The Portrait

Shut the door when you go out. The wind is getting up and I don’t want my papers blowing about.

DO YOU KNOW, after you left yesterday I spent the next hour walking about this little room—which I grandly call my studio—cursing you? And myself, for not throwing you out the moment you set foot over the threshold. Why did you suggest I paint your portrait? I know the reasons you insinuated in your letter, of course—expressed delicately and gravely, you felt I needed help. Needed to feel you still loved me. That you didn’t resent the way I abandoned you and went off without a word. A portrait would perhaps restore my self-confidence, and give me some much-needed income. A picture of you at some exhibition would be a fine way of advertising my continued existence, maybe even ease my return to London. Is that it? I am grateful; touched. It has always been your worst characteristic, to bestow generous aid and ask nothing obvious in return. No wonder so many people distrust you. I can see you talking it over with your wife, as she sits on the sofa and reads, you at your desk by the big window. Proof-reading a review? Working up a lecture? Are you still working on that book you started in Paris? You look up. “I’ve been thinking about Henry quite a lot recently. I really think I should see if I can help him a little. …”

And she smiles. She had a lovely smile. “Such an awkward man! You know I never really took to him. But I know he is an old friend of yours, my dear. …”

You go on: “What about writing to him and seeing if he’ll have another go at a portrait? I hear he is not at all well. His last few letters have been rambling, almost incoherent, so I’m told. That way I’ll be able to find out how he is. …”

So your excellent wife—a fine woman, who has never directly denied you anything—gives her assent, and you write to me. Maybe I am inventing; but I’m sure I am close.

But that is not it, is it? I have been here near four years now, with not a peep from you before. If you wanted to send me money, there are easy enough ways of doing it. And no amount of friendship would make you spend more than ten minutes on this island unless there was some compelling reason. People can change, but not that much. You get faint crossing Hyde Park. Nature has never been one of your loves. So what is it that makes you need to sit in my presence for days on end? What is it that you are after, that you evidently cannot ask me directly? That is the way you draw people in, is it not? Sit silently, until they speak to fill up the silence; give little away yourself while the other person reveals their soul?

You see, your very presence takes me back into the past and wakes up all sorts of memories I had forgotten about for years, which have not troubled me for a long time. I got no work done whatsoever after you left, and had recourse in the early evening to that wine which you find so revolting. I drank far too much of it, had only an omelette for dinner; I didn’t want to go to Mère Le Gurun for fear you would be there. The prospect of an evening’s conversation with you made me feel perfectly sick, so I stayed put and made myself feel ill all on my own. I slept badly. I haven’t really slept well for years now. Not since I left England. Some nights are better than others, but last night I scarcely slept at all, despite the pharmacopoeia of potions I have in my little cupboard. I am in a bad mood, mainly because of my ageing stomach, which I find can take less and less of any sort of ill treatment. The man who once used to go for days without sleep in a frenzy of work is no more. Dead, my friend, and buried; only a shade remains, which needs an early night and cannot take too much wine.

I grant that there are some questions to be answered. How is it that an artist in his prime, nearing the peak of his career, should act in such a foolish way? He has income, some small renown and (even better) reputation. He has just taken part in one of the most important exhibitions ever to be seen in the country, is at the vanguard of the artistic revolution sweeping the world. He has achieved, nearly, what he has aimed at all his life. From near poverty in Scotland, then time as a jobbing illustrator for scruffy magazines and penny dreadfuls in London, scrimping and saving to go to Paris, and finally the goal is at hand. Then suddenly—pop!—off he goes. Packs his bags and says farewell to more than twenty years of struggle and hard work. Tells no-one where he is for some time, refuses to answer letters. Why? There is no insanity in the family, is there? Both his parents were well-nigh teetotal, were they not? If he has some horrible disease, better, surely, that he stay in London and get proper medical treatment? What is the cause of this behaviour? What did he do that makes him flee the country like some murderer on the run?

There are limits to eccentricity, after all. Behaving outrageously is conventional, necessary for any painter wishing to be taken seriously these days. But this is beyond outrageous. It is offensive. The whole point of running off to the continent in a fit of aesthetic pique is to come back again, so others may revel in the deed, glory in the flouting of convention, draw strength from the shock and disapproval of others. To disappear completely, send back no pictures to advertise your continued existence, is different; it implies a disdain for all those artists in Chelsea and beyond, and few people can forgive being disdained. Makes them look at their metropolitan lives and wonder. What’s wrong with being here? Should we be doing that too? Or it makes people suspicious, makes them gossip.

You want an explanation. You have a right to know. Well, we shall see; I think you may know the reasons as well as I do. As my painting progresses, perhaps mutual understanding will emerge as well as a portrait. I have been waiting nearly four years for you to ask; you can wait a few days for my answer.

Sit, then; the light is good and I’m often at my best when in an ill-humour. No, no, no. You know better than that. Both arms on the chair, head against the rest; you are meant to look senatorial, the Roman of old, an imposing figure of authority. Don’t you remember? Or did your dinner have a similar effect on you as on me that you slump there like an empty paper bag? That’s better. Now keep still, for pity’s sake.

Memories? Oh yes. Both good and bad, I assure you. Worst of all, you brought out feelings of regret, for the first time since I came here. But then, you always had that effect on me, so why should it be any different now? I started thinking about what might have been, had I stayed in London, had I cultivated people properly, had I stayed in the fight, had I got married. I saw the career ahead of me, culminating in a large house in Holland Park or Kensington, revered by my many pupils, rather than forgotten and living in total isolation. Too late now. Now I would have the reputation of being unreliable, an unsafe pair of hands. How many commissions do you think I abandoned when I left? At least a dozen, most of them paid for. And I doubt that what I paint these days would find much favour. Too eccentric, too strange.

It could have been different, as you know. It was within my grasp; all I had to do was keep in favour with people like you, produce works that were suitably advanced but not too daring that no-one would buy them. That is why I can indulge in regret. You can’t regret a fantasy; only a real opportunity lost can produce that sort of wistfulness. Would success have been so delicious as it seemed when I thought about it late last night in my bed? Probably not; I tasted enough of it to get the bitterness on my tongue, the dry feeling in my mouth when I complimented ugly old women for the sake of their husbands’ wallets, or made polite conversation to dealers interested only in the difference between buying and selling prices. I knew the vulnerability of the successful with those beneath, eager to tear them down and feast on their entrails.

Did we not do that, you and I? Would I have been spared in my turn? I think not. It is the cycle of the generations, played out in every species that walks the face of the earth. The rise of the young, the tearing down of the old. Again and again. Was I supposed to sleepwalk meekly through a play where the script was already written, on which I could have no influence? We sat long hours in Paris bars and London pubs, sneering at the likes of Bouguereau and Herkomer and Hunt, deriding their pomposity, the prostitution of their skills into sterile emblems for the bourgeoisie—those were the glorious, rolling phrases, were they not? How good they made us feel. But what would those below say about me now? What are they called again? Vorticists, Cubists, Futurists or some such? Too weird even for you, I imagine. Sentimental, I think, might be one word for the sort of stuff I was producing in London. Prettified, perhaps; insincere would wound because it would be true. And no doubt a whole raft of other insults I cannot even imagine. Who knows what sins we committed in our turn when we cast our elders into the darkness and trampled so gleefully on their reputations?

We weren’t really very good, you know. Think of all those acres of canvas we churned out when we came back from Paris, all that semi-digested Impressionism. We got rid of the wistful peasants and the studies of girls knitting, true enough; but we replaced them with unending landscapes painted in muted greens and browns. Thousands of them. Didn’t really matter if it was Cumbria or Gloucestershire or Brittany, they all looked pretty much the same. I don’t know why English painters love brown so much. It’s not as if it is so much cheaper than any other colour. We learned from the Impressionists only how to produce pictures safe enough to hang on the parlour wall, next to the engraving of the Queen and the needlepoint made by Granny when she was young.

It is the violence these new people bring to their work which interests me; what they produce may be revolting, incompetent, the antithesis of real art; they may be frauds and fools. Who knows? But they tap into the violence of men’s souls like the first roll of thunder on a summer’s day. They have extended their emotional range into areas we never thought of. There was nothing of that in our work. We challenged those old men in so many ways, but our notion of violence was still heroic. General Wolfe capturing Quebec, Napoleon crossing the Alps. No blood, no death and no cruelty. We produced studies of sunlight on cathedral walls and thought that was revolutionary enough. I could have led the way, you know.

Anyway, I decided not to wait for my inevitable eclipse. I would not be a sitting target. I retreated, packed up, came here; foreswore the knighthood, the obituary in The Times, the commemorative retrospective at the Royal Academy. I did not wish others to destroy my reputation, so I did it myself, before they could strike me down. At least I would deprive them of the pleasure. Cowardice, you may have thought at the time. I prefer to think of it as being acute. What soldier stands and waits to be overcome by a superior force? Better to get out of the way.

And bide my time. My renunciation was tactical, not mystical. I do not yearn for obliteration; my opinion of my work is too high for that. True, the wait will be long, but I am not concerned with my reputation during my life. Even had I achieved immense fame, I knew it would evaporate soon enough. I am after a bigger prize than that. Far bigger.

You think I am deranged, that the years of loneliness and isolation have finally tipped me over into an insane self-importance. Ah, but you will see, when I have finished this painting. You will see.

I suppose I’d better tell you my secret; you’ll find it out on your own, and I don’t want that smirk of yours to appear without being summoned by me. I have taken to going to church. Not just for the aesthetics of it all, either. I do the whole thing. Communion, confession, everything. A good Catholic I have become—me, brought up in the Church of Scotland, which abominates all things papist. If you want to break with your past, exterminate history beyond all hope of recovery, there is no better way of accomplishing it than a good conversion, I find. I think it was the discipline of it which attracted me. I was, after all, living in this house on my own, without any attachments, and I needed to give some form to the week. You’ll see that it has influenced my painting considerably. I’m now more than conversant with the sufferings of the martyrs, for the local priest is very keen on such things, and likes to go on about it in his sermons. A man for miracles as well, which I find refreshing these days, when everyone seeks an explanation and refuses to believe anything which cannot be made rational.

He has undertaken my education in matters religious, and gives me readings to ponder after my confessions. He has a predilection for the old Celtic saints, coming as he does from sturdy Breton stock, and I find that they appeal to me greatly as well. A few months ago I read about Saint Coloman, who was accused of being a traitor for some reason and killed. He was hanged, and his body was left on the gibbet, uncorrupted, for eighteen months. I think the point of the story is that it was only his death which sanctified him; before that he had been nothing extraordinary, yet the hate of others turned him into something not even crows dared defile. We are a long way from Good Works and the teaching of the kirk here. Do you think that was why the good father chose that for my bedside reading? Or perhaps there was something else in his mind. Perhaps I was meant to think about those who killed him; they were all drowned.

If I let you see what I am doing here, you would see instantly how Catholic my eyes have become under the influence of such teaching. There you sit on your chair, which I am subtly transforming into a throne. Your pose is imperious, you are more than a mere critic writing for newspapers and fashionable magazines. I seek to approach truth through subtle flattery, you see. I will not short-change you; I have given my word on that. No mere journalist, then, but something more. You will have the pose of a pope, as painted by Velázquez, to remind everyone of the power that people like yourself wield in our modern world. You command, and it comes to pass. You lift your finger and a reputation is made, shake your head and the hopes nurtured for years in the ateliers, worked for and so desperately desired, are dashed forever. So, you do not move armies, do not wreak destruction on faraway lands like our politicians and generals. You are far more powerful than that, are you not? You change the way people think, shape the way they see the world. A great power, wielded without check or hindrance. A despotism of the arts, in which you are high priest of the true and the beautiful. Very much like the Pope in your own way, and in my fashion so will I honour you.

But the church and myself? Yes; I am serious. I have always believed in sin, you know, my Scottish forebears gave me that if nothing else. But I always found Scottish sin so unsatisfying. There is so much of it you can’t really distinguish between any of its wonderful varieties. Playing cards on a Sunday, drinking alcohol for more than medical necessity, seducing your neighbour’s wife, murder—it is all one and the same, sin which condemns you to eternal torment. Wake up, get out of bed, go downstairs and have breakfast, and already your soul is lost. So why not murder someone as well? You’re doomed before you’re even out of the cradle anyway. Down here they are more subtle in the matter. They have big sins and little sins, sins mortal and sins minor; you are not thrust into hellfire without any say in the matter. You have to earn damnation.

A God like that I have time for. We get along, and as He has made my life so much more interesting, I find I can believe in Him a little. So I go to Mass, and sit in rapture with the fishermen and their wives, bathe in the odour of haddock and sanctity, and confess four times a year. I find I have little to own up to these days, so I have to go back over the years, clearing away the backlog. I fear the priest groans when he sees me coming, as he knows he’s going to get another chapter of autobiography which will have him crouched in his little confessional for hours. He suspects me of enthusiasm, which is itself a sin.

On the other hand, he cannot say that I do not have a wondrous variety of faults to own up to. I keep him entertained; occasionally I hear an intake of breath, and I feel him half-smiling in shock, and, I suspect, with more than a little envy. You must meet him, by the way. I don’t mean that because you will enjoy the experience, although he is pleasant enough. Or because he is the high point of social life on the island, even though that is true as well. You must meet him: it is an absolute obligation. His power in his domain is greater than that of the Pope in what is left of his. This island of Houat is a theocracy. I do not joke. The priest is deputy mayor, but ensures a nonentity has the official role so that everything is done his way. He is head of the fishing syndicate. The magistrate. The headmaster of the school. His nuns control the electric telegraph, and he has only recently given up control of the alcohol supply. You do not annoy Father Charles. Not if you want to stay on this island. He is monarch, head of the judiciary and God’s representative on earth, all incarnate in the same small man. And he has the only good cook on the island. Benevolent, but in his sphere as autocratic as you are in yours. You must go and see him; if you do not, he will come and see you, and that would be impolite. Do please try to make yourself agreeable, for my sake. None of your witty cosmopolitan repartee, if you don’t mind. He is a proud man, very protective of his subjects who, you should know, do not object to their subjection. Were it not Father Charles, it would be someone else, who might not be so enthusiastic at keeping the French at bay.

This is the man who has taken your place as my guide and confessor. I did my best to enjoy my sins, but I find atoning for them is more pleasurable. Do you know, he once called me a libertine? A marvellously ancien régime term, which I was quite taken by. I came back home and immediately sketched myself as Hogarth’s rake, soaked in debauchery in my studio, with my two favourite models draped all over me. I burnt it, though, as I didn’t manage to put in any severity, only nostalgia, which wasn’t proper. You can’t be forgiven unless you truly regret—that’s one of the rules, apparently—and it was clear evidence that my regret was far from total.

Besides, it was a lie; my sins were never so elaborate. Even when my very soul is at stake I can’t resist the tendency to overpaint the subject. It is a weakness you pointed out to me years ago, and the Lord knows how hard I have tried to rein myself in, to stick to facts, to obey the law as laid down both by God and William Nasmyth. But I never succeed for long. Sooner or later, I heighten the colour, clutter the image or add an extra model to my memories.

JACKY WAS ONE of the figures in my sketch, of course, always my real favourite as a subject. She was so disgusting, so common, so vulgar, you couldn’t help admiring her. And a brilliant model, as well. A body like Aphrodite, a face like the Virgin and an ability to stand still for hours in any pose you cared to ask for. I’ve always preferred women on the Rubens scale, myself. None of these skinny Botticelli types for me, all points and angles. With Jacky you got the opulence of form, rounded and full, set off by a flawless skin that was almost like marble. She was the personification of fecundity itself; everything about her was sensual, fleshy. What else could anyone want?

I imagined initially she was thinking when she sat for me, but eventually I concluded there was nothing inside at all. A complete blank. Time had no meaning. A minute, an hour, a day, it was all the same to her. She had nothing better to do, and so she simply sat still. I think that was what she did when she was on her own; having me pay her to do what came naturally was an extra bonus. But when she did talk, my goodness! The contrast between that angelic expression and dull mouth was remarkable. “So I said to her, I said, if you think I’m going to give you tuppence-ha’penny for that, you got another think coming. I told her straight and do you know what she said to me. …” On and on she would drone, giving details about the price of tomatoes or cloth or how she burned some cake, or couldn’t find a stocking, until your head was spinning and you wanted to jump out of the window just to get away from her. I always thought it most perplexing, because I still, somewhere, held on to the old notion that character is reflected in the face. Not in the case of our Jacky, and the discovery fast killed off any desire. You could ask her to do anything, and she would meekly obey, but it was like making love to a cardboard box; movement but no passion, not even the pretence of any engagement. Just the same vacant stare. I knew, of course, that she had alternative sources of income, that she “entertained a gentleman,” as she put it in a show of primness—I always suspected that somewhere in there was a lower-middle-class housewife, who dreamed, perhaps, of her parlour and of washing day. I do not think the gentleman in question could have been greatly entertained. Nor did I wonder who the poor soul might be; just felt sorry for him.

A pity she went and killed herself, though; she deprived the world of many a fine picture by her selfishness. I never would have thought it possible, until I read about it in the paper. Part-time prosititute dragged from river, the papers said. She deserved a better memorial than that, despite her many failings. The best model in London, in my opinion, but stupid. Very stupid. Imagine killing herself just because she got herself pregnant! Who would have thought she was even capable of feeling shame? Let alone acting on it in such an extreme way. Very perplexing. She was silly when alive, and died as she had lived, it seems.

Ah! Such an impenetrable face you have, my friend! Such control. You are a painter’s nightmare, you know. It was something I once admired greatly. The stoicism of the English gentleman is a wonderful thing, unless you are trying to capture it on canvas, because emotions bounce off it and never reveal themselves. Tell you something shocking or wondrous, insult you or compliment you, and that same inscrutable expression comes back. It is like trying to peer through a dirty window: you do not see true, and end up seeing only your own faint reflection instead. That will not do. You must show some strong emotion for me before you leave or I will throw down my brushes and stamp out in a painterly rage. Haven’t had one of those for years.

Curiously, Evelyn took to Jacky. I passed her on when she came back to London in 1902. She needed a model, and eventually Jacky became her one and only sitter. It was a strange conjunction. Each supplied a lack in the other, I suppose; Evelyn must have liked Jacky’s simplicity, the domesticity of her mind, the vacuity of her tastes. Perhaps she wanted a refuge from all that aestheticism, needed an occasional antidote to the high seriousness of creation. Can you understand such a thing, William? Might it ever appeal to you? And Jacky responded to something in Evelyn; her independence and her silence, perhaps. The inner strength that belied the feeble frame. Or perhaps she saw more than I did, and realised how very fragile she truly was, and responded to her courage. She was laughed at, I know, when people like myself—who thought the low made suitable subjects for art but not for conversation—saw them together in the street. Arm in arm, sometimes. Friends. Not artist and model, or mistress and servant. There was a certain lack of decorum in being so familiar; a bit like taking the parlourmaid out to a restaurant.

And how they could spend so much time together was a mystery, especially as Jacky would scold her on occasion like some old shrew. I wouldn’t have put up with being talked to in such a way by a mere model, but Evelyn didn’t seem to mind, even showed signs of being properly apologetic. She found friendship in all sorts of odd places, and never really enjoyed the company of other artists. She was one of those people who could winkle out something interesting in almost anyone, if she chose. I thought that with Jacky the effort must have been almost superhuman, but it never looked that way when I saw them together. She seemed far more relaxed than ever she was with me. Not that I thought about it then.

I need no models now; I haven’t painted any woman under forty for some time. They guard their womenfolk carefully here, and it is a small island. Besides, I don’t find all these lacy coifs particularly appealing, and they don’t go about with their heads uncovered. Nor, for the most part, are they particularly appealing subjects, unless you like to paint weather-beaten faces and the effects of back-breaking work or scant food. Not the sort of subject matter that usually appeals, and they are not open-faced; you would have to know them much better to penetrate their minds and turn them into something worth looking at. Still, beauty can flourish in even the most inhospitable terrain. There is one girl I would love to paint; she has the eyes of the devil. But we have done no more than exchange glances over an expanse of church. I fascinate her, I know. I am to her what you were for me: a new world, full of opportunities, offering everything she wants and cannot win by herself unaided. She wants to leave this island, to see and be different things. She dreams at night of what it must be like, to be something other than she is. She longs for freedom, and is hated for it by many on this island. Her desires have made her difficult and unsympathetic. It will eat away at that beauty soon enough.

If I intervened, her fate would change: whatever happened, she would go, would not marry the honest fisherman who is her destiny, would not be aged before her time by hardship and pregnancy. Lord only knows how she would end up. But high or low, part of her wants to take the chance, to roll the dice. Anything but what is mapped out for her here. If only I would force her hand. Goodness, I see the temptation! But I won’t; it is not for me to change her future. All she has to do is get on the boat and not come back. It’s simple. If you change someone’s life you have a responsibility to them forever; it is a heavy burden which you must not shirk. Do you not agree, William?

I have painted one portrait, though. Still life might be a better term. It’s unfinished, like most of my work these days. But not through laziness; it cannot be completed. About a year ago, a boy was washed up at the place called Treac’h Salus, a fine sandy beach, about twenty minutes’ walk from here. No-one knew who he was; not from this island certainly. Perhaps he’d been swept off a fishing boat in a storm the week before, but no-one had heard of such a thing. Perhaps he was a cabin boy on one of the passing steam ships, a stowaway, even. Enquiries were made, but he came from the sea—that was all anyone ever discovered. Those who know such things thought he’d been in the water a week or so, not much longer. I was having a morning walk when I saw the small group of islanders gathered around him in the distance; there was something calm, reverential, about their pose; they were praying. You remember Millet’s Angelus? The way the woman’s head inclines to the ground, the way the man fiddles nervously with his hat, both lost in thought? The intensity of prayer depicted so simply and effectively?

My curiosity disturbed them as I approached over the sand, but I could not keep away; I needed to see what was producing that perfect pose. My reaction was quite different to theirs. They were reflective; I was fascinated. They were resigned; I was excited, stimulated. The brilliant colours of decay, the complex bundle of angles and curves on the twisted body, half-eaten and swollen. The green tint, reflecting purple and red in the sun that crept over an exposed leg, so recently young and strong. The way the majesty of the human form, God’s image, could be reduced so easily by the sea to the obscene and grotesque. And the eye—one only, for the other had been eaten out of its socket. One eye was preserved, a pale sky blue shining like hope in that jumble of mouldy, stinking carcass. It still had personality and life, something which seemed almost amused by its predicament. And not fearful or distressed; perfectly calm, almost serene. An echo of the soul which survived despite everything that had happened. I could see it watching me, seeing how I would react.

Haunting. Literally so, because I could think of nothing else for days; I felt I knew it, had seen it looking at me before. I came back in the afternoon with a sketchbook, but the disapproval would have been so intense it wasn’t worth trying to settle down. And for some reason I could not draw it properly without actually being there. All I could get down was that eye, which drowned out the rest of the scene like a brilliant light in darkness. Even though the image was fixed in my mind, the composition just so, the rest of the boy kept slipping away from me.

They buried him next day in the grim little graveyard, with a full funeral as if he had been one of their own. No small thing, that; funerals are expensive and these people have little enough to spare. But he could so easily have been one of their own children. A touching ceremony, really. Stark and austere like their own lives. The congregation gathered in the churchyard overlooking the sea, a genuine, heartfelt grief for someone they had never known, and never even suspected existed. They are good people, truly they are, though your expression as you listen to my tale shows how worthless they are to you.

One curious thing did happen a few days later, which even you might find intriguing. Maybe not. But the police heard about it and came over from Quiberon to find out what they could, and were properly cross that the boy had been buried already. Even threatened to dig him up again, although the priest soon put paid to that idea. The curiosity was that, to a man and a woman, they refused to say anything—not where the boy was found, nor what they did with him, nor any suspicions they might have had about who he was. They closed ranks completely, and responded to all questions with a sullen, stubborn silence. The boy was theirs, now. This was their business. Their obstinacy when confronted with anything to do with the outside world is extraordinary.

It brought back an old fascination of mine that had been lingering in the back of my mind for years. Do you remember those Sunday morning expeditions we used to do together in Paris? I found them so wonderful, getting up early, meeting in a café for some bread and coffee, then off for a day of talk and art. A close friendship, as close as it can be. My education, of more use to me in many ways than any time I spent in school or atelier. We saw Puvis de Chavannes in the Pantheon, and argued long whether his vast canvasses of saints were genius or mediocrity, triumph or disaster. I still haven’t made up my mind, but I have a love for them because they are forever associated with the bliss of friendship and the joy of experience. We had the whole of the Louvre at our disposal, medieval wall paintings, Renaissance architecture, the sculptures of Houdon and Rodin; we saw churches and monuments, art modern and ancient. Studied Italian paintings and German prints together, ate and drank and walked. We sat in parks and dusty squares, walked by rivers and canals until the light faded, and still we went on talking. I remember the way you would stab the air with your finger to make a point as you marched along, the way you collapsed on a park bench and fanned yourself with a guidebook as you finished some wordy peroration about the use of public sculpture. The way you could recite poetry at the drop of a hat in your perfect French to illustrate some painting or panorama. The way you could turn anything into the subject for a lecture.

I came back from these outings exhausted, but unable to sleep, my head spinning with all I’d seen. And, of course, went over everything we had talked about. Had I said something stupid? Of course I had, many times over; so had you, but with such confidence no-one dared call it so. That was one of the things I learned; one of the most important things. But even then I think the seeds of our divergence were germinating; I remember a brief flutter of slight annoyance—swiftly suppressed—when you made some sneering remark about Boucher. Well, alright, not to everyone’s taste, all those silly women dressed up as shepherdesses with those bouffant wigs perched on their heads. But look at the way the man painted! He could do anything; I couldn’t believe it when I first saw them. That didn’t matter to you at all, and maybe you were right. But you didn’t see the man’s sense of humour. Do you think he didn’t know he was making these grand aristocrats look faintly absurd? Didn’t you realise that was the point? No; humour was never your strong point. It was all too serious for you. Playfulness has always been absent in your life.

I remember the trip to Saint-Denis best of all, the great cathedral with the sepulchres of the kings in that grimy industrial suburb. It was one of those revelatory moments that come only rarely in a life, all the more so for being so very unexpected. Particularly Louis XII and his queen, those statues; showing both of them in their full glory, regal and powerful, and underneath as corpses, withered, naked and disgusting. As you are, so were we; as we are, so will you be. No sentimentality or hiding. No black crêpe or fine words to hide the reality. These people were able to confront the inevitable full on, and show that even kings must rot. It is our final destination, and something artists have shied away from for generations. We are young and agile; established and comfortable; dead and decayed. Hope, fear and peace. There are only three ages of man, not seven. I am painting the second now.

My failure with that boy on the beach, the most recent, annoyed me because the sculptors in that cathedral had succeeded. I could not understand it. It was a simple enough task, after all; a still-life composition no more complex than an arrangement of artefacts at Julien’s académie. But I failed; all I managed was a bundle of shapeless rags, a sentimental, incoherent mess. It was little better than the sort of thing I would have knocked out for the Evening Post. “Mystery death of boy on beach.” Two paragraphs, page four, illustrated with a grotesque sketch by myself, printed in two garish colours—three if it was sufficiently horrible.

It festered; I am not used to such setbacks. Normally my technique would have sustained me, and allowed me to produce something tolerable enough to revolt the general public. But I no more wanted something accomplished than I wanted something sanitised and artistic. D’you remember that appalling painting by Wallis in the Tate, The Death of Chatterton? Pretty young poet lies sprawled in an elegant pose across the bed after taking arsenic. Ha! That’s not what you look like if you swallow arsenic! You’re covered in filth, you stink, you lie crouched on the floor from the agony, your face screwed up, hideously disfigured as the poison eats away your intestines. You don’t look as though you’ve just dropped off for a nap after too many cucumber sandwiches. But he couldn’t paint that. That wouldn’t have made people think sentimental tripe about doomed artists dying before their time. That’s what I wanted to get away from, and not by painting landscapes or the poor enjoying themselves at the music hall. Real death—which is the stuff of life, after all. I know; I did quite a few suicides when I worked for those magazines. And murders and hangings. But it was always just work, and I only ever had about an hour to rush off a sketch, get back down to the office and help set up the copy. “Dreadful Death in Clapham.” “Shocking Murder in Wandsworth.” “Part-time Prostitute Found in River.” I would have been there when they fished poor Jacky out, had I not become a painter.

So, I took a leaf out of Michelangelo’s book and went to study corpses. There’s a morgue at Quiberon, and the doctor in charge has artistic pretensions and no-one to talk to. In exchange for a little scandalous conversation and a few paintings, he gave me free run of the place. Every corpse that came in, I looked at and studied. The more disfigured and decomposed the better. I became quite expert at depicting the effects of maggots, and of water, and of dog bites on tramps left too long in gutters; excellent in putting down in a few strokes of the pencil the beautiful red line that a knife across the throat will make. Of bones showing through green skin, of skulls beginning to surface through the face. The sort of detail even the most scurrilous of London magazines would not touch, let alone a patron of the arts.

But it still wasn’t good enough, and d’you know why? Because they were dead. They had no character, no personality. Obviously not, you say, and I don’t want to stress the obvious. But the only way you can depict the flight of character, of the soul, is if you have known the person in life. The man who sculpted Louis XII must have known him well. The absence of personality wells out of that statue like a great hole; you can know the man by what is no longer there.

I HOPE YOU NOTICE that I have radically altered my technique since you last saw me. I have done away with those vastly long brushes that used to be my stock in trade. A pity, in some ways, as they looked so good. I remember the photograph that went with the review of my first big show at the Fine Art Society in 1905. I was more proud of the photograph than the reviews, I think, good though they were. Now there, I thought, there is a painter. And it was true. I was a handsome dog, and every inch the artist, standing so proud some three feet from the canvas, with that long thin brush extended before me. A bit like the conductor of an orchestra, forcing my colours to take on the shape and shades I required. Big brush strokes, very Impressionist. But it was all thirty years too late, wasn’t it? We were so proud of ourselves for challenging the establishment, bravely taking on the academicians, banishing the dusty and fusty, the conventional and the staid. But they were already dying on their feet anyway, those old codgers. We didn’t really have to fight; our generation never has. Never will, either; if there is a war now—and people tell me there may be one day—it won’t be us marching along, rifle in hand. We’re too old already. Besides, we were merely imitators, importers of foreign ware into England, with no more originality than the people we so greatly despised. Less, perhaps; you would never have mistaken one of their pictures for a French one; our radicalism consisted of making ourselves copyists.