Still Life [antikvár]

Prologue Post-Impressionism: Royal Academy of Arts, London 1980 He signed the Friends' Book in his elegant handwriting: Alexander Wedderburn, January 22nd, 1980. She had said, peremptory as always, that he was to go straight to Room III, where 'the miraculous stuff was to be found. Early. So here he was, a distinguished pubHc man, also an artist of a kind, stepping obediently through Room 1 (French i88os) and Room 11 (British i88os and 1890s), on a lead grey morning, to the pale grey, classical, quiet place where the bright light shone and sang off pigment so that the phrase, miraculous Stuff, seemed merely accurate. On one long wall hung a row of Van Goghs, including an Aries 'Poets' Garden' he hadn't seen before, but recognised, from small photographs, from charged descriptions in the painter's letters. He sat down and saw a bifurcated path, simmering with gold heat round and under the rising, spreading blue-black-green down-pointing vanes of a great pine, still widening where the frame interrupted its soaring. Two decorous figures advanced, hand-in-hand, under its suspended thickness. And beyond, green green grass and geraniums like splashes of blood. Alexander was not worried about whether Frederica would turn up. She was no longer in the habit of being late: her life had schooled her to temporal accuracy, perhaps to being considerate. He himself, at sixty-two, felt, not quite accurately, that he was now too old, too setded, to be put out, by her or by anyone else. He thought with warmth of her certain approach. There had been a pattern, an only too