3 MARCH 2001, Page 23

When a philoprogenitive artist paints his dream children, dirty feet and all

PAUL JOHNSON

One aspect of the new horror sciences which does not disturb me is the technique now available to help people to have children. I was one of five children and have had four myself, and now have six grandchildren, so I cannot imagine what it is like to live an existence in which children play no close part. Not that I am soppy; I can roar at children as loudly as Uncle Matthew did. But I could not do without them, and my heart overflows with pity for those who are forced by the vagaries of nature to lead a childless existence. I know one woman who fears to take a walk in Kensington Gardens because when she sees a child in its pram she bursts into tears. She is now adopting a child, but it is a long and fraught process. Those powerful people in the social services who, from ideology or sheer hatred of humanity, make adoption so difficult — it is ten times as hard to adopt a child today as it was a generation ago, and 20 times more expensive, so it is out of the reach of most people — are in my view the true heirs of Herod. Not that I think that everyone has the right to a child. No one has rights except God. But we all have duties, and we have a responsibility to raise children if we have the means and are not prevented by other, overriding duties.

The patron saint of the childless is Charles Lamb. No one loved children more, understood them more clearly, or wrote about or for them with more skill. Almost the first 'real' book I read (after Froissart's Chronicles) was Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, which he wrote with his sister Mary. Poor Mary's intermittent fits of madness made him a reluctant bachelor. Or rather, when he finally, aged 44, plucked up his courage to propose to Fanny Kelly, she of 'the divine plain face' as he wrote, that gifted actress turned him down because she feared the strain in his blood.

Lamb knew how to make a child happy. He was much attached to Coleridge's three, especially the luckless Hartley. He had a soft spot even for Hazlitt's young William. This lad was spoilt by his father for ideological reasons. Hazlitt would hand him a guinea at the beginning of a day and tell him not to come back before he had spent it, `to give the boy liberal notions'. But Lamb was fond of him even so. He had Mary Wordsworth's boy, another William, to stay, and the letter in which Lamb records the visit, and the lad's doings and sayings, is a masterpiece of observation and quiet humour. Most touch ing of all Lamb's writings is his mesmeric essay, the best thing he ever wrote, called 'Dream Children', in which he imagines talking to two little ones, John and Alice, whom he had conjured up out of lost loves and wistful yearnings, and who suddenly vanish in the last paragraph. Who could write such a marvel today?

I thought of Lamb's tender visions when I looked round the exhibition of Murillo's paintings of children at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. The best picture in the show is the delightful `Fruitsellers', showing a girl and a boy happily counting the coins they have received for selling grapes. Also on view, and also on loan from Munich, is the wonderful painting of the two boys gobbling grapes and melon, one of them with his mouth full. When I was a child we had a coloured print of this painting, for Murillo was one of my father's favourites. My sisters and I used to discuss it. One boy obviously owned the melon and the other the grapes. The melon boy had given a slice to the grape boy. Why had he not received some grapes in return? And which would we rather have, a lot of grapes or a whole melon? Was it rude of the melon boy to talk with his mouth full? And why did both boys have such dirty feet? True, they had no shoes, but there must have been streams available to wash those dirty soles in. I thought it shocking, but my sisters, much older than me, said that they 'understood'.

Of course, before Caravaggio came along and changed everything in European art, no one (that I remember) put dirty feet into their paintings. In his wonderful canvas in a Roman church, currently on view at the Royal Academy, which shows two old peasants worshipping the Christ-child and conversing in a friendly way with his mother — a marvellous combination of the real and the supernatural — Caravaggio shows the old men's feet as they were; absolutely filthy. This was a bit much for the prelates of the day, and I rather think that this particular painting was at first turned down (as were at least six of the master's) for going too far, even though the Counter-Reformation line was to make the events in the New Testament seem real. All good artists in the first half of the 17th century were lured into real

ism by Caravaggio, and Murillo was no exception. But I notice that he compromised on the dirty-feet question. Whenever he shows street boys, eating or trying to scratch a living or delousing themselves, he makes their feet dirty, because they were dirty and he painted them from life. But when he shows the child Jesus and the boy St John the Baptist, their feet are miraculously clean. Their holiness repelled dust. William Blake was the same. When the young George Richmond, visiting his house, asked for soap and water and was told there was none, Blake's wife Kate explained, 'You see, Mr Blake's skin don't dirty.'

Why did 'Bart' Murillo paint so many pictures of children? They were not particularly saleable in Spain, though they eventually became popular elsewhere. I suspect that they were 'dream children' again. Murillo came from a big family I think he was the youngest of 14 brothers and sisters. He himself had 11 children that we know of. But, one by one, they died. The loss of a tiny child in 17th-century Spain was horribly common but, even so, Murillo's lot was hard. By the time his much-burdened wife succumbed, only four of the children were left. Nor was this the end of the poor man's misfortunes. His eldest son died young, his remaining daughter entered a convent, and another son emigrated to the Americas. When Murillo himself died, only one child, a son, was there to comfort his last days.

Murillo, in my view, recreates in his urchins the little boys and girls he had begotten, loved, lost and lamented. They overshadowed his days and haunted his dreams, and to put them on canvas was a form of exorcism. There is one particularly poignant picture, not shown in the exhibition but reproduced in the catalogue. It shows a beautiful teenage girl, lifting her shawl to reveal her gently smiling face. Could this be a reference to his last daughter who had taken the veil and was convent-immured? We do not know. There are so many things that we do not know about artists and their children. When Vermeer died, he left behind ten children, all still minors as his widow lamented, applying to the authorities to relieve her destitution. Is it not curious that none of these little boys and girls, doubtless much loved, ever appear in Vermeer's paintings? He was evidently philoprogenitive, but his art is childless.