Viper Wine (52 page)

T
HE
D
EATHBED
P
ORTRAIT

‘It’s a kind of dance of death. But it’s her life force I was responding to. I hope to put a little bit of life into charcoal. Whether [the work] is of someone dead or alive is irrelevant.’

Artist Maggi Hambling on drawing a series of deathbed sketches of her lover Henrietta Moraes, 2002

‘When we came in, we found her almost cold and stiffe; yet the blood was not so settled but that our rubbing of her face brought a little seeming colour into her pale cheeks, which Sir Anthony Van Dyck hath expressed excellently well in his picture . . . A rose lying upon the heme of the sheet, whose leaves being pulled from the stalk in the full beauty of it and seeming to wither apace even whiles you look upon it, is a fit emblem to expresse the state her body then was in.’

Letter from Sir Kenelm Digby, 1633

BY CANDLELIGHT, AND
dawn, and daylight, as it filtered through the bed-drapes, Van Dyck worked constantly. The sorrow all around him, the sobbing in the hall where Chater held vigil, the distracted presence of Kenelm coming and going from her bedside, and the disorder in the household, did not seem to penetrate him; his lean moustaches were fixed in a placid expression of concentration, as he painted, so any common observer might think he was unmoved, when in fact all the sensitivities of his soul, and his precise brush, were working to transmute Grief into Comfort.

Tin-lead yellow, Bismuth white, orpiment. By continuous circulation they may be sublimed and fixed together and lastly by coagulation, become immutable. Thus is the painter like the alchemist. This vision of cruelty and despair, this horrid, unwonted scene, this death’s head, about to putrefy, sighing as its cavities gave up their air – he would, by his Art, render this into a vision of serenity and calm; his most Intimate work, tender and careful. Her pale form, enclosed by dark blue drapes, like a pearl in a velvet setting. Her nightdress and cap, clean and shining white; her face, set in an attitude of sleepy contentment; her eyes, caught between opening and closing.

Van Dyck almost smiled as he worked. It was a beautiful sight, if you but had the fortitude to see it so, and did not let the fear of your own demise cloud your vision. His art could transmute the awful question, the why that howled above her head, into a serene certainty: we all must come to this long sleep. Tin-lead, smalt blue, azurite. By his manipulation these base metals and tinctures would become Higher. This brief interlude between death and decay would, by his painter’s alchemy, become lasting. Van Dyck always hesitated to use the word eternal, even in his private thoughts; he was not to know it would be carved upon his own tomb by his English admirers.

‘The pearls are not very lucid,’ said Sir Kenelm, standing at Van Dyck’s shoulder, looking at his work in progress.

Van Dyck wanted to shout at Kenelm, but remained silent.

The body in front of them let forth a noise, which sounded like a plaintive snore, and startled Kenelm, so he ran to her body, and clasped it in his arms, desperate to take the noise as a sign of life.

Van Dyck was about to call out to Kenelm to bid him stop deranging his sitter – she would take some putting right – but he contained himself, breathed, and continued painting. There was not much time left.

Venetia, Lady Digby
,
on her Deathbed
, by Anthony Van Dyck, 1633

He had painted posthumous portraits before. In Antwerp, his tutor Rubens sent for him in the middle of the night, and Van Dyck found him kneeling over his wife Isabella in her open coffin. Now that was a task to paint. No sleep, all night; the children wailing, the bell tolling and the priest imploring them to go to church to bury her. And Rubens, weeping, and ordering him about at the same time – suggesting a better light, a more dramatic composition, and so forth. All he produced was a poor copy of Rubens’ style – a stiff tableau of death. But that was seven years ago, and since then he had gained so much in confidence, that he now worked within his own preoccupations. Every day, he painted portraits capturing his sitters’ steady, living breath, and this was very like, except this portrait caught the final whisper of breath that a body exhaled.

That breath was deemed precious, because it contained the essence of the spirit departing the body. Vasari related that Francis I was present at the moment of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, clasping him in his arms as he died, sucking from his lips his last exhalation, to make it his own inspiration.

Sir Kenelm clutched the counterpane, imagining he could feel Venetia’s breath upon his cheek. He hovered closer, searching for the phantom of her sleep-sigh, her departing pneuma. He wished he could have caught and captured it. A glass bulb would have sufficed to catch her spirit in, the filament crackling with her presence.

Kenelm – whose mind was then unmoored and skittering through time – remembered that when Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was captured in a test tube by his son Charles, kneeling at his bedside. Edison’s great admirer, Henry Ford, the alchemist of speed and metal, displayed that empty test tube at the Ford Museum, outside Detroit, where on a small plinth the glass performed the high service of making the invisible visible. The inventor of the light bulb’s breath was a worthy catch, but how much sweeter, how much more useful for his Great Work, would his own wife’s breath have been?

But though he dragged a net through the heavens, he would never find any of her vitality. He shuddered as he felt the flames that would, in 1666, consume their double tomb, raging around their grave like a furnace, blowing the windows of Christ Church Newgate, blackening her gilt memorial, and turning their ashes loose across the smoking rubble so they mixed together in the wind.

The calcium of bones, the keratin of eyelashes, the exhalations of our bodies – all these are reconstituted as carbon atoms, used to make the world anew: the earth, the lilies of the field, the ink of this book. What is can never cease to be. Kenelm found comfort in these alchemists’ precepts, touching them again and again like rosary beads. We are all stars, and to the stars we return.

Tin, lead-white, bismuth. Van Dyck’s brush moved with gentle care. His portrait listened so closely to Venetia; all the closer, because she would never now have anything more to say. In life, a portrait of this intimacy, with the sitter in her nightgown, framed
by bed-drapes, would have been outrageous. But she was safe, now, from any ill remark, scandal or unwonted action. She had become a monument. She had always sought to preserve herself so that on future occasions she would not be found wanting, but now, at last, she was ready.

The woman is perfected

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

Sylvia Plath,
from ‘Edge’, 1963

Van Dyck finished this painting himself, without delegation. He applied the final white gleam to her pearls, her one, half-open eye. One eye symbolised occult knowledge: there was no accident in Van Dyck’s art. He worked softly, stealthily, so that nothing might jar the peacefulness of his creation, and all the murmurs that he had ever heard resonated through his brush. He saw her with the artist’s double vision. And if, onto the dark expanse of her counterpane, he threw a snake, twisting first into the form of a blanket’s gold-enamelled hem, and then into the guise of a viper’s scaly back, it was only because artists cannot help themselves.

L
ET
M
E
S
PEAKE
!

GRIEF MADE KENELM’S
mind turn over, like a boat, and—

Let me speake!

Those who would protect him told him he ought to put his mind upon a different subject. He could not sleep, or eat, but existed in a heightened state of consciousness—

Oh, is’t so indeed?

His beard grew untended, his hair unshorn—

Enough from you, who hath spoke so long! Let me have the reins awhile.

Note – The following is taken from Sir Kenelm Digby’s correspondence, including a long letter to his sons, written in the weeks after his wife’s death, 1633:

I can have no intermission, but continually my fever rageth. Even whiles I am writing this to you, the minute is fled, is flown away, never to be caught again.

I have a corrosive masse of sorrow lying att my hart which will not be worn away until it have worne me out.

Not only while I felt the first violence and heate of a passionate and extreme love; but even to her dying day, when I had time enough to observe her and to know her thoroughly, and that almost ten years had converted that which might be thought desire and passion into a solide vigorous and peacefull friendship which (believe me, my children) is the happiest condition and the greatest blessing of this life.

In a word shee was my dearest and excellent wife that loved me incomparably.

Many times she received very hard measure from others, as is often the fortune of those women who exceed others in beauty and goodness.

Although it be not the custom with us in England to have the husbands all the while present att their wives labours, yet she understanding that it was warranted by practise of most other countries – a mann’s strength as well as counsel being in these cases often times necessary – she would never permit me to be absent. She had so excellent and tender a love towards me that she thought my presence, or my holding her by the hand did abate a great part of her paines.

What she won at play furnished her with a certain large revenue, which she gave for the poor. Before she died she disposed of £100 in one lump, to be prayed for.

Whiles she did play, one could observe neither eagerness nor passion in her; no stander-by could have guessed by her countenance whether she won or lost.

Her presence and comportment was beyond all that I ever saw; it would strike reverence and love in any man at the first sight. Her cheeks grew pink through exercise . . . Her blue veins shewed in her forehead . . . Her face could not be expressed upon a flatt board or cloth, where lights and shadows determine every part. Even a little motion in so exact and even a face gave her a new countenance, the life and spirits of which no art could imitate.

[She lost some of her hair] with the birth of one of you boys. Nothing can be imagined subtiler than hers was [her hair]. I have often had a handful of it in my hand and have scarce perceived I touched anything. It was many degrees softer than the softest that I ever saw, which hath often brought to my consideration that [one] may judge the mildness and the gentleness of the disposition by the softness and fineness of one’s hair.