Mrs Whistler by Matthew Plampin

Mrs Whistler by Matthew Plampin

Author:Matthew Plampin [Plampin, Matthew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-03-21T16:00:00+00:00


25 November 1878

As a battlefield, Jim supposed that the Court of Exchequer would serve well enough. Arranged around a large square table stacked with the lawyers’ papers and books, the bench was set at the far end, with the witness box off to one side. The ceiling was ecclesiastically high; the windows, set above oak panelling, held dim panes of stained glass – coats of arms and other such things. There was an aura of ancientness, of authority, and a marked absence of light. Rembrandt – yes, it was all rather like one of the later etchings of Rembrandt. The chamber was rather smaller than Jim had envisioned, however; and if these two facing groups of legal men and witnesses were armies, then one, the enemy’s, was missing its general.

Too unwell, the weaselly lawyers had said. Too frail still to submit to the ordeal of the trial. The courtroom was full, crowded with personalities most varied in their stripe and hue; but John Ruskin, the noble author of Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice et cetera, was made conspicuous only by his goddamned absence. Before they’d begun, before the first bewigged gasbag had risen to speak, there was a very real sense that the entire undertaking had been a confounded waste of time.

‘Hang it all, Reeve,’ Jim murmured, casting a look of subtle disappointment in his solicitor’s direction, ‘why in thunder didn’t you do something?’

Reeve, deep in his papers, didn’t notice. After so long a wait, after so many delays and obstructions, it was shaping up to be a day of such disappointments. The witnesses, for instance. Jim had secured William Rossetti, a decent and responsible critic, to counter the damnable Ruskin; the painter Albert Moore, a real brick, with whom he’d once shared a studio in Bloomsbury; and one other who was rather less easy to account for, a strange, malodorous speci­­men named Wills. This fellow was an artist, supposedly, unknown to Jim – another client of Reeve’s, subpoenaed by him only two days before when it had become clear that no other option remained. Jim was thankful, for Rossetti and Moore at least, but he couldn’t help thinking of these men as offcuts. As last resorts. His witnesses should have been a parade of the great and good. Frederick Leighton had been unavailable, though: at the palace being knighted, the word was, an excuse so absurd and impossible it simply had to be believed. Tissot and Boehm – friends of many years’ standing, and true allies he’d thought – were rather harder to explain. Indeed, neither man had explained, not in any adequate manner, merely displaying a deep and unswayable reluctance to become involved. Something else was at work here. Jim was certain of it.

And then there were his paintings. With much expense and fuss, a small exhibition had been prepared in a room at the Westminster Palace Hotel, just over on Victoria Street, using pictures wrested from the hands of Mr Graves and others – the Carlyle and the Mother among them.



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