The Painter

by Will Davenport

  Well, he might say that, but the embers in the furnace of my temper had been fanned into a good flame now and he and I still had business with each other.

  'I take it badly that you impugn my reputation, sir,' I said. 'Whatever you may think, the fact is I am known throughout the length and breadth of my country as the best of all the portrait painters.'

  'Your country is neither very long nor very broad,' he said, 'and you must think me very foolish indeed if you believe I have not made enquiries. We have a Dutchman at court now, a proper expert appointed Keeper of the King's pictures, and I sent for his views on the subject. Would you like to hear them?'

  I don't mind admitting that news came as a bit of a shock. Someone had buttered up the new King. Someone was in for a good shower of gold. I couldn't think of any Dutchmen I knew who deserved it.

  I didn't say I wanted to hear this Dutchman's views but he told me regardless.

  'He insists that our friend in York must be mistaken. He says there are two van Rijns in Amsterdam who paint. One is Gerrit van Rijn who is twenty years old which you, sir, clearly are not. The other is indeed the noted Rembrandt van Rijn but I am told that he is known for never leaving his home and that in any case, he is currently said to be busy rectifying a commission for the City Fathers. This van Rijn, I grant you, is indeed a most famous painter but my informant tells me he is undoubtedly in Amsterdam and certainly not here with us in England. As I say, you had an accomplice perhaps in York, someone out to persuade us your portraits are worth more than they really are?'

  'Who is this curious countryman of mine who pours out this shit?' I asked.

  'He is called van Ulenborch,' said Marvell. 'Do you know him?'

  Van Ulenborch, The name made my heart spin and sink at the same time. My old friend's son. My old friend who brought me to Amsterdam, who put my pictures on sale and above all, who introduced me to his even dearer young cousin Saskia, The son was nothing like the father. Mind you, I'd had my moments with both of them.

  'He is a criminal' I said indignantly. 'He sold fakes to Brandenburgh and he had to go on the run. We would not have him in Amsterdam. He would have broken his father's heart. You should tell your King to watch out for him.'

  'Keep your advice to yourself,' said Marvell vehemently. 'I think the pot is calling the kettle black. His letter warns me that there is an old pupil of Rembrandt van Rijn who likes to borrow that signature for his own paintings. Maybe that is you. I have looked hard at your portrait of Dahl and while I admit it is competent, I do not see in it any signs of greatness.'

  'That is a jobbing piece,' I said, and my blood was truly up now. 'As workaday as your damned poems. No better than them but I think that whereas they may be the best effort you ever make, Dahl's portrait is far from mine. Did you see what I had to paint it with? You decide who I am, Marvell. You judge me by this portrait in front of us now, no other. You hold yourself so high but you could not create anything one hundredth so beautiful as this will be.'

  Amelia chose then to intervene again and her intervention seemed to be a quotation, perhaps from the same poem as before. I caught the same sound at the start of it. She used the words as a whip to beat him back. Marvell gave her a savage look, then he crossed to the easel.

  'Ridiculous,' he said. There is no skill in this, just blotches.'

  'Do you know anything at all about painting? This is the dead colour, the base for everything that follows. This is no more than the equivalent of you cutting your sheet of paper to size. Come back in a few days and you'll see what a real portrait should be. Then you will admit you could never match it in verse.'

  'We will have our contest then. I doubt you, Dutchman. Only gentlemen have the sensitivity for true art. You are a peasant through and through.'

  'I told you before,' I said, 'my father was a miller. I am proud to be his son. Real blood ran in his veins, not the cousin-mated, strained thin stuff of your gentlemen. I was raised as part of the real world around me, not forced to look at it through window glass, separated by the filter of gentility and clean linen. Listen you fop, I have a talent which is made of wind and fire not learnt in some costly academy. I have heard what you claim to be verse and I will paint you into the ground.'

  'The poem that is forming in my head will beat anything you can paint, Dutchman,' said Marvell.

  'We have a contest indeed, mister poet. I'll wager anything you like on it.'

  He laughed scornfully. 'It is a shame you have nothing worth wagering.'

  'If you win, I shall paint the portraits you want for nothing. Amelia's portrait, Dahl's portrait and your own portrait too. If I win, you pay me treble for this painting alone.'

  That stopped him. 'How is it to be judged?' he demanded. 'How can anyone choose between a picture and a poem?'

  'Have you changed your mind? Do you not believe in a universal scale of artistry? I thought you claimed it would be self-evident. Simply choose a judge whose taste is beyond question.'

  'In Hull? Is there such a person?'

  'In Paull Holme if you wish,' I said, nodding significantly towards Amelia, 'You have said yourself that this house is her canvas, her great artistic endeavour. I see harmony around me. I see evidence of a creative mind which understands the finer points of form and colour.'

  'Her?' he said doubtfully. 'Would that be suitable, I wonder …'

  He got no further because it must have been entirely obvious that we were discussing Amelia and she gave him a look that could have fried bacon. Blow me down, he took the bait.

  'Yes,' he said, 'it is true that she has some claim to artistry. She regards this house as a work of art rendered through colour, shape and texture. She also understands the beauty of the English tongue.' He addressed her rapidly in that tongue and she raised an eyebrow and replied somewhat tersely.

  'She accepts,' he said, then he bowed abruptly to Amelia and went out of the room as if he took with him all that mattered in it.

  I whistled and looked at Amelia. 'I don't know what it was you said at the start there,' I remarked, 'but I thank you for it. You put his tail between his legs.'

  She understood what I meant and she gave me a delicious look of complicity. Was Marvell such a fool that he did not realize no woman could fail to give first prize to such a picture as I had in mind?

  She came around to the easel then and inspected the dead ground I had painted, then she raised her eyes to study the wall behind and looked down at the colour of her dress. Pointing at the empty space next to her in the picture, she raised her eyebrows in interrogation. I shrugged. I had not yet thought of how to fill that gap. There was a tall column behind me, made in a dark green ceramic, China work, I would judge. On it was a plant in a pot. She indicated it and held up her hands in pretty supplication and I saw how well it would fill the space, how neatly it would set off her colour and the colour of her dress.

  I nodded. She did indeed have an eye, this woman.

  After eating, I went up to my room at the top of the northern tower. I needed to think hard about what I would do and Amelia was in my mind and before my eyes, open or shut. In fact, that's an exaggeration. I should have had her and nothing but her on my rnind. That's the way it should have been because after all, I had held those superb shoulders in my hand that morning, I had stroked those angled cat's cheeks with impunity, I had been able to make those lips part just with my voice and my eyes. It proved one thing, one wonderful thing. I wasn't too old after all.

  I suppose I should say that it was quite some time since I'd had an attractive woman on the end of my paintbrush and even longer since I'd had the chance to do anything about it, because somehow Hennie always managed to be somewhere close at hand when there was a girl sitting for her portrait. Any man knows the importance of casual encounters, those brief ambiguous, speculative looks from passing women in the street. You know when they've noticed you. You know when they are aware of the short fat spark that jumps between your manhood and their womanhood. You just know. There mu
st come a moment however when that spark passes down a generation, I thought that moment might have come one morning last year, as I was walking down to see the progress of the Koenigsgraacht dredging. It was always interesting to see what came up in the buckets and shovels as they dug the great trench where the new canal was to be. As I was walking, I saw a stunner approaching, a woman of perhaps thirty but still oh so sweet. From far away, long before I could make out her features, I spotted that confident sway, that sinuous thing they do with their whole bodies when they are supremely confident that the looks they draw will be entirely approving. When she got nearer I saw that her confidence was not misplaced and that she had a face to start a thousand cocks rising to crow. I gave her the look, of course I did. She looked back at me, then she looked again with that tiny hidden smile that hides an infinity of imaginative possibilities. For a moment I thought she must have a slight squint as the glance was off-target and then, finally I realized with horror that instead of looking at me, she was looking at my son, Titus, walking next to me.

  The strumpet!

  That was a thunderous moment, when my ringers' grip on the whole world seemed suddenly to have loosened. I was not wearing good clothes that day because I had come straight from my easel and my hair was not brushed. Today proved all was not lost. Today proved the game was still in play. Today showed that the woman may well have had a squint. Amelia had put me back in my rightful place in the world and I should have been thinking about her hands and her face and her body and nothing else.

  Instead I was brooding, in a thoroughly self-flagellating manner, on Marvell's communication from the black sheep van Ulenborch. The father, old man Ulenborch, hadn't always been whiter than white. He had been central to my life, the man who brought me into the artistic and social life of Amsterdam, who found buyers for my first paintings and sitters for my portraits. However, he had this unpleasant habit of demanding collateral for loans which I thought should have been straightforward family matters once I was married to his kin. He took paintings, my paintings, as security. Worse than that, he used to make rather a lot on the side, being rather fond of having copies done while he had them and flogging those off in, shall we say, a somewhat dubious manner. Worse still, at one point, let me see, twenty years ago or so, I was in hock to him for rather a sizeable sum and I'd secured it with my etching plates, a hundred or more of them. Ulenborch, playing the game at both ends, borrowed the money he lent me from the Waterland Mennonites. He didn't make any conditions, and he didn't ask me, he just passed the plates straight on to them, bang. Well, they did what you'd expect from such high-minded moralizers. They started printing off them. Of course, they didn't do it well and they didn't use the right paper or the right ink. I got the plates back fairly sharpish but for a couple of years after that, you couldn't sell an etching at a decent price because they'd flooded the market with their second-rate offerings. I was so cross I lost my temper entirely. They tell me I picked Ulenborch up by his collar, right off the ground, and shook him.

  Marvell, may the devil take him, had a sure touch in getting under my skin. Trust him to poke at the running sore of the bloody City Fathers who had rubbed salt into the wounds of my bankruptcy. Amsterdam is a clannish place. Who you're in with matters a great deal. It's a tribal city. The people I was in with aren't really in with anybody else these days. When someone called in an old favour and got me on the list for the new Town Hall, I was already riding for a fall. They were waiting for me to stumble. First they gave the whole damned lot, eight bloody great paintings, to Flinck who learnt every single thing he knew at my knee, and hadn't been above signing his student pieces with my name come to that. By this time, Flinck had prostituted his art. He'd been good once, potentially great, but then when he went off on his own he got all fashionable. He started using an absurd range of bright colours to please simpering nincompoops with deep wallets and with no knowledge of the subtlety of art. Oh yes, he became very fashionable indeed but he lost that key understanding of how a painting will stand the test of time if you restrict your palette. A narrow range, that's what you need. You have to let the viewer's eye do the work and see the colours which are not really there. Anyone with any sense should understand that the viewer's imagination is the most powerful tool and as soon as you merely hint at things, you bring the whole power of that tool into play.

  I wondered if Marvell knew that. It surely applied to verse just as much as to pictures.

  I doubt it.

  Anyway Flinck got the whole job, then almost immediately, very conveniently, or so it seemed at the time, he turned up his toes. Rumour had it that he ate a bad lobster at some smart party and it did for him. Whatever. That lobster did not die in vain.

  Of course that left the City Fathers in a bit of a quandary so they split the job between Lievens, Jordaens and me. Lievens was somewhat truculent about it because he was after the whole job. Now, you have to understand that these paintings were specified down to almost the last detail. There is a type of Hollander who thinks it is not enough to be Dutch, who feels embarrassed that the Dutch are a bit of a mongrel breed. That type has to believe in a glorious past so what did they do? They invented some glorious ancestors, the Batavians. Later on we applied the name to our Spice Island colonies but these original Batavians were supposedly our forefathers in our own land. Myth has it that one of them, Julius Civilis, pushed out the Romans so, as everyone loves to be descended from heroes, he had to be the very first scene and they gave me that one.

  I may have been a bit rash to do what I did but I was particularly concerned not to go down the fashionable Flinck route. If Julius Civilis was anything then he was clearly a bloody-minded barbarian tough guy through and through. You don't get the better of Romans by looking like a court-favourite milk-sop. Flinck's sketches had showed this oh so elegant chap, swearing an oath as if he were being sworn in to the Surgeons Guild, in profile of course, because Civilis only had the one eye and we don't want to shock the onlookers, do we? Mine wasn't like that at all. My Civilis was the sort of man who could empty an inn with a single grunt. His oath-swearing was a clash of swords. His empty eye socket was a hideous reminder of battle. You wouldn't cross this man, or at least not more than once.

  The other thing I did was give it a rough, tough texture because it was going to be very high up on the wall and smooth detail just does not work when it's up high and badly lit. My paint reached down and grabbed the eyes however far away the viewer stood, but they didn't like that at all. No, the City Fathers, idiots every one, did not like that. They didn't like me, the way I lived with Hennie, or anything else I did, and I felt much the same way about them. That painting was earmarked for rejection before I ever picked up a palette.

  Enough of that. I had a picture to paint and a contest to win and Amelia deserved my entire attention. Dahl was away again, as ever, which seemed an extraordinary waste of a wife, particularly such a wife as his. There were always servants around. The room in which I was painting her was far from private. Up here was a different matter. I liked this old room in the tower. No one came up here except me. You had to go out of the house and in through a separate door to get to the stairs, which were more of a ladder, really. It was a strange arrangement, caused I suppose by the fact that the two lowers, one at each end, predated the rest of the house by a very long time, but suddenly I could see possibilities in that awkward layout. This room of mine had a tolerable afternoon light from its windows. I wondered perhaps if I could find an urgent need to paint some quick studies, to try Amelia in various poses for which only the windows in my tower room could possibly provide proper illumination. I knew how it would go then. There was nothing we might not do up here in the interests of art and we would be in our own stillness, our own time, our own morality, away from servants, away from Marvell.

  The following morning we went on with the painting. I had dined in my room when I realized that Marvell was apparently planning to stay. He still tried to treat me as a man of no status and u
ntil I had levelled him with my portrait, I would sooner stay out of his way. The need for more pigment forced me out of bed at an uncomfortably early hour. In particular I needed a purer lead white if I was to achieve that translucency of skin that I could see in my mind's eye.

  There was only one thing for it. I had to make some.

  Lead was no problem. With men working on the roof there were snippets and off-cuts of lead sheet all around the outside of the house. The vinegar was the difficulty, that and the horse, I ransacked the larder to the utter indignation of my friend the cook who kept trying to swat me with a ladle. None of the vinegar jars in that larder smelt anywhere near strong enough. Then curiosity prompted me to undo the muslin cover of a large stoneware jar near the back and my nostrils were wonderfully assailed by the biting, pungent odour I needed. The jar appeared to be full of eggs, a curious custom of the English, to pickle an egg, which seems to me to be one of those foods best eaten as fresh as possible. I grabbed the whole lot and set off at high speed to run the gauntlet of the cook who tried to seize the jar with one hand while beating me with the other. It is always best to specialize. Trying for both at once was doomed to failure and I got clean away. Outside I found a thin pan being used for chicken feed and borrowed that then I set off for the horse's field. What you need for good lead white is a fresh heap of horse manure, firm but hot, in which to bed your pan. Then you pour the vinegar over the slivers of lead which you have shaved into it and there, so long as you add further fresh manure, the magic happens and white lead begins to form under the effect of the heat and the special vapour. That's if the horse feels like having a shit. The one in the field, Marvell's snorting steed, appeared to be suffering from constipation. I watched the damned thing for ever before it deigned to lift its tail and issue its brown bounty on to the grass. It was years since I'd done this, not since Leiden days when you could walk into the fields in three minutes from our studio.