You paint a self-portrait. Your father requested it. He wanted you to leave a picture of yourself. He will get on better with your picture than with you. He won’t lose his temper with you for not getting up in the morning, for being absentminded, for wandering around aimlessly.
For the first time you look at yourself in the mirror with a painter’s eye. You’re not good-looking, but you like yourself. You smile. You will paint yourself smiling, with that smile with which you seduce women and drive your father white with rage. When he shouts at you and tells you to get on with it. You smile, and no one can do anything to you. You don’t shout, you just smile.
You sketch your face. You capture your likeness. You have always clung to pictures. When you were sent out on errands during your apprenticeship, you stopped in front of galleries and looked at the pictures, always the same pictures. Once, when one of them was suddenly not there—it was a study of Valenciennes—in your excitement you walked into the gallery to ask after the painting, to see it one last time. It was as though you’d lost a loved one. But then you didn’t dare. You said you’d gone in the wrong door, and you blushed and ran off.
You cling to pictures, your pictures. You don’t really want to sell them. You’ve been known to buy pictures back. They are part of you, part of your life. You look at them. They don’t change. When you put out the lights at night, you know they’re there in the dark.
If only you’d drawn Victoire, while she was alive. You’d never have been a painter without her. It broke your father when she died. After that he didn’t care what happened. He gave you the money he’d set aside for her. If you’d drawn her, she would still have been there. But drawing people, that was something you only learned to do afterward. Once you’d learned to see.
You learned: the world is flat, space is composed of blurs, shadows. Gradations. There is no time.
Long after you’ve died, long after the boy you saw on the field above Trouville will have died, your pictures will still be around. They will have barely changed. If only you’d said that to him: Once we’re both dead, this picture will still be there and show your village the way it has long since ceased to be. But who will look at it, once we’re both dead? Children always put you in mind of death, of your death, of the passage of time. Perhaps that’s why you never wanted a family.
All I really want to do in my life is draw landscapes. That’s what you wrote to Abel Osmond from Italy, shortly after you’d turned thirty. Draw landscapes. I won’t change from that. That resolution will keep me from entering into any firm bonds, such as marriage.
As if the one excluded the other. Were you kidding him, or only yourself? You’re a sketch artist, that’s the reason. Whether it’s a landscape or a woman, you’re incapable of deciding. A fleeting touch, a brief glance, that’s enough for you. So brief that nothing changes. The eyes, the shoulders, the hands, the bottom. Pictures of women. But such brief moments come with a price. Even in Rome.
Your passion is seeing. The act of love for you is painting. The other, the physical thing, is tedious for you, it just distracts you from work. You make love the way you eat, when you’re hungry, quickly, without concentrating. You were never especially picky. For your bed the lovely Italians, for emotion the lovable French. And as a painter, as you wrote Abel, I prefer the former. Roman prostitutes. They do their work for a fixed price, and when it’s done they leave with a smile.
You never really loved people, you were afraid of loving them, of losing them, of dependence on them. Love makes you vulnerable. Perhaps that’s what makes you so popular: because you don’t expect anything from people, you’re indifferent to them. You were always generous. You helped lots of them without making a fuss. You buy your freedom. You want to be left in peace.
You don’t like people for the same reason you don’t like the sea. Back then, on the field in Trouville, you looked out at the sea, and it became clear to you that you don’t like it. Because it keeps changing. It’s dangerous. You can drown in it. You need terra firma underfoot. You wish the world would freeze over. Strange that you never painted snow.
YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE ABLE to take the moment of love into yourself, and live from the memory. But memory is deceptive. You remember the feelings, not the appearance of things. Once you tried to draw Anna from memory, your dear, sweet Anna. But as soon as you had the pencil in your hand, her face blurred. Your recollection was just a feeling. A feeling has no nose, no cheeks, no mouth. You can’t trust your feelings, they’re too inexact. Whereas exactitude was always your commandment. When you paint, you can’t leave anything unresolved.
Memory cheats you, and you cheat memory. You paint it over, you destroy it. The world has no colors. Colors are interrelated, one entails the other. You obey colors. This green, this brown, this blue, you saw them for the first time when you mixed them on your palette. Your world is made up of lines and surfaces and colors. Your light is white lead.
How frightened you were the first time you painted your own likeness. How your face changed under the brush. It became a landscape, an approximate landscape, a surface. For a moment you were afraid you would lose your face.
I paint a woman’s breasts no differently than I paint cans of milk. The forms and the contrasting tonalities: that’s what matters. When you said that, did you think of Anna’s breasts?
Her love only makes you impatient. You would have to sleep with her to free yourself of her, you would have to paint her. Why won’t you paint me, she once asked in jest. Why does she want you to paint her? She thinks it would be proof of love. She doesn’t know that it would destroy your love, that it could do nothing else. What you contemplate changes, becomes a picture. When you contemplate her, her face freezes. However much you fight it, you see lines, planes, colors. If you were to paint her, you would discover her beauty anew, the beauty of her picture. You would love the picture. Anna would be nothing in comparison.
YOU COULD HANG IT UP in your studio. Then you’ll always have me with you.
You know that modeling is hard work. You have to keep still for a very long time.
I don’t mind that. It’s what I’ve done all my life.
I can’t paint you, because I can’t see you. My feelings for you cloud my eye. I can’t paint what I love.
She laughs. She’s flattered, but then she looks at you with an expression of reproach.
If you loved me …
She doesn’t get to the end of the sentence. It’s up to you. But you just kiss her hand. No one can keep silent like you. She reflects.
Don’t you love the landscapes you paint?
I love my pictures. The landscapes don’t mean anything to me.
VIEW OF VILLENEUVE-LES-AVIGNON, View of the Church of Saint-Paterne in Orleans, The Woods at Fontainebleau, Trouville, The Mouth of the Touques. You give your pictures titles, as if that’s what they were for: one particular church, a bridge, one village rather than another. You love these villages, these landscapes, but when you paint them, you have to be indifferent to them. You said it in jest, but it’s true: you work out of a passionate indifference.
It’s hard to explain and hard to understand. You paint what you see with the maximum of precision, but you don’t care about the precision of the depiction. You try to capture the feeling, the inexact feeling, as exactly as you can. What counts is decisiveness.
Your regard is cold, but not unfeeling. The coldness of the regard is an absolute precondition. You mustn’t be moved when you want to see clearly. To see something with cold regard means being nothing but eye. Otherwise it’s not possible to feel your way into a landscape or a person. To feel your way means above all to forget yourself, to be beside yourself. It’s not proximity that’s your objective. The foreground is always messed up, if you don’t wholly disregard it. You have decided against nearness. Nearness is warmth, nearness is when you’re in love.