A Brighter Tomorrow - Maggie Ford (thriller novels to read .txt) 📗

her breath, so as not to show herself up any further. As they started away, she felt the breeze hit against her cheeks with the increase of speed, but the machine wasn’t as noisy as she had imagined – none of that rumbling, clanking, banging of the very few she had so far seen frightening the horses as they rattled past far faster than a trot.

His galleries were situated near Brompton on the other side of Hyde Park. They didn’t look nearly as big as she had expected but seemed to have quite a few people moving in and out of the main door. Leaving the vehicle in a side street, he conducted her through a side door, along a short corridor and into a long, brightly lit room where people were wandering with intent expressions as they gazed at what was being shown.

No one noticed them enter from the side door and Hunnard seemed to prefer it that way. Unobtrusively he guided her to one side.

‘Your self-portrait,’ he announced, quietly indicating it, now in a plain, light-coloured wood frame. A little removed from a collection of modern art, it looked isolated, as if it had no right to be there, making it look amateurish and stiff against the flowing lines of the others. It looked different and out of step with what he told her was the work of post-impressionists.

When she said nothing, Hunnard went on. ‘There have been quite a few new schools of thinking springing up these last fifty years. Yours is just another way of looking at life and it takes time for the public to adjust to something new.’ Gazing at her forlorn little painting, Ellie could see why.

It did look out of place. Perhaps it would never sell. Then why had he bought it and then even come back for more of her work?

Hunnard led her away from her forlorn little picture to move between the rows of hung paintings. What he was saying meant nothing to her – all about post-impressionism, primitivism, expressionism. As she gazed with feigned knowledge at what he was pointing out, it was going over her head. All she knew about painting was what Michael had told her, no connoisseur himself, and her natural talent and sensitivity for what she painted. All this grandiose allusion to all these different schools of painting was only making her feel inadequate and very naive.

‘Your work is very different,’ he was saying. ‘It falls into the category of neither impressionism nor expressionism, though maybe leaning towards primitivism.’

Ellie had never heard of any of this before, having no idea what he was going on about. But she wasn’t going to display her ignorance.

‘However,’ he continued, ‘your work is new, refreshing, and for a young woman your brushwork is surprisingly strong, which adds to its charm. It presents a puzzle and the public may think that; but I firmly believe it will eventually be accepted.’ If this was meant to be encouraging, she didn’t feel it; but he continued with hardly a pause.

‘It was the same with most of our impressionists in the beginning as well as with the expressionists and primitives. Consider Vogeler, Fritz Mackensen, Charles Maurin, Lovis Corinth, Paula Modersohn-Becker. She is a woman, by the way, like yourself, but is of course well established.’

She was glad to hear of at least one woman among all these male painters. She wasn’t alone, then.

‘What you lack, young lady, is experience, good grounding. You need to study under a good tutor, another painter of merit. I strongly advise you to consider it. But you are very young and have hardly begun to live.’

Ellie wanted suddenly to laugh but managed to curb it. If anyone had done enough living, as he called it, she had – enough for someone twice her age: living in fear of her own father, watching her mother working to keep her family together, watching her die, being thrown out of her home at the age of fifteen to fend for herself and a younger sister, and they could well have been sent off to an orphanage to work like little slaves for all the good her own brother had been… No, that was unfair. Charlie had given Dad a good bashing when he’d caught him abusing her. But then he had walked out. They’d both walked out, leaving her at fifteen to cope with a dying woman.

She became aware that while she’d been going over the past, the man standing beside her was still talking, unaware of her wandering thoughts.

‘In time you could develop into as fine a painter as Modersohn-Becker, if you apply yourself. You have time on your side. Even Paul Gauguin did not begin to paint seriously until he was nearly forty.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘But now his health is failing him. His paintings no longer sell as once they did. Virtually penniless, yet he is producing some of his finest work. He now lives far away from France, you know, on one of the islands in the Marquesas. Such is the fickleness of public taste.’

He gave a deep, dramatic sigh before turning to regard her. ‘But you have still to reach your peak, and this is why your single piece of work is here. It takes up room, but I pride myself on being far-sighted and have faith in it. And that is why I have bought your second painting.’

Ellie found herself being conducted back to where her picture was hanging. Someone was now gazing up at it, briefly consulting a catalogue he held, then looking back at the picture in deep study. Ellie dared hope that he would suddenly say to Hunnard that he wanted to buy it, but the man moved on and Ellie felt her heart sink a little.

‘You see,’ Hunnard began, ‘I am interested in the subject.’

‘You mean my mother?’ Ellie queried. ‘She was—’

‘No, child, the subject matter, the technique – symbolic of your world as you see it, the way