The Optickal Illusion Page 5

  Pindar kept reminding him that the more that duchesses and their daughters exposed their flesh in his studios, the more the commissions he needed to survive in London were assured. This was all the inducement that Opie needed. He was haunted by his father’s scorn. The chief vow that he had made to himself when he left home was that he would not satisfy his family by ending up in a debtors’ jail. On the days when self-disgust mocked him, when his mind numbly counted his seductions in the way that a Catholic monk might count his rosary beads, he still gave thanks that at least, so far, he had escaped the gutter.

  Yet life continued like a cartwheel rattling down a slope, faster and faster, the debris flying everywhere. Some kind of collision seemed inevitable, and it had come a week ago when he returned early to his apartment. Foxes screamed in the alleyway as he approached. The noise jarred and shredded at his thoughts, so it was only when he was on the point of entering that he realised the front door had been left ajar.

  Fear tightened the back of his neck. As he entered warily, expecting burglars, a scuffling surged out of the dark. Opie realised he had no weapon with which to take them on. His hands were shaking, but he quickly gained enough composure to dart outside and seize a loose rock from the road, large enough to inflict damage in a fight. It weighed cold and heavy against his fingers – with the other hand he reached to take the lamp hanging on a hook next to the apartment entrance.

  He entered again. The noise was coming from his studio – a realisation that further spiked his rage. His lamp cast a queasy yellow light as he went to open the door. He readied himself for the fight, and raised the stone. But then the images started to crash against his mind like a flock of birds trapped in a small room. The curve of a woman’s naked breast, a pair of walnut buttocks, flapping sheets, sheer locks of blond hair, hands in the air, faces leached of expression. And all the while sounds of shouting that he initially thought were coming from his mouth, but seemed to be coming more loudly from the other side of the room.

  As he fought to make sense of the confusion, time froze, then shattered. The buttocks, he realised with a lurch of disgust, were Pindar’s. An entirely separate body, now hastily being wrapped in a sheet, was that of a much feted society beauty. She was trying not to look at Opie, but her eyes juddered towards him as if drawn by a magnet. As they looked at each other Opie felt the sour tang of disbelief.

  Whenever he thought of the expression on her face in the days immediately afterwards, he would not be able to rid himself of the image of Pindar’s obscene anatomy. The grotesque swell of the belly, the forest of hair erupting from ruddy flesh, the Priapic tilt of the large dripping cock. And the woman, that woman whose guilty gaze fixed him to the spot. Opie had spent weeks tracing her lustrous curves and the pearly white hue of her skin both on canvas and in his mind.

  Her name was Elizabeth Delfton, and her father was the richest man in Lincolnshire. He had commissioned Opie to do a portrait celebrating her modest and virginal qualities. It had taken him a fortnight to persuade her that as well as the clothed version for her father, he might also paint her naked. The sense of victory when she agreed was one of the sweetest he had ever tasted, and that same evening he had confided to Pindar that he was in love.

  But now love lay ripped and ruined across his apartment. His great friend and confidante was his chief betrayer, and his lover’s virtue worth no more than a counterfeit guinea. The unwelcome truth tore through his mind like a hurricane. His lamp dropped to the floor and they were in darkness again. By the time he had lit it again, Pindar and Miss Delfton had disappeared.

  He is brought back to the present by a drunk lurching towards him – the pale face leers and gurns before retreating into the senseless night. Opie looks down into the dark waters of the Thames again. His shivering is becoming uncontrollable – the wind seems to pierce his skin, and runs malignantly through every bone in his body. He cannot delay for much longer his entry into human society this evening. Wrapping his cape around him, he turns his back on the river, and walks across the terrace towards the Royal Academy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Royal Academy, December 1796

  ‘Even Light it self, which everything displays,

  Shone undiscover’d, till his brighter Mind

  Untwisted all the shining Robe of Day;

  And from the whitening, undistinguish’d Blaze,

  Collecting every Ray into his Kind,

  To the charm’d Eye educ’d the gorgeous Train

  Of Parent-Colours. First the flaming Red

  Sprung vivid forth; the tawny Orange next;

  And then delicious Yellow; by whose Side

  Fell the kind Beams of all-refreshing Green.

  Then the pure Blue that swells autumnal Skies

  Aetherial play’d; and then of sadder Hue

  Emerg’d the deepen’d Indico, as when

  The heavy-skirted Evening droops with Frost.

  While the last Gleanings of refracted Light

  Dy’d in the fainting Violet away.’

  james thomson,

  ‘A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Isaac Newton’, 1727

  It takes just a couple of minutes for Opie to walk across Somerset House courtyard and arrive at the entrance hall of the Academy. Inside, oil-lamps give the busts of Newton and Michelangelo the human glow he feels he lacks. As he walks up the geometric staircase, he smiles briefly as he remembers a ripped sketch for a cartoon being passed round a couple of nights ago in a coffee house. In it society ladies tumbled down the staircase, bottoms exposed and petticoats flying, as old men squinted lecherously at the view.

  As he reaches the first floor, a footman greets him and removes his cape before opening the door to the great Council Room. The action makes him feel strangely naked. He fights the urge to turn and run back down the stairs. In front of him extends the horseshoe table around which twenty artists from the Royal Academy are seated. All are engaged in private conversation, yet suddenly he feels under scrutiny.

  ‘My dear Opie – what ails you!’ cries a voice. Opie looks with irritation to see the artist Joseph Farington. Farington’s curiosity crawls over other humans like a colony of ants, he reflects. Sometimes it feels harmless, at others as if it is whittling the flesh from your bones.

  He takes a deep breath.

  ‘My patron is trying to ruin me,’ he replies, as he walks over and sinks into the chair next to Farington. ‘He is a phallus on legs, an obscene Priapus, a swollen cock of the farmyard.’

  ‘A Madeira for Mr Opie, please.’ Farington beckons to a footman holding a tray of glasses. He turns back to Opie. ‘It sounds as if matters have become quite unpleasant.’

  Beneath his carefully tended crop of white hair, Farington’s ruddy visage burns – it would be wrong to say with pleasure. But his expression suggests he is less distressed than his words imply. His domed, white forehead takes on an almost celestial glow, while thick dark eyebrows sit like leeches above his darting eyes.

  ‘What crime has he committed now?’

  Opie laughs blackly.

  ‘What he has done cannot be repeated in polite company. I dream of ridding myself of him,’ here he takes a sip of Madeira before starting to laugh almost uncontrollably, and Farington looks with concern at those sitting around them.

  Opie contains himself. ‘I thought I had met the woman I was going to marry.’ He realises he is almost spitting the words out. ‘Yet Pindar has bedded her. I cannot work with him, yet he tells me I will be nothing if I do not work with him. I am in purgatory.’

  He becomes aware of the long-limbed presence of Robert Smirke. As ever, he is sitting – hand resting on his cane – at Farington’s side. Smirke’s gravitas and sedately curled hair give him the aura of the kind of Caesar who would neither commit incest with his sister nor fiddle while Rome burned.

  ‘I am most sorry to be apprised of your news,’ he says drily. ‘I knew your patron was troublesome, but I had not appreciated to what degree. What is the woman’s na
me?’

  ‘Elizabeth Delfton,’ Opie replies shortly. ‘I have been painting her these three months past.’

  Smirke’s eyes meet briefly with Farington’s.

  ‘Will your patron truly ruin you if you take recourse?’

  ‘Pindar writes doggerel that he describes as satire. You and Mr Smirke are too sophisticated to be among his readers. But there are hundreds – some might say thousands – who think him amusing. If he writes an insulting verse in the morning, it can be distributed by pamphlet so that half of London is reading it by the afternoon. As long as he salts it with enough wit, no one is concerned with discerning fantasy from fact.’

  Farington shakes his head. ‘I have not read Mr Pindar, but I have read some of the attacks on him by rivals.’

  Opie looks at him darkly.

  ‘Pindar is hated,’ he replies, ‘yet it is all fuel to the fire of his selfimportance. Nothing can shame him as long as he is shaming others.’

  Smirke is quiet for a moment.

  ‘I saw you coming across the courtyard from the Thames,’ he says eventually. ‘I trust you were not thinking of jumping into it.’

  Farington shakes his head violently, as if he hopes through this action to dismiss the words his friend has just said. But though his tone is light Smirke’s gaze in Opie’s direction is steady. Opie frowns.

  ‘Be not mistaken. I have no intention of committing suicide…’ he begins.

  ‘No, no, no, I am sure that is not what Mr Smirke meant,’ interjects Farington.

  Opie looks at Smirke, who maintains his gaze.

  ‘I am pleased.’ Smirke’s tone slices the air uncomfortably. ‘Mr Pindar may be making your life wretched, but there are many who prize your existence over his. It would not be worth ending your life because your pride has received a bruising.’

  Opie thinks back to the black waters of the river. He shudders as he imagines their cold embrace.

  ‘That was not my intention,’ he declares with more rage than he has intended. Seeing the alarm in Farington’s eyes, he softens his tone. ‘Maybe it is my patron who should be plunged into the Thames – then the trouble would be at an end for all of us.’

  Finally Smirke smiles. He gets up, puts a hand on Opie’s shoulder, then turns to a group of men behind them. Opie becomes more conscious of the dip and rise of other voices in the room – a great smudge of sound as the artists of the Academy wait for the evening’s lecture to start. He looks around. Many of the men here have sweated their way up from humble beginnings. One the son of a bankrupt, another a political exile, another with an innkeeper for a father. All have achieved their fame after long, lonely hours in the studio. All know what it is to rise in the early hours of freezing winter mornings to paint with numb fingers, or to ignore the call of the outdoors when the sun is dancing outside the window. All know what it is like, despite those efforts, to be devoured and spat out by the London critics. A litany of solitude, self-doubt, and ridicule – that, to him, is the lot of the striving artist. And now they have achieved success, each would fight to the death to be considered infinitely better than anyone else in the room.

  We proclaim that we are a fellowship, yet we are in eternal combat, he thinks, staring at the two men sat across the table from him. Together the pair look like an illustration of youth and age. The former, Richard Westall, is sketched in ink and blood with curly black hair and a sensuous red mouth. The latter, John Rigaud, is a more solid proposition, his tombstone slab of forehead overhung by the tendrils of a powdered wig.

  A clinking on a glass at the top of the table silences the room. Benjamin West stands up. ‘Now we are all here,’ he declares, looking round at the gathering of artists, ‘shall we commence the demonstration?’

  As Opie stares at West, he is aware that the latter’s face is starting to disappear. In response to the President of the Academy’s words, footmen have started to extinguish the oil lamps. Swiftly Opie moves up to West’s end of the room as the shutters are secured over the windows.

  ‘What have we here?’ he exclaims to Farington, who has followed him. ‘A séance for my reputation?’

  ‘No, he intends to murder us all,’ murmurs Westall, who has come round to their side of the table. ‘It’s the only way he has a hope of winning the greatest acclaim at next year’s exhibition.’

  Laughter in the encroaching darkness. Opie takes another sip of his Madeira. Now he cannot see it, he feels more clearly the amber colour of the drink as it runs down his throat.

  ‘I will not keep you in the dark much longer, gentlemen,’ comes West’s voice.

  A few guffaws, though he can sense the masks of contempt on the other men’s faces. Even those who respect West cannot pretend he is a good public speaker. The jokes tend to be leaden, the delivery stumbling. Yet the darkness has a stilling effect, and the mixture of condescension and forced amusement is steadily being replaced by an air of expectation.

  After a few moments one of the shutters is opened and replaced with a board with a hole in it. A thin shaft of moonlight pierces the darkness next to where West is standing.

  ‘We have all studied Newton’s Opticks,’ comes his voice. ‘We bow to his genius in proving that white light is composed of different colours. I have been thinking recently about what the structure we see in the arrangement of these colours teaches us as artists.’

  He is just visible behind the shaft of moonlight. Now he takes the large prism from the leather case in front of him on the table, and holds it so that the rays of the moon shine through it.

  A murmur goes up. The artists are able to observe a small rainbow gleaming in the dark. Its colours are not as bright as those that Opie has seen in more common demonstrations of prismatic colour involving the sun. There is something simultaneously more concentrated and more ghostly about them. All sense of ridicule has now completely vanished. The entire company – the speaker included – seem hypnotised by what they see before them.

  ‘As we know, the refracted light is strongest at the top of a rainbow. Here it shines out in red, orange, yellow,’ continues West. ‘As the angle of light diverges more from that of the original beam, so the shades become more muted – we pass to green, violet, and blue. I have been thinking about how we can reflect this in the practice of history painting.’ He picks up the glass of water next to him, and takes a sip. ‘We structure our paintings through chiaroscuro,’ he continues, ‘through the contrast of light and shade. By studying the rainbow we can enhance this structure through colour. Those aspects of the picture we wish to make most prominent – those onto which, in a sense, we want to shine the most direct light, we can tint with the primary shades of the rainbow: red, yellow, orange. Those aspects which are less significant we can pick out in greens, violets, and blues, which complement the brighter shades without detracting from them.’

  He pauses for a moment, allowing them to take in his words.

  ‘Rubens in particular is a master of this,’ he continues. ‘He uses it to show what is significant and what is not, making it the rule that governs all his great historical paintings. I want you to hold the image of the rainbow in your minds before we move to the next part of my demonstration.’

  Two argand oil lamps are lit. Under the influence of their glare, the moonbeam and with it the rainbow disappears. Between the lamps stand a covered picture. As one attendant removes the prism, another removes the cloth, to reveal Rubens’s Flight Into Egypt.

  There are a few gasps. ‘Good god, this is very interesting,’ comes Farington’s voice.

  Opie merely stares.

  ‘I hope you can see now, gentlemen, why I chose to give you this demonstration by moonlight rather than during the light of day,’ says West.

  His voice carries on, but for Opie there is no more need for words. He has always loved this picture for its sense of stealth and mystery, the muscled angels in the dark bringing a sense of the danger of divinity. Now he looks at it to see how the different levels of emotion bleed into the colo
urs. On the canvas the moon appears as a crescent, twice – once in a limpid grey-blue sky, once reflected in the water below it. To its left the huddled trees create a looming black mass that provided the backdrop to Mary and Jesus on a donkey, accompanied by Joseph on one side, and the angels on the other. What is extraordinary, following West’s demonstration, is how clear the use of prismatic colours is in shaping the way the Holy Family is presented. Science and emotion are balanced perfectly. Mary – as always the emotional focus of the picture – wears a dress of deep brilliant red. Her face, and that of the infant who she holds closely to her breast, are painted in a golden yellow light, so luminous that they outshine the moon, while Joseph, his face turned away from the onlooker, is clad in a rich tawny orange. The strongest colours of the rainbow having been used to establish the heart of the painting’s story, Rubens has made his modulations in pale blues – for the Virgin’s headdress – and muted browns, for the downward bent head of the donkey. The rest is in blackness.

  West seems to be speaking more fluently than usual this evening, and his enthusiasm has spread like a contagion through the room. As the lights are lit again and he concludes, ‘I would like to invite your comments,’ there is an eruption of sound.

  ‘Mr West, Mr West,’ calls one voice particularly loudly.