Iain Pears - The Portrait

Ah, but it looked good for a while, no doubt about it, and it was the way to make a living, win a reputation. The English cannot take too much novelty; thirty-year-old fashions are quite radical enough for them. Not a criticism; it’s comfortable and safe, but even then I think I was aware that our excitement and fervour were not quite genuine. There was always something of the amateur theatricals about us. So I went back to the beginning when I came here. I’d been a good enough painter, but not an entirely honest one, so I started again. Out went those long-handled brushes, in came perfectly ordinary ones, the sort you can get at any supplier’s. Change that, and you change everything. The movement of the brush on the canvas, how much paint you pick up, how you mix it. I am more precise, more considered and meticulous now. And I am more interested in what I am painting.

A big change. My inability to remember the name of that woman I so horribly insulted was no accident. I can scarcely remember any of my sitters; could hardly remember them then. I didn’t know them when they came into my studio for the first time, and knew them scarcely any better when they left clutching their finished portrait. I painted what I thought they looked like, how the light reflected off their clothes and skin, the interplay of colours around them. Character and personality played second fiddle to technique. And that was not good enough. Reynolds knew that, and said so. Rembrandt knew it so well he couldn’t even be bothered to mention it. He no doubt wanted to paint the soul, Reynolds wanted a psychological study, but it was the same thing they were after, really. What lies beneath; the skull beneath the skin, and the soul within the skull—or wherever it may be found.

And I was putting down a lazy, superficial glance, thinking that because it was my glance, put down in the latest French style, it was enough. All I was saying was: Look at me! Aren’t I clever? A very poor thing, that. I have concluded that unless you are humble before your subject, you are no good. And it doesn’t matter whether your subject is the King-Emperor of Britain and the Indies, or a cheap model, or a bowl of fruit.

You see the link, no doubt? Of course you do, you got there way before me; you were always cleverer than me. I am trying to justify why it is that most Sundays you will find me on my knees in the local church. I am trying to become a better painter, my friend, because if the Almighty doesn’t make me feel humble, the pasty face of William Nasmyth smirking before me in my best chair is hardly likely to do so either. I am trying to paint you, inside and out, and that is why I find it all so difficult. You are a hard one to fathom, always have been, because you have always been a bit of a charlatan.

There! That’s what I mean! Most people would look displeased at that, a little concerned at least. I have never met anyone, however despicable, who does not believe that they are fundamentally decent. It is part of the human condition. Nothing to be done about it. We need to feel as though we are doing our best. We need to justify our ways, to ourselves even if to no-one else. But you are different. You smile at the accusation. Not in a dismissive way, either, as if to say, foolish man, you cannot touch me so easily. No; with you there is the slightest, smallest nod. Of agreement. Of course I am a charlatan, that little inclination of your head says. That is my profession. We live in an age when appearance is all, and I am the master of it. I am a purveyor of the new upon the public, the intermediary. I persuade people to love what they hate, buy what they do not want, despise what they love, and that can only be done with the techniques of the circus ring-master. But I am honest, nonetheless, and tell the truth. In that lies my integrity: I am a fraud with a purpose.

“What do all men desire, except fame?” That was the question you put to me one night in a pub in Chelsea. We were a little drunk, I recall, so I didn’t reply; I knew you were going to answer for me anyway. I liked those evenings; to talk of such things, surrounded by the boatmen drinking away their wages, the porters and the grocers getting louder and louder as the publican pocketed their children’s food for the next week. It still meant a lot to me, though I was beginning to touch my emancipation by then. Your words were no longer received uncritically, and I was coming to see myself as your equal in stature. Is that not what a good teacher does, after all, stands and watches his pupils grow through, then outgrow, his tutelage? But then I realised you did not want me to grow. Just as much as I needed you to teach me, you needed my worship and naïveté and were not prepared to do without. I often wonder what it must be like to be a father, to see your child no longer childish, losing that automatic tendency to adore. Does it come in a moment, or gradually? Is it a peaceful or a violent process? Is that why artists behave like children, needing to humiliate and denigrate their elders in order to feel sure of themselves?

I suppose I will never find out. I will not see forty-five again, and it is too late; children are a form of creation that I will not experience. My decline is imminent; already I feel my bones ache when I get out of bed, feel tired at the end of the day, have trouble seeing things as well as I once did. It is the great curse of the portraitist, to be so aware of one’s own decline. I have spent years looking at people’s faces and bodies, know which muscles need to sag to produce that look of diminution in the elderly. I see a face and can trace the lines creeping across the cheeks and forehead, the way the eyes sink and lose their lustre. I have to see my fate every time I look in a mirror. I can foresee the future. It was no shock to me when you arrived. I knew exactly what you would look like; knew the precise shade of grey that flicks your hair, how far the hairline had receded, what difference it would make when more of that high forehead was revealed. Nothing bad, by the way; it adds to the air of intellectuality. I also knew in advance that your hands have become more bony, so that the impression of claws is accentuated. The fates have reserved corpulence for my decrepitude; you are awarded an ever more skeletal appearance, the skin of the neck beginning to drag down in lines like a lace curtain. I also knew that age would not have lessened that angularity that makes you seem uncomfortable and ill at ease. It has made it worse, in fact; you now seem to have no patience for anyone in the world. If you get older, that will get more pronounced. You can look forward to no physical ease; your body will not permit it. The inevitable beckons already; time is short.

I still enjoyed your company, long after we came back to London. I looked forward to our evenings, when you would, as much as possible, stop being the critic, and I would stop being—whatever I was trying to be at the time. It all ended when you married, alas; then you became domestic and proper, and went to clubs instead of taverns, and dinner parties instead of whelk stands. You lost the last slither of your integrity in Mayfair, and learned to hide the earnest intensity that had always redeemed you. Slowly you said less that was good about people, more that was bad. Didn’t you miss it, though? On those night-time voyages we were adventurers in the dark lands of London, seeing subjects for paintings down dingy alleys, or huddled in doorways. We thought of ever more exotic places to meet: a tea shop in Islington; a chophouse at Billingsgate; a tavern in Wapping; a dance hall on a Saturday night in Shoreditch where we would watch the clerks and the cleaners, the cooks and the shop girls as they forgot their cares for a few inexpensive hours. There was something of magic in those places for me, something you do not get at the Athenaeum. A recklessness, and an energy, and a desperation. The very stuff of paintings, I think, if only a means can be found of persuading people to buy it.