Flora

1882

The visit came late in 1877; an art journalist from London who had been paid to see the once-genius at work.

Dadd had seen him standing in the hall of Broadmoor, looking about himself at the dining areas and the view of the gardens. He had been standing in a rectangle of sunlight that turned his black clothes sepia, rusty; round-shouldered, portly, his hat held in his hands, he seemed deep in thought.

When Dadd was introduced to him later in the superintendent’s office, it was obvious that this man was not a gentleman. His collar was yellowed, the bands of satin on the coat lapels were worn. His demeanor was all turned down, a down-turned mouth and down-turned eyes, and hands clasped one across the other in an odd posture.

Dadd had painted a man like him once, nearly thirty years before—the little man who scrapes his shoe outside the drawing-master’s door. He had called it Insignificance or Self-Contempt—Mortification—Disgusted with the World. And it was the world that bore down on the little man’s shoulders, the enveloping cloak of the rusty sepia-black world that hung over his shoulders in the sunlight.

And so the first question he had asked him was “How is the world?”

The journalist had snatched a glance at the attendant; he did not know if any information could be given.

“The world is running apace,” he said at last.

“After what?” Dadd asked him.

The little man smiled. “Oh—all kinds of miracles.”

Dadd leaned forward. “Have they a name?”

“The transmission by telegraph … the phonograph … the light globe.”

Dadd inclined his head. “What is a light globe?” he asked.

“A filament … a vacuum … that creates an artificial light.”

“By what means?”

“I am not sure,” the journalist confessed.

Dadd’s eyes ranged over him.

“I hear that you have painted wall murals,” the journalist continued. “And the theater curtain, here in the hospital.”

“Yes,” was the reply.

“You have painted on cloth, for the curtains and scenery?”

“The stars, the planets,” Dadd said. “The rising of the sun.”

“I have never seen a sky of yours,” the journalist said. “I have seen very many figures, and landscapes.”

Dadd considered this truth. “I have looked for another world under my feet,” he murmured.

When the article was printed just after Christmas that year, the little man in the rusty-colored black coat had called Dadd’s paintings “melancholy monuments of a genius.” It was better than the last review, in which the interviewer had called the paintings “curious freaks of fancy.” However, Dadd was not troubled by them; he never saw them, never read them. They were kept from him in case the diagnoses disturbed him.

He thought for a little while about voices transmitted by wires, and preserved in wax, all which seemed to him to be the product of sickness, a worse sickness of mind than he possessed. And the names were so curious. The phonograph. The telephone. How did a man press a voice into wax, or thread it along a wire?

Birds hung on wires. Sometimes, in the fields when he was a boy, farmers had killed and hung crows on wires at the edge of woodlands, or on field gates, as a warning. He thought of the world’s voices hung on gates, hanging head-down in air, strangled and rigid, knotted and tied.

Flight was harnessed this way, and the same with voices and light. A voice, or an illumination, a man-made sun or star, compressed into the hand, balled into a chemical. It was odder than looking in a mirror and seeing a familiar room reflected, printed backward. All the world was going in the same direction, encapsulated, imprisoned, reduced.

It seemed that man’s sole intentions were to tie creation to a gate. Put the sun in a glass globe; put a symphony on a wax cylinder. But it made nothing. There was nothing extra gained, except perhaps a little space, an empty space that used to be filled by the actual persons that owned the voices, the actual musicians that played the instruments. It provided a space where once an audience sat in a symphony hall, or a man sat reading aloud in his own room. It prolonged and extended a single moment, making it both small and rootless, no longer identified with a particular place.

Music went hurtling around in the sepia reproduction of the world, the photographed and recorded world, losing the value of the actual moment, because it could be seen and heard over and over again. There was no more advantage in being present. It was of no particular use anymore to be present. The moment could be preserved and played back to you. The experience of passion could be replicated and shared a hundred thousand times, exactly the same in the hundredth telling as it was in the first. No progression, only replication.

He wondered if they had taken the men who created the false miracle into confinement; if they, too, languished into old age. He did not know. He had not asked, so astonished had he been that such a sad little man could create such fantasies, or believe them if they had been told to him.

He imagined his own voice encapsulated and then played back to him. It was simply the expression of what his mind had been telling him for decades; that there were voices let loose in the world that clung to false bodies and inhabited minds. Voices that took on the sound of a man’s own.

Soon, he thought, sitting before a blank wall and staring at its face, the world would believe its own bodiless, formless ghosts; it would hear them. It would transmit them to others, and every man would allow himself to become convinced of their reality. Soon, the whole world would be barred and caged, and the asylums would be opened, because there would be no distinction between the lunatic and the rest of mankind.

There was not so much difference then, after all, between the madman and the sane. There was not so much difference between the artist and the lunatic. They bled into each other.

A month later, Dadd was told that Rossetti had died.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, named after an angel who had, in turn, painted angels. A man who did not need platinum or iridium, zirconium or magnesium, to illuminate his faces. And yet even Rossetti had been tormented in his way. The man had exhumed his own dead wife to retrieve a book of poetry that he had written, and thereafter retreated into an addiction to chloral hydrate. Rossetti, who had painted the same beautiful face of his model over and over again, and called it Proserpine, and La Ghirlandata, and Venus Verticordia.

Dadd resolved to paint his own beauty.

He called her Flora; and she was as real as Elizabeth Siddall, Rossetti’s muse. His own model was called Florence, and she was the wife of the medical superintendent, whom he saw at daily intervals. He asked if he might paint a fresco of her, in the way of the old masters. She was a kindly woman, of a sweet nature, and implored him to paint in her own hallway, so that she might see it as soon as she came into the house.

He painted her on a large space, six foot by ten, directly onto plaster, using the fresco techniques he had learned forty years before; color mixed with water onto fresh plaster.

He painted her like a May queen, garlanded, crowned.

When it came to her face, he had more difficulty than he had ever known. He could no longer recall the exact contours of the faces of women he had known. He had not seen them in a lifetime. He tried to remember Catherine, but no image came. Eventually, he painted a fairy’s face with his own striking dark eyes.

She sang out of the picture, calling, calling, the sun rising at her back, the fields filmed with promise of heat, the trees dark with full leaves, the river running through the fields behind her.

The fresco took eight weeks. When he had finished, Dadd retired to his room, lay down on the bed, and stayed there. He called it an idleness; he told his physician the same.

“I am very idle,” he said to the doctor who was summoned.

His heart and chest were examined.

“There is some congestion in his breathing,” was the doctor’s verdict. “Nothing more or less than I might expect in a man of sixty-five.”

Dadd lay on his back, hands crossed at his waist, eyes closed: an icon of sleep, a prophet in stone.

In his dreams, he saw himself astride the echoing Earth, painting the planets and stars on the backcloth of the sky, with Catherine at his side.