me two which were just as I like them to be. Two would do for now I thought, though at home I would have several palettes ready for the different parts of a painting.

  The really bad news was that brushes were not to be had anywhere, nor canvas of sufficient quality. The brushes on sale might be adequate for painting your window frames, but they were no good at all for my needs. As for canvas, sail canvas was the best available of a coarseness that would not suit at all. I solved this part of the problem by turning the clock back twenty years or more and resorting to my early ways. Returning to the joiners' shop, I selected some fine oak panels, thin and flat, prepared, I should imagine, for a furniture maker. Through my companion, I ordered them jointed together to make the size I required, I asked for three to err on the safe side.

  It was back to the brush problem after that. We found some domestic brushes, the sort with which ladies may powder their faces, but that was all. As we went from shop to shop with little success, the poet's progress up the road became slower and slower. Every man, woman and child seemed to know him and half of them sought to accost him with what sounded like demands or sometimes entreaties, or in one case, belligerence of such an extreme form that I expected them both to be involved in a brawl at any moment. His name, as I came to hear it more often, proved to have a harder sound at its heart than I had thought and a stronger tail. He was not Marfel, he was Marvell. One of these men who stopped him, friendly in his approach, looked at me with interest, talked at length to Marvell and indicated directions.

  'We have a chance it seems. There is a portrait maker here,' said Marvell to me at the end of his talk. 'I have never heard of him before but I have been abroad a great deal and he is come from York last year. He lives quite near my own house at the end of Salthouse Lane, Let us see if he can help.'

  A gloomier bugger I have seldom met than this so-called portrait painter. He met us with a scowl at the door and although I understand all about what it is to be disturbed when the creative flow is on you, I really could not say that the creative flow had ever trickled anywhere near this wretch. Eventually Marvell prevailed on him by sheer force of will to let us inside his horrible house, whereupon he took us up with bad grace into a studio which was as ill-conceived as any I have ever seen. The light came from two contrary directions, a window in the gable and a large roof-light. That confusion was fully reflected in the paintings stacked around the walls, all of which I saw were painted on to wooden panels. There was a landskip or two, apparently painted of a countryside lit by at least three suns, judging from the confusion of highlights and conflicting shadows. He knew nothing of composition, of scale, of proportion or of the proper make-up of a palette. The colours were varied to a bilious degree.

  He made up for that paucity of sk
ill by his surplus of brushes however, a great pot full of them in badger hair and in sable. Marvell persuaded him to sell us six and I pocketed three more while he wasn't looking. He also had carmine, vermilion, a useful tin yellow and two blues, azurite and what he claimed to be lapis which he sold us at an extortionate price. Marvell paid without argument, so who was I to argue?

  Before returning to collect the finished panels, we went next to a grand building which proved to be the Customs House, where Marvell sought out Dahl who came, flushed and triumphant, from a noisy room full of bewigged men. They talked for such a long time that I remembered what it was to be a tiny child, impatient at my mother's knee, aching with the cruelty of waiting out her unending conversations with friends. After an eternity it was over and Marvell turned to me.

  'The captain will return to Paull Holme later tonight, and will collect the panels on his way. You and I may go back now. He wishes you to begin the painting as soon as you can tomorrow.'

  'He may wish it, but he'll have to put a halter on his wishes,' I said. 'The panels have to be prepared first. That's two days' work at least. There is no rushing these things.'

  The captain gave me a hard look when this was translated, so hard that I wondered for one illogical second if he could have divined my thoughts about his wife. Certainly, it was the likely form of his wife's portrait not his own which occupied my thoughts for all of that dull jog home.

  My frolics with Cornelia were more than thirty years ago. Except during Saskia's short life, there had been many, many others and there still sometimes were. In Amsterdam I had the power to do it, the power of language, the power of old reputation and above all, the power of my brush. Even in my newly reduced circumstances, even without the patronage others so ill-deservedly received, the gold chains bestowed by grateful nobility, even with the City Fathers constantly on my back about this or about that, I was someone and reputation loosens clothing faster than fingers can. Here I was nobody. Could I do it here? I knew I was going to find out because I had to catch that cat-like face and there really is only one way that I know to do that properly.