“Harry Furniss, I suppose.”
“Extraordinary! Just possible, but—he died—let me see—surely more than ten years ago!”
“But only from a book. How to Draw in Pen and Ink–it was my Bible when I was a boy.”
“Well, you have his vigour, but not his coarse style—his jokey, jolly-good-fellow superficial style.”
“Of course, I’ve done a great deal of copying since those days, as you can see. I copy Old Master drawings, at the Ashmolean every week. I try to capture their manner as well as their matter. As you said you did when you restored pictures.”
“Yes, and you didn’t learn anatomy from Harry Furniss, or from copying.”
“I picked it up in an embalming parlour, as a matter of fact.”
“Mother of God! There is a good deal more in you than meets the eye, Mr. Cornish.”
“I hope so. What meets the eye doesn’t make much impression, I’m afraid.”
“There speaks a man in love. Unhappily in love. In love with this model for these nude studies that you have been trying to palm off on me as some of your Old Master copies.”
Saraceni laid his hand on a group of drawings of Ismay that had cost Francis great pains. He had coated an expensive handmade paper with Chinese white mixed with enough brown bole to give it an ivory tint, and on the sheets thus prepared he had worked up some of his sketches of the nude Ismay, drawing with a silver-point that had cost him a substantial sum, touching up the drawing at last with red chalk.
“I didn’t mean to deceive you.”
“Oh, you didn’t deceive me, Mr. Cornish, though you might deceive a good many people.”
“I mean I wasn’t trying to deceive anybody. Only to work in the genuine Renaissance style.”
“And you have done so. You have imitated the manner admirably. But you haven’t been so careful about the matter. This girl, now: she is a girl of today. Everything about her figure declares it. Slim, tall for a woman, long legs—this is not a woman of the Renaissance. Her feet alone give the show away; neither the big feet of the peasant model nor the deformed feet of a woman of fortune. The Old Masters, you know, when they weren’t copying from the antique, were drawing women of a kind we do not see today. This girl, now—look at her breasts. She will probably never suckle a child, or not for long. But the women of the Renaissance did so, and their painters fancied the great motherly udders; as soon as those women had given up their virginity they seemed to be always giving suck, and by thirty-five they had flat, exhausted bladders hanging to their waists. Their private parts were torn with child-bearing, and I suppose a lot of them had piles for the same reason. Age came early in those days. The flesh that showed such rosy opulence at eighteen had lost its glow, and fat hung on bones far too small to support it well. This girl of yours will be a beauty all her life. This is the beauty you have captured with a tenderness that suggests a lover.
“I am not pretending to be clairvoyant. Looking deep into pictures is my profession. It is simple enough to see that this model is a woman of today, and the attitude of the artist to his sitter is always apparent in the picture. Every picture is several things: what the artist sees, but also what he thinks about what he sees, and because of that, in a certain sense it is a portrait of himself. All those elements are here.
“None of this is to say that this is not good work. But why go to such pains to work in the Renaissance style?”
“It seems to me to be capable of saying so much that can’t be said—or I should say that can’t be said by me—in a contemporary manner.”
“Yes, yes, and to compliment the sitter—I hope she is grateful—and to show that you see her as beyond time and place. You draw pretty well. Drawing is not so lovingly fostered now as it used to be. A modern artist may be a fine draughtsman without depending much on his skill. You love drawing simply for itself.”
“Yes. It sounds extreme, but it’s an obsession with me.”
“More than colour?”
“I don’t know, I haven’t really done much about colour.”
“I could introduce you to that, you know. But I wonder how good a draughtsman you really are. Would you submit to a test?”
“I’d be flattered that you thought it worth your trouble.”
“Taking trouble is much of my profession, also. You have your pad? Draw a straight line from the top of the page to the bottom, will you? And I mean a straight line, done freehand.”
Francis obeyed.
“Now: draw the same line from the bottom to the top, so exactly that the two lines are one.”
This was not so easily done. At one point Francis’s line varied a fraction from the first one.
“Ah, that was not simple, was it? Now draw a line across the page to bisect that line—or I should say those two indistinguishable lines. Yes. Now draw a line through the centre point where those two lines bisect; draw it so that I cannot see a hint of a triangle at the middle point. Yes, that is not bad.”
The next part of the test was the drawing of circles, freehand, clockwise and anti-clockwise, concentric and in various ways eccentric. Francis managed all of this with credit, but without perfection.
“You should work on this sort of thing,” said Saracem. “You have ability, but you have not refined it to the full extent of your capabilities. This is the foundation of drawing, you must understand. Now, will you try a final test? This is rather more than command of the pencil; it is to test your understanding of mass and space. I shall sit here in this chair, as I have been doing, and you shall draw me as well as you can in five minutes. But you shall draw me as I would look if you were sitting behind me. Ready?”
Francis was wholly unprepared for this, and felt that he made a mess of it. But when Saraceni looked at the result, he laughed.
“If you think you might be interested in my profession, Mr. Cornish—and I assure you it is full of interest—write to me, or come and see me. Here is my card; my permanent address, as you see, is in Rome, though I am not often there; but it would reach me. Come and see me anyhow. I have some things that would interest you.”
“You mean I might become a restorer of old paintings?” said Francis.
“You certainly could do so, after you had worked with me. But I see you do not take that as a compliment; it suggests that your talent is not first-rate. Well, you asked me for an opinion, and you shall have it. Your talent is substantial, but not first-rate.”
“What’s wrong?”
“A lack of a certain important kind of energy. Not enough is coming up from below. There are dozens of respected artists in this country and elsewhere who cannot begin to draw as well as you, and who have certainly not as fine an eye as you, but they have something individual about their work, even when it looks crude and stupid to the uninstructed eye. What they have is what comes from below. Are you a Catholic?”
“Well—partly, I suppose.”
“I might have known. You must either be a Catholic, or not be one. The half-Catholics are not meant to be artists, any more than the half-anything-elses. Good night, Mr. Cornish. Let us meet again.”
“What would you like for your birthday?”
“Money, please.”
“But Ismay, money isn’t a present. I want to give you something real.”
“What’s unreal about money?”
“Will you promise to buy something you really want?”
“Frank, what do you expect me to do with it?”
So Francis gave her a cheque for ten pounds. When Charlie came to Buys-Bozzaris’s poker-night two days later with ten pounds to risk, Francis was immediately suspicious.
“Did you give Charlie that ten quid?”
“Yes. He was in a hole.”
“But I meant it for you!”
“Charlie and I believe in property in common.”
“Oh? And what does Charlie share with you?”
“What right have you to ask that?”
“Damn it, Ismay, I love you. I’ve told you so more times than I can count.”