The Optickal Illusion

  Advance Praise

  ‘As if stepping into the frame of a sensual, intricate and richly textured painting. The novel is a fine achievement by a serious and talented writer’

  Weny Wallace, author of The Painted Bridge

  ‘The descriptive language is rich with colours and patterns… an absorbing story with lively characters and an unconventional female lead’

  The Bookbag

  THE OPTICKAL ILLUSION

  A very eighteenth-century scandal

  RACHEL HALLIBURTON

  To my boys Bill and Fergus, and to Lily.

  ‘We are never further from our wishes than when

  we fancy we possess the object of them.’

  johann wolfgang von goethe,

  Maxims and Reflections, 1819

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE: London, January 1797

  CHAPTER ONE: America, 1757

  CHAPTER TWO: St James’s Palace, residence of King George III, London, 1795

  CHAPTER THREE: The environs of Somerset House, December 1796

  CHAPTER FOUR: The Royal Academy, December 1796

  CHAPTER FIVE: A walk through St James’s Park, December 1796

  CHAPTER SIX: Mr West writes home

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Dealing with Mr Cosway

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Mr West’s betrayal, January 1797

  CHAPTER NINE: Joseph Johnson delivers a warning

  CHAPTER TEN: Ann Jemima’s flight

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: Three artists and a bottle of gin

  CHAPTER TWELVE: The plot for revenge

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A dispute with Mrs Tullett

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Persuading the artists of the Royal Academy

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Benjamin West and the art of self-deception

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: The tide turns against Mr West

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A meeting at Wright’s Coffee House

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Mr Cosway demands his price

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: Dinner at Joseph Johnson’s

  CHAPTER TWENTY: Ann Jemima recovers

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: Benjamin West confesses

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Josiah Darton travels to the West Country

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Benjamin West is forgiven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: The ingenious Miss Provis

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: The lamentations of Thomas Provis

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: The fate of a respectable woman

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: The Exhibition

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: The critics’ verdict

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Venice, November 1797

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  London, January 1797

  Benjamin West thought back grimly on the events of the last year. Forced himself once more to remember that initial meeting.

  The Provises had seemed curious from the start. There was something disconcerting about the two of them, as if they had been belched up fully formed from the earth seconds before appearing on his doorstep. The man was sallow-skinned, mud-eyed. A creature of perverse moods and humours. The girl, by contrast, had a fresh and pleasant demeanour. Lit by her curiosity, her pale blue eyes swept boldly around the room, even as she described to West the purpose of their visit.

  They were father and daughter, they said. The father was a courtier at St James’s Palace who worked in the Chapel Royal. The daughter had ambitions to be – and here West still felt a jab in the stomach for reasons he couldn’t understand – the daughter had ambitions to be an artist.

  What had he failed to comprehend? He had intended to deal with them honourably, but now everyone in London was saying he had not. It was as if somebody had dropped a small amount of ivory black paint into yellow orpiment on a palette – the more he prodded and stirred the memory, the murkier it became.

  They had come to him for advice. They wanted to talk to Benjamin West as the pre-eminent artist of his time. He laughed contemptuously. Traveller, innovator, and great friend of King George III despite the undoubted disadvantage – since 1776 – of being an American.

  His heart started to beat slightly faster. In these times the world seemed permanently to be shifting. Each day was a walk onto thin ice – you never knew whether the next step would leave you upright or plunge you into oblivion. When he had arrived in London, thirty-four years ago, he’d had no intention of staying. Yet somehow his centre of gravity had shifted. Now the city was his home. But for how much longer now that all in London were calling him a scoundrel?

  Like a greyhound slinking to its bone, West’s mind returned again to the meeting. It had taken place just over a year ago in December, at his house on Newman Street. The couple had entered the very drawing room where West sat now. The father, Thomas Provis, had sidled up to the sofa clutching a sheaf of papers, while the daughter, Ann Jemima, almost danced into the centre. Both looked as if they had found their natural positions in the room, she the source of light and he some insignificant little planet orbiting around her.

  ‘I am filled with gratitude that you set aside this time to see us,’ she declared. Her long thin fingers clasped and unclasped themselves. As she began her account of why they had come to visit him, he had been captivated by the excitement in her eyes, the confidence of her voice. But now the recollection of the father’s lingering silence made more of an impression on West’s mind. Was he being judged even then? Had Mr Provis perceived something about his own character that even he hadn’t realised? Some duplicity he hadn’t fathomed?

  ‘The father and daughter have a manuscript.’

  Another painter had told him about them. Richard Cosway – a renowned philanderer – had been giving art lessons to Ann Jemima Provis, and was eloquent about her charms. Even before he met her West could see in Cosway’s eyes, in the suggestive movement of the tongue across cracked lips as he talked, that she was just the kind of young lady who appealed. He had not, therefore, taken it very seriously when Cosway told him she had made an important discovery.

  The manuscript had been left to her father, Thomas Provis. In it, apparently, was a secret that had obsessed every single artist of note over the last half century. They were willing to hand it over for a considerable sum of money.

  ‘It is a technique for painting like Titian,’ Cosway said. His eyes held West’s for a second. Scepticism glimmered in the air between them, and they both laughed. ‘I agree, it is most unlikely that a low-ranking courtier like Provis has come into possession of any such document,’ he continued. ‘But it would mean much to Miss Provis if she had the chance to explain it. She is a most insistent young lady, and I have told her that you, as President of the Royal Academy, would be in the ultimate position to judge the manuscript’s authenticity.’

  ‘How did they come into possession of it?’

  ‘I believe they found it in papers that Mr Provis inherited.’

  ‘Why was the secret not discovered till now?’

  ‘I think Miss Provis would explain it better than myself. The story is somewhat convoluted.’ Cosway coughed drily. ‘An expert such as yourself will find it easier to separate the vinegar from the wine than I have.’

  The flattery was clumsy. But that did not mean West was immune to it. In this city every other scoundrel had a miracle. Yet with a flourish of the quill and a splash of ink, he made an appointment to see them the following Tuesday. What the couple claimed to possess was no doubt as dubious as most of these schemes. But there was no reason not to hear them out for a few moments – entertain himself with their theories about something that had taunted him for much of his life.

&nbs
p; If they were obvious charlatans, he would escort them politely to the door. And in the unlikely event that they had discovered something of value, he would give them some money in return for their presenting it to the Royal Academy. Of one thing he was sure: whatever they were claiming about their manuscript, they would not be in a position to understand it fully. Thirty-seven years after first coming to Europe, West had made sure that no one in London had an understanding of Titian that was superior to his own. If their game was one of deception, he would see through it in a second. If they were honest people then he would be in a position to help them greatly.

  And so the meeting had taken place. Now, more than a year later, he found himself threatened with ruin.

  He gazed out of the window at the darkening winter sky, lost in thoughts from which he emerged discomfited some moments later.

  ‘Was it myself I misunderstood, or the Provises?’ he whispered. Then he shook his head angrily. ‘A crime has been committed. And I am the one who stands accused.’

  Scandal was the meat of this city’s conversation – whether it was good quality beef or maggot-riddled mutton it was consumed daily and regurgitated as eagerly in St James’s Palace as in the lowest taverns. Till now he had avoided being butchered for London’s entertainment. How West acted in the next few days, he realised, would make the difference between whether his reputation was merely put on the grill, or stuck through with a spit before being ripped apart so savagely that he would never be able to live here again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  America, 1757

  ‘To live is not to breathe but to act. It is to make use of our organs, our senses, our faculties, of all the parts of ourselves that give us the sentiment of our existence.’

  jean-jacques rousseau,

  Émile, or On Education, 1762

  Forty years before the scandal that threatens to consume him, Benjamin West is on a riverbank in Pennsylvania covered in mud. He will never forget the smell of it, the feel of it. Rocks and minerals pulverised by time, swirled into sludge by the same forces that will eventually grind everything down.

  Benjamin and his elder brother William are following a Mohawk tribesman. The tribesman, Running Wolf, has promised to impart to them secret knowledge that Benjamin wants, and his brother thinks he is mad to want.

  As Benjamin West makes his way along a steep bank he slips. A world flies up around him; his elbow, then the rest of his body, hits the ground, and seconds later he is looking at the sky.

  ‘Tarnation!’ he bellows.

  The mud is spattered across his stockings and breeches, and he can feel it starting to seep under his jacket. He slides towards the water. He grabs at a root, winces at the raw pain of it against his hand. Below the river roars and shimmers. With a jolt his body stops.

  ‘Benjamin!’

  His brother’s face – upside down – hovers above him. He can see the raw lines of shock upon it. His eyes are darting back and forth, making the calculation: can he descend the bank without slipping himself and dragging them both towards the river?

  Benjamin looks downwards. He can see a rock jutting out, and lunges towards it with his right foot. Once he has confirmed the rock will take his weight, he swings his whole body round so he is facing the bank, and starts to attempt the climb back to the path.

  ‘Curses!’ he cries as he slips again, but this time Running Wolf is reaching down. Benjamin stretches his hand up with his fingers extended, ‘as if he were Michelangelo’s God, and I were Adam’, he will joke later. The tribesman’s hand goes past his and grabs onto his wrist, there is a sense of a great upward force, and then he is on the path. William regards him with a mixture of relief and disbelief.

  ‘You look like a man born out of mud,’ he declares.

  ‘I came here to discover about mud,’ Benjamin replies. ‘I feel no shame that I have covered myself in it.’

  Around them nature’s canvas dances and shifts: ruby-throated hummingbirds, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, ox-eye sunflowers, the white and crystal fury of the river.

  ‘Come further upstream,’ says Running Wolf. ‘The river is slower there. You can wash the mud off…’

  ‘… and then you can mix it with bear’s entrails and paint it on again…’ says William.

  The tribesman’s eyes flicker towards Benjamin, who smiles and shakes his head.

  ‘My brother shares not my passion for art.’

  ‘It is fine enough when it sits quietly on a canvas,’ replies William.

  ‘He understands not that I want to talk to people for whom paint is a part of life and death, of war and celebration.’

  ‘You will do anything to gain an advantage over other artists.’ William’s eyes spark. ‘If you had to go to Hades and back to get a colour that no one had used, I’d wager you would do it.’

  A large clot of mud falls off Benjamin West’s cheek as he considers a reply. The two brothers stare at each other. Two men standing either side of an obsession – Benjamin’s eyes ablaze, William’s eyes shiny with mockery. They hear the same words, yet the words stir emotions in each man that the other cannot comprehend.

  ‘It is bear’s grease, not bear’s entrails,’ Benjamin eventually says more seriously.

  ‘I see not a great difference. The bear still dies.’

  ‘Mr William,’ says Running Wolf. ‘Let us go. Your brother needs to wash. There will be someone who can teach you to fish with a spear.’

  A look of sly amusement crosses Benjamin’s face.

  ‘Is not his tongue sharp enough?’

  ‘I speak thus because I love you, brother.’

  Benjamin reaches out with a muddy hand and grabs William’s till it too is encased in dirt. He looks into his eyes. ‘Then taunt me no longer.’

  A truce is established with a look, and the three men walk on together. The morning sun has returned after two days of rain – dragonflies dance, and a bald eagle soars overhead. That day William catches six fish, and Benjamin learns secrets that will stay with him for the rest of his life. But right now all is the rushing river, the heat of the sun, the whirr of insect wings and the different rhythms of birds, the shivers in the grass, the darting of lizards, and the thick, clinging mud.

  Voyage to the Old World, 1760

  At the age of twenty-one, Benjamin West is on a sugar-merchant’s ship heading for Italy. There will be a point in his life when he will ask himself if this is where it all started to go wrong. But as he embarks all he can sense is the swirl of sea against the prow and a silver sun breaking through early morning cloud. His old life is packed up in a trunk and the possibilities of the new one hang in the briny air.

  A wealthy patron has recognised his talent and has offered to send him five thousand miles away and three hundred years back in time. Titian, Raphael and Da Vinci are some of the artists West shall study – he shall also witness the dissection of human corpses, and sketch according to the Golden Ratio.

  His excitement at what is to come sustains him through a voyage that proves tedious apart from an incident in the third week when a pig escapes and causes uproar below decks. On a morning raw with the sound of seagull cries, a sixteen-year-old boy goes to dispatch the animal for that evening’s dinner. But whether it is the gleam of the knife, or the look in the boy’s eye, the pig scents oblivion and decides it does not want to meet it. One flash of steel, and the swine turns battering ram. The boy runs to hide, while the animal pants and squeals between the galley and the storeroom.

  West is one of the men who helps to catch it. It is a moment of strange joy amid the tedium. On the night of the pig’s attempted escape, he sits in his cabin and draws the incident in his journal. Working with black chalk held in a porte-crayon, he takes much time over the pig’s fleshy snout and the contours of a belly that seems continental in size compared to the stumpy promontories of its legs. He does eight or nine sketches of the men trying to catch the animal, observing how the different angles of the bodies affect the sense of speed and chaos within t
he picture. ‘If it is done the right way, a picture can contain past, present and future,’ he murmurs. He stares at his final image, then, dissatisfied, rips out the page and screws it up.

  He goes to lie on the uncomfortable narrow bunk that has been warden to his nights since the ship set sail from Philadelphia. As he struggles to fall asleep, his memories of the furore merge with the commotion that arose when, two months beforehand, he announced to his family at dinner that he would make this trip to Europe. He remembers his brother, sees again the outrage on his face. When he eventually spoke, his words were full of contempt.

  ‘It is ambition that drives you from us. Our grandfather risked everything to come from England with William Penn. Why can you not honour him by building your life here and supporting our parents?’

  ‘It is not ambition,’ he chided him. Though in truth he could not say what the excitement was that gripped him. The taste of unknown cities, untried ideas, the sense that the future had become a cliff edge from which he might either soar or plunge.

  His mother watched them keenly.

  ‘Benjamin is doing exactly what his grandfather would have wished him to do,’ she declared.

  He understood her too well not to recognise that she was upset, but knew also that she would be mortified if he stayed behind for her. William raised the level of attack.

  ‘There is a chip of ice in your heart. I have witnessed it all too often. Most of the time you are an honourable man, but whenever you get the chance to advance yourself, you will do whatever is needed, no matter who suffers.’

  There were tears in his eyes that he blinked away quickly. Benjamin realised that in his anger he too was trying to conceal a fear of losing him. He reached out a hand. But his brother backed away, glaring.

  He felt the tears in his own eyes.