The Fatal Englishman Read Online Free PDF

by the dramatic character of Rome and wanted to stay longer; he felt sure he could work well there. Now that the coast was clear of his wife, however, Gandarillas wanted to return to Paris.
    Wood was happy enough to be back in his well-organised studio. He had made a small library and installed a vast couch in the gallery upstairs so he could spend the night if he liked. In the evening a servant would bring him dinner, and under Gandarillas’s influence he had become a gourmet. On 20 April 1923 he dined alone off vegetable soup, a fresh lobster, filet de boeuf , asparagus, compote de bananes , coffee and a bottle of Bordeaux.
    He worked away and felt encouraged by what he did. Alphonse Kahn told him to go and copy the paintings in the Louvre and he took this fatherly advice in good part. One of his strategies for self-encouragement was to be dismissive of the shows he visited: ‘I saw the Salon today,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘and really there was not one picture I could not have painted much better myself.’
    Like many painters, Wood had a weakness for the circus, and in June he painted a big picture with what, in the terminology of the day, he called ‘two niggers’, Pierrots, a gypsy, a monkey and a dog. He was not happy with the result, but the work he put into it paid dividends almost at once in another painting.
    This was ‘La Foire de Neuilly’, one of the first paintings in which Wood’s own style could be seen. It was a big, jolly, well-organised canvas. He had absorbed some naive influence, possibly from Douanier Rousseau, but it was rendered in terms he had seen in the paintings of Matisse and Derain. The result wasraw but exciting; it was a French painting with a strong English accent.
    The summer season of parties was by now in full swing. The Comte and Comtesse de Beaumont held a ball in their Louis XIV house which had been decorated for the evening by Misia Sert, Diaghilev’s associate at the Russian Ballet. Gandarillas wore a Pierrot outfit designed by Picasso; Wood made a Russian costume of his own. A fellow-guest was Lord Alington, one of the most remorseless pleasure-seekers in Europe. He went as the Sun King, his costume consisting of a number of rays attached to his gilded skin. As the evening progressed he gave away the rays one by one, until even his Louis XIV mask and his golden stockings were gone. When he returned the next morning to the Ritz hotel the old ladies in the Place Vendôme were taking their poodles for an early walk. The manager of the hotel rushed out to wrap Alington in a blanket, but not before Alington, on the steps of the hotel, had removed his golden fig leaf and presented it to the Ritz as a little souvenir.
    Exhausted by parties, Wood confided in his mother that he was having doubts about his own abilities. ‘I can no longer be content to draw things as I see them,’ he wrote. ‘What is the use, it has all been done long ago.’ It was only a tremor. Soon he was back in his usual vein of (desperate ambition: ‘All I want is to succeed, and I shall do it somehow.’
    Then came the invitation he had longed for. Mme Errazuriz asked him to dine with Picasso and his wife. Picasso was the king of Paris. He was at this point going through a monumental, neoclassical phase, though ‘Three Musicians’ (1921) and ‘Three Dancers’ (1925) used techniques of advanced Cubism. He was also doing figurative paintings, such as the beautiful portrait of his little son Paolo dressed as a toreador, and set designs for Diaghilev. Picasso was above the petty squabblings of rival movements; he had won the battle for respect by his Cubist pictures before the War, and by now was recognised and deferred to, far more than his great contemporaries Braque and Matisse, as the Master.
    In France. In England he was regarded with distaste, except by a handful of critics led by Roger Fry. Christopher Wood, to hiscredit, recognised Picasso’s genius. While his own painting went down different