The Portrait

ONE

I'm coming to a tragic end; that seems almost certain now. The sliding doors are open. I can hear fire raging; it crackles. The wind is blowing directly from the north and into the studio. Sparks shoot towards me, turn to ash, and drift in like flakes of snow. I am on the easel and can only expect the worst.

He walks in from the garden. He's coming to get me. There's no doubt anymore. He's going to throw me on the fire.

I'm telling you this now, right at the start, because otherwise you'll close the book the moment you realise who I am, inevitably thinking, What's
he
going to experience?

Getting a bit loose maybe … or having a lamp with a sharp edge fall over against him during a cleaning session, and then he gets a dent … at worst, a tear. And in the long run — come on, what can existence possibly have in store for him? Ending up in an attic, with his front against the back of someone else who has also been taken down off the wall … Not a cheerful prospect, true, but in the meantime he'll have done his thing, for at least the span of a human life. Fulfilling his task and carrying to the best of his ability whatever is depicted on him.

For heaven's sake, what can be tragic about someone who is only a support?

That's what they call us in the trade. Supports.

One painter will sometimes ask another, What kind of support do you work on?

Double-weave linen, the other replies. Or portrait linen, when I'm working small format.

Ah, the first says. I swear by extra fine.

They can debate the subject with all the detail that wine lovers bring to discussions of different vintages.

What's ideal about double weave is the structure, the resistance to the brush, like licking an orange.

That's the kind of thing I heard them say, and they seemed to understand each other. I pricked up my ears because, when it comes down to it, listening has always been my only way of finding out who or what I am. I mean, if you, like me, come into the world white and completely blank, with nothing on you at all, you are totally dependent on what they make of you. That's what makes the little they say about you while you are still unpainted so tremendously important.

Like everyone else, I started as a roll, hanging between the other rolls at Van Schendel's. I remember virtually nothing of that hanging. We are going to spend our whole life hanging, but our first hanging remains a mystery. I was somewhere in the middle of the roll, in suffocating, unconscious darkness. The shop assistants called our roll a
two metre
, because of our width. There were other rolls called
one-and-a-halfs
. Most canvases by far were cut out of them. I don't know when exactly the two-metre-wide roll containing me was hung up at Van Schendel's. All of that is prehistory, as far back in my past as an ovum in a human's. That's why I have no idea how long it took for the section of roll I would be cut out of to reach me. It could have been years. I do know that I spent almost ten months with some sixty centimetres of my surface hanging out into the shop, like a dog's tongue. Several times, a shop assistant rolled me out a little further to let a customer look at me and, above all, feel me — then he rolled me back up again.

I am an Extra Fine Quadruple Universal Primed. Anyone who wanted to look at me more closely knew I cost a fortune, especially compared to the One-and-a-Half Double Weave to my right, which, although Oil Primed, had, according to the customers and shop assistants, a significantly shorter staple.

The problem with the roll I come from was size. Two metres is the maximum width, but my quality was close to the highest imaginable. Do you see the rub? Unusually large formats could be cut out of me, but almost none of the artists working in those formats painted with the precision my quality actually demands. Your format, as my final owner would say, is more daubed than painted.

I'm not going to say I despaired in the year I spent rolled out to the daylight like a sheet of toilet paper. More than just waiting, I learnt to daydream. I let myself be carried away by fantasies about who would finally want me. Who in this country was famous enough to afford me? Because that was what my daydreams always came down to: my painter
had
to be a prestigious artist, otherwise he could never afford me. No wonder that I, despite my innate modesty, began to fantasise about life in a gallery, with visitors thronging around me every day.

Absurd, because people who paint precisely enough to want me invariably produce work that trend-setting art lovers and the curators of the temples of contemporary art write off as old-fashioned.

Pandering. Kitsch.

I admit to remembering virtually nothing of the moment I was finally bought. It was a nondescript man, smallish, in a dark-blue army-disposals coat and paint-splashed shoes. He had wide, avid eyes, but I didn't really see them while the transaction was taking place. During purchases they don't actually look at you from the front; instead they feel you and look at you from the side to see how the light catches your surface. One prospective buyer even licked me — before going back to the One-and-a-Half Double Weave next to me, which she had only felt with the inside of her wrist, as if testing a baby's bottle. As if Double Weave has a special temperature … It simply didn't occur to me that the man in the blue coat was seriously considering me — he looked so unrenowned. I didn't even interrupt my daydreaming, and only woke with a start after he had turned and was striding off, gesticulating and talking away to Dennis, who always worked in Van Schendel's on Wednesdays. At the counter he began to order me.

Two metres by a hundred and twenty. Wooden frame, six-centimetre stretchers, with wedges, stapled not nailed. Yes, a huge format. Dennis thought so, too, and I could see that he had to do his very best not to ask what I was going to be. The man in the blue coat gestured, spreading his arms, as if to show that he was thinking of a
life-sized figure
, but who or what I couldn't make out. Huge, that word was mentioned several times and, yes, for him it was the first time it was going to be something
standing
. Absolutely, a cross at the back to reinforce the frame would be very wise. And the stretchers, shouldn't they be glued, three-point-six thick, to give it that bit of extra stability?

I couldn't see the counter from where I was hanging — the shelf with tubes of Rembrandt was in the way. But I did catch his name, or were they only his Christian names?

Felix Vincent.

It didn't ring any bells.

Maybe I thought
,
What kind of self-respecting artist calls himself Vincent?

My whole life long I had hung diagonally opposite a poster of furiously painted sunflowers. It was actually the only work of art I knew.

Yes, that's exactly what I thought. A serious painter wouldn't call himself Vincent. He'd know better
.

I obviously had a premonition. Something wasn't right. The indescribable end, in the flames of the pyre that is now roaring so fiercely outside in the garden that I have started to feel its warmth — was that really contained in this moment?

It could have been anger as well, at myself, for suddenly feeling such a troubling sense of unease — when it was actually one of the greatest moments of my life. My purchase! My conception! The moment when someone said, I want that one! Use that to make the canvas on which I will realise my vision!

Two by a hundred and twenty, standing. That's nothing to be sneezed at.

Two weeks later, he came back to pick me up. If I had the gift of speech, I would now describe what it feels like to finally be a canvas, a canvas with dimensions, a piece of linen that has been measured out, cut with the most razorish Stanley knife and irrevocably stretched tight around a sturdy frame with six-centimetre stretchers no less than three-point-six thick, with wedges and a cross at the back.

A kite that is being flown for the first time might feel more majestic, a kettledrum about to start its premiere performance of Beethoven's Fifth might feel mightier, a newly raised mainsail filling with wind while its ship heels beneath it might feel more ecstatic — but we, the unpainted, silent and as white as chalk, enter a world that promises us more than kite, drum, or sail. Who could be more on edge with curiosity? More willing? More receptive?

When I was carried out of the shop by Felix Vincent and a young, blonde woman in an apple-green leather jacket and apple-green basketball boots — who I would later identify as the love of his life, Lidewij, Lidewij Gams — I knew there was only one creature in the world I could be compared to: a newborn babe.

Just before they came in to carry me off, out of the shop, onto the pavement, into Amsterdam, to the side street where they had parked their van, Mr van Schendel gave my wedges a final tap, and my frame groaned in all four corners as if in labour, wedge against wood, wood against wedge, stretching me one last time until I couldn't go any further. And Felix Vincent flicked my skin with his right index finger, exactly in my middle — yes, flicked is the right word, just like shooting a crumb off a table. Vincent flicked me in the middle like that, and I boomed like a Turkish drum.