part one


Space opens up (or out) to your left. The long table. The porridge-toned gong to call you to breakfast. The Italianate marble fireplace with the family crest. Griffins Cupids. The three doors. Along this wall. The first – reading left to right – opens back onto the red room, the after dinner burgundy glow. The second middle door will yield to your interest in time. As it becomes visible. The third waits. Your simple escape

The gloaming brooding of Landseer's landscape must be left its corner. Other paintings. Surrounded by voices. Dead. Over your shoulder. Turn around.


Schloss Rosenau. It's an isle of light. Along the aisle of light. Sufficient to allow divinity or merely human majesty its approach. Seat of Prince Albert, Coburg, Germany. Panels flank the radiance of patronage. Split the image in two

 

(overlapping voices:

'there is a picture that resembles nothing in nature but eggs and spinach. The lake is a composition in which salad oil abounds and the art of cookery is more predominant than the art of painting'


'an interesting scene if you could make out its character but German nature may be like German art, not designed to be intelligible to commonplace mortals'



'a smeared palette'



'wonderful fruits of a diseased eye and a reckless hand')

(a single voice, John Ruskin, 1842:

'If you take such a piece of water as that in the foreground the first impression from it is: "What a wide surface!" You glide over it a quarter of a mile into the picture before you know where you are and yet the water is as calm and crystalline as a mirror. You are not allowed to tumble into it and gasp for breath as you go down. You are kept upon the surface: flashing and radiant with every hue of cloud and sun and sky and foliage. But the secret is in the drawing of these reflections. You cannot tell when you look at them what they mean. They have all character and are evidently reflections of something definite and determined. Yet they are all uncertain and inexplicable. Play colour and palpitating shade which you cannot penetrate. Nor interpret. You are not allowed to go down to them. You repose as you should in nature upon the lustre of the level surface. This power of saying everything. And saying nothing. Too plainly')

  

They are not nearly human enough. That boy tensing the supple fishing rod. This girl floating on her own misshapen collapse. Their scattered picnic. On the river plain behind them, crouching mendicants are at some filthy human game. Fawning before an oblivious king


part two


Ten paces down the length of the room: // Find

what could be Margate Harbour on a sunny day

Or Emigrants Embarking. Or not

They scratched away the cracked sky to find the sun

The 'lighthouse' is a white-hot brushstroke a blemish on the skin of light

The 'emigrants' are in motley headdresses robes

Preparing for war? is this not

Odysseus setting sail for Ithaca

Caesar Landing in Kent

A Viking Funeral on The Swale

King Alfred Inspecting his Fleet

Goethe's Theory of Colour

With what confidence could you mount the steps to the promise of a quayside?


part three


Imagine that you have bought another painting. Not quite this one three side-steps to your right: // The Wreck Buoy

The painter requests you to loan it him. Back. In a sense it has been 'his' already. Forty years. He is unhappy. As ever. With the painting. As it is. It is. Completed. 'An early picture on which Turner spent six laborious days quite at the end of his life much to Mr Munro's horror

but it came out gloriously with a whitened misty sky and a double rainbow.' Impossible arc. Spectral retribution. Painted. Over. Not over. There are people there abandoned. Drowning

Do you expect improvement. Embellishment. When it returns. The painting darkens. Its allegory more equivocal. Ruskin called it Turner's last 'before his noble hand forgot its cunning

More lightning burst than rainbow. Obliterated hope. Sucked into error. Paint our virtues over. And over. Until we believe

in a completely different picture. Can you wish or demand the old one back? Will the artist repent his pentamento? When he sees your face. He knows you will sell it

(whispered or muttered quietly): HAJ Munro of Novar, sold Christie's, bought Agnew; John Graham of Skelmorlie Castle, sold Christie's, bought Agnew. Bought by George Holt, 1888, £1837.10.0

The eye's progressive asperities. Pull back to hopeless degradation. All the surfaces for sinking

Scribbling in a graveyard of brushstrokes