The Dark Clue by James Wilson Read Free Book Online

blue sky,’ he said, ‘he’d as like as not try to make a brighter or a bluer. Once, I recall, he’d done a beautiful grey picture of
Helvoetsluys,
without a hint of positive colour; and next to it was Constable’s
Opening of Waterloo Bridge,
which seemed to have been painted in liquid gold and silver; and Turner looked several times from one to the other, and then fetched his palette, and put a daub of red lead on his grey sea, a little bigger than a shilling, and went away without a word.’ He started to laugh. ‘And poor Constable groaned: “Turner’s been here, and fired a gun”; for, of course, his own picture now looked weak and insipid by comparison.’
    â€˜Perhaps, then,’ I said, ‘it’s little wonder Turner was so much disliked.’
    Davenant nodded. ‘But what none of them understood was, he meant no harm by it. It was but a kind of friendly rivalry, a goad to make us all strive harder, to perfect our art. If you outdid him, he’d laugh about it, and clap you on the back, and tell you to enjoy your victory. And he’d as soon help you as fight you. No man had a truer eye for what was wrong with a picture, or for how to make it right.’ He got up. ‘Let me show you something.’
    I followed him on to the landing and halfway down the stairs,where he stopped before the moonlit seascape I had passed, not a quarter of an hour since, on my way up. I now noticed, picked out in black lettering on the frame, the title:
Dover beach: night. By John Davenant, R.A. Exhibited 1837.
    â€˜There,’ he said.
    It was a dramatic enough scene, with moonlight spilling out from behind a great bank of dark cloud, and then shattering into a hundred pieces on the inky sea. Just below the horizon was a heeling merchantman, its full sails almost black in the eerie light.
    â€˜It has great power,’ I said, glad to be able to praise something wholeheartedly at last.
    He nodded, colouring with pleasure. ‘But the power is Turner’s. My first conception was quite different – no cloud at all, and the moonlight falling straight on to the ship, and making the sails glow white – and that is what I painted. But when I saw it framed, and hung at the Academy, I knew it was wrong, and so did my friends – but could any of us say where the fault lay?’ He shook his head. ‘Not until Turner chanced by, clutching his palette, and looked at it for half a minute, and said: “It wants depth, and contrast. You should cover over the moon – make the mass of the cloud black, and the edges silver, so you’ve got the brightest and the darkest next to each other – put the sails in shadow, and a dab of light on the bow.” Well, I felt the truth of this, but I was naturally rather cautious, and, try as I might, I could not get the effect he meant; and after coming back once or twice to see how I was getting on, he finally lost patience with me, and seized the brushes, and did it himself – two great strokes of black, two of white’ – here he mimed the words, with large sweeping gestures – ‘one, two, three, four. And of course we all saw at once that he was right.’
    Davenant stood back to admire the painting, chuckling and shaking his head in wonderment; but I felt faintly disturbed – not merely by the high-handedness of Turner’s intervention, but also by its result: for it had instantaneously transformed a scene of bland tranquillity into one of louring menace. My thoughts, however, were at that instant disrupted by the sound of footsteps from below, and by Davenant’s suddenly roaring, so loudly that I nearly leapt from my skin:
    â€˜Good God, Hartright, there’s dedication for you!’
    I turned, and saw Mrs. Holt coming upstairs towards us.
    â€˜She doesn’t wait to be called, you note!’ said Davenant. ‘Can’t wait to get back to harrying the