What's Bred in the Bone by Robertson Davies

Author:Robertson Davies [Davies, Robertson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-7710-2787-1
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Published: 2015-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

FRANCIS HAD ACHIEVED in a high degree the Oxford pretence of doing nothing while in fact getting through a great deal of work. He had learned how to study at Colborne, where success was expected, and he had improved on his technique at Spook. At Oxford he more than satisfied his tutor, hung about the O.U.D.S. meddling a little with the decorative side of its productions, contributed occasional caricatures to the Isis, and still had time to spend many hours at the Ashmolean, acquainting himself with its splendid collection of drawings by Old Masters, almost Old Masters, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists whom nobody thought of as masters, but whose work was, to his eye, masterly.

The Ashmolean was not at that time a particularly attractive or well-organized museum. In the university tradition, it existed to serve serious students, and wanted no truck with whorish American ideas of drawing in and interesting the general public. Was it not, after all, one of the oldest museums in the Old World? It took Francis some time during his first year to persuade the museum authorities that he was a serious student of art; having done so, he was able to investigate the museum’s substantial riches without much interference. He wanted to be able to draw well. He was not so vain as to think that he might draw like a master, but it was the masters he wished to follow. So he spent countless hours copying master drawings, analysing master techniques, and to his astonishment surprising within himself ideas and insights and even flashes of emotion that belonged more to the drawings than to himself. He did not trust these whispers from the past until he met Tancred Saraceni.

That came about because Francis was a member, though not a very active one, of the Oxford Union. He would not have joined if he had not been assured in his first year that it was the thing to do. He sometimes attended debates, and on two or three occasions he had even spoken briefly on motions related to art or aesthetics about which he had something to say. Because he knew what he was talking about, when most of the other debaters did not, and because he spoke what he believed to be the truth in plain and uncompromising language, he gained a modest reputation as a wit, which amazed him greatly. He was not interested in politics, which was the great preoccupation of the Union, and his interest in the place was chiefly in its dining-room.

In his second year, however, a House Committee that was looking for something significant to do decided that the lamentable state of the frescoes around the walls of the Union’s library must be remedied. What was to be done? The budding politicians of the membership knew nothing much about painting, though they were sufficiently aware of the necessity to have some sort of taste to decorate their rooms with reproductions of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers or—greatly daring—the red horses of Franz Marc.

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