The Painter by Will Davenport, Laurie Jewell (Designed by)

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Read an Excerpt

Tuesday, January 7th, 1662

(January 27th in the United Provinces)

I paint what I see.

If people don't like that they can shove their eyes up their arses. It's all the same to me, so long as they pay.

I must say, in mitigation of the circumstances I now find myself in, that on a number of occasions in the past forty years, I have been described by men who love art as one of the greatest painters of all, and it is not for me to disagree with such experts.

Honesty is everything. I paint what I see and I paint it in the only way I can. If my style has gone out of fashion, then the fault lies with fashion, not with me. A rich client tests the honesty of any painter. To the world, the man in the chair may look like a frost-nipped turnip, but what is he to himself? When he looks in the glass, does a demigod look back? I don't paint to flatter. I paint to infect the canvas with the exact humanity of my vision; turnip or no turnip.

There is a lesson in this. Paint too many honest turnips and your studio will soon fill up with orphan canvases. That way lies the road to starvation and the perpetual sideways lookout for the money-lender's men-the way my own life has gone in the last five years. Riches to rags.

I had been slow to attention with that wary sideways look, so now I was at sea for the first time in my life, unable to even contemplate the waves.

The captain was standing near the wheel and my eyes feasted on his face as soon as I saw him. His hand rested on the compass housing, and the lantern light reflecting from the brass ring around it warmed the color of his wrist so the skin shone against his dense blacksleeve.

He looked at me with distaste and addressed me in English, a language I have never seen any reason to learn.

A seaman tugged at my arm. "He says who are you?"

"My name is van Rijn."

"He says do you make a habit of stowing away?"

"I did not stow away," I said indignantly.

"You were hiding on board when we cast off. What would you call it?"

I ignored the minion and spoke directly to the captain, drawing myself up to my full height, which was still far short of his.

"I am a gentleman," I said. "I wish to be treated as a gentleman."

He surveyed me with contempt. I was wearing my shirt of the best silk, one of a dozen given to me by the Cloth-Makers Guild in the forlorn hope their commission might jump the queue. A little stained with paint certainly, a little torn and stitched here and there, but the quality was undeniable. My trousers of the finest Flemish cloth, bought with Don Antonio's gold from the philosopher's portrait. I hadn't noticed until now how they had begun to age and fray. My cloak best of all, a noble velvet gown bought for a great deal of money at auction and said to have belonged to the King of Bohemia. But where was my cloak? Was it still in the bowels of the ship? Had I lost it during the evening's chase?

"I have no wish to be on your ship," I said to deflect his unnerving, unimpressed eye. "It is a mistake. Can you please turn round and take me back?"

My request was translated, and all at once he was Neptune and I was some ignorant mollusk. I could tell his tone was incredulous; the seaman preserved that tone in his interpretation.

"The captain says you know sweet sodding nothing of ships if you think he will turn round and miss this tide. He says you are coming with us, you damned van Rijn, and you can bloody well pay for your passage as well as the bottle of his good claret wine you drank before we found you."

"I am a bankrupt," I said, playing with the word as I said it. It was still a new idea to me, and whereas before the event it had seemed like a nightmare, now it rang out and surrounded me in chain mail.

The captain frowned and barked at his man. "An Amsterdam bankrupt?" the seaman said. "The captain says we will see how well that stands you in Hull."