UNDERGRADUATE PAGE

On Painting Wells Cathedral

By GRAHAM BINNS (Corpus Christi College, Oxford) WE did not at first presume to paint the west front, having come simply to admire it, but we had brought our oils. There had been a pretence at avoiding the obvious. We had looked at the moat: " Only Seurat could do justice to that shimmering reflection."

" And even then it could be any moat—though we might introduce a sign-post to Wells. . . ." We had looked at a field of orderly sheaves through an arch of gnarled hawthorn: " One really needs to be Van Gogh—and the composition escapes me."

" It does seem a pity to come from Oxford to Somerset and then paint a field one might see at Hinksey. . . ." Once more the west front loomed up before us: " Only a Prout or a Rothenstein could really attempt it—but, of course, one might make an impressionistic interpretation! "

" We cannot utterly ignore the finest west front in England." Neither could we, so perhaps there was health in us after all.

He sketched, rapidly and expressively, with a fine flourish and a masterly manner. Shapes formed at his finger-ends, while balance, proportion, symmetry revealed the harmony of his mind and the purity of his conception. I, meanwhile, used charcoal with deliberate emphasis, and made a smudge. It was then that I began painting, inconsequently, a patch of mauve sk-y, an acre of cathedral green, and, mistakenly in umber, a square patch of the tower. I worked erratically, stopping often to glance at the work of my companion. Where I had used my colours stiff and strong, his were clear and limpid as water-colour.

" You seem able," said he, " to fill your cathedral with feeling and excitement while mine remains a watery-eyed old maid."

" But you," I countered gallantly, " are at least painting a cathe- dral. It is perfedly clear that none of my colours exist in the original, while, glancing from the west front to your canvas, one might hardly know the difference—and your poplars are quite un-, mistakably poplars."

" They are not poplars Neither the trees on the green nor the trees on my canvas are poplars."

" Well, whatever they are, they are very like. In fact, if Renoir had painted a cathedral I am sure it would have been in your manner ! "

" I believe he did and it wasn't. But I must say that your own is very modern and striking—reminiscent of Piper, but more joyful than macabre. I like the amicable way in which each of yofir twin towers leans toward the other. It would all make a fine backcloth for some ecclesiastical fantasia. It is like an early Utrillo, but needs some additional motif—a tea-table or a striped umbrella on the green."

We walked, after lunch, to the field of golden sheaves. We knew that our west fronts were really very bad. Then, as we climbed the hill, my companion clasped his hand to his forehead. His eyes flashed, and his whole frame shook as if he was transported with an accession of understanding. " I know what my painting needs," he cried. " Boldness! Vivacity! Character! " Simultaneously I felt the full force of his earlier suggestion: a tea-table and an umbrella. .

_In the urgency of renewed inspiration we turned at once in our tracks and hurried back to the hotel. As we crossed the green beneath it the cathedral turned grey with disapproval. The bishops in their niches were transfigured with scorn, and the very sky became ominously black. We averted our eyes, shut ourselves inside; and turned our backs to the window. What, mattered now was not the west front, but composition. We were both, with Doctor Opimian, averse to investing the ideality with too much reality ; each of us had established an aesthetic.

On my canvas the elms and the two twin towers shone opulent and golden. The fine tall windows over the west door glowed with sanguine warmth. Into the door, like a ribbon on the grass, stretched a path, crimson, orange and blue, iridescent with molten colour. Dark Spenserian shadows fell across the sward. In the centre, bathed in an island of sunlight, a tea-table had been erected, and through its centre, leaning rakishly towards the sun, had been stuck a large red and white umbrella. Beneath this garish tulip sat two damply despondent figures with a large pink tea-pot on the table between them. Why were they there ? Who were they ? Whence had they come ? Sitting there beneath the towering splendour of the west front these two depressed persons, one mauve- suited, one in ginger, were enigmas. It must be plain to all who know Wells that two such persons could not, in fact, sit with their tea-pot and their gross sunshade on the green. They deceived no one, yet there they were, symbolically in the feeling of my composi- tion. Like the two twin towers, each looked blankly before him into the shadows.

And with these my fellow-painter was busy. " Strength and forcefulness! " he murmured, as he applied purple patches to the shadowed sides of buttresses. " Pools of light and ponds of dark- ness! " he said, executing in ladylike appliqué a Chinese-white pilaster. His cathedral' now took form and body, became painterly, but rather purple. Grimly, with a palette-knife, he worked upon his foliage. Soon the trees grew apart, one from the other. As their shadows now lay in the wrong direction, he quickly scrubbed them out with a light and sunny green. Then, with intense care, he painted in his foreground a large purple cow. " Do you think that right ? he asked.

" As a cow, no," said I. " As a shadow, it is rightly placed. But, again as a shadow, where does it come from ? "

" I am painting from beneath a large and spreading chestnut, and its shadow lies before me."

" But, in fact, there is no chestnut."

" I am working on the principle esse est percipere.' I would point out that, though there is in fact no shadow, the idea is less preposterous than the two persons beneath your umbrella. My shadow is at least a natural phenomenon, while they are drawn from the lower reaches of Chesterton, or even, perhaps, The New Arabian Nights, and lead only a second-hand •existence. Your whole work is, of course, more palazzo than cathedral. Two typically English towers look down their noses at a Byzantine base. It is like the palazzo ducale with a skyscraper extension! "

" Wells winces to hear you! " I cried, and ran to the window. Floods of natural tears streamed over the face of the cathedral. In the garden below a fountain gurgled in sympathy. The great west front, sublimely mediaeval, looked across at our window. We gazed at it shamefaced, and thought as one: " We have been distinctly unwise. Where Ruskin would have been content with the single statue of a king of England, brash and belligerent, arms akimbo, or a yawning gargoyle, or a sprouted pinnacle, we have attempted to indicate not one but. all of these in a vast embroidery of stone. We have learned in this vacation exercise a true lesson of humility, and never again shall we presume to paint from the imagination." And then, as if in token of forgiveness, the scene transformed. A sympathetic sunbeam lit upon the sward A ,warm glow from the west flooded the great stone face and picked out the glass in colourful Byzantine The cathedral towers, in their simple grey dignity, seemed benevolently aloof from the gaiety of the base. Two men in loud and literary suits stalked slowly from, the west door to the green. With the uncanny deliberation of a well- rehearsed actor one raised up above them a large golfing umbrella, and they sat down lieneath it on two iron chairs. A cloud scudding over the centre pinnacle was suddsnly becalmed as it lay athwart the sunlight. Its shadow, cast upon the grass, was like a vast and purple cow.