Free The Portrait by Iain Pears Page A

sum for it and I felt I should have had a share. It’s not as if I sold it as a Gauguin, after all. My conscience is clear. In a museum now? Good heavens, how gratifying! I must write to them before I die, or better still, I will leave a note in my papers so that if someone ever writes a biography of me, the information will come out then.
    I painted it for purely innocent reasons, I assure you, and had no intention of selling it to anyone. But do you remember when news of this man first came to us? How some shrugged and dismissed him, while you became convinced that he was the greatest thing since—the last greatest thing? I was intrigued, and went along to that dealer who had some of his pictures. I studied them hard, you know; sketched them, examined them meticulously, tried to figure them out. And got nowhere; baffled completely. So I decided to paint one, to see if that could give me any insight.
    It did me no good. Whatever merit he possesses does not lie in his skill; he is not a skilled painter, speaking from a technical viewpoint, and I already found my simplicity in the East End; I saw no need to rush to the other side of the world for it. Besides, they seemed rather fraudulent to me, and I felt rather sorry for those poor native women splodged onto his canvas. They were just puppets, nothing more; no individuality or existence of their own. He was using them, not looking at them. He travelled right across the world and still could see only himself. At least colonialists provide sewage and a railway line to those they exploit. He took and gave nothing in return whatsoever. Nonetheless, a Gauguin I painted, and rather a good one, it seems, as it fooled not only you but everyone else as well.
    I was going to paint over it when I’d finished, but Anderson came to visit. This was shortly after he had abandoned painting and gone into art dealing. “Get between the painter and his public, my boy.” That was his business, and he proceeded to squeeze his svelte little body into just that position; taking more, giving less. The recipe for brilliance as a dealer. You, I recall, were properly sneering at his decision, and were highly critical of the consummation of his marriage to Mammon, although I never really saw that there was so great a difference between him and you.
    You hurt him, you know; and very badly. Under that don’t-give-a-damn façade there beat the heart of a sensitive soul. He really wanted to be a painter—far more than you could ever understand. He had set his heart on it when he was eight, so he once told me. Can you imagine his anguish, poor man? To have everything necessary except true ability? His eye was exceptional, his taste exquisite, his sense of colour remarkable, his feeling for proportion and structure was near perfect. Technically he was highly accomplished. He worked hard. But try as he might, he couldn’t put it all together, couldn’t harness those skills into a harmonious whole. So, rather than be a bad painter, permanently disappointing himself, he became a dealer instead.
    You were the one who forced him to give up, you know. That winter when he took a studio near the Tottenham Court Road and went underground, living like a hermit, doing nothing but work all the daylight hours God sent. By day he painted, the rest of the time he sketched and drew. He became obsessed; I could see it on his face on the rare occasions I bumped into him. The darkness of too little sleep, the slightly hunched air of one trying to defy the world but knowing he is taking a gamble that might well not come off. A man trying to ignore what he already knows in his heart.
    He was painting for his life, working away to try and tip over that edge into—what? Not competence or expertise; he had those already. He wanted to be good, and he thought he was getting there. He persuaded himself this burst of work was inspiration, that finally he had let loose whatever it was that proved so difficult.
    Eventually he