Unfinished Painting

At a Glance

Metadata	Details
Publication Date	2022-08-01
Journal	Fourth Genre Explorations in Nonfiction
Authors	J.D. Scrimgeour

Abstract

In the grand Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, hangs an unfinished 18th-century portrait by a well-known portraitist of the era, Nathaniel Dance-Holland. The museum’s description says the subject wears a “powdered wig,” and his hair does have the long swept-back look of George Washington and other men of the era. It is definitely not white, though, but auburn with wisps of grey. The man’s turned head and tentative expression convey a sense of being unsettled, as if he’s been interrupted in a private moment. It’s quite well done, and realistic, the pink in the cheeks and the nose, the uneven flares of hair.The figure is set against a rich brown backdrop, expertly shaded to indicate the off-stage light source that illuminates half the subject’s angled face. Much of the lower half of the painting, however, is unpainted canvas, a dull beige, the outline of the clothes that would be covering his upper torso. This part looks like a rudimentary cartoon. A few bold brown strokes sketch a jacket’s lines, and the contours of arms rise in a triangle in front of where the chest would be. Apparently the sitter was to be holding a large portfolio, which is simply a right-angled space, a great beige blankness.The painting caught my attention immediately: the contrast between the deep brown and flat beige, the verisimilitude of life in the pinked cheeks in violent contrast with the unexplored map of some hinterlands where the body exists.Looking closer only roiled me more. The painting expressed many things about art and life, the act of making, and our never-finished selves. The fact that it was unfinished was what made it come alive, the head rising from its white collar, which rose from, well, nothingness, a random blotch of beach sand on a cloudy day. The face would have been just another 18th-century portrait were it not for the contrast—instead, the head held a life that the rest of the canvas didn’t, and we notice the features more than we would have otherwise. I wonder if Dance had made the head so lifelike that, beholding it, he felt it unwise—or he felt uncomfortable—to continue. He couldn’t paint if that face was going to be staring at him. Or he needn’t paint because he’d already, as we say in our times, nailed it.I saw the portrait on the day before Thanksgiving, when I’d walked with a few relatives to the Nelson. I tried, in a sentence or two, to express my astonishment at the painting to others, but I didn’t want to be a bore, and, besides, it all felt so obvious to me. The others seemed to appreciate it, but perhaps only as a kind of joke—which it was, too! An “Oh, I give up!” So I quickly gave up trying to say more, took a photo of it with my phone, and moved on. We had plenty on our docket that day, and we strolled through a couple of rooms before returning to the crisp sunshine of the afternoon.On this trip to Kansas City, I had intended to scribble in my journal as much detail as I could about my in-laws’ Thanksgiving, which, for much longer than the 31 years I’ve known my wife, Eileen, has been a huge affair, with 50 to 70 people coming for Thanksgiving dinner. After eating, most make the fifteen-minute walk down to the Plaza, the ritzy shopping area that turns on all its holiday lights that evening after a countdown—5, 4, 3… . If you get a late start and miss the lighting ceremony, the joke is that you just close your eyes, count down yourself, and then open them. Yay!Over the decades, I’ve had my moments during the nearly week-long stay where I feel antsy, but the holiday is generally a highlight of the year, a celebration of family. My wife and her eight siblings all married, and all nine families had children, 26 in all. Two of those children got engaged this year, the first of the new generation. The youngest started middle school last year.There’s a painting that hangs in the stairwell in Eileen’s parents’ house. It’s called “The Beanball,” and it shows a boy in the foreground with a troubled face, while behind him a pigtailed younger girl (his sister?) storms toward him with a fierce pout and clenched fists. She’s just been pelted by a pitch. Though it’s not actually by Norman Rockwell, but Bob Byerley, it is Norman Rockwell. The warmth and gentle, hokey humor of it contains the feeling of the FitzGerald Thanksgiving.On the FitzGerald Facebook page, I looked at the photos posted of the five long tables that seated over 50 people, stretching through the dining room, across the foyer, and out into the family room. Each year, Jim, Eileen’s father, arranges for the one of the youngest grandchildren to holler, “Grandpa, pass the salt,” across the three rooms after everyone says grace, and the feast begins.Although I’m not one to celebrate family on social media, I almost reposted a photo, a long shot of all the crowded tables, for the world to see with the caption, “And we all like each other!” Family joy, though, is hard to share with others. It feels like gloating, and it seems to tempt the fates. Also, in these times, this picture might seem, well, weird—a family with nine hetero couples, all of whom have remained married at least fifteen years. Something disturbing must be going on under the surface … but don’t ask me. I’ve got nothing.The dinner itself takes place at what used to be Eileen’s parents’ house. It’s the house where she and her siblings grew up, and the parents sold it to John, their second of their six sons. John and his wife Gretchen live there now with their three children, and the parents live in a bungalow next door, which they bought when their neighbor went into a nursing home.The first time I attended a FitzGerald Thanksgiving was in 1989. Eileen and I came all the way from Bloomington, Indiana, where we were in graduate school. She had spent the week before quizzing me on her siblings’ names and birth order. I arrived as her new boyfriend, sporting a mustache and a gold stud earring, which at the time was tepidly alternative. I found out later that they teased Eileen about it. Of course, they joked about everyone’s love life back then, just as there’s a curiosity about the grandchildren’s love lives now. Although it’s definitely not true, family lore has it that if you bring someone to Thanksgiving, you have to marry them.That first visit I was given a cot on the third floor, the legendary netherland that had housed all six boys through their youths. I stayed there along with the six brothers, who at that time were between 18 and 24. As you might imagine, late night, when they all came home from parties and local bars, was a bit rambunctious. And in the slog of the following morning, I sensed that any clothing, including underwear, was communal.This year, thirty-one years later, our family was treated to “fancy dinner” with Jim and Irene in their bungalow on the Tuesday before the holiday. Fancy dinner is a recent family tradition. Every few years, each child’s family has dinner with Jim and Irene in their dining room on good china, with various gaudy trappings collected over the years from their weekly excursions to estate sales: gold (plastic) placemats, golden (not gold) silverware, candles, finger bowls.It was a curious dinner in that, as the name implies, it wasn’t entirely serious. Yet it sort of was. I wore a nice sweater and didn’t wear jeans. The food wasn’t particularly special. For another fancy dinner that week, with another out-of-town family, Jim and Irene considered ordering bar-b-que. Ultimately, they didn’t get take-out for that dinner, and they added a special touch—a servant, Eileen, who wore an apron and came out of the kitchen whenever her mother rang the fancy bell on the table. (Where did the bell come from? I sense the FitzGeralds have one of everything stashed somewhere in their small house.) Eileen’s father called her “Helga,” which didn’t quite fit with the idea of an Irish servant girl she was supposedly portraying, but no one was trying very hard for verisimilitude. Eileen spoke little dribbles of her high-school French.The dinner, the joke of the servant, was a reminder of the underlying presence of class in these lives. The FitzGeralds, probably in part because they had nine children, were never well off. Jim disliked his government job, retiring as soon as he could. Irene was a private nurse for an extremely wealthy family. The FitzGeralds grew up just on the east side of Main Street. Cross to the west side and the houses turn into estates; the people on the east side often worked for those on the other.Return visit on Friday … by myselfJeremiah Meyer, Dance Holland’s lifeThe head belongs to—well, not belongs to—but is a representation of a famous “portrait miniaturist,” Jeremiah Meyer, who was a neighbor of Dance on Tavistock Row, a stretch that housed many artists and actors in London’s Covent Gardens.More on Thanksgiving … but whatNegotiating politics? NahSense of being unfinished, early on … the earring in a portrait.Making … life calls … but what calls, the personal or the communal, life/family vs. art/selfSpeculation on paintingWhat I’m thankful for … We are all being made, unfinished selves … Why did Dance stop? The head is well made, and the outline of the rest seems like it will turn out fine. The portfolio does seem large, filling the lower left-hand quadrant—did Dance have doubts about its prominence? Still, it seems like the size could be revised easily (it hadn’t been painted yet), and it probably was the right proportion for the subject. After all, it represented Meyer’s occupation.What if the painting had been stopped at a different time? If Dance had only outlined the whole piece in brown lines and then abandoned it? There might be the small kick of seeing an 18th-century artist having sketched something that looks like a bleached-out Simpson’s character, but that’s a minor thrill, a Bart Simpson wisecrack.What if the painting had been more complete? I think we would have felt more of the painter’s sense of failure. If he had gone so far to color in the cloak-like coat, or flesh out the hands, before stopping, I think we would have sensed that he fucked up somewhere—didn’t get the hands right, or made the shoulders uneven in an unfixable way. To have brought the painting so close to completion, and then said no more—the work would radiate that frustration, that despair.But here I feel free will. Dance woke up one morning, looked at what he had done, and said “Enough.”Enough. Why? The joy of speculation is rich. What do you think?Miranda Pratt, who works at the Nelson-Atkins, wrote telling me that the painting was probably made “around the time” he had moved back to London from Italy. Meyer had been a neighbor, she told me.I was hit with a flash of inspiration. He’d left Meyer in Italy, so the painting couldn’t be completed. Dance hadn’t finished the painting simply because he moved! Life called. He answered. The painting was abandoned. For whatever reason, the fact that life came before art had made me feel the life of art, the life in art.I could wander back to my in-laws, returning to life’s bustle, and somewhere in the departure, art would be made. It would be made in the unfinishing, the abandonment.Too romantic. Art is choice. Choosing what to put where, whether to stop or go on. Even Jackson Pollack’s “action painting” involves whether to drip or fling. And as Pollack himself said, “I can control the flow of paint; there is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end” (Rohn 114).As I soon discovered, Dance hadn’t worked on the painting in Italy and abandoned it when coming back to England. Meyer lived in England, and the two presumably met, or became friendly, when they lived alongside each other on Tavistock Row, a stretch that housed many artists and actors in London’s Covent Gardens. They both had lived there from the mid 1760s to 1782. While we don’t know for sure when Dance began the painting, or when he abandoned it, it seems like he would have had time to finish it.Maybe, just maybe, whenever he was painting it, Dance appraised it and said, “It can’t get better.” Maybe he saw it the way I do. The head says it all, everything else would just be filler. Maybe he stepped back and saw the pairing of the brown and beige background, maybe a modern sensibility swept through him and he saw that to abandon it was to complete it—he recognized his accidental genius.I don’t particularly like the “braided essay,” an essay that alternates between subjects, having a few paragraphs on, say, an 18th-century painting, and then some paragraphs on an American family’s Thanksgiving dinner. It seems too faddish in current literary circles, something one writes because it’s assigned in a graduate creative writing program. For that reason, I don’t trust it. The odor of personal ambition clings to it; the author’s desire to be current, to seem in the know.I resent it, too, for how, like much of what gets called Creative Nonfiction nowadays, it seems a deliberate effort to separate itself from the general public, to make something that, while it may address hot-button issues, does so in a way that might as well be cerebral poetry. In essence, the braided essay is just another of the new nonfictions that moves the essay toward the “lyric essay,” a kind of hobbyist’s craft, removed from the flow of the historical world and its citizens.Reading one, I often want to say to the author (the narrator?), Just chill out and talk to me.The family probably doesn’t all like each other. How can they? But, as Rodney King asked—“Can we all get along?” We stopped the tradition, which felt rather tortured in a family where people don’t want to stand out, of having every person at the table say what they are thankful for. It ended soon after the Thanksgiving where one person said they were thankful that no one in the family was in the war in Iraq and another (the spouse of a cousin) followed with thanks for all our troops who were over there, defending our freedoms.Once he put down his brush mid-painting, Dance (how I love the name!) never picked one up again. He turned his attention to politics, and served in Parliament for much of the rest of his life. What could he do better than what he had done? And how had he made his masterpiece? By quitting. I wonder if he even bothered to wash his brush out that day, or if he left it hardening on the palette.Yes, I wrote “masterpiece.” Forgive me. I trust my own taste too much. No one has paid much attention to the painting through the centuries. Who am I kidding?If any photos exist …British portraitist, who painted King George and Captain John Cook, among others. Founding member of Royal Academy in 1768. Gave up painting in 1790, went into politics, member of Parliament.“In 1800 Dance changed his surname to ‘Dance-Holland’ by Royal license, Holland being the surname of a distant cousin of his wife.”From Tate website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dance-holland-the-meeting-of-dido-and-aeneas-t06736.Dance did a self-portrait in 1773.Meyer was married in 1762, had three children. Like Dance, he was an original member of Royal Academy.This information is from … Pollack quote: https://www.dartmouth.edu/∼chance/course/student_projects/Kristin/Kristin.htmlSomeone actually wrote a dissertation on Dance-Holland. In 1973, David Antony Goodreau completed his dissertation for a PhD in Art History from U.C.L.A. It was titled, plainly, Nathaniel Dance, R.A. (1735-1811).At some moment in the walk along Brookside, or maybe ascending the daunting hill of 53rd street, the final leg of the return,Father was architect, “city surveyor”—105, GoodreauAfter mid 1770s, number of portraits declines significantly—“probably only did them for his own pleasure or as favors to friends” 170, “It is particularly lamentable because his most effective and original portraits were executed in the half dozen years before his retirement from professional practice in 1782.” 170, Goodreau1782—left Tavistock Row, gave his painting materials to Gilbert StuartTook up residence with Harriet Dummer, wealthy widow whom he married.There’s a parallelism between the point of the portfolio and the body’s two slopes, which rise to their own point: the head.In the middle of writing this essay, Eileen and I celebrated her birthday with a trip to New York. We bought tickets to the Met (which get you in for three days!) and spent much of the weekend in its galleries. I was humbled by the art, the human lines of the sculptures, the moods of color. That same weekend, Eileen showed me a photo she’d taken of a friend’s unfinished painting. It didn’t leap out at me like Dance’s, but it had the similar contrast of blank canvas and a completed face, and the contrast was, I had to admit, similarly interesting. The glory and abundance of the Met, and the simple beauty of the unfinished painting Eileen showed me, made me realize that I was probably wrong to think of Dance’s work as a It was to say is it? Like like family. and in the of being any photos exist of me an earring, I don’t know where they that earring, and my left a seem like a kind of Something … . no one would know I had an earring if I hadn’t been back to that first visit to Kansas on this of Meyer does not have an He doesn’t have a body what have you with it. Eileen and I to we that we would to get married in the and her parents would an in Kansas was one of and of was the least bit but Eileen’s family was Eileen had as a when we went to with the family, she didn’t get up and did and she had her from when quite her parents know over the that we were in a before we were her father had said over the after Eileen’s and the after their Eileen’s parents the and paid for it, so we didn’t going the was for the family as much as it was for to marry in the we had to of was about it, but I it would be to how the other half and Eileen was to it; she’d years in She could last out the a with a in Bloomington, and on a we walked the two across the to the We down with the father, and we didn’t We were this for Eileen’s of were Eileen said how she had been me and in on He to talk to her about her was long but she didn’t want to say that so We had just to make her parents is between you and he said to I looked at She was Two years later, this would the to get married and We didn’t get married in the in the middle of writing this is the middle And is it part of finished or unfinished, or is it at that where the that white collar, way to family to Kansas City, for the first of the new my who seems to as often as she takes a It was mid just before this made it out to the and got to look at the unfinished painting a third And I became that it was special. My who hadn’t come the first saw it and got it two years of his Even the drip of on the left which, was the color for how they seems as if one of random were across back then sensed the an and and member of the Royal made a of the painting in to make of it. It has of the beauty of the of the face right, and the expression looks rather than and the point is that he to it at all, an unfinished painting, when there were so many other finished he could have then the with the ceremony, his simple your the of on the floor, the the siblings and A in the middle of the and it to some before it again. in the the on the number of children their of 26 would have in the next years. The was The will be … Why did Dance What is a of and While in Italy, Dance had an to a painting and they began a arrived in London a few after Dance there, and she moved in a few houses down from Meyer and Dance the would and in but that was not to be. better in seems like she would be hard to a the life of the those who took an was another well-known portraitist, along with Dance and Meyer a member of the Royal was to his his was even to a to quite him in his of There are a few that Dance, as an act of may have been for the of by an himself as a ended in when it was that the was a and a things we do for I might stop this essay to the of Dance’s know that I there is that between life and art, between when to from one to the that I’ve walked my whole life. To live the and of the or to the and that the world me, that people give me. To to at wore that earring because it felt at the but I didn’t about to it, to the from I the was open and I could that stud just to make people wonder about me, about who I actually but I’m not to make the effort to it I’d rather my time you go to Kansas City, stop by the Nelson. It’s And walk to the room on the first of the original in the and Dance’s unfinished portrait of I want you to do is to look at it and me if you see what I do.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.24.2.0030