I stumbled upon the eighteenth-century cartoonist, James Gillray, in an exhibition at The New York Public Library in 2004. His world instantly captivated me – not only was it full of dirt, gossip, and intrigue, it also gave a sense of a society undergoing profound change. About ten years later, when I was thinking about writing a novel, I was looking through a collection of his cartoons and discovered a satire of a real-life scandal. Titianus redivivus;–or–the seven-wise-men consulting the new Venetian oracle erupts from the page with ribald detail: it includes the shamed artists, a urinating monkey, the ghost of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a young woman presiding over them all from a rainbow. It is simultaneously cryptic and outrageous. I started to research it the same day.
The true story of Benjamin West – then President of the Royal Academy of Arts – and Ann Jemima Provis is every bit as extraordinary as it first appears: it deals with obsession, jealousy, vanity, deception, lust, disappointment, and the elusive pursuit of genius. It also shows the Royal Academy at a point when it was still a radical young institution, introducing new artists and contemporary art in a time when many collectors were obsessed by historic works. The artists themselves came from a range of backgrounds, so the Academy was a microcosm of tensions in London immediately after the French Revolution – some were close to King George III, others were closer to those wanting to overthrow him. Beyond this was the cat-hissing rivalry that automatically sprang up between individuals who wanted to mark themselves out as the greatest artists of their time.
It was fertile territory. For about a year before writing anything I immersed myself in the letters, diaries and historic records of the real-life characters involved. As with other historical fiction writers, for me – while the history was fascinating – it was in the gaps between what is known historically that this story was able to come to life. Next to nothing is known of Ann Jemima, apart from the extraordinary effect she had on everyone who met her. One satirical song published at the time suggested that the main interest the artists had in her was sexual, but it did not take much research to gain a sense both of her artistic accomplishment and of her intelligence.
The resulting book is not a faithful historical account – for that it is best to go to the diaries of Joseph Farington, one of the artists caught up in the events depicted. The outrageous deception central to the plot comes from fact, but the motivations, ambitions and intrigues of the different characters are my imaginative response to the arc of the story. Researching the era more widely was both illuminating and liberating – one particularly enjoyable discovery was that there were many more female innovators at the time (in science, art, literature and music) than most conventional histories suggest. Unorthodox and law-unto-herself though she is, Ann Jemima is also an indication of the many other voices that have been silenced, and a world of stories still waiting to be told.