The Portrait. Iain Pears

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 wasn’t good enough, and d’you know why? Because they were dead. They had no character, no personality. Obviously not, you say, and I don’t want to stress the obvious. But the only way you can depict the flight of character, of the soul, is if you have known the person in life. The man who sculpted Louis XII must have known him well. The absence of personality wells out of that statue like a great hole; you can know the man by what is no longer there.

      I HOPE YOU NOTICE that I have radically altered my technique since you last saw me. I have done away with those vastly long brushes that used to be my stock in trade. A pity, in some ways, as they looked so good. I remember the photograph that went with the review of my first big show at the Fine Art Society in 1905. I was more proud of the photograph than the reviews, I think, good though they were. Now there, I thought, there is a painter. And it was true. I was a handsome dog, and every inch the artist, standing so proud some three feet from the canvas, with that long thin brush extended before me. A bit like the conductor of an orchestra, forcing my colours to take on the shape and shades I required. Big brush strokes, very Impressionist. But it was all thirty years too late, wasn’t it? We were so proud of ourselves for challenging the establishment, bravely taking on the academicians, banishing the dusty and fusty, the conventional and the staid. But they were already dying on their feet anyway, those old codgers. We didn’t really have to fight; our generation never has. Never will, either; if there is a war now—and people tell me there may be one day—it won’t be us marching along, rifle in hand. We’re too old already. Besides, we were merely imitators, importers of foreign ware into England, with no more originality than the people we so greatly despised. Less, perhaps; you would never have mistaken one of their pictures for a French one; our radicalism consisted of making ourselves copyists.