The Artist and the Feast

and the paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck

Sometimes a book you’d have loved anyway collides with an experience that makes you love it even more. This happened to me last week whenThe Artist and the Feast popped up on Libby, where it had been on my hold list for weeks, on the day I visited “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Sometimes a book you’d have loved anyway collides with an experience that makes you love it even more. This happened to me last week when, serendipitously, The Artist and the Feast by Lucy Sneed popped up on Libby, where it had been on my hold list for weeks, on the day I visited “Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck” at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

The novel begins in 1957, at the National Gallery of London: A woman. A painting. The sense of greeting an old friend.

Edouard Tartuffe, 1859-1921

Le Festin (The Feast) 1920

Oil on Canvas

The Feast depicts a table laden with food, some half-eaten, some rotting, but nobody present. The colours are characteristic of Tartuffe’s bright, luminous palette, and the painting showcases the distinctive brushwork which earned him the name “Master of Light.” Particular skill is shown in the reflections in the wineglasses and the smear of butter on a silver knife. The table is laid for thirteen, which has led some to suggest it is an allegory of the Last Supper. The uneaten feast can be seen to represent the futility of decadence after the First World War, as well as lives interrupted and pleasure wasted. The Feast is the only painting to survive the fire that destroyed Tartuffe’s studio in 1920.

The woman remembers the painting burning. She remembers setting the fire.

We jump from there to Provence, the scorching summer of 1920. Joseph Adeliade, a young journalist, travels to Tartuffe’s farmhouse to write about him. Joseph is a failed painter, a conscientious objector during WW I, an embarrassment to his wealthy father. Crippled by grief and guilt for his older brother Rupert, who returned from the war shellshocked and mute, he is trying to reinvent himself.

Tartuffe is a genius, a notoriously cranky recluse, once a close friend of Cezanne, who has refused to talk to anyone since having fled his successful career in Paris years before. Months after Joseph sent a letter requesting an interview, he received a simple reply: “Venez. Come.”

But when he arrives, Tartuffe claims to have no knowledge of having summoned him.

Enter Sylvette, Ettie—Tartuffe’s niece. She takes one look at the piece of paper Joseph has handed him, and says, “Here is your Young Man with Orange.”

Tartuffe appraises Joseph. “Fetch me an orange,” he says to Ettie.

“Tartuffe holds it up to Joseph’s cheek, as if to see how the colour works against the pale English face. ‘Yes,’ he murmurs. ‘Yes.’”

He asks Joseph, “Can you sit very still? Can you be absolutely silent? Can you promise not to interrupt me, not to touch anything, not to distract me? Can you live as a shadow except when I need you to the Young Man with Orange?”

If he can do that, he can stay, Tartuffe says. He can write anything he wants.

The story unfolds from here.

The heat is palpable in this novel: in the sweltering studio, where Joseph sits for hours every day; in the shimmering landscape. In the growing attraction between Joseph and Ettie, who slowly reveal the secrets of their lives to one another.

Tartuffe, a wonder of, well, weirdness. Painting “The Feast,” he demands that Ettie make meals of his subject, then often plucks the plates of food, half-eaten, from the table and takes them to his studio to decompose to the degree he needs for the painting he imagines.

But, reader, keep in mind the epigraph of The Artist and The Feast, which comes from John Berger: “We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.”

Because the deeper you get into the book the more you realize things are way more complicated than you thought.

A hint: Ettie longs to be a painter.

I so didn’t see how she makes that happen coming.

I’ll say this, too: Lucy Steeds writes about painting—from an idea to the finished work—like nobody else I’ve read. I felt as if I were painting Tartuffe’s paintings myself, living inside them as they emerged.

Reading the novel brought an even deeper appreciation for the Helene Schjerfbeck paintings I’d just viewed at the Met

Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) was luckier than most women painters of her time. Her talent was recognized and nurtured early. She studied in France and Italy. She knew and was influenced by Whistler. Sometimes her work reflects other artists of her time.

Unfortunately, her life beyond Finland was cut short when she had to return to spend years tending to her ailing mother. Not that she quit painting.

Thank God, she didn’t!

There, in isolation, her work grew into something utterly, gorgeously her own.

But she was a woman.

In Finland.

Though she was revered in her home country, most of her work remained there. Until recently, her biographies have been available only in Finnish and Swedish.

“Seeing Silence” is an apt title for the Met’s exhibition, but for me it meant more than the expression of silence in Schjerfbeck’s work that was highlighted in the curators’ labels.

It is also the silence that surrounded (and still surrounds) the work of women artists.

Some, like Schjerbeck, eventually find the spotlight—which is a blessing. But there are so many women, equally talented, we will never know.

So much beautiful work lost to us.

Still, I am so grateful for the discovery of Helene Schjerfbeck’s paintings.

I know I will not forget them.