Politics has gone against me too. For a long time, I was in with the right crowd. My patrons were Mennonites. The balance of power had tilted in their direction and that was good for business for a while, then after that it was rather bad.
Anyway, Mennonites, Anabaptists and the rest of them still give me something to laugh about. I relish the way they all think that they have the only version of the truth and I am constantly intrigued by the violent way they squabble over the tiniest differing details of their variety of God, except the Jews who go their own way with a becoming degree of humble serenity and seem so much more intelligent about the whole question. What they all have in common is that they believe their God is looking after them with a benevolent twinkle in his eye, except again for the Jews, who believe deep down that he's just as likely to be coming for them with an axe.
Ubi deus, ibi pax as the saying has it, where there is God there is peace. It seems to me truer to say that where there are gods there is usually war.
We stopped for a while on the way back from the city while Marvell fiddled with something supposedly stuck in his horse's hoof and I asked him about his God. He looked at me and said, 'I am a Member of Parliament. My God is the same as the God of those who elect me,' which struck me as about as honest an answer as any I have heard. About as cynical as well.
When he had stopped pretending to remove the non-existent stone, he shuffled around to the matter that was clearly in his mind.
'After you have painted Dahl,' he said, 'I have it in mind to set you a further commission, as a test, you understand.'
Arrogant sod, 'What test?'
'A test to see which of our two arts can soar higher.'
I just looked at him and he said, 'It is a commission that will be paid in coin, not in mitigation of debts incurred.'
'I thought language stopped us comparing our skills.'
'We will each perform our task in another language.'
I laughed until my saddle sores hurt. 'You'll write a poem in Dutch? Not so hard perhaps. How am I meant to paint a picture in English?'
'Not in English. In the language of another country, the country the Dahls come from.'
'I don't understand.'
'I think you may be a jobbing painter,' he said. 'You know how your Dutch faces fook, but can you describe a face in a different tongue? Not Dahl. Whatever remains in Dahl's face, any fineness of feature has sadly been chased away, if ever it existed, by years of hard living and salt spray.'
My God, I thought, he has read my mind. Not just that, he wants me to do what I myself want to do more than anything. He wants me to paint Amelia for his contest.
'Jobbing painter?' I said.' You call me a jobbing painter, you umber Humber jobbing poet!'
'I am no jobbing poet,' he said harshly. 'I studied under John Milton's tutelage. If you know of Donne, you will know of Milton.'
I shrugged. I wasn't going to show him I was impressed. I deliberately misunderstood. 'I'll take your challenge. You think yourself fine-featured, I suppose. All right. I'll paint you and my painting will leave your doggerel crawling in its wake.' I knew that wasn't what he meant at all.
Marvell looked a little startled. He made as if to reply and then stopped himself. 'Me? Yes, good. You paint me if you want. We will see how that comes out.' He considered, or rather he put on the sort of expression that was meant to tell me he was considering. 'That's not such a test. Is one face enough, I wonder? Two might be better. Paint her as well. Dahl's wife. Let's see how well you can portray Amelia.'
Oh yes, I thought. Perfect.
I took up his earlier point to give me time to reflect and to fill in some gaps. 'You can help me paint Dahl,' I said, 'or at least in the way he would wish to be painted. What sort of man is he?'
'Oh, I know your game, painter,' he said, 'You want to know what will flatter him. I am not sure I should tell you that.'
'Listen, arsehole,' I said, and he jumped. 'I don't give a pound of dogshit for flattery. I'm asking you who he is, that's all. I don't want to leave it to him. I'll have him posturing in front of me in no time pretending to be an admiral and if I let him decide the way he wants to look, he'll never like it. Nobody lives up to their unfettered imagination. Back home, it's true, I have some advantage. I already know about the people I paint. I am not a jobbing painter and if I were younger I would make you pay for that remark. Every subject is different. I make up my mind what they wear and how they stand and what else is in the picture and they take it or they leave it. I just want information, so stop trying to be clever and let me have it.'
He gave me a hard look and I wondered if he would bother to answer, but he did.
'I like Dahl,' he said in the end, 'but he is a mystery. We've all had to take sides for the past twenty years. We had no choice, but he did. He arrived here at a time when any prudent and commercial man would have thrown in his lot with Cromwell's parliamentarians and he did nothing of the sort. Instead he took up a fight that was not his to support a king who was in exile. He took messages abroad for the King at some risk to himself. All right, you might say that in the last few years that was less of a risk. With Cromwell dead – you do know about Cromwell? The man who had the old King killed?'
'Of course I do, we're not pig-ignorant in Amsterdam.'
His half-smile irritated me.
'With Cromwell dead and the whole republic falling to pieces, it wasn't so hard to be a King's man, but for all that he pushed his luck.'
'So he believes in a natural order of affairs, ordained by God? He thinks that kings rule by divine right?'
'Yes, perhaps he does. Where he comes from, Norway, the land of glaciers and fjords, they have a strange and sombre relationship with God.'
'And what is he most these days, a sailor or a trader?'
'He is a good sailor but he's a better trader. Here they force him to be a sailor. The guild does not accept alien merchants in their midst. That is why he sticks in their gizzards. He made his fortune in the east, I have heard. He met his wife out there in Batavia.'
'In Batavia? Our Dutch colony?'
'Yes, I should caution you perhaps. He affects not to understand you but I think he knows at least some words of your language.'
'And the wife?'
'What do you mean, "and the wife"?'
'Where is she from? You said they come from the same place but there is a difference by the look of her.'
'Her father was English, I believe. Her mother was from Stavanger, across the German Ocean, near to his own town, but that was by chance. They met, as I understand it, on his ship that brought her back from Batavia where she had been stranded by misadventure.'
'Does she speak my language then?'
'No. She was there but a short time and very ill throughout her stay.' He looked at me. 'Her portrait would be a fine thing, were it done with skill.'
I tripled the price I would ask for the portrait he intended to commission. This man wanted Amelia's image for himself and he wanted it badly. I think he realized he'd given the game away because he stopped and said, 'Facts pay for facts. What of you?'
'What about me?'
'How have you come to this? Will you be missed in Amsterdam?'
'No,' I said. 'Not if my message gets through.' Though I suppose I knew they would be worrying. It was so out of character for me to go anywhere at all that they would probably think me dead in the first instance, which was not without some advantages, though it grieved me to think of Hennie and Titus brought to this sorrow. All the more joy for them, however, when the message came.
'Where do you live?'
He clearly knew the city so I could not bear to tell him the recent truth. I opted for an older version of the facts.
'In the Breestraat.'
'Those are fine houses.' His questioning tone said he did not believe me but even if it wasn't strictly true now, it had been, and not that long ago either.
'And do you live by your painting?'
'I have, and by my
teaching.'
'So, if you don't mind my asking, what has happened to you that you wind up a drunk and filthy stowaway in stinking clothing?'
'Painting is not an activity for good clothes. I clean my brushes on my clothes. They are working clothes.'
'Were you working when you came on board the ship?'
'I had been.'
'If drinking is working then you had been. What are you running away from? Failure perhaps?'
Failure? FAILURE? Who the hell did he think he was talking to? Fashion may have switched to sillier, smoother painters but who gives a standing fuck for fashion? In a fairer world, I would have walked where Rubens walked. I would have sported the golden chains of royal patronage. I would have had acolytes and courtesans. Emissaries from foreign thrones would have sought me out in ever increasing quantities. You know why they stopped? I told you. Because I don't paint the way everyone else paints. Failure? Bastard. I'm so far ahead of the game that there is simply no way of judging where I stand. I'll give him failure.
'I paint like no one else has ever painted before,' I said stiffly. 'I understand things no other painter understands. They think that getting the paint on smoothly is all that matters. I know better. I know that the eye needs rough paint, rough surfaces to conjure depth out of flat canvas. I paint perfection then they hang it too near, they light it too brightly, they peer at it too damn closely and they ask for their money back. They don't listen. Idiots.'
'You don't like to please your customers then,' he said faintly and I could see him wondering whether this commission was going to work out.
'Only those who aren't worth pleasing,' I said.
'Perhaps it's time we went on our way,' he said, swinging up into the saddle of his horse with appalling ease. I put my foot in the donkey's stirrup and it contrived to wander off, tipping me on my back. He didn't notice until it caught up with him all by itself. Bloody donkeys. Bloody Members of Parliament. Bloody everything.
Oh yes, God. What I really want to know is where do I stand with him? Is it reasonable to have at the back of my mind, as someone who doesn't believe in any normal idea of God, a small and disconcerting suspicion that he might nevertheless be taking a keen interest in this unbeliever's doings, despite not existing? I only ask the question because of all the ships I might have stumbled on board that night in Amsterdam, that was the one which was destined to change my life or at the least to bring it to some crisis.
I have a favourite subject, a patient sitter, the only one who puts up with the way I paint because he knows me inside out as I know him. Stumbling on to Dahl's ship was to change the way I paint that sitter for ever.
I was only fourteen when I realized I was on the way to being the best painter in the world, I knew from that moment on that I should not do what everyone else said, I should not take the well-worn path to Italy where all the painters go to learn from the supposed glories hanging on Italian walls. It is a powerful long way to Italy and, by all accounts, none of my favourite foods were available anywhere along the way. Above all I learnt all by myself that I should not paint quickly. They want you to hurry up and get on with it, those who commission portraits. They want the evidence that they really are as gorgeous as they think and anyone highborn enough to pay for the product is likely to have the stamina of an inbred bullfinch. I've seen other painters at it, fanning their bloody sitters and bringing them sherbets and all sorts of nonsense – letting them stand up while they plump up the cushions so when they sit down the posture's gone and you have to spend five minutes tugging them back into the right position. Enquiring after their well-being as if that was what mattered and not the picture, as if their health could in some way be imperilled by the back-breaking task of keeping still. The upshot of it all is that the painter winds up painting in a huge hurry to keep the sitter sweet and of course you lose the potential. It's obvious, isn't it?
To tell the truth, I have only ever had that one sitter who understood the need to sit completely still, the utter importance of a consistent posture and the ability to put on just the right expression and to keep it in place. That sitter is me. That's why any portrait painter worth his salt paints himself as often as he can. Plus the fact that I don't have to pay myself anything and these days, with pupils harder to come by, that matters. I don't complain if it takes thirty hours' painting to get the thing right. I don't come round behind the easel at the end of every session and say, 'My goodness, you have made my nose look big,' or 'I'm sure my eyes are larger than that.'
I know I've got a big nose. I've stared at it for years.
As a result of all that happened at Paull Holme, I see a different man when I look in the mirror now.
Anyway there's not much point in dwelling on the next week or so. Dahl came back that night and the whole house seemed to quail before him because he arrived in the blackest of moods from his business, swathed in a dark cloak. Marvell whispered to me that he looked like a bat come from Hull, then had to explain the joke at length because it apparently derives from some English expression concerning Hell which was unfamiliar to me. I found a bottle of Genever, which no one appeared to want, in a cupboard, and took it off to show it my room. The following day, when my head was thick from the effect of damp plaster on the walls, a servant was sent to bring me to the master and I found Dahl standing with
Marvell on the new terrace in front of the house.
'I have got to go,' said Marvell. 'You have slept far too long. Mr Dahl wishes to get on with the picture so he wants to get it sorted out while I'm here to translate. When can you start?'
I told him what I needed to prepare the panel for paint, rabbit glue and all that, and I told him I would be ready on the morning following the next day. We discussed where the picture should be painted, which gave me an excuse to go all through that house of theirs until we found a large empty room on the first floor, with a soft light from the eastern courtyard which had a touch of north in it. This suited me perfectly. I could have predicted what he wanted in the picture, a ledger and a fancy brass nautical instrument. I have two views of brass instruments. They're great for the highlights and I can knock up a really shiny brass in no time flat which always impresses the paying customers. On the other hand, they are complicated things and if you get one little detail wrong, like the sliding bits having the wrong number of notches or something like that, then they're down on you like a ton of bricks. I wasn't going to argue.
I stewed up rabbit skins for the size and made a good attempt at gesso during the day and the day after that I gave the panels a careful preparation. It was nowhere near the standard I would have expected in Amsterdam, but then in Amsterdam, I wouldn't have been using wood and I wouldn't have been preparing it myself. The extraordinary and galling thing was that my food was brought to me in the room where I was working. Now, nobody would call me a snob. I am not highborn. My father was a miller as I said. I am happiest with people who say exactly what they think and believe me, the poor find that much easier than the rich. However, on the rare occasions when I have painted a portrait in someone else's house, the only good thing about being away from my own studio, which is something I utterly hate, is that I get very well fed. I do not leave my studio lightly. Well, I didn't, not when I lived on Breestraat. I could probably be persuaded more easily these days if anyone tried. Anyway, I would only stir out of my house for the most important sitters, or those to whom I owed a lot of money and, as an honoured guest of the household, I am used to sharing their table. Mealtimes were always what made these inconvenient excursions worthwhile.
To be brought a hunk of bread, a piece of very dry cheese and a small pitcher of the most disgusting liquid imaginable was not at all what I regard as decent treatment. It was a variety of beer, but opaque and as bitter as a purgative. The tray's contents were exactly the same at each meal. In the afternoon, without even another bottle of Genever to keep me company, I gazed mournfully out of the window until the light went. The river could have made an etching of sor
ts except that nobody had thought to build anything of interest to catch the eye along its banks. There was hardly a tree to be seen, let alone the straight verticals of a house or a barn to punctuate the wandering horizontals. I went on staring out until dusk came and I realized I was missing my Hennie and my Saskia before her.
In Amsterdam, I never notice the night sky. I use the daylight as ferociously as I can because there is no artificial light, however pure the oil, however costly the candle, which gets anywhere near the true colour that the sun gives. For years, I have woken at dawn, I have slept at dusk and in the winter I catch up on the sleep I lose in the summer. You may say you have heard I have been a night bird too, but in those days, and even now on the odd recent occasions when desperation has driven me out to some drinking den in the dark hours, I cannot say I have been aware of the stars because the air in the narrow Amsterdam streets is always thick with a foggy smoke. On this night, the west wind cleaned up the air, rolling the clouds before it out to sea and, as they disappeared, first one, then two, three and four bright pricks of light speared out of the sky. Of course, I knew what stars were but that is like saying a man can know what love is without experiencing it. Before the sky was fully dark, it was studded with stars and then, my God, when it did reach pitch dark, before the moon rose, I was astonished at the vast sparkling carpet that spread across the sky.
Until that moment, I had always thought that the truest test of an artist's skill was perhaps that fine line Apelles left as his calling-card when he visited Protogenes and the still finer line Protogenes then painted within it. That night I thought I understood the reason no artist has dared to paint a truly starry sky is because it is truly the greatest test. The blackest black which I can mix on my palette is just as black as that black you achieve by closing your eyes in the deepest cellar of the house in the middle of the night. The problem lies at the other end of the scale. The brightest, whitest white even with silver powdered into it goes not one tiny step of the way towards the brilliance of a star. Even if it did, where would that leave you? You could not paint the dark sky first and then expect the tiniest dot of this bright whiteness to succeed in overpowering the background on which you planted it. You would have to paint the entire canvas with blazing white and then surround the million stars with perfectly controlled dark sky and that would drive any painter there has ever been to utter madness.
The Painter Page 10
