Maude with an 'E' - Chapter 3

Pearls of Success

Henriette was predisposed to make a success of this interview, Maude was equally determined to enjoy the occasion and make the best of an opportunity like this. So she happily followed Henriette's prompt and allowed her thoughts to be directed along more pleasant lines. “The poor lady couldn’t have known, after all.” She thought to herself, compassionately. She decided she’d paint her father out to be the loving father that he was, by many a definition. Only, perhaps she’d save that 'painting' for a little later, as right now it could seem like overcompensating for the awkwardness that had just occurred.

“Well, when I look back I personally see one of my first ‘successful’ pictures as “Un Chant D’amour.” Of course that was in 1889, so you might be surprised at my calling it the first, having already been exhibiting for 15 years. By then, I’d sold a good many pictures already. But this one had a certain story behind it. And it was a picture that Princess Louise ended up turning into a tableaux vivant performance before the Royal family at Windsor Castle. It amazed me that it was performed in front of royals. Well, as you might imagine, that was when I felt I’d ‘arrived’.”

“You said it had a bit of a story behind it?”

“We’d recently gotten a bicycle and the novelty of that hadn’t worn off yet, so I remember that well. So, my husband and I were bicycling in a particular neighbourhood, I don’t suppose it matters much, which one. You know, it was very good of him to accompany me like that, it really was… he is very thoughtful and protective like that. He’d even had the bicycle altered, dropping the frame to accommodate my skirts. The boys out in the street could be quite bullish when it came to ladies starting out on bicycles… you know, they just loved to tease, and play pranks. On one occasion I remember them all linking their arms and lining across the street just to upset me as I approached. I found the best way of coping was to appeal to their more primitive sense of self preservation, by simply avoiding their gaze, and, going full-tilt with my head down, offer them no choice but to scatter.

But when I had come home that day and told my husband about the altercation… well he hated to see me head out alone if he could help it. Anyway, there we were, cycling along one day… and to the side of the road my husband noticed an old curiosity shop. To alight and to go in was the only thing to do. We were never able to resist such a temptation.”

She closed her eyes, embarrassed, while she took a sip of her tea and Henriette took the break in her narrative to glimpse about the room. Indeed there were a great many curiosities to speak of, all arranged unintentionally about the place.

Maude carried on, “There…” she said, gesturing as if she was back in the shop again in her mind, remembering the first time she’d set eyes on it… “there, we happened upon this enchanting harp-lute. It struck me as so quintessentially suitable a theme for a canvas that there was nothing left to do but purchase the thing, with a view to using it as a prop in a painted scene.”

“After devising the arrangement for the picture, I lacked a sitter for the part of the man… if you’ve seen the painting you’ll remember there was a man sat with his back to the viewers?” She looked to Henriette for confirmation.

Henriette nodded reassuringly, as she rested from her note-taking only long enough to take a sip of tea.

“Well, and if he hadn’t already won my heart this would have done it for all time, but my husband actually agreed to sit for me. At first he spared time for me here and there where he could. Eventually we had half the room turned into his billiards room as you see… so that he could sit when I needed him and then take a break by playing billiards when I didn’t. And we’ve kept the room like this ever since. Even so, the endeavour developed into a literal labour of love, since he ended up sacrificing hour after hour to me, in order to support me in my work. The position he was required to sit in was a difficult one to hold for very long, alas, he would sit and sit and sit, until his back ached.” As much as I loved him for it I couldn’t let him ever do that again of course, and I think he was glad of it. I always tried to either paint without the need of a male sitter or only paint a male into the scene when I knew I could secure a male sitter. Perhaps for this reason too, my husband retained the billiard table in the room… I suppose it meant he could maintain a manly presence in the room - thus continually championing my virtue - at the same time as provide a pleasing pastime for whichever sitter it happened to be.

So that was one “pearl” of a first, you could say. However, my truly first successful painting… was the one I was telling you about earlier. Let’s call it a pearl of perhaps lesser monetary value than the latter, but nonetheless valuable in the part it plays on the 'necklace', as a whole… I don’t know if I mentioned that I was still a student then, at South Kensington. It was the first picture, the all-important, first one I ever ventured to send to exhibition and subsequently sold. I sent it in to Mr. Wallis at Pall Mall’s French Gallery. Not long after the exhibition had begun, I had occasion to go there and glimpse the spectacle of this exciting first in my life. My mother had actually come to London at that time, and so she was with me, ever supportive as she always had been. I remember a conversation her and I having with Mr. Wallis where it became evident that he thought Mother had painted the painting, and so he complimented her, saying, “If you go on working I am sure you will succeed, for you have shown great promise in that little picture.” She accepted the compliment heartily. We laughed so much about that, after we left.

Maude became pensive just then, thinking of her step-mother, and of course her father again. What she wasn’t telling Henriette was that her mother, on that visit to London, had brought with her a very welcome letter. To Maude, from her father. Maude had kept it safe down until today, as it was one of the few instances she had in writing from him on the topic of her having pursued art as a career. Favourable words of congratulations from him had been few and far between. It was a choice example of the potential he had for being loving and caring, it’s just that so many other things in life had seemed to make it harder and more complicated, for him to express his deeper feelings of approbation towards her. What she couldn't have known then, was that the kind words in that letter would prove to be the last kind words she’d ever receive from him.

She decided to delve deeper into memories of her childhood, “I could always be found to be drawing trees and scribbling faces on any and every scrap of paper I could get my hands on. I recollect clearly how my father bought me my first paint box. It had cost a penny. I’d seen the colourful paints veritably beaming out from behind the glass of the shopkeeper’s window… almost creating a rainbow between myself and it, pointing the way to a pot of gold at the end, but here instead of a pot of gold there was a box - resplendent with coloured paints. My father had to coax me away from shop window so that he could carry on his with his errands that day but you can imagine my delight when he produced it as a gift not long after, to cheer me up when I’d fallen ill. From that day forward, I spent most of the time with a brush in hand, I’m told. And as I continued to grow up I had a burgeoning desire to become a landscape painter. Turner’s pictures were my ideal pictures. I longed to see nature as he saw it. I’d grown up in quite a built up area of Manchester and so our rare trips to the colourful countryside on sunny days, were like injections of joy into my life. I can’t remember a time when the brilliancy of colour did not speak to me in some powerful way. I think it could be because of this that I’m also very attracted to the pictures of Rossetti and Burne-Jones.”

“That’s understandable. I can just see you as one of Rossetti’s famed red heads.” Henriette said, leaning back and squinting, as if to see her in some other format. “I wonder at why you didn’t continue to pursue landscape art?”

“Alas, it was chronic poor health that prevented me.”

“Ah, I see.” Henriette paused, wondering what to write, not wanting to seem callous.

She needn’t have worried on Maude’s account though. Maude was no stranger to suffering. She had lost her birth mother at a very young age, an age too young to even be able to remember her. She had been taken up with consumption about ten months after Maude’s birth. Maude revealed this to Henriette, as she further recounted her personal history. Henriette could only imagine what her father, Louis, must have felt at the loss of his beloved wife and the prospect of raising his newborn daughter alone, as a widower. Though he had come from Prussia and no doubt experienced many a cold winter, that winter may have been one of his coldest.

And yet what close bonds of love Henriette imagined there having formed between the two, as his young daughter toddled through life.

“I imagine when you were younger that it was difficult to get a glimpse of Turner’s works. What’s your earliest memory of seeing a great work of art up close?”

“Well, and this may be hard to be believe... but I can remember when I was 4 years of age, my father took me to the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857! And I don’t just remember due to having been told that he did... I vividly remember the impression it made on me, seeing those huge oil paintings! They towered over me like fascinatingly beautiful monsters. It was like something out of a magical fairytale.

Of course I didn’t remember anything about the painters who had painted them, at the time, I just remember being in awe of the colour and sparkle. And I remember the warm fireplaces we’d often stop at along the way and some candied almonds my father bought me. Indeed ever since then, candied almonds tend to take me back. At a later point in life, when I could appreciate the information, I had occasion to look at the 1857 Exhibition catalogues, and found that there were a great many works of Turner displayed on that occasion. I’m sure it was some of his particular bursts of brilliant colour that became etched into my young mind and ignited this passion I have for colour and art.”

Henriette herself had been to similar art exhibitions and it was easy for her to understand the draw and appeal of a room full of glistening oil paintings, especially considering the smoggy industrial neighbourhood of Maude’s origin.

The industrial revolution was bringing about amazing changes but with those changes, it was also bringing a dull blanket of grey to daily life for most in England. To enter a large room, walls heaving with emblazoned, oil painted colour-rich canvases, depicting all manner of subject theme and scenery, always made for a refreshing change to the commoners' senses. Exhibition halls and art galleries were colourful feasts for the eyes, occasions where one could enjoy the visual sensation of being in nature but without the discomfort of having to travel to get there, and without the usual accompanying odours.

Henriette’s own clothing and the interior decorations of her home, and for most people she thought, were of dull greys and browns. Home furnishings for those who couldn’t afford to indulge their taste for the ornamental, were basic and functional. Even pictures of art in magazines and newspapers were usually black and white. If it weren't for the colour that nature supplied in the form of flora and fauna, one could very well go through an entire working day and not meet with much vivid colour to speak of.

It was no wonder, Henriette thought, that from a young age this young Mancunian Jewess had been taken with colour, fascinated by it and enthralled by the possibilities a small box of painting colours could bring to her life.

Henriette had also been painting the scene in her own mind, as Maude had been reliving the event... it didn’t take much stretch of the imagination to see her, at the age of 4, hand in hand with her cigar-dealing father as they strolled through the great halls of the Grand Exhibition Hall, purveying the artworks on display, and nibbling on candied almonds as they went. Indeed, what an experience in contrasts it would have been for a toddling, inquisitive girl, having emerged from the everyday greys and browns of the cobbled stone streets and brick terraced houses of her smoggy Cheetham neighbourhood, to then be bathed in the radiance of those towering, shimmering works in oil, framed in sparkling gold.

“Just think, that within 30 years your very own work was thus displayed also, and you’ve received a positive review from a Rossetti family member too! Have you ever imagined little girls wandering the Royal Academy exhibition and perhaps being inspired by your paintings too, as you were then?”

“Hmm, when you put it that way, no I hadn’t but I can see what you mean. I certainly hope my work could be a source of inspiration to other girls like me. And I can tell you, if I could have known where my efforts would eventually lead, as you say, positive reviews and such… well, that would have just filled my girlish sails.” Her arms waved as she spoke, and one could almost feel the wave of inspirational air passing through the room.

Maude had needed all the encouragement she could get, because to become a successful female artist during the 1870’s was to take on the world as Maude knew it.