Free Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill by Diana Athill Page B

gold and silver were beautiful for their shininess.
    It was the same with pictures. Brightness and richness were what moved us – and also the picture’s subject. In an illustration to a story about children lost in a forest, the children must look like real children and the forest must be elaborately leafy and thorny and dark: we were bored and disappointed if the shapes were simplified and the colours flat. However clever the use of a few flat colours, however enticing those colours in themselves, they were not showing us what we wanted to see. And if an illustration which grown-ups saw as deplorably vulgar did show us what we wanted, and showed it with an ebullience of detail and colour, then we loved it.

    Luckily no one bothered much about educating our taste. Every now and then someone who didn’t know us very well would give us for Christmas an artily illustrated book and we would ignore it; and every now and then some grown-up would make it clear that he or she thought comics dreadfully ugly, and we would think ‘Oh well, grown-ups!’ On the whole we were allowed to go on seeing the redness of red and the blueness of blue, even if that red and blue together were boringly ‘obvious’, and experiencing the sadness of sad and the happiness of happy, even if the story which embodied them was painfully sentimental. And there was plenty of more grown-up reading about if we felt like turning to it, which of course we would do sooner or later.
    My favourite picture when I was about eleven, more evocative in my eyes even than illustrations by Edmund Dulac or Arthur Rackham, both of whom I loved, was a particularly insipid drawing of a princess in a fairy story by A. A. Milne. This princess, whose anatomy was quite lost in the swirls of her floating hair and raiment (indeed from the disposition of the swirls she could not have had any anatomy), happened to have features which I coveted: a swan-like neck and clouds of black hair. And her dress, supposing any body could have been found ethereal enough to wear it, was wonderfully becoming. The artist had studied Beardsley, so that feeble though the drawing was, it contained echoes of a dreamy decadence. Time and again I would turn back to it, unable to see why my mother and my governess could see nothing in it. To me it was the essence of unattainable elegance – and it was witty, too: there was something about the way the jewelled slipper peeped out, the fingers tapered and the necklace was implied by playful dots which suggested wit. A real Beardsley might have alarmed me. From this bad drawing I was getting as much pleasure and stimulation as I would get from a real Beardsley when I was older, without any reference to the artist’s skill, simply because this, I was sure, was how the princess in the story looked and dressed. And when I discovered Beardsley I did not appreciate him the less for having been seduced by his feeble imitator: instead I enjoyed him the more because he reminded me of my princess.

    ‘Art’ was the engraving of Dignity and Impudence above the nursery fireplace, and the three watercolours by my great-grandfather on the wall opposite the nursery windows, only one of which was interesting because it was a little bit like the view of the gamekeeper’s cottage near the weir although, disappointingly, it was actually a picture of some unknown place in Yorkshire. Later ‘art’ stretched to include two pleasant silvery-blue East Anglian landscapes by Arnesbury Brown, bought by my grandfather and much more attractive than the other downstairs pictures, most of which were all but invisible behind brown varnish. But – oddly – ‘art’ did not include the five best pictures in the house.
    These were portraits of people I knew, so I didn’t think of them in terms of artistry. They would have been bad if the likeness had been at fault, but since in all of them it was excellent I saw the drawings of my aunts Peggy, Joyce and Doro and of my uncle Bill