1
Frans Hals- Portrait of a Woman
I stare contentedly at Herr Hals who returns my gaze sporadically and only to check the sheen of my nose or the curve of my ruff.
‘Keep your hands still.’ He grunts. He is rude, like all artists. All the men who have ever painted me have been rude, even insolent. They think that talent excuses their manners.
I fumble with my gloves when he is not looking. The leather is making my hands sweat and he refuses to open the window. I am stifled in my widow’s garb, the heavy black fabric sucks the heat towards me and the frothy white collar is making my neck itch. I used to have such a beautiful neck; all my suitors would say so.
‘Like a swan,’ they would croon, ‘an elegant swan.’ They never thought to consult each other to ensure they were not using the same compliments.
That was all before my chin descended and slackened the skin of my face. Everything has slackened these past few years. Middle age has crept up on me while I was not looking. Now when I pause to watch young men in the street they see the quality of my clothes and the fineness of the lace at my wrists. They see money, not beauty. It used to be the other way around.
In my first portrait I was barely sixteen. Brown eyes blazing and budding breasts rising over a low cut gown. A virginal portrait to celebrate my recent engagement to one of the wealthiest merchants in Amsterdam. Herr Dhal was an old friend of my father, high up the council of merchants with a large town house right on the canal. Just shy of his fiftieth birthday, he sold fat and piss to the best tanneries in the city. He had paid lavishly for a new artist, fresh from the academy. A genius apparently.
For weeks I had sat in the gallery of my father’s house while Hals painted me. He had shut up all but one of the widows in the long room and it illuminated his canvas whilst blinding me each time the sun sank below midday. His wild eyes had burnt into my blushing flesh from luncheon to dinner everyday, except Sundays for seven weeks. So much longer then sittings normally take but Herr Dhal was paying for the best and the painter was nothing if not thorough.
‘Lift your chin, the light’s giving you shadows under your eyes.’ I had complied, rising my face and subtly dropping my eye lids in a way my father had told me was seductive. He mumbled in approval and returned to his canvas, preferring to see me through the thick layers of paint.
‘Tell me Herr Hals....’
‘I’m painting you lips, don’t talk’ he snapped, ‘Madame’ he added reluctantly.
Stabbing alternately at his palette and the canvas he would mutter curses under his breath. Occasionally he would pause and sigh. Over the rim of the canvas I could only see the crown of his curly head bobbing with the rhythm of his brush. But in these moments he was perfectly still, almost like he’d stopped breathing. In the stifling air we were motionless. Each of us counting our breaths in measured gasps until he raised his brush or my father swung through the gilded double doors to check on his progress.
Midway through our last session he put down his brush. From behind the canvas he emerged, looking at me for the first time. He was not checking the folds in my dress or gauging the precise colour of my cheeks, but looking at me. He rose, cupped my face in his hands and kissed me. With an artists hands he peeled the heavy fabric of my most expensive ball gown from my sticky skin. We lay down on the dusty floor and he had painted the shadows under my breasts and the pinkness between my legs. My husband did not notice my new palette on our wedding night; he was old and I was young and attentive.
Thirty years and several husbands later I was widowed and dazzlingly rich, rich enough to pay for an old master to paint my last portrait. A master with a fast hand and eyes that burnt me to look at.
I chose a small room for the sitting. Small, dark and at the back of the house. I had used it as a sewing room before my sight became too strained to thread the fine needles. I ordered the single window swathed in black velvet and the room illuminated with candles. Candle light creates the illusion of my former beauty. Not a lot of beauty but some at least.
‘Mistress?’ A shaky voice called from the hall on the day of the first sitting.
‘Yes Ann?’ I called as a pale and nervous face poked around the heavy door. Just fifteen but charming. I had given her a position as soon as I saw her. With her wide brown eyes and dark hair slipping from her white cap, she reminded me a little of myself at that age.
‘Mistress, the painter is here, shall I send him in?’
‘Yes Ann, I am ready for him’
He swept in with a cursory glance at myself seated in a high backed chair in the corner of the room, waiting for the first touch of paint against the blank canvas.
And so we have sat in this darkened room for a fortnight, holding our breaths. Waiting for my image to materialise.
The room is suddenly silent, the rasp of his brush has ceased. I blink the mist from eyes to see him rest his brush on his pallet. With a sigh he looks up at me and carefully treads the space between us. Slowly, he brings his hands; dry and cracked and covered in paint to the point of my chin and holds my face. He kisses me and sighs again, slipping his arm around my waist and lowering me to the floor.
‘The shadows,’ he whispers into my greying hair, ‘they are the same.’
Megan King (From her first portfolio of creative Writing)