Provenance
Le Bateau-atelier (1874)
The Studio Boat
Kröller-Müller Museum
The Studio Boat
Kröller-Müller Museum
Pinned to my corkboard, 3X5 glossy less
image than brief citation at the bottom of a page, beach pebble on a kitchen windowsill, dried bit of heather crushed between the leaves of Wuthering Heights. A ripple on the river's surface. Fading sheen, fragile boundary of air and water. Shadows stretch from the other shore. Mirror- still. As the river breathes. Forty-two Dutch guilders at the museum store, rolled into cardboard tube, tucked into her bag. On the train back to Amsterdam from Otterlo, lulled by the rocking of the cars-- of the little boat--, she dreamt her delicious theft. (Another forty dollars at the frame shop on Broadway, just around the corner from their Riverside apartment. No Hudson glimpsed from those smudged windows. She craved a river view.) Hazy impression of woods and farmhouse on the distant bank. Trees rusty, gray. Wavering reflections draw the eye. Two lines, two poles, a mooring? The painter's floating studio--all that light on a palm of dark. Eight years it hung above her writing desk, reminder of a drowsy gallery in a woodland park, how it warmed that roof, cooled those splintery, green- painted boards, leaving no words to name the colors. Only texture. We can't see in. Can't quite discern the painter as he cleans his brushes, peering out the open door to watch a pair of ducks, invisible to us, drifting among the lilies by the shore. We cannot see Camille on her low cot, keeping him company, book in hand. The door is open but we can't see in. |
Later my father mailed that picture back
to their friend in Amsterdam, memory of the afternoon the three had shared in Otterlo. Kept just the snapshot and its echo of a different journey when-- match struck in the Giverny kitchen, all those yellow chairs!--she'd cried out, she could see the painter himself brushing color onto wood! It's the dark hull. I'm sitting on the verge, looking out across to that imagined place, his painted world and where he paints it from. And now I've taken it as talisman, as footnote, to keep company in my turn. Mere scrawl along a margin of my losses. Image reaching back to image reaching back to canvas, back to wood, to water ... Manhattan, Otterlo, Argenteuil. It's the dark hull. I've taken it to keep company with how he painted the outside, and the inside. How I now can see obliquely through to where each saw what the other saw and how it holds us there. It's the dark hull and its reflection, catching my breath as the river breathes. (c) Karen McPherson 2015 |