The Portrait by Iain Pears Read Free Book Online Page B

too serious for you. Playfulness has always been absent in your life.
    I remember the trip to Saint-Denis best of all, the great cathedral with the sepulchres of the kings in that grimy industrial suburb. It was one of those revelatory moments that come only rarely in a life, all the more so for being so very unexpected. Particularly Louis XII and his queen, those statues; showing both of them in their full glory, regal and powerful, and underneath as corpses, withered, naked and disgusting. As you are, so were we; as we are, so will you be. No sentimentality or hiding. No black crêpe or fine words to hide the reality. These people were able to confront the inevitable full on, and show that even kings must rot. It is our final destination, and something artists have shied away from for generations. We are young and agile; established and comfortable; dead and decayed. Hope, fear and peace. There are only three ages of man, not seven. I am painting the second now.
    My failure with that boy on the beach, the most recent, annoyed me because the sculptors in that cathedral had succeeded. I could not understand it. It was a simple enough task, after all; a still-life composition no more complex than an arrangement of artefacts at Julien’s académie . But I failed; all I managed was a bundle of shapeless rags, a sentimental, incoherent mess. It was little better than the sort of thing I would have knocked out for the Evening Post . “Mystery Death of Boy on Beach.” Two paragraphs, page four, illustrated with a grotesque sketch by myself, printed in two garish colours—three if it was sufficiently horrible.
    It festered; I am not used to such setbacks. Normally my technique would have sustained me, and allowed me to produce something tolerable enough to revolt the general public. But I no more wanted something accomplished than I wanted something sanitised and artistic. D’you remember that appalling painting by Wallis in the Tate, The Death of Chatterton ? Pretty young poet lies sprawled in an elegant pose across the bed after taking arsenic. Ha! That’s not what you look like if you swallow arsenic! You’re covered in filth, you stink, you lie crouched on the floor from the agony, your face screwed up, hideously disfigured as the poison eats away your intestines. You don’t look as though you’ve just dropped off for a nap after too many cucumber sandwiches. But he couldn’t paint that. That wouldn’t have made people think sentimental tripe about doomed artists dying before their time. That’s what I wanted to get away from, and not by painting landscapes or the poor enjoying themselves at the music hall. Real death—which is the stuff of life, after all. I know; I did quite a few suicides when I worked for those magazines. And murders and hangings. But it was always just work, and I only ever had about an hour to rush off a sketch, get back down to the office and help set up the copy. “Dreadful Death in Clapham.” “Shocking Murder in Wandsworth.” “Part-time Prostitute Found in River.” I would have been there when they fished poor Jacky out, had I not become a painter.
    So, I took a leaf out of Michelangelo’s book and went to study corpses. There’s a morgue at Quiberon, and the doctor in charge has artistic pretensions and no-one to talk to. In exchange for a little scandalous conversation and a few paintings, he gave me free run of the place. Every corpse that came in, I looked at and studied. The more disfigured and decomposed the better. I became quite expert at depicting the effects of maggots, and of water, and of dog bites on tramps left too long in gutters; excellent in putting down in a few strokes of the pencil the beautiful red line that a knife across the throat will make. Of bones showing through green skin, of skulls beginning to surface through the face. The sort of detail even the most scurrilous of London magazines would not touch, let alone a patron of the arts.
    But it still