Columbine

1854

There were no women in Bedlam, at least none that Richard Dadd could see.

Sometimes at night he thought that he heard their voices: he thought that he heard screams, a sound so frightening to him that he would crawl into the corner of his cell and sit with his knees drawn to his chest, his head buried in his knees.

When he was a young man, he had painted a girl in a white dress, holding a rose. It had been in 1840. Late spring. The magnolias had finished flowering and the roses were in first bloom. He was twenty-three. Looking back on that part of his life was like putting a telescope to his eye and seeing the years made inconsequentially tiny. He had been admired then; he had been out in the roaring and peopled world; he had been adored and feted. Admitted to the Schools of the Royal Academy at fifteen, he was thought to be a genius. His work was commissioned; his work was bought. It was rumored that he would not fail, nor starve in a garret. He would rise to prominence; he would be famous. He would be courted. He would be loved.

He had friends then. Other artists who had not been ashamed of his reputation or company. Other men who understood him and came to see him. They had a company, a group, to which others yearned to be admitted. They called themselves the Clique. Frith was one, Egg and Phillip and Ward were others. There was no animosity between them, no jealousy. They formed a committee to outdo the old academicians, to bring the light of new painters out into the open and not have them suffocated by age.

Someone had once told him, in that time, that he was the brightest of them all. He had kept the letter and wondered where it could be now. “Sportive humor, innocent mirth … of the kindest and the best, as well as the most gifted …”

She had written it to him, the girl in the white dress. She was Catherine, the wife of his oldest brother. He had persuaded her to sit for him one afternoon, the afternoon when the roses first came into color. He had picked the rose; it had been yellow. The name of it escaped him now, but his memory of her did not. She sat on the bench outside the house, self-consciously holding the rose that he had given her, the dark hair falling to her shoulders. Catherine and Robert had been married the year before his imprisonment: the year before his possession by demons, the year before the voices. He wondered if she had once come to see him on the arm of his brother, or whether he had simply imagined her presence.

It was ten years now. A little more than ten years.

He had been sketching a great deal lately. In January, he had painted The Packet Delayed, a child’s game on a riverbank. He had been thinking of Robert then. Two boys hold on to a branch while trying to retrieve a toy schooner from the water of the stream. He painted the masts of the schooner so clearly, so defined, that it was almost an engraving rather than a painting.

As winter progressed to spring, he painted David sparing Saul’s life; and sketches of the passions of brutality and pride; ambition; agony; raving madness. Drunkenness. Avarice, melancholy. In the same week of June he painted two groups: all men conversing, settling disputes. One of them stood over a painting, inspecting it with a glass. Somewhere in the paintings, somewhere in the paintings he painted within paintings, was the answer. Paint within paint within paint. Detail under detail. He sketched hands and mouths; hands extended, pointing, and holding.

Mouths open in conversation. Faces turned to other faces, rapt in concentration.

When he sat back from A Curiosity Shop—done in such a hurry, done from ten in the morning until three in the afternoon, missing luncheon, deaf to the instructions to come to the table—a sadness swept over him.

He had no society of equals. He had no conversations. He could not make out liveliness or appreciation of intellect when others looked at him. He had lost it somewhere, by some action he could not fathom. He painted friendship, but he had none. He had been alone for over ten years, and never touched another human hand in admiration.

He took up the brush again and painted Columbine. Looking toward him over her right shoulder, the smile playing on her mouth. He completed it in a matter of minutes: it was not difficult. She inhabited his soul.

When it was over, he sat at the easel in the dying light of the afternoon and wept for company. He was dying here, alone, forgotten, alive only in paint, in the fantasies he created. And paintings were fragile. They did not last. He could destroy Columbine in a second, if he wished it. Even if she survived, she might be lost, torn, put away in the dark. She was not real. She was only a memory. In a flash of clarity, he wished violently for someone to talk to. Someone alive and substantial to love.

For Frith, and Edward Ward, and John Phillip. For his own brother.

And for a girl in a white dress, holding a rose.