Free The Fraud by Barbara Ewing Page B

downstairs in Queen’s Square). Large and small portraits on all the walls, some by her brother she at once understood, but other paintings in different styles. Piles of canvases and bare boards were stacked in corners. There were colours in cabinets, wrapped in little parcels. There were large and smaller brushes on trays on a big bench, bottles of oil: walnut, linseed. There were rags and towels and pitchers of water and bottles of Turpentine. He showed her packets of something he named size , a kind of flour, that was mixed with water to paint over the new canvases so that paint would not leak through. And in the middle of the studio with its big windows facing the best light, there stood a large wooden easel. A canvas was stretched over a frame made of wood, ‘That frame is a stretcher ,’ said Philip, and the stretched canvas on the frame stood on the easel. And there on the canvas was a half-finished portrait of a man who seemed to be - from his clothes, from the way he looked - a nobleman: an unfinished nobleman. Beside the easel lay a wooden plate of colours with a hole for his thumb - he showed her how he held it - the plate was called a palette . A palette and a small palette knife beside: many wondrous colours lay there like an exuberant rainbow, mixed, un-mixed, bright, dark: thrilling.
    ‘It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen in my whole, whole life,’ she whispered so that he may or may not have heard her; her fifteen-year-old face was suffused with wonder. For the first time she was seeing a real artist’s studio: it was everything she had dreamed of. Her heart was beating so fast she could not say anything else. And a new thought came:
    I must not, yet, tell him of my own Drawing.
    I must learn more first.
    She stared at the painting on the easel . I know nothing about paint and colours. I seem to be able to draw a face but I have only used charcoal. She looked about her brother’s studio in awe. I need to first understand how little I know. There is very, very much for me to learn.
    Not for one single moment however did she doubt her path and her calling: her hands tingled to hold one of the brushes. She looked around the studio, breathed the scents and the smells into her very soul, and knew: this was to be her life.
     
    At night, from the window at the top of the house, she looked out on this new city, saw London flickering and dancing down St Martin’s Lane. Swirling dark mists came down often, yet some nights stars shone like small lamps above her. Once she quietly took out her paper and her charcoal and in the light of her candle quickly drew the servants as she remembered them: the maid Euphemia’s face was upturned and smiling. Every new night, with her precious small bag beside her, she lay in her new bed in her new room and heard the night-watchmen calling the hour as they made their slow way about the London streets: ‘Three of the morning, ’ they would call, and, ‘All’s well.’ And she thought to herself, yes, yes all is well. I shall learn, I shall learn everything from my brother, and then, at last, I shall be an Artist, just as he is, the two of us, together, shining just as I said , and new happiness almost overwhelmed her.
     
    She curtseyed to the handsome gentleman her brother introduced her to, her cheeks flushed. ‘ Buongiorno , Signore Burke,’ she said, and he bent to her hand and smiled.
    She must not make a mistake: she must sound right. This was the rich, important art dealer, her brother’s art dealer, Mr James Burke: a tall handsome gentleman with a direct gaze and beautiful grey eyes. Mr James Burke did not wear a wig but wore his own hair tied back, in the fashion of sailors, so lightly powdered as to be almost its own colour. ‘He may look like a Highwayman,’ said her brother, ‘but he is the most powerful person in my life! He arranges for me to meet all sorts of interesting and wealthy people - and he explains to them that I am the best