AND ANOTHER THING
Homer nodding badly at Burlington House and cheering me up no end
PAUL JOHNSON
A fortnight ago I seemed to be painting brilliantly and produced fine landscapes. Then last week, turning to interiors, I failed horribly day after day. An 'expense of spirit in a waste of shame' — that, often, is painting to me, not through absence of talent or even vision but through simple lack of the technique to do what I set myself. There is nothing more depressing at my age — almost 70 — when it is too late, or too humiliating, to go back to school. When I am writing I know exactly how to set down on paper the precise thoughts I have formulated, and do so without doubt or hesitation. I am a complete professional in that métier. But faced with a blank sheet of drawing- paper, or worse, a canvas, I am filled with apprehension, often justified by the ensu- ing debacle.
But the balm for my wounds is to look at paintings by the masters. There are two ways of learning from them. The first and obvious way is by observing how they car- ried out their aim in triumph. The second, hardly ever discussed but which in some ways 1 find more useful, is by noting their mistakes and why they made them — and, even more interesting, why they failed to correct them. The huge ragbag exhibition of works from provincial collections now at Burlington House is crowded with examples, and I shall spend many fruitful hours there. For instance, was there ever a more accomplished artist than Sargent? The watercolour of sleeping soldiers from the Fitzwilliam is an example of his daz- zling skill. Yet close by there is his embar- rassing portrait of Dorothy Barnard, a fail- ure all the more lamentable in that Dorothy, three years earlier, figured enchantingly in what many think Sargent's finest work, 'Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose'. Poor Dorothy is shown here in profile with her tummy sticking out and a horribly sour expression, her chin weakened, her promi- nent nose emphasised, her thin hair look- ing as though it will not last long. How come Sargent left it in this state? The answer is that he was engaged in open-air painting at the time and began this por- trait indoors because it was raining. When the weather brightened he abandoned it unfinished, and left it behind in the house of the girl's mother, who begged to be allowed to keep it, warts and all. Dorothy later owned it herself, perhaps thinking, `Well, I really did look, and stand, like that, then.'
More interesting is the sunset oil of Lin- coln by Peter de Wint. De Wint is one of the surest of our watercolourists, and my failure to get hold of one of his works forms a painful gap in my collection. He did trees better than anyone else. He is dear to me because he always charged in guineas and when a would-be patron tried to bring him down a bit, saying, 'Shall we say pounds, then?', would answer sharply, No we shall not! Those shillings go to my wife for her clothes!' De Wint hardly ever worked in oils, as he always painted out- doors, and this work is a rarity, and flawed. The reflection of the cathedral in the river is implausible, and there is a large vertical smudge on the left of the picture which is too transparent to be the sail of a boat, and looks like a simple mistake to me. Why did not de Wint rework the reflection and paint out the smudge? I suspect the answer is that he was so used to watercolour, where mistakes are irremediable or have to be incorporated by prodigies of ingenuity, that he simply forgot that in oils you can change anything. Unsure of what to do, he put the thing aside and never got round to correct- ing it.
Mistakes in composition, of course, are far more serious and are never easy to put right. The Bowes Museum has a nightmare canvas by the Mannerist 'Frank' Primatic- cio, or one of his gang, and for some inex- plicable reason it is in the show at the RA. It is called The Rape of Helen'. It is true that a vaguely gesturing woman is being carried off by the disembodied head and hands of a red-haired man against the protests of a chalk-white animated female statue whose prominence ought to make her, or it, the main subject of the work. But the boat on which Helen is to be transport- ed to Troy is already being cast off and pushed out to sea by its sailors before the disembodied head has a chance to get her on board, and most of the frenzied activity in the picture appears to be irrelevant. The confusion is so total and hilarious that the thing might have been painted by Poussin, and some of the nude modelling has the deadly touch of Cezanne at his most inept. This kind of 'Old Master' painting cheers me up no end.
I was also cheered, though for different reasons, by seeing again Ford Madox Brown's 'Work', which I recall examining with my father in Manchester when I was a boy, and which was also in volume two of my children's encyclopaedia. This amazing piece of well-meaning ineptitude used to frighten me. I thought the girl and baby in the foreground were sure to fall into the hole being dug by the workmen, and I was terrified by the bearded devil in the big black hat on the right (actually, Thomas Carlyle, who is sardonically commenting on the scene to Frederick Maurice). The composition is so crowded that everyone is in each other's way, and the idle rich, whose lack of occupation is supposed to contrast meaningfully with the poor hard at work in the foreground, have been pushed right to the back and are almost invisible.
The picture has to be laboriously explained to make any sense. I studied it for hours as a child and saw it as a series of delightful mysteries. Who, for instance, owns the dog at the bottom, a cross between a whippet and a dachshund, wearing an ill-fitting red coat? Surely not Carlyle, though it is gazing at him, as if waiting for orders. And where is the work- man hurling the earth he has excavated with his shovel? It ought to hit the bare feet of the flower-girl on the left, but care- ful scrutiny reveals there is no earth — the man's shovel is empty and his action meaningless. The anomalies and incon- gruities of this absurd work are endless. But they also make it delightful. I have lived with this painting all my life and still love to pore over it, just as I endlessly reread Emma, looking for felicities I have missed. What does that tell us about art? It tells me that I must get back into my studio and start painting again, with renewed hope and passion.
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