Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

Part of our task in this circumnavigation of London is to become our fathers, our grandfathers; to learn respect for obscured and obliterated lines of biography. Accessing the fugue, we parody lives that preceded our own. Reading Victorian memoirs, we come to believe that these events have not yet happened.

Renchi was showing me the book, on the day of our walk around the City’s Roman walls. We were sitting in the café at the Museum of London. A High Way to Heaven (Clarence Bicknell and the ‘Vallée Des Marveilles’ ) by Christopher Chippindale. Marc Atkins, who had just met Renchi for the first time, was there. With his camera. I held the cover of the book close to Renchi’s face and asked Marc to take the shot. It’s an extraordinary double portrait: the slanted book becomes a mirror. Twin grey beards, spruce. Twin noses. Heavy eyebrows. Faces full of stalled wonder. The sloping shoulders of Clarence in his pale jacket slide into Renchi’s T-shirt (‘Fruit of the Loom’). On the wall of the cafe, above the coffee machine: SUMMER DESSERTS.

Reading about Clarence, I discover a template for Renchi; not an explanation, or psychological profile, but a concurrent stream of particles navigating a way around a similar landscape. ‘Then’ and ‘now’ are distinctions I can’t make. Clarence Bicknell, the youngest son of a wealthy businessman, entered (and abandoned) the church; he travelled, settled at Bordighera on the Mediterranean coast of north-west Italy, a few miles from the French border. He took long daily walks. He explored Liguria, painting more than 3,000 watercolours of plants. He was a vegetarian and a promoter of Esperanto (attending conferences in such places as Krakow). He commissioned a house (decorated with Art Nouveau foliage and playful mottoes) on the slopes below the high Val Fontanalba — where he would carry out the extensive survey of rock-engravings by which he is best known. He shipped stones back to Cambridge. His herbarium of dried specimens was displayed at the Hanbury Institute, Genoa. He funded and stocked his own museum, the Museo Bicknell, in Bordighera.

This life, as Chippindale annotates it, was one of discreetly inflicted patronage, questing, categorising: true liberality — before the term became degraded. The busy leisure of a gentleman amateur of the best kind: rising at five a.m. to tend his garden, offering hospitality, walking the mountains, carrying out his obsessive logging of the marks on ancient rocks. ‘Casa Fontanalba’, his colonial chalet, was known as: ‘The Cottage at the Entrance to Paradise’.

Clarence Bicknell’s father, Elhanan, made his money in whale oil. Which meant epics of slaughter, boiling vats on Bugsby’s Marshes; bones and blubber. A heavy stench that drifted on the east wind. You can smell it still as you emerge from the Blackwall Tunnel to drive over the exhausted tongue of land on which the New Labour visionaries chose to erect their Millennium Dome.

Bicknell’s sperm oil lit the world, but Elhanan was also interested in another kind of oil, in paintings. And painters. Clarence’s mother, Lucinda (the third of Elhanan’s four wives), was the daughter of Hablot Knight Browne — who produced illustrations for Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym ‘Phiz’. Bicknell was comfortable with painters, as patron and as friend. His large house, in the rural suburb of Heme Hill, was close to the Ruskin property. Young John was a frequent visitor. Oils and watercolours by J.M.W. Turner dominated the Bicknell collection (which included works by Roberts, Etty, Landseer, De Wint). David Roberts was a relative. His daughter married one of Clarence’s half-brothers.

A private gallery for contemporary art in the Surrey foothills. Elhanan didn’t care for old masters. Turner, from whom he commissioned a number of works, was sketched by Landseer (and painted by Count d’Orsay) enjoying the hospitality of Herne Hill: Turner in Mr Bicknell’s Drawing Room . Player and gentleman. Turner’s Melvillean epic, Wlialers (of 1845), was produced with the sperm oil magnate in mind. And painted, this dark monster rearing from a red-gold sea, six years before the publication of Moby-Dick. Melville devoted three chapters to pictorial representations of whales: illusions, myths, truth. He tracked the story back to a crippled beggar on Tower Hill holding up a crudely daubed board which featured a primitive summary of ‘the tragic scene in which he lost his leg’. The whale narrative returns to Elhanan Bicknell, investor and collector — and to the London works, alongside the Thames, where he refined spermaceti.

When (in the 1840s) Turner wasn’t ‘at home’ in Queen Anne Street, he hadn’t necessarily slipped away to Mrs Booth at Margate; his other refuge was Herne Hill, with the Ruskins or the Bicknells. The Cockney lion wasn’t an easy guest, sometimes talking at length, charming the ladies with accounts of his sketching expeditions, sometimes mumpy and silent. With his host, Turner discussed the operation of the whaling industry, the source of that soft light that bathed the dinner table. Bicknell is thought to have commissioned all four of Turner’s whaling subjects.

The inevitable quarrel between artist and patron came over plans to engrave an edition of The Fighting Temeraire. Turner asked for fifty proofs, Bicknell offered eight. Taking an inventory of Whalers , inch by inch, as if reading a balance sheet, the Herne Hill entrepreneur discovered some fiddly detail he didn’t care for — and which he intemperately rubbed out ‘with Handky’. Turner, in a strop that could never be mended, was persuaded to make alterations.

They live with us, these phantoms. The collaboration between Turner and Elhanan Bicknell. Hunted whales and boiling vats on Greenwich peninsula. Definitions of the Light. Clarence, the youngest son, escaped from trade, from London, to become a rehearsal for Renchi: for the problem of finding the true path. Painting was a useful pursuit, a necessary irritant; never a profession. Questing walks. Generosity to friends and fellow townsmen. Vegetarianism. The urge to research, record. The karma of family wealth modestly dispersed — along with the difficulties (or guilts) associated with that process. The will towards good (that stumbles and blunders and is aware of its own absurdity). We repeat patterns that we can barely discern. We make old mistakes in new ways.

Clarence Bicknell, from his ‘Entrance to Paradise’, searched for pictures in the rocks. He sketched groups of horned figures: ‘Weapons and implements’. These implements, now interpreted as ‘halberds’, are characteristic of the early metal age in prehistoric Europe. Triangular blades set at a right angle to their shafts: they look like flags marking holes on motorway golf courses. Pin men dancing for joy: Conan Doyle’s The Dancing Men .

More significantly, Bicknell made a rubbing of ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. Here indeed was ‘The Highway to Heaven’ (the dream of a celestial autobahn). Here was the (unacknowledged) inspiration for the work Renchi produced when the M25 walk was completed. As part of a deprogramming process, he picked certain sites along the road as suitable for sand paintings, drawings with vegetable dye. In rehearsal, he sketched his designs in chalk on the road between the London Waste chimneys and Picketts Lock. The full ritual was intended for the tunnels at Epsom. Our orbital circuit was broken down into four vertical lines, like the Paradise ladders; chalk chippings were placed along one margin, small stones from a deleted burial ground along another. Drumming continued throughout the day, as Renchi laboured to complete his painting.

The Marc Atkins double portrait — Clarence and Renchi Bicknell — becomes a triptych with the addition of Clarence’s sketch of a 1909 discovery in the Mediterranean Alps: The Chief of the Tribes . After a day, during which they had endured intermittent heavy showers, Bicknell and his companion, ‘in a state of great excitement’, came upon something like a stone mirror: his own bearded image, thousands of years old, softened by lichen. ‘Le Sorcier’ was the title the French used. Bicknell spoke of’ Devil-dancers or Witch-doctors of savage tribes’. A beard, teeth suggested by a line of dots, intense eyes under a single horizontal bar (eyebrows or a lid to prise open the skull). The ‘horns’ on the head become hands, digits emphasised with chalk by future portraitists, determined to capture a clear representation. A human face. An archetype. As shocking in its immediacy as the mummified body of ‘Otzi the Ice-man’, who was recovered (clothing and weapons intact) from the snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border.