‘If you need to learn how this goose quill should be cut, get a good, firm quill, and take it, upside down, straight across the two fingers of your left hand; and get a very nice sharp penknife, and make a horizontal cut one finger along the quill; and cut it by drawing the knife towards you, taking care that the cut runs even and through the middle of the quill. And then put the knife back on one of the edges of this quill, say on the left side, and pare it, and taper it toward the point.’
Cennino Cennini,
The Craftsman’s Handbook, c. 1400
Benjamin West sits in his study. It is late afternoon, and time is starting to bleed and blur with the onset of evening. He has tried to start the letter several times now. He takes up the crow’s quill and begins again.
‘December 22, 1796 ‘William, my dearest brother,’ |
Newman Street, London |
He sits back and sighs. ‘I am not certain even of this, my old friend and sparring partner. I have not seen you for almost forty years.’ He remembers their farewell at the docks when his ship departed for Europe. How after all the arguments, William had finally agreed he would take the coach and horse with him early that morning. The smell of brine, the clatter of chains and shouting. How they had stared at each other briefly before hugging fiercely, sensing the uncertainty in the air all around them.
He frowns, and starts to write once more.
‘I have had much on my mind reecently, and feel the want of a dear Friend like yourself to talk with. The Atlantick has never felt so wide as it has in reecent weeks, nor indeed has London ever felt so small. I have been here some thirty-three years now, yet on some days I feel more of a Stranger than I did when I first struck these shores.’
For a moment he imagines the world and its oceans spreading around him – the rivers, mountains, great plains and deserts. He thinks of himself as a small dot within that world, and of the political events that are changing it daily. As Britain huddles on the map, to one side the young General Napoleon is leading the French army across Italy and central Europe, surprising the world with victory after victory. To the other side, America has just elected its second president, John Adams. Yet for one of West’s nieces, all these events have been eclipsed by the arrival of an elephant in New York. ‘Such a strange and wond’rous beast you have never seen, dear Uncle,’ she has written. ‘So ugly in each individual detail – the tiny eyes, the discolour’d teeth, the grey pallor of the wrinkly skin, the absurd little tail. Yet in sum so dignified.’
Such is life, West thinks to himself. In so many details, so filled with ugly absurdity. Yet in sum, if not always dignified, certainly a thing to be marvelled at.
‘These days even I find it hard to credit,’ he writes, ‘how bold I was in courting Outrage. I remember that you yourself, with that characteristick Skeptycism that I have come to value so dearly throughout my life, expressed Amazement when I wrote to you that I had enter’d a dispute with both Sir Joshua Reynolds and the King. I was thirty-two, so not a young man – yet still I was fill’d with the spirit of vigorously Questioning all that I set out to do.’
His education in Europe has not improved his ability to spell. He suspects now that it is one of the causes of his stubbornness – the memories of his schoolmaster hitting him on the knuckles and berating his stupidity still linger. Fear of the scorn he will court through his mistakes is a demon he must wrestle every time he writes.
‘That argument prov’d one of my defyning moments,’ he continues. ‘I desired to paint the great Battel of the Plains of Abraham that the British fought in North America in 1759. It was a battel that seem’d to change everything in Britain’s favour.’ A smile flickers on his lips. ‘No one knew then that we were living in a century of political Earthquakes. Certainly no-one in London could imagyne that in fewer than twenty years America would declare independence.’
He shakes his head, lost in thought for a moment.
‘The convention was that historic figures in paintings wore togas. But this made no sense to me. I believed the time was ripe for change. “No”, said I. “They shall wear what they did on the battlefield. When the Romans had their Empyre, they did not even know that North America existed. If Julius Caesar could not have imagined it on a map, why should I paint the men who fought there in togas?” No-one could give me a sensible answer. So I created the first historical painting without Classical attire. From what some persons said, I was about to walk into the jaws of Hell.’
Sir Joshua Reynolds looms before him. He remembers how the great man had summoned him to his house. When West had entered his study, there had been a sense of winter in the air. He had never seen Reynolds so severe. After he had offered his counsel and saw West was still not to be diverted from his course, he had entirely lost his composure. As West had retreated, he had shouted that his reputation as a painter would be destroyed forever by this venture.
Dazed by Reynolds’s anger, West had taken his leave and wandered to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to contemplate his future. As he had sat on a bench, a thin, insidious rain had started to fall, stinging his eyes and quickly starting to run down the back of his neck. A homeless man had approached him – the skin on his face raw, almost as if it had been flayed by hunger and exposure to the cold and damp. West had given him a guinea. As he had watched him disappearing, he had made a bargain with himself that if the experiment did not work, he would sell everything he had in England, and set sail for America within the month.
‘I suspected my subject would otherwise be Pleesing to the King,’ he recalls now. ‘The Death of General Wolfe, after all, shewed a British General dying gloriously after Victory against the French. I constructed my picture so that Wolfe – tho’ in contemperory dress – evoked the dying Christ when held by the Vergin Mary. He was surrounded by the doctor who essayed to save him and other heroic commanders from the Campaign. I made certain that my English friends could not forget, either, the bravery of the Mohawk tribesmen. I painted the indiginous warrior prominently in the foreground to the left. You alone will have noted his resemblance to Running Wolf who took us out fishing those many years past.
‘Some critics were outrageous enough to write that my painting did not shew the truth in any event. They said that since General Wolfe died in the heat of battel, it is impossible that all the Personnages in my painting would have been present. To which I replied that there is a purer truth than that which can be observed through the eye alone. It is the truth one has when one is in possession of all the Facts, a truth that thru echo and implication tells a story in full.’
He remembers the elemental force of London’s outrage, how fighting against the scandal had felt for a short while like being a piece of straw tossed in a hurricane. Everywhere he had turned he had been buffeted by disapproval. He had proclaimed he found the sensation invigorating, even as he had been filled with alarm. But he had never confessed to his brother – or indeed himself – till now, how terrified he had been.
‘Today,’ he continues, ‘that picture is seen as my Greatest triumph. After chiding me for it, the King realised that the many among the publick loved it. In the end he himself ordered a copy. Some would say I chang’d all of history painting through what I did. No artist paints historical figures in togas these days. Even you, who have so often rebuk’d me, were forc’d to conced that because of my daring I changed the course of art.
‘Yet it has been a long while since I achieved a great success. Now, it feels that even when I Adheer to the rules, I am chastised. The King – and maybe this is a symptom of his Madness – has threatened these last two years not to attend the Royal Academy Exhibition. He believes I am secretly Sympathetick to the French Revolution, and reminds me bitterly of past conversations we have had about equality. Yet I am no traitor. I recognise there is a Delikate line I must tread as a guest of the King, and tread it I do.’
He dips his quill in the ink.
‘There is but one happy Aspect of my life right now,’ he continues, ‘though I comprehend not precisely what it portends. A young girl, one Ann Jemima, and her father, Thomas Provis, came to me a year ago offering a Manuscript that appears to shew the technique of painting like Titian. I was highly Sceptical when they first appeared. But I think I am able to create an effect through using it that is simultaneously subtil and vibrant. The girl herself has responded well to some of the insights I myself have given her on Titian. She is but young, just seventeen years of age, yet it is worth remembering that when one of our youngest members, Joseph Turner, entered the Academy he himself was no more than fifteen years. What is in little doubt is that she is socially more agreeable than Mr Turner, who when I was with him last was spitting on the canvas – whether for social or artistic Effect I am at a loss to say.
‘There is only one curious aspect of our encounters. When she is not in my presence – and I have met her five or six times now – I have no precise recollection of what her Face is like. I can tell you that it is a pleasant enough Face, and the eyes have a blue Aspect, but were you to ask me to sketch it, I could not. Maybe this is an Instance of old age advancing on me. It is of little matter, but it is not a Problem that has afflicted me in the past.’
He frowns, and stares out of the window as if hoping, if not to find the answer to the question he has raised, at least to be distracted from something that is starting to discomfit him. The sky’s blue is lit up by angry streaks of pink, carriages clatter back and forth below.
‘Please let me know,’ he eventually writes, ‘whenever you first have the Opertunity – your opinions on these matters, and anything else that Strikes you to be of importance. I hope you will always know how Important your Opinion is to me, even tho’ I have so often ignored it. Forgive me. The older I get, the more I admire your frankness. I wait to hear from you with impatience, and hope this will find you and your Family in health as through mercy mine are.
Your brother,
Benjamin’
He signs the letter with a frown, and makes to put the crow’s quill back in the small copper oval holder that also contains the inkwell. But he miscalculates the force with which this should be done, and the entire holder tumbles to the floor. For a moment he watches the inky puddle disperse into tiny black rivers across the floorboards. The sky outside grows still darker and the pink streaks disappear, yet it is a while before he can stir himself to remedy the situation.