River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [65]
Hobhouse had known Chinnery at the Royal Academy, where they had been contemporaries of J. M. W. Turner. Chinnery had himself once been regarded as a painter of the same calibre, but he was a man of changeable moods: wilful and witty, amorous and extravagant, he was this minute in a high good humour, and in a deep dudgeon the next. None of this was out of keeping for a member of that clan, Mr Hobhouse had added, for the Chinnerys were a family in which unusual talent seemed often to be combined with odd and excessive behaviour.
The artist had certainly inherited more than his measure of the family’s traits. The promise of a brilliant career was not enough to keep him in London. He had taken himself off to Ireland, where, like many a feckless youth before him, he had ended up marrying his landlord’s daughter. She had given him two children in quick succession which was perhaps too strong a dose of family life for his flighty stomach; he had taken off again, leaving his wife to cope with the infants as best she could. His destination now was Madras, where his brother was then living: after five years in that city, he had moved on to Bengal, settling eventually in Calcutta. There, in the capital of British India, he had met with tremendous success, being universally acclaimed as the greatest English painter in the East. When word of his triumph trickled back to England his family had decided to make their way to India to join him – first his daughter Matilda, whom he had last seen as a child, and who was now a young woman; then his luckless wife, Marianne; and finally his son John, who had hopes of embarking on a military career. But the move brought misfortune with it: within a year of his arrival, John was carried off by a tropical fever, and the loss had all but unhinged Chinnery, embittering him against his wife, the very sight of whom became unendurable to him. Once again he took to his heels, moving about as far as possible – to Macau, a place that had suggested itself, or so the wags said, because in the event of his wife’s pursuing him any further he could always take refuge in Canton, where he would be safe from all foreign women.
In southern China, said Mr Hobhouse, his old friend appeared to have found a niche that was to his liking, for he had remained there for the last thirteen years, a length of time that was, for him, an eternity. Now, at the age of sixty-four, safe from marital pursuit, he seemed to be content in the company of sea-captains, travelling merchants, opium traders and other itinerants. They for their part, seemed to regard his work with the greatest approbation: so many, and so lucrative were his commissions that he was reported to have created an atelier in order to keep pace with the demand, training his house-boys and servants in his methods of painting.
Did it matter to Chinnery that he, who had once been thought of as the equal of Romney, Raeburn and Hoppner, should be languishing in a place that was so far from the salons of Europe, a distant backwater where he had to serve a clientele of the grossest philistines? That he affected to be indifferent to such considerations needed hardly to be said – yet it was rumoured that the cognoscenti’s neglect of his work, in London, had filled him with so much bitterness that he had taken to the opium pipe in order to escape his distress. Whether or not this was the usual idle blather of the canting-crew Mr Hobhouse would not say: but even though he was unwilling to venture an opinion of his own on this subject, he did express the hope that Fitcher would look into the matter and throw some light on it when he returned to Britain.
Paulette listened to the tale in silence, and was careful to do nothing that might suggest that she knew anything at all about the artist or his career – but in point of fact, the Chinnery name was not unknown to her: far from it. Indeed, on at least one aspect of the painter’s life she was far better informed than