MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
R. WINSTON CHURCHILL has said somewhere that all busy men, especially those engaged in public life, should occupy their moments of leisure by writing a book. His contention is, if I remember rightly, that a book in process of preparation is the most intimate and confident of all companions : it waits for us upon the side- table in the shape of notes or even of draft chapters, and, when at last we are able to return to it, we are received with a wide welcoming gesture, and the conversation is resumed at the exact point, and in the exact tone, of previous intercourse. For those, moreover,, who are exposed to the vicissitudes of politics a book in process of being written is a comfort greater even than that provided by the most affectionate and intelligent of dogs. The electors may by their votes deprive us of our seat in Parliament, but, when we shake the dust of an ungrate- ful constituency from our shoes, we reflect with relief that we have a calm and faithful book awaiting us, whereas they haVe not. All authors, in the rare intervals when they have no book on the stocks, are conscious of loneliness and walk sadly through life, feeling that an essential element of their existence is no more than a gap. Having just completed and published a 'book that has absorbed three and more years of constant application, I am now deprived of this companionship. Immediately, I know, the keel of a new book must be laid. But what is the new ship to be like ? I am wearied, for the moment, of biography : history and 'politics, for the moment, inspire lassitude and not zest : for some strange reason I am not tingling with desire to embark on a critical study of the metaphysical poets; so I have been thinking of writing a book about gardens. The problem is to choose some theme requir- ing no immense technical or scientific knowledge and yet offering occasions for pleasurable research. The alternation of expectation and surprise has, since the days of Babylon, been the foundation of all garden design. It would be agreeable to hire a little house at Nineveh or Karnak and devote the winter months to the study of this theme. * * Yet when I look at any bibliography of flower-books I am deterred by the number of people who, in the past, have also decided to write works on botany or the history of garden- design. Either they have approached their subject from the scientific standpoint and made long and precise catalogues of the many varieties of some given family; or else they have decided to " write lovely " about mediaeval trellis-work, about the conduits and sprinklers of Tuscan villas, or about how to mingle the anemone with the primula in a white apothecary vase. Garden books tend to be either as desiccated as a herbal or lush with sentiment. 'Discouraged by this prospect, I decided last week that I should for once not write a book at all, but that I should take a few quick lessons in the art of water-colour painting and then draw , strong and delicate pictures of the flowers I preferred. I saw myself next February, having mastered the difficult art, seated at my easel with a tooth-glass on the table beside me containing a group of aconite and a single iris reticulata. Patiently I would make firm brush-strokes downwards and sideways, and, after a few hours, there would be the netted iris glistening as if touched with dew. All through the spring and summer I should remain entranced by this occupation, and when the high midsummer pomps came on I should have assembled enough drawings to make a pleasant and expensive little album for the Christmas of 1953. Before, however, purchasing my accoutrement, I decided that it would be well to examine the works of my predecessors. I therefore visited the exhibition now being held at the Marl- borough Gallery in Old Bond Stmpt of the drawings and engravings of the most popular of all botanical illustrators, Pierre Joseph Redoute.
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I had always assumed that Redoute was of French nationality, but I then learnt that he was a Luxembourgeois, from the Ardennes. For this reason the exhibition was opened by Dr. H. R. Madol of the Luxembourg Legation, who spoke a few well-chosen Words. He informed us that, although Redoutes studies of 'roses and the lily family were justly famed, although his catalogue of the flowers at Malmaison was a masterpiece of botanical scholarship, although his album, Le Choix des Plus Belles Fleurs, was one of the finest collec- tions ever produced, his true genius could only be appreciated if one studied his book on edible and inedible mushrooms. I spent some time in the gallery, closely examining the work of this master. I much appreciated his drawing of a crown imperial, but I found his magnolia and his carnations straggly and•poor; his drawing of pansies in the album of the Duchess of Wurttemberg was a delicate piece of work, and he had managed with great skill to indicate the gentian's startling blue. I made a note in my mind that gentians, for the illustrator as distinct from the gardener, are almost foolproof. It was, I decided, with the acaulis that I should initiate my artistic • career. But as I studied Redoute more closely I became conscious of a certain disappointment. He appeared to me to fall between the stools of botanical accuracy and artistic elegance. There was about his paintings a touch of affectation, of stylishness, of deliberate grace, that I found disconcerting. My own pictures, I resolved, would be manlier than that.
On leaving the exhibition, I went to the library to obtain more information about flower-painting in general and Redoute in particular. I was unable to obtain Monsieur Leger's study of the master, but I did obtain, and read for the second time, Mr. Wilfrid Blunt's astringent volume on The Art of Botanical Illustration. I was glad to be reminded that Mr. Blunt also felt that Redoute had been over-estimated, both as a botanist and a painter. He appears to have possessed special gifts of self-advertisement and salesmanship and, although he owed almost everything to Gerard van Spliendonck, his teacher at the Jardin des Plantes, it was the pupil and not the instructor who reaped the reward. Although a man of most unpleasant appearance, having a " face like a Dutch cheese," thick blubber lips, and heavy clumsy fingers, he was so much appreciated in successive courts that Marie Antoinette sent for him to paint a cactus which was sharing her incarceration in the Temple, and the Empress Josephine employed him to cata- logue and immortalise the exotic plants which, in her lavish manner, she collected at Malmaison. He attained a ripe old age and died, as he would have wished, when in the act of examining the corolla of a new lily. But Mr. Blunt, in his austerity, regretted that Redoute should have been so influenced by the false elegance of the first Empire as to prefer pretty flower patterns to scientific accuracy. And I agree that, when compared to Diirer's incredible "Rasenstiick,' or to Rabel's dog-tooth violet, or to Georg Ehret's hibiscus, the paintings of Redoute seem lax and vague. My own style, I once again determined, would resemble Diirer rather than this courtly sentimentalist.
Mr. Blunt's book about the botanical illustrators is so sharp and uplifting that, even when I had read the passages about Redoute, I went on reading what he had to say about the others. Writing as he does from the botanical point of view, he disparages the Dutch flower-painters, even van Huysum, since they were apt to clutter up their pictures with flowers that flourish at different times of the year. From his specialised angle, even Fantin Latour seems less important than Walter Fitch. Poor old Mrs. Delany is fobbed off with a sneer. I have derived the unpleasant impression that, however quickly I may master the art, however pretty and precise my draw- ings may become, I shall not satisfy either Mr. Wilfrid Blunt or his brother the PrOfessor. I shall not therefore purchase the required accoutrement or expose myself to disappointment and shame. I shall write the life of Amenhotep
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