A Map of Glass - Jane Urquhart [62]
Each tree in a village square, the shutters on a town hall, walls surmounted by crenulations, the sculptured facade of a church or cathedral, cobblestones on a ruelle were wonderfully and faithfully rendered, but this may not have made much of an impression on Branwell at the time. It might very well have been this view of all of fortified France that made him decide at that moment to leave Europe, for that is exactly what he did. Perhaps there was simply too much of it: too much art, too much architecture, and too much history that included too much war. He must have recalled—and with uncharacteristic fondness—his island boyhood and everything that had delighted him about it. His father’s tyrannical ways may suddenly have felt sane to him, sane and firm, and rooted in a world large enough to include the limits of the family’s island empire as well as all the ships and rafts that set sail from its quays. The ships, the rafts likely appeared in his mind, and then the verdant shores of the St. Lawrence River dotted with discrete, undefended villages. Home, he would have known, was now what he really wanted.
A few days later, canvases unstretched, rolled, and packed, he sailed, taking with him two memories: the darkness of Les Invalides and an unshakeable desire to reproduce a particular turquoise painting in the Louvre, by a long-dead northern European artist.
So after a visit to the attic of Les Invalides, Branwell left behind European civilization and returned to his home on the island where everything for a time probably appeared to him to be not pastoral and bucolic as he had preferred to recall it, but raw and unfinished and in what looked to be a state of complete destruction. Felled and ruined trees were being floated down the lake to his father’s docks. Raw and unfinished timber was being hastily assembled in order to construct the merchant ships that would litter the lake’s surface, ships that would eventually carry not only timber but also animals, barrels, china, furniture, food, bolts and nails, cast-iron cooking utensils, shotguns, salt, axes, hacksaws, looking glasses, bolts of cloth, cannons, cannonballs, and human beings. For a time, the sails that surmounted these vessels might have seemed too crisp to Branwell, too free of the patina of age, and the ships themselves too attached to greed and commerce. Still, all of this would have been preferable to the cities that crouched in the dusty attic of Les Invalides, cities in which, it appeared, each activity, every thought, and all spoken words could only have been a preparation for conflict.
His distracted father had been—in the beginning—quite pleased to see him: he believed that his son had taken on an air of sophistication as a result of his European adventure and said as much to him during a welcoming dinner cooked by his sister. After a couple of weeks, however, Woodman Senior became uneasy about this sophistication that seemed to be manifesting itself in an attitude of bored listlessness and the inability to take to any form of useful employment.
His sister, a year younger, much less beautiful, and in some ways even odder than Branwell, continued to paint the burning hulks and smashed schooners of which she was so fond but he, the educated one who had gone abroad to study art, painted nothing at all. What was his father to make of this? He offered himself as a subject for a portrait and Branwell complied in order to please him, but Joseph Woodman proved incapable of sitting still long enough for his son to make a creditable likeness (moreover, staring at his father made the painter nervous and his subject even more irritable than usual).
“It isn’t what you want,” his sister had told him. “Paint something you want to paint, ships for example.”
But, of course, that wasn’t what he wanted either.
He finished the portrait. It was hung above the mantel in the parlour where it remained for several decades until his father, in ill-tempered old age, demanded of Annabelle that it be taken