The Swan Thieves

Chapter 7 Marlow

She really was leaving--the young woman with the beautiful smile -- and I wondered whether I'd communicated anything to her without intending to; I would have liked to ask her about my hunch that she was a painter, too. There was a Renoir on the next wall, and she strode past it, unseeing--uncaring--and out of the room. This pleased me: I don't like Renoir either, with the exception of that canvas in the Phillips Collection, Luncheon of the Boating Party, where the people are almost eclipsed by sunlit grapes and bottles and glasses. I didn't trail her; noticing two young women in one day seemed to me tiresome, futile, without pleasure to the exact degree that it was without future or purpose.
This had all taken only a second or two, and I went directly back to the Thomas self-portrait, where the man with the greasy forehead was now in the way. When he moved, I stepped forward to look more closely myself. Again, a painting that verged on Impressionist, particularly in the casual handling of some of the background--dark curtains--but quite different from the daring and grace of Leda. A painter of diverse abilities, I thought--or maybe Thomas had changed his style in the 1880s, progressed in a new direction. This painting owed something to Rembrandt: the brooding expression and somber palette, perhaps also the unsparing auto-portrayal of the subject's red nose and fleshy cheeks, the descent of a previously handsome man into less-flattering age, even the dark velvet cap and jacket--smoking jacket, it might have been called: the Painter as Old Master and aristocrat, all in one. The title of the self-portrait came from the foreground, where
Thomas had folded his elbows on a bare wooden table piled with coins--large coins and worn ones, bronze, gold, tarnished silver-- antiques of various shapes and sizes so skillfully painted that you could almost have picked them up one by one between your thumb and forefinger. I could see even the marvelous old writing on them, the characters of strange alphabets, the square holes, the knotted borders. Those coins were considerably better rendered than the image of Thomas himself; next to Manet's fruit and flowers, the painting was rather clumsy. Perhaps Thomas had cared deeply about money and not much about his own face. In any case, he had been striving for the look of the seventeenth century, turning his gaze two hundred years back, and I was staring at the nineteenth-century result, nearly a hundred twenty years later.
There was one personal characteristic Thomas hadn't caught from all those smoky Rembrandt portraits, I thought: sincerity. He'd been harsh enough, apparently--or vain enough, or deluded enough--to paint a wily self-consciousness around his own eyes. That shrewdness was probably calculated to make the viewer uncomfortable, especially with the presence of the coins in the foreground. It was an interesting face, in any case. Had Thomas made a lot of money from his paintings, I wondered, or had he merely wanted to? Had he had some other sort of business, or a grand inheritance?
I didn't know the answers, of course, so I went on to the Manet still life, admiring, as the girl I'd noticed a few minutes before also probably had, the glass with its white wine pooling inside, the light on the dark-blue plums, the corner of a mirror. There was a little canvas by Pissarro I remembered liking, too; I went into the next section of the gallery for a few minutes to see him and, while I was at it, his fellow Impressionists.
It had been years since I'd looked really deeply into an Impressionist painting; those endless retrospectives, with their accompanying tote bags, mugs, and notepaper, had put me off Impressionism. I remembered some of what I'd read in the past: the small group of the original Impressionists, including one woman--Berthe Mori-sot--who'd first banded together in 1874 to exhibit works in a style that the Paris Salon found too experimental for inclusion. We postmoderns take them for granted, or disdain them, or love them too easily. But they had been the radicals of their day, exploding traditions of brushwork, making subject matter of ordinary life, and bringing painting out of the studio and into the gardens, fields, and seascapes of France.
Now I saw with fresh appreciation the natural light, the soft, subtle color of a scene by Sisley: a woman in a long dress disappearing down the snowy tunnel of a village road. There was something touching and real, or touching because it was real, in the bleakness of the trees along the lane, some of which towered over a high wall. I thought of what an old friend of mine once said, that a painting has to have some mystery to it to be any good. I liked this glimpse of the woman, her slim back turned to me in the twilight, more intriguing to me than Monet's endless haystacks--I was walking along a row of three that showed various stages of daybreak on their pink and yellow slopes. I slipped my jacket on and prepared to leave. I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
In the lobby downstairs, the black-haired girl had disappeared. Miriam was deep in consultation with a man her own age who seemed to be having trouble reading the museum maps. I walked by, poised to smile if she glanced up, but she didn't see me, so I had to postpone my greeting. Pushing out through the doors, I experienced that mingled relief and disappointment one feels on departure from a great museum--relief at being returned to the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and disappointment at that world's lack of mystery. There was the ordinary street, without brushwork or the depth of oil on canvas. The traffic was roaring past in the usual Washington chaos, some driver trying to get over in front of another, a near miss, horns leaned on or punched. The trees were beautiful, though, heavy with blossoms or new green; I'm always struck by their beauty after the nondescript winter that seems to be the best the mid-Atlantic can muster.
I was thinking about a blend of colors that might express those bright-green and russet leaves against one another when I saw the girl again--the young woman who had been studying Leda ahead of me. She was standing at a bus stop. She looked very different now, not reflective or engaged but defiant, straight and tall, with a canvas bag over her shoulder. Her hair shone in the sun; I hadn't noticed before how much dark gold was mixed with the red. Her arms were folded across her white blouse, and her lips were pressed tightly together. I was seeing her profile again, and already I would have known it anywhere. Yes, she was self-sufficient, almost hostile, but for some reason the word "disconsolate" came to my mind. Perhaps it was just that she seemed thoroughly alone, even deliberately so, and she was of an age to have been standing there with a handsome young husband. I felt a pang, as if I'd seen an acquaintance from a distance without having time to stop and speak; I had a sense of sneaking away before she could notice me.
I went quickly down the steps, and she turned just as I reached the bottom. She saw me, half recognized me (the undistinguished fellow in a navy jacket, no tie). Why was I familiar to her? Was that what she was asking herself, not remembering me from our encounter inside? Then she smiled, as she had in the museum-- a sympathetic, almost embarrassed smile. She was mine for a moment, an old friend after all. I gave what was probably a ridiculous half wave with one hand. Strangers are strange to each other, I thought. Well, I had been stranger than she. I could see the lines around her eyes when she smiled; she might be over thirty after all. I tried to stand tall and straight, like her, as I walked away.