Authors: Matthew Plampin
‘The hall shuts at nine,’ he says, ‘and we are not, I think, at our fastest.’
Drinks are finished off, chairs scraping back as the company heaves itself upright; and not long afterwards they are walking out from the darker regions of Charing Cross, over the broad thoroughfare and around the end of a neat terrace. Sight of the pillory, empty for once, on its platform beside the statue of King Charles – standing in the lamplight like a barren, battered fingerpost – brings Will a jolt of alertness. His fists clench; he scans the people milling at its base. But she’s not there. The realisation comes cold and clear. She’ll never be there again.
The shops, kitchens and concert rooms of Spring Garden are lit merrily against the coming night. A chain of coloured lanterns leads away from the main parade to a small park behind, from where Will can hear a fiddle, and the claps and whistles of a dance. Set on a corner, the exhibition hall is a smart, square construction of red brick, and it is busy. This is troubling. Will’s understanding was that Tom’s venture had foundered. His expectation, when he agreed to this jaunt, was that the place would be deserted.
They approach, weaving and slurring yet also markedly sombre, like a well-oiled funerary procession that has mislaid its coffin. Morland is at their head, swaggering in a wide-brimmed hat; he starts proclaiming about
genius
and
hallowed ground
and asking the people on the steps if they understood, really
understood
, what they have been privileged enough to see. Will lingers at the rear, making discreet efforts to determine who might be within. Academy life, it has turned out, is quite viciously political, and there are several among the senior members who he’d like very much to avoid. But it’s futile, the view too partial to be of any use. He looks to the sign pasted up by the doors: six feet high, printed in large, plain script – and bordered, since last November, with black.
EIDOMETROPOLIS
is emblazoned across the top;
The Form of the Capital
below, in letters half the size; and beneath this, arranged in a tidy block, the description:
A situation so chosen as to sh
o
w to the greatest advantage the Thames, Somerset House, the Temple Gardens, all the churches, bridges, principal buildings etc.
,
with the surrounding country to the remotest distance
.
He must enter. Of course he must. To hell with them all. If Northcote or Hoppner are in there – both broadly supportive during his election the previous year, but conspicuously less so since – he will merely tip his hat and continue with his study of the display. Let them see Morland and the rest. Let them form whatever conclusions they pleased. As he’s climbing the steps, he notices a builder’s cart, drawn up in the street on the other side of the hall. Two others are behind it, and around them a team of labourers smoke their pipes and drink pots of beer. They are set-breakers, he realises, ready to start demolishing Tom’s great picture the moment the doors are shut, in preparation for the room’s next exhibit.
Payment appears straightforward: a coin box on a table, just beyond the entrance, watched over by an attendant. No sum is given, however, a handwritten notice stating that this is being left to the discretion of patrons, with all proceeds going towards the relief of the deceased artist’s family. The company from the Rummer are dropping in shillings, three or four at a time; half crowns too. Even the impecunious Morland manages a stream of pennies that must add up to at least two and six. Then, as one, they are all looking back at Will: at J.M.W. Turner R.A., the most successful and affluent of their number by a considerable distance – widely known, despite his attempts at concealment, to command prices that are double their own, with another nought stuck on the end.
Ambush
, he thinks, fishing out his pocket book. A clean golden guinea nestles in its folds, earmarked to buy a new hat for Father, to smarten the old fellow up a touch and protect his bald pate from the last pinches of spring. That’ll have to wait. He drops in the coin with a private wince and trundles through to join them.
A simple wooden structure fills the hall’s main chamber, something like a drum on a ten-foot stand, with a flight of stairs leading up inside it to a central viewing platform. The company’s excitement suddenly flares, Morland and Bob Porter racing to the summit. The autumn before, in the galleries of the Louvre, Will glutted himself on Napoleon’s plunder – poring over the works of Tiziano, standing stunned before the grand canvases of Veronese, remaining until the guards ushered him out. Following the others up, he’s reminded of those days; of the jubilation that would build within him as he walked into a certain room and approached a particular painting; of the sure belief that he was about to be made wise, elevated, both improved and renewed. The sensation is not so strong here, not nearly, yet it is undeniably present. He can’t help but be irritated by it.
This isn’t Will’s first visit to Tom’s show. He came alone one morning in late October, the day after his return from the continent. A letter seemed an inadequate way to convey his opinion, so he resolved to travel up to the house in Islington that Tom shared with his wife and infant son. There was some Academy business, though, and a few patrons to see, along with a print man in Oxford Street; and then Tom Girtin was dead, killed by the complaint that had hounded him since childhood, and buried before the week was out. Emerging onto the platform now, experiencing the thing again, makes him quite sick with regret.
That it is lit artificially this time, by a huge lantern suspended from the skylights, scarcely diminishes the impact. Many hundreds of buildings are arrayed along the river: foundries, palaces, warehouses, tumbledown tenements and churches by the dozen, steeples of slate and stone sprouting amid the surrounding rooftops. The very best effects enwrap certain sections – the interplay of sunlight and coal smoke, of cloud shadow and morning mist – and thin away to nothing in others, allowing for great clear distances to open up, off towards Lambeth fields and the low hills of the western horizon. The Thames, also, is a marvel, its reflections rendered with unusual detail, and a multitude of complex tones accurately captured; it has a
current
, furthermore, the water seeming to inch mightily around the room. Will knows very well how damn difficult it is to bring this off.
The company’s initial awe is giving way swiftly to sorrow. Georgie Samuel and Louis Francia embrace, both weeping openly, the Frenchman burying his face in his friend’s lapel. Porter, who claims to know panoramas, holds forth with some vehemence about how this one is the finest ever put to canvas, the very
finest
, the absolute pinnacle of the form; while Morland, wet-cheeked, is gesturing with his cane, insisting that those in his proximity attend to certain passages and incidents that he deems especially excellent. The refrain from all is
Promise Denied
: what else Tom Girtin might have done, had he lived just another ten years. Another five.
It is, on one level, a chastisement. Will believed Tom was lazy. It can’t be denied. He thought that indolence lay at the root of the fellow’s many casual attitudes towards his profession; of his refusal ever to make a serious run at the Academy; of his tendency to lose himself in implausible, unachievable schemes. Yet here is an emphatic contradiction, a scheme fully and gloriously realised – and one that represents so much labour, so much concentration and effort, that it makes Will faint-headed to consider it. He looks to Blackfriars Bridge, its stone channel jammed with carts and carriages, pedestrians and riders; to the expert perspective of its arches and the gentle rise in its middle, a miracle of exactness; to St Paul’s beyond, a looming citadel several times as tall as the next tallest structure, the dome sheened with rainwater as a storm closes over the City from the east; and he feels a hot, shameful relief that this man, this great rival, is gone.
It fades almost at once. Will’s eye halts at the border of this storm, snared by a singular effect above the Monument that escaped him during his first visit. The light of an unseen sun infuses one of the uppermost rain clouds, restoring its whiteness – appearing to illuminate it from within like a paper lantern. This brilliant spot lies against a patch of blue on one side and a thunderous darkness on the other. It’s familiar, annoyingly so, like something he himself has witnessed but failed to record. A similar passage, he realises, could correct a deficiency in his latest marine. His largest yet – although not seeming, right then, so very large at all – it is a remembrance of his return journey from France; of a hazardous embarkation, a tip-toe along the lip of a hungry sea. It has power in the water, that he knows, in the waves that lick and froth and gape, but the sky isn’t as effective as this one here. Not by a good distance. Will glances at the rapt, tear-tracked faces around him. He has a small book in his pocket, and a piece of chalk. Could he make a sketch – a quick, ten-stroke impression? Jot down a note? Or simply make his excuses and rush home for an adjustment?
Hissing disturbs the platform’s worshipful hush. Will turns; the artists have huddled at the top of the stairs and are waving him over.
‘Edward Lascelles is here,’ Georgie Samuel informs him as he comes near. ‘Down with the French prints.’
‘You’ve had dealings with him, Will, haven’t you?’ asks Porter. ‘Drawings of the family house, wasn’t it?’
Will answers warily. ‘A while ago now.’
Several of them talk together. The fellow is fabulously rich, and free with it too. They say that he was in Paris last year buying china – splashed over six hundred guineas. And he loved Tom, really
loved
him. You know how these noblemen can get. Kept a room empty at the country mansion just for his use. Commissioned a veritable stack of drawings. Even fixed up his marriage, some have claimed, to that goldsmith’s girl. Tom certainly wouldn’t ever have got round to such a step on his own.
Tiring of preamble, Morland strikes his cane against the platform floor. ‘Turner,’ he says, ‘someone needs to buy this thing. The widow can’t store it. Poor creature’s in dire need of funds – I believe she’d let it go for a hundred pounds and the costs of transportation. That’s nothing to a big beast like Lascelles. Nothing whatsoever.’
‘It needs to be preserved,’ states Francia stoutly. ‘It should stand as Tom’s memorial.’
‘Better it be bought by some blockheaded aristocrat,’ Morland continues, ‘than left to those wreckers outside. There’s no saying what might result if they get their hands on it. Philistinism prevails in England, gentlemen. We all know that. It could end up as decorators’ rags. Beggars’ blankets. Paupers’ shrouds.’
‘You must approach him,’ urges Porter. ‘Make the proposal. For the sake of our friend.’
Beau Lascelles.
For a time, Will was cautious. The pictures, both drawings and oils, were received and paid for without comment. They’re at Harewood, as far as he knows. He spent the money and forgot them. But there was a sense of something unfinished; a suspicion that despite the reinstatement of the Lascelles’ patronage, an opposition lingered. He began to hear of Beau consorting with his detractors and voicing public criticisms of his art. It was even rumoured at one stage that Lord Harewood’s elder son had been plotting with Lady Sutherland to set Tom against him in the Academy elections. This came to nothing, of course. Will’s preparations were too painstaking. And Tom would hardly have co-operated.
Now he’s beyond Beau Lascelles’ reach: a full Academician at seven-and-twenty, with earls and dukes lining up to purchase his canvases, and true connoisseurs seeking him out like votaries approaching an oracle. He’s safe, he’s sure of it, but he can’t rid himself entirely of that old unease. That intimation of doom attached to the name Lascelles. He still takes care to leave any room he thinks Beau might be about to enter. Throughout Tom’s funeral, he was watching intently for an aristocratic mourner who never appeared; and the month before that, in a Louvre swarming with English visitors, he hid behind a majolica St Francis while the heir to Harewood’s party passed nearby. Right then, flight seems the best option. There must be other exits, over at the rear of the hall.
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
This prompts his companions to make their case again, in more forceful, voluble terms – to embarrass him into capitulation, perhaps even drawing the attention of the very man he seeks to avoid. It’s an effective ploy. Simply to stop them, Will signals his assent and starts grumpily down the stairs.
*
Beau Lascelles proves difficult to locate. He’s alone, for a start, without friends or servants; a lofty, greyhound-faced absence, in particular, seems to hang at his shoulder. His clothes are more reserved, as is now the fashion, even among the highest – linen for satin, cotton for silk, powder all but absent. There’s less of him, in every sense. The figure from Will’s memory has grotesque, caricature proportions, with its strut, its gesticulations, its irreducible lordliness. This man here, however, makes him wonder at his years of worry. He looks ordinary.
The area below the viewing platform – the crypt, as it were, beneath the chapel – has been given over to another of Tom’s projects: a series of picturesque aquatints depicting the environs of Paris, taken from drawings made during his stay. The nobleman is studying one of them in the low light, a valley view done in the broad format Tom had come to favour. He notices Will’s approach, but does not break off from his inspection until the painter is at his elbow. Will feels the brush of nerves, as one might before a confrontation, along with a certain detached curiosity as to how this might actually go. Up close, he can see the additional years on Beau, how the architecture of his face is entering the first stage of its collapse – the fault lines appearing, the downward slide beginning. Those hooded eyes, also, are raw. He has been weeping. There is no vulnerability in his manner, though, and his greeting is one of sardonic distaste.