The Fraud (30 page)

Filipo di Vecellio was in a towering rage. He could not, of course, withdraw from this momentous exhibition, he must be seen to publicise his Art (for what was the Exhibition after all but a marketplace, for all the talk of an ‘English School’. Art was trade, despite the President of the Royal Academy’s talk of ‘Intellectual Dignity’ and ‘Beauty’).

‘And why does he champion History Painting when he is so bad at it!’ shouted Filipo di Vecellio. ‘As far as I can see the only recommendation for History Painting is that the canvases are Large, not that the canvases are Eloquent!’ He shouted all this at his wife, at his returned children, at his sister, at his servants, at his dealer. He had a new dealer. It still rankled in the artist’s heart that his old friend and dealer James Burke had gone abroad so suddenly and for so long: when he had returned, he had not even had the courtesy to renew the acquaintanceship. The new dealer was a short, fat, very rich man called Mr Minnow. Filipo di Vecellio shouted most loudly of all at Mr Minnow. ‘Have you
seen
one of Joshua Reynolds’ Epics? They are an embarrassment as he must know! At least I do not put my hand to something that is beyond me, at least I have Grace! Four hundred and eighty-nine works exhibited and I am insulted!’ Mr Minnow was summarily dismissed. Signore di Vecellio did not care, was heard to shout again. ‘Well, at least if we sell from the Royal Academy we will not have to share our fees with
Dealers
!
’
The family of Signore di Vecellio had not seen him so angry, ever, and sent an urgent missive to Mr Minnow begging him to ignore such insulting and impassioned talk and to return immediately. It was all very distressing, for Signore Filipo di Vecellio was on the whole - everybody knew it - an amiable and charming man.

‘Such an insult to a Founding Member of the Royal Academy!’ he kept shouting in the huge dining-room of his opulent house in Pall Mall as his sister poured soothing Indian tea and the returned Mr Minnow murmured in his ear.

Finally, the root of the trouble was made clear. Filipo di Vecellio had been to the new Royal Academy to see the paintings before the Exhibition opened on the morrow. The President, Sir Joshua Reynolds, had many paintings hung favourably (not to mention his portraits of their Majesties); Mr Thomas Gainsborough had many paintings hung in auspicious places. Of Filipo di Vecellio’s offered eight portraits, only
two
had been chosen to be hung in the Great Room at the top of the new building and the other six were to be shown, most inadequately, in the smaller gallery next door. When he had first started work, portrait painting was perhaps about the sitter: now it was definitely about the artist, and the respect due, and the
signore
felt respect was not being paid. ‘One of my Portraits is hung next to a historical water-colour by an insane Academy
student
: a William Blake, who does not wash, apart from being quite incapable of the Epic Style.
The Death of Earl Goodwin
indeed!’

Worse, one of Filipo di Vecellio’s two portraits in the Great Room had been hung ‘below the line’. He had been ranting about ‘the line’ for days. The ‘line’ was a thin pelmet about eight feet from the ground in the Great Room and the best place for pictures to be hung was just above the line - not too high, but with their bottom frames touching the pelmet. Then, when the room was full of people, spectators could look up very slightly and see the best pictures. It was clear that if people had to look higher to see the paintings further up, the neck would become strained; it was also clear that if pictures were hung ‘below the line’ they would not be seen at all through the crowds.

‘Sir Joshua’s
Portrait of a Gentleman
and Mr Gainsborough’s
Portrait of a Gentleman
and even paintings by that American Mr West and paintings by that foreigner Mr Zoffany’, (Filipo di Vecellio forgot for a moment that he too was a foreigner) ‘have all been hung in more prominent positions than even my best Portrait of Lord Alderly. Even the Portraits of that deceased cartoon himself, Mr Hogarth, find favour these days, everybody knows he went down to the prisons and painted the faces of murderers’ - the only piece of information that really caught the imagination of his son, Claudio, whose mind was really elsewhere - ‘yet here he is exhibiting next to Royalty! And Sir Joshua’s portraits of their Majesties are poor, very poor, I account my portrait of Queen Charlotte infinitely more like.’ (He forgot also that he painted that picture over ten years ago.) Signore di Vecellio was particularly incandescent about the paintings of Mr Thomas Gainsborough, his neighbour in Pall Mall. ‘Gainsborough paints people in the fashionable clothes of today’ - his daughter Isabella’s pretty, sulky face came to attention at the word ‘fashion’ - ‘and as I always say, as Mr Hartley Pond always says, such compositions will last less than a wink of an eye, for Fashions change and Mr Gainsborough’s Portraits will soon be out of fashion and dowdy, and yet there they are - on the line,
on the line
!’

Only his sister Francesca understood how much more there was to his rage than he could express. He had defied them all, misled the whole of London and become one of its most successful portrait painters. To do that he had denied his origins. Yet here, towering over him now was Thomas Gainsborough, son of an English
miller
; Joshua Reynolds, son of an English
vicar
; the despicable, immoral George Romney, son of a
joiner
. All of them had come up through some sort of apprenticeship, not glorious like her brother who had literally burst on to the artistic scene from nowhere, like a firework. It was a bitter, bitter pill for him to swallow that his flame had flickered and almost died; that after all his magnificent subterfuge his English contemporaries had left him behind, after all. (And indeed Signore Filipo di Vecellio perhaps should have considered himself lucky that foreign artists were acceptable to the British Royal Academy: French Academicians would not have dreamed of it.)

His wife, the beautiful Signora Angelica di Vecellio - who had begun, so unusually, to keep to her room - called him to her, soothed him, said she would attend on the morrow and they would take their place where they belonged in London Society: he stared at the loved, changed face and seemed for a moment as if he might weep.

 

The great day dawned, streets wet with rain: the Glorious Day for the Art of the Great British Nation.

The Strand soon became cluttered, and then totally blocked: impassable as noble carriages attempted to disgorge their noble passengers - their Majesties were delayed by the turmoil. Peddlers rushed about with lemonade and milk and pies and apples, adding to the fearful, exciting commotion. A fishmonger had somehow got his cart among the crowds outside Somerset House and was shouting of live haddock for sale, as if people might take one and place it, still wriggling, in a pocket as they entered the illustrious portals.

Finally - the Royal Monarchs safe - the new Royal Academy was unveiled to the waiting world. With an entrance fee disguised as a catalogue as a deterrent, the crowds could not have been expected to be so large, so wild, so unwieldy; people clutching catalogues rushed up the exciting, narrow - dangerous, even - winding staircase; gowns and hats and ribbons were caught, entangled. Shoes fell off, several ladies fainted and one inebriated gentleman fell from a great height and was only saved from certain death by the density of the crowd.

It was, truly, glorious, despite the passing Naval gentlemen, busy with their wars, snorting in derision at some of the people fighting to be admitted. The gorgeous ceilings were gaped at and the various naked statues gasped at; up the staircase, in the Antique Academy, the Medici Venus stood modestly (a plaster copy from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence) and naked Roman gladiators in marble sprawled immodestly as they faced their destiny (young ladies were hurried away before they swooned).

Finally, approaching the last landing and the Great Room, exhausted spectators were treated to a panel that showed
Minerva Visiting the Muses on Mount Parnassus
.
The Academicians had meant that the students at the Royal Academy must look ever upward: the perspiring visitors felt exhorted onwards also but almost collapsed with exhaustion and exertion in the heat. At last, reaching the very top, they pushed and shoved into the Great Room under portals bedecked with words, in Greek, that translated as:
Let no-one uninspired by the Muses enter here
(luckily hardly anybody pushing and shoving understood that the words meant that most of them were actually too ignorant to enter).

Inside the Great Room were a huge number of paintings of all shapes and sizes, hung
hugger-mugger
as one of the newspapers reported afterwards. The paintings hung, crowded very close together, above the line, below the line, on the line: gentlemen’s portraits, epic paintings of scenes from history, portraits of courtesans near to portraits of nobility, frames touching, faces near. Although both un-named, Mrs Sarah Siddons the actress and Our Lord were displayed not far apart.

Sir Joshua bowed, Mr Gainsborough bowed, Signore Filipo di Vecellio with his beautiful veiled wife bowed; heads craned, people pushed, voices raised, ladies emitted faint shrieks, perspiration poured: a bright, glorious, noisy, democratic, thrilling, hot, sweating
British
Art Gallery. There was so much noise and such a smell of humanity that ladies fainted and had to be treated with
sal volatile
and people were squashed against each other and suddenly a young lady cried, ‘How dare you sir!’ to a deeply shocked and serious young man, who turned quite pale in the embarrassment of such a public misunderstanding: she most surely could not think that he had
meant
to brush a hand against her bosom? Surely she understood that he had been pushed by the crowds? And as the spinster Signorina Francesca di Vecellio, who had been studying with great interest the portraits by Sir Joshua and Mr Gainsborough nearby, tried to move away she turned slightly and found herself almost in the arms of the art dealer James Burke, who must have been standing very closely behind her, unobserved. She stumbled slightly: an older woman in a grey gown. He caught her arm and also her waist; in the general
mêlée this
scandalous behaviour was not noticed (and, besides, what would have been scandalous behaviour towards a young lady was surely only chivalry towards an older one).

Francesca di Vecellio was a woman of great calm and control but she could not stop the blush that spread quickly to her cheeks; she immediately stepped back, away from the arms that had once held her in more intimate ways than this. They were surrounded by raised voices as the enormity of what had just happened was realised, there were shocked squeals and conflicting accounts; James Burke easily spoke beneath the noise.

He did not say,
Are you well?
He did not say,
Why does Angelica cover her face?
He did not say,
I think of you still.
His face did not suffuse with lost love.

He simply said, ‘Are you still painting?’

She saw the once beloved face that she had not seen for so long. She had painted it dozens of times: in joy, in agony - not just on canvas or board but in her head and in her thoughts and in her day-to-day living - never was he entirely absent, this man who had finally made her an artist. She saw him still, always saw him, that first moment in her sewing-room as he stood, amazed: one hand arrested at his cuff, his body absolutely unmoving, his face unbelieving: that was his gift to her.

Signorina Francesca di Vecellio therefore looked down for one moment at her gloved hand to contain herself. The voices around them had begun to subside, it became clear there had been a terrible mis-understanding, the bosom not being knowingly brushed, everybody bowed and apologised and a general hum of goodwill rose again.

James Burke spoke to the woman beside him very quietly, his head near to hers. ‘I want to sell one of your Paintings. For a great deal of money.’

She did not understand. He saw that she did not understand. He still spoke low. ‘I do not mean like before. Something has happened, Grace.’ And if he saw her flinch at the use of her name he did not show it. ‘I have - found a Market where you will sell. I believe I have found a way to make you an extremely rich woman.’ Still she looked at him blankly.

‘It is my profession, you remember,’ he said, not intimately, but professionally, and Signorina Francesca di Vecellio saw hooded grey eyes, those eyes that had always been so open and direct. ‘I am, after all, a Dealer in Arts.’

Because of the noise, because of her confusion, because they had not spoken together ever since he left her room that terrible night, because of all these things perhaps she misheard him; it seemed to him that she misheard him. But perhaps she spoke deliberately.

‘A Dealer in Hearts,’ she said. ‘Indeed.’ And she turned away to her young niece, Isabella, who was conversing with rather alarming vivacity to a young gentleman with his own hair elaborately coiffured, the latest style, but as she turned Mr Burke laid his hand, just for a moment more, upon her arm. ‘I will find a way to come to the house.’

And in the pulsating, perspiring crowds in the Great Room Filipo di Vecellio still smiled and nodded gracefully; people bowed to see him. And his wife, the veiled Signora Angelica di Vecellio, once known as the most beautiful woman in London, would never, after that illustrious day, be seen in public again.

 

After such an unforgettable artistic opening there were, immediately, reactions in the newspapers: critics and commentators and members of the public.