Calling Mr. King by Ronald De Feo

Author:Ronald De Feo [Feo, Ronald De]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-476-4
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2011-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

So, without really missing a beat, I got back into my “studies.” Over the next few days I spent my mornings at the library and my afternoons reading in and roaming about the Metropolitan Museum or visiting those art galleries along Madison Avenue that hadn’t shut down for the summer. At the library I was happy to discover the art library, which was down the hall from the Main Reading Room, was quite pleasant, incredibly well stocked, and—big surprise!—fully air-conditioned. What more could I ask for?

One miserably humid afternoon I decided to finally take in that Constable show at the Frick. Mercifully, the air-conditioning was on full blast so the place was terrifically cool and much more fit for human life than the streets outside. The show was stuck down in some posh rooms in the basement, which was fine with me, since the tourists were hitting the main floor in a big way. There were a lot of drawings, which were okay. I particularly liked the ones of Malvern Hall and East Bergholt House—though maybe what I really liked about them was the houses themselves and their Georgian look. But what impressed me the most, just in terms of art—Christ, I’m sounding more like a snotty intellectual each day—what knocked me out, as they say, were some of the small oil paintings hanging here and there along the way. Although I had never seen Hampstead Heath under such a pink sky or looking so smudgy, and although I’d never seen a field—the East Bergholt Common, in this case—with so many intense greens and yellows or looking so smudgy, the pictures reminded me of places that were real. They were sort of painted memories of particular areas at certain times of day, with the kind of color and light and general feeling you remembered. Maybe the scenes weren’t very accurate, but that didn’t matter because this was the way your brain saw them now.

I looked at the Constable stuff for a long time and then decided to go upstairs, try to ignore all the visitors, and see the rest of the museum. I must say—and so would Sir Peter—that it was a very tasteful mansion, with a lot of wood paneling in the quietly fancy rooms and an elegant center court with just the right amount of plants and a fountain with just the right amount of drip and splash. And while I may know next to nothing about paintings, even I could tell that the stuff in this place was first-rate. I found more Constables—really big pictures this time—and a country lane scene by my old friend van Ruisdael.

And then I saw it. I saw the Turner. It was just one of those things, one of those unexpected moments, a sight that amazes you, that forces you to react, that gives you a bit of a chill. A good chill. I stopped dead in my tracks and stared. When I managed to shake off at least some of the shock, I moved slowly closer.

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