This involved delicate negotiation, but it was as nothing to the work of persuading the National Gallery of Canada that it should accept a picture of such curious provenance, and show it with pride in a room specially devoted to it, even if it did not cost the Gallery a cent.
People who control important galleries are very far from being stupid, but they are not accustomed to thinking of pictures psychologically. If the picture, whose beauty they readily acknowledged, were the work of a Canadian who had painted it less than fifty years ago, why had he painted it in a sixteenth-century style, on an authentic old triptych, with paints that defied any of the tests that had been used? Yes, yes; the picture was a masterpiece, in the old sense of being a work undertaken by a painter who wished to prove himself a master. But what kind of a master? Francis had been a pupil, certainly the best pupil, of Tancred Saraceni, who was himself a supreme master of picture restoration, and so much a master that it was suspected that he had revised, or even recreated, some old pictures into forms that were vastly superior to what they had originally been. People whose lives and reputations are devoted to pictures have fits at any suggestion of faking. Faking is the syphilis of art, and the horrid truth is that syphilis has sometimes lain at the root of very fine art. But connoisseurs and great galleries shrink from saying to the world: Here’s a fine, poxy piece of painting, beautiful, uplifting, sincerely describable as great—though of course, because of its ambiguity, not precisely the sort of thing you can safely recommend to Kater Murr. For him and his kind, everything must be Simon Pure—or, if you prefer the term, kosher. Kater Murr is very active among the connoisseurs and the galleries.
It was here that the testimony of Clement Hollier was invaluable. If a man wants to paint a picture that is intended primarily as an exercise in a special area of expertise, he will do so in a style with which he is most familiar. If he wants to paint a picture which has a particular relevance to his own life-experience, which explores the myth of his life as he understands it, and which, in the old phrase, “makes up his soul”, he is compelled to do it in a mode that permits such allegorical revelation. Painters after the Renaissance, and certainly after the Protestant Reformation, have not painted such pictures with the frankness that was natural to pre-Renaissance artists. The vocabulary of faith, and of myth, has been taken from them by the passing of time. But Francis Cornish, when he wanted to make up his soul, turned to the style of painting and the concept of visual art which came most naturally to him. He did not feel himself bound to be “contemporary”. Indeed, he had many times laughed at the notion of contemporaneity in conversation with both Hollier and Darcourt, mocking it as a foolish chain on a painter’s inspiration and intention.
It must be remembered, added Darcourt, that Francis had been brought up a Catholic—or almost a Catholic—and he had taken his catholicity seriously enough to make it a foundation of his art. If God is one and eternal, and if Christ is not dead, but living, are not fashions in art mere follies for those who are the slaves of Time?
All of this had been thoroughly explored by Darcourt in his life of Francis Cornish, but he had to go over it many times in person, before many committees of solemn doubters.
The bigwigs of the National Gallery, who regarded themselves quite reasonably as the guardians of Canada’s official artistic taste, hummed and hawed. They heard; they understood; they admitted the adroitness of the argument; but they were not convinced. A man who painted in a bygone style, and who had the effrontery to do it with an accomplishment and imagination notably absent among the best modern Canadian artists, was not someone they could readily embrace. He had played the fool with one of the most sacred ideas still left to a world where the notion of sacrosanctity had become abhorrent—the idea of Time. He had dared to be of a time not his own. Surely such a person was either touched in his wits or else—this was a grave fear—a joker? Government bodies, the worlds of connoisseurship and art, dread jokes as the Devil dreads holy water. And when a joke also involves great sums of money—money, the very seed and foundation of modern art and modern culture—the dread quickly mounts to panic, and Kater Murr has catfits.
Nevertheless, Darcourt, staunchly aided by Hollier, and supported at every turn by Arthur and Maria, prevailed at last, and on that December day the Francis Cornish Memorial Gallery was opened.
It was a gallery in the sense that it was a large room devoted solely to the triptych of The Marriage at Cana and, on the other walls, a display of supportive material that showed what the Canadian origins of the picture were. Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, enlarged so that they could be studied in detail, and the people of Blairlogie, the people of Grandfather’s household, and the medieval isolation of that backwoods town could be made apparent to anyone who chose to look. On another wall were Francis’s careful studies in Old Master style, as evidence of how the extraordinary technical skill of the great picture had been acquired. And on the third wall the most intimate of all Francis’s drawings—hasty sketches done in the undertaker’s workroom, quick impressions of Tancred Saraceni and Grandfathers coachman which linked them with Judas and the huissier in the great picture, and the arresting studies—drawn with so much adoration—of Ismay Glasson, clothed and naked and, plain for all to see, the Bride in The Marriage. Not all the figures in the great picture were represented in the sketches and drawings, but most of them were, and perhaps the most arresting were the photograph of F. X. Bouchard, the dwarf tailor, by Grandfather, and the pitiful figure of the dwarf naked on the embalmer’s table, drawn by Francis; the most casual looker could not fail to see that this was the proud dwarf in parade armour who looked out at the spectator from the triptych.
It had been agreed by Arthur and Maria and Darcourt that the sketches which identified the grotesque angel as Francis the First should not be shown. Some mystery must be left unexplained.
With these exhibitions were explanatory notes, written by Darcourt, for what Hollier wrote was not plain enough for the widest possible public. But what could be plain only to visitors who had understood what the whole room said were the words painted in handsome calligraphy on the wall above the great picture:
A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative.
2
“Are you happy with it, Simon,” said Maria; “I do hope you are. You’ve worked so hard to make it happen.”