Letters

The Portrait Painter

Can you start by telling us a little more about your apprenticeship. It's certainly an unusual start to a career; a beginning which seems dated by modern standards in that you actually apprenticed yourself to an established artist [the forger Han van Meegeren]. Why did you decide on this course?

Because I love the old system, the old routine of work and discipline, of learning your craft from a master. Van Meegeren was very reluctant about the idea at first, in fact he was displeased I even managed to find him in Roqubrune. But he was already doing small classes here and there. Teaching local kids basic sketching and technique, trying to earn a bit. At the outset I suppose it was nice for him to speak his mother tongue again — he'd burnt a lot of bridges before the war, and by the actual nature of his art, so he had every reason to be suspicious of me.

But the turn came when he admitted to wanting a working studio, a full studio with all the trappings — light, models, materials and constant production. It was a bit of a novel idea, almost a pipe dream; and then I come along and plant the idea of apprenticeships in his head, you know, a classical studio with apprentices preparing paints and canvasses and taking lessons in perspective and running errands, earning their keep doing the rough work which the master finishes and signs as his own — just like they did in Holland in the 17^th.

And he really did want to teach, he was good with the kids. I'm sure it also pleased his vanity — the sheer innocence of it — the proposal, I mean the conceit of giving two years of my time just to learn how to see properly — it tickled him. All the media reports consistently left out the generosity of his humour; I'm sure the idea of conducting apprenticeships was right up his alley. I think that clinched it — the sheer classicality of it — which for van Meegeren was very close to his heart, what with Vermeer and all. I mean, how many artists can tear themselves away from the public coalface long enough to teach some other sod how to render properly?

Bless him, he taught me everything from the basics to the final touches. Once he'd warmed to me he gave generously, and you don't have to look deeply in my work to hear his influence. He corrected and refined all the unpruned shit, the misgiving in how I saw and rendered things. He taught me illustrative narrative, tone and the psychology of the eye — I mean controlling perspective so others participate in the mood, making a scene real emotionally. And balance, the illusion of natural progress and movement, all the tricks.

Everything I do now has its roots in that studio period. And to be honest I think we came close to doing the old system justice, of doing the hard work before signing your name. It's wonderfully archaic. Van Meegeren was a trifling taskmaster, he had that edge of the sadistic bastard about him; but in the end that was all good, it helped. When he did correct my work it'd only be for emotive tone and expression, that's where he came down hardest.

I got a very strong discipline out of the bargain — and something of his mad eye for detail both inward and outward. Let me also say at the outset that there was deep spirit in the man.

His ability for mimic was astounding — he could take in a scene at a glance and months later do it full justice with only a spare prop arrangement in front of him; he was very structured and disciplined in this. I caught only a glimpse of the mindset behind it — he certainly didn't describe all his methods to me, but he had his own classical training. Actually, out in the field near the end of my stay, working on a small landscape which I don't think ever came up in the catalogue — I remember it was a blazing hot day and he deliberately went out at noon — that was when I got the feeling he saw more than was actually out there in front of us. It was uncanny — but at the same time, something of a put-on, like an air or attitude deliberately struck, which if it weren't for his depth and perception I'd have dismissed as a notion. But it moved me.

This is the theme that runs through your portrait of him, the additive value of the artist's eye, the generosity of imagination…

Exactly. And that was the hardest to get down. I know if he'd read about it before dying he'd have thrown the book at me, called it a bunch of bollocks or some subscription to a coffee-table book's understanding of art. That's what he said most often, when I was piffling about some theory of art, he'd cut me down with "Art? It's bloody work!" So I've done him a slight disservice, but I wasn't in bed with that old Dutch line that work will set you free, work will save your soul and shit. Which, again, is not to say that he didn't believe in what he did, spiritually, to the core. Ultimately, that's the only teaching, or rather, the only example you can impart. And in that sense, his total immersion in art was what filled my expectation, my desire to learn, tenfold.

Was he active religiously?

In public, no, not at all; but in private he was deeply intuitive, very alive to it. None of it reached my eyes; he was discreet. Only his wife dropped a hint about it now and then. I think she very much missed going to weekly services, attending a community — she felt exiled down there. It was only through her that I could fill in the vaguer elements of Han for the portrait we know today. She fleshed out the spectrum of his character and in turn helped humanise the picture somewhat.

Tell me more about the studio itself.

It was a huge parlour room, a wide open space with two tall windows that could be shuttered from outside but which only reached halfway — there must've been four shutters to each window originally, upper and lower, but the top half was always open for that Southern light. It was wonderfully diffuse — the house was positioned on the eastern face of a shallow valley, facing north-west I think, but the light was remarkably consistent, very easy to control. He had special thin curtains made for when it was too strong.

And that's where he kept that growing collection of artifacts and objects and carpets and porcelains — he was already a mad collector of life's offshoots. Antique vases and weapons stuffed into a curio room, disparate pieces of old armour, tiny animals and embryos in specimen jars, butterflies and stuffed birds, fabrics and Chinese silks, jeweled turbans and furs and even an original perspectyfkas [camera obscura]. He picked up all the materials others discarded and yet only five percent of the stuff ever got used in his compositions. There was a stack of marble fragments; basalt pieces from Egyptian statues and busts used for ballast by British ships, broken on the journey or simply dumped at port… I swear there's parts of Grecian originals in there — a hand, a calf up to the knee and twisted to the left — pieces badly eroded or damaged but still evocative in form. Also this badly abused torso which he'd laboured to possess — some cutthroat bargain with a mad Spaniard he wasn't willing to elaborate on. A magnificent athlete's torso so effeminate in its rendering — I studied it for hours — there was something extreme about it, or rather it was rendered from some other extreme whose context was cut off.

He'd just accreted all these materials and would use them, continually, as reference points for the work at hand. I was like a little kid in his grandfather's garage, in this dusty playhouse of antiques, and van Meegeren was the patriarch assembling the pieces for a unified vision. Again — that wonderful eye of his, paying heed to everything on the horizon to bring the immediate into better relief — from this wealth of material he'd produce a spare domestic setting; from his objective mastery of everything would come just one representation — but it'd be perfect. They were great days. And we drank a lot too. I didn't read a single book for the whole two years.

The biggest lesson I learnt was of movement — that is, the particular essence of composition — and the exact moment, the way I discovered this was with plaster casts in the studio. Any sculptor could've told me this in a minute, but I had to find out the long way and then almost by accident. Namely, an exact cast of a hand or arm is completely lifeless, it's just a reductive facsimile of form. It takes years for a sculptor to acquire the art of animation, to render the seeming essence of movement through all the trickery and shadowplay of art. Which means, ultimately, that there's no such thing as absolute realism or accuracy or whatever, there's always an irreducible amount of artifice somewhere in the representation. That what the artist brings to the representation is of the essence, that's where the art of it lies — in this ultimate effect. And for a portraitist, I think that's the hardest, that's a humbling thing to take on.

Indeed, your medium is the portrait — his the brilliant flawed forgery —

I don't think he was a forger in the received sense. He was more like a ghostwriter — entering the method, mind and eye of another so completely to create parallel works of genius and character — I mean he won't be understood as a genius himself but he raised the bar for copyists and classical students and teachers, he deepened the perception and understanding we bring to the masters. And he certainly had a huge correcting influence on the taste and precision of art critics. They won't let him forget it.

But like I said, most of my work involved composition and movement, establishing a scene and working to that small transformative moment, on those final touches when the true subjective cast emerges. Otherwise I studied form and portrait. I spent weeks on a hand. Weeks on suggestive turns of eye. Weeks boiling narrative down to a single image.

But this, I mean, you're a writer, not a painter —

[at this point the interview ended, the subject walking out of the meal we were engaged in. He did not leave acrimoniously or in a huff; but phoned in the following comments several days later]

[Van Meegeren] gave me a formal basis for the arts of representation, so that I could fill in the varying details from life and from myself. That, I suppose, was the essence of his gift.