The Portrait Read Online Free PDF

then; the light is good and I’m often at my best when in an ill-humour. No, no, no. You know better than that. Both arms on the chair, head against the rest; you are meant to look senatorial, the Roman of old, an imposing figure of authority. Don’t you remember? Or did your dinner have a similar effect on you as on me that you slump there like an empty paper bag? That’s better. Now keep still, for pity’s sake.
    Memories? Oh yes. Both good and bad, I assure you. Worst of all, you brought out feelings of regret, for the first time since I came here. But then, you always had that effect on me, so why should it be any different now? I started thinking about what might have been, had I stayed in London, had I cultivated people properly, had I stayed in the fight, had I got married. I saw the career ahead of me, culminating in a large house in Holland Park or Kensington, revered by my many pupils, rather than forgotten and living in total isolation. Too late now. Now I would have the reputation of being unreliable, an unsafe pair of hands. How many commissions do you think I abandoned when I left? At least a dozen, most of them paid for. And I doubt that what I paint these days would find much favour. Too eccentric, too strange.
    It could have been different, as you know. It was within my grasp; all I had to do was keep in favour with people like you, produce works that were suitably advanced but not too daring that no-one would buy them. That is why I can indulge in regret. You can’t regret a fantasy; only a real opportunity lost can produce that sort of wistfulness. Would success have been so delicious as it seemed when I thought about it late last night in my bed? Probably not; I tasted enough of it to get the bitterness on my tongue, the dry feeling in my mouth when I complimented ugly old women for the sake of their husbands’ wallets, or made polite conversation to dealers interested only in the difference between buying and selling prices. I knew the vulnerability of the successful with those beneath, eager to tear them down and feast on their entrails.
    Did we not do that, you and I? Would I have been spared in my turn? I think not. It is the cycle of the generations, played out in every species that walks the face of the earth. The rise of the young, the tearing down of the old. Again and again. Was I supposed to sleepwalk meekly through a play where the script was already written, on which I could have no influence? We sat long hours in Paris bars and London pubs, sneering at the likes of Bouguereau and Herkomer and Hunt, deriding their pomposity, the prostitution of their skills into sterile emblems for the bourgeoisie—those were the glorious, rolling phrases, were they not? How good they made us feel. But what would those below say about me now? What are they called again? Vorticists, Cubists, Futurists or some such? Too weird even for you, I imagine. Sentimental, I think, might be one word for the sort of stuff I was producing in London. Prettified, perhaps; insincere would wound because it would be true. And no doubt a whole raft of other insults I cannot even imagine. Who knows what sins we committed in our turn when we cast our elders into the darkness and trampled so gleefully on their reputations?
    We weren’t really very good, you know. Think of all those acres of canvas we churned out when we came back from Paris, all that semi-digested Impressionism. We got rid of the wistful peasants and the studies of girls knitting, true enough; but we replaced them with unending landscapes painted in muted greens and browns. Thousands of them. Didn’t really matter if it was Cumbria or Gloucestershire or Brittany, they all looked pretty much the same. I don’t know why English painters love brown so much. It’s not as if it is so much cheaper than any other colour. We learned from the Impressionists only how to produce pictures safe enough to hang on the parlour wall, next to the engraving of the Queen and