I love a painting that hangs in the National Gallery in London. It has to me the atmosphere of a memory or a waking dream. It shows a man seated in deep shadow at the corner of two streets, thumb to chin and fingers crooked as if nursing the remains of a cigarette, eyes down and pensive; waiting.
Two musical instruments lie next to him on a table: a lute, shining like a new chestnut freed from the husk, and a viola that reaches invitingly towards you as if just asking for its strings to be plucked. For you are here too, somehow, hovering on exact eye level with the man and his table. The painting, so small and mysterious, is peculiarly alive to the nearness of your presence. It puts you on the spot on this quiet day when the leaves of the young elms are just beginning to turn and the man in black sits low at the crossroads. Before him, the cobbles rise up and over the gently swelling bridge into a brighter world of red-roofed houses and church spires and dappled light elsewhere. But he remains forever on the outskirts.
Arriving in London for the first time, in my early 20s, I found a strange counterpart in this painted figure. He too was on the brink of something, or perhaps nothing at all, a loner on the edge of events. But he stayed still, never changing, ever faithful in his time and place, while I tried to make my way in this unfamiliar city without knowing where I was going or what I was doing. The waiting man became a fixed point.
The picture in which he appears is nowadays known as A View of Delft, With a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall. According to the writing so discreetly lettered on the wall behind the lute, it was painted by C Fabritius in 1652 [probably best known for his later painting The Goldfinch]. Titles are an oddly new invention, evidently unknown or unnecessary to artists of that time, and nobody knows what Fabritius might have called his painting, if anything at all. It is true that he presents a view of the little ringed city of Delft, canal-crossed and storeyed, with recognisable streets and spires. But his vision takes you so close to this man that if he relaxed into movement and dropped his arm down across the table, with its sonorous blue cloth and its musical instruments, he could almost touch you with the tips of his fingers. I do not know why the title ignores him in favour of the place, or the stall, as if where the scene is set matters more than he does. He is not even looking at this view of Delft, though in a sense we are all gathered before it. The picture, polarised between the shadows and the sunlit stage, takes off towards the bright side, the road sweeping over the canal and into the centre of town, beneath a blue sky that casts its reflection on the waters below. Delft holds its pleasures somewhere over that bridge. But my eyes keep returning to him.
In those early days, I didn’t care why the man was sitting by a table or about his instruments – the polished lute, the viola with its deep curlicues. Maybe he had made them, or was just trying to sell them, possibly both. I only cared about his darkly handsome presence, head tilted, absorbed, the timeless outsider. He looked as if he might be about to remove a fleck of tobacco with practised elegance from his lips; we smoked roll-ups back then. His preoccupation was magnetic, contemporary, the pose of thought so subtle and familiar as he waits for someone to come, for something to happen, for life to catch alight.
This painting became a kind of staging post for me on a specific journey across London. I used to walk down Charing Cross Road from the publishing house where I worked, slip through the side entrance of the National Gallery to see the art, and then catch the tube to meet someone with whom I was having an almost comically doomed affair. The Dutchman gave me luck, or perhaps it was courage. For pictures can shore you up, remind you who you are and what you stand for. The relationship we have with them is so singular and unique that nobody can gainsay our experience. What you see is what you see, yours alone and always true to you, no matter what anyone else contends. Once, I remember repeating the route on my return and glimpsing the picture twice in one day, just to cancel out the inbetween time of misunderstanding and impasse. Later on, in a new job in Soho, I would zigzag through Chinatown and into the back door of the museum to look at the art at lunchtime. I even saw A View of Delft late on a winter’s night, slipping in with a painter who had visiting rights after hours. How can it be that I did not know how he got them, did I never ask? Such mysteries we leave undisturbed like a perfect meniscus when young.
The more tortuous the relationship, the more I preferred the Dutchman. Sometimes I walked past quite fast, rapid sideways glance, just to check that he was still there among the 17th-century paintings. It always felt as if he might vanish if too clumsily approached. It seems to me now that this is in the nature of Fabritius’s image, which has the transient appearance of a mirage. And what if it was not there one day, what would that mean? It is possible to be superstitious about pictures; people have raised them like standards in battle, prayed to them, attacked them, carried them about like talismans. We make pilgrimages to see them and are disturbed to find that they are not where they are meant to be but hanging in some other museum, on loan abroad, or just inexplicably gone. Paintings are reliable; they are not supposed to let us down. They absorb all our looking and our feelings without ever changing, unlike living beings.
I myself was faithless, volatile and confused. I was not in love, no matter how much I wanted to be. But I could not understand why, nor explain myself to the man I was seeing. But this painted figure, who could hear nothing, was not looking my way and clearly didn’t even exist, appeared to understand everything, with the magical power of images; I suppose he was literally the man of my dreams.
Of course, I did not go to the National Gallery just to see A View of Delft. There were other paintings, other people, other lives. But there is an analogy between art and music. You listen obsessively to a single track, torn-hearted, and then perhaps much later to the song before and the one after and eventually return to the wild blue universe of other artists altogether. But that first song still has its irreducible significance, its time-stopping potency; and so does this painting for me.
It speaks of solitude in the city, of hoping for life to begin, of waiting on the dark side of the street. Despite its exquisite depiction of Delft – the invitation to the eye to slip through the streets, past the church, over the bridge and into the twinkling town – it is the most internal of paintings to me. The man sunk in thought, and silence, beneath the ghostly swan on its swinging sign, exists outside time in his head.
***
Visiting children, told that my father was an artist, would challenge him to draw a circle in one go to see if it was true; and he would oblige with a single flawless line. But then he might turn that circle into a peach, a planet or a diamond ring, whatever they wished, in a few agile marks. To see the world transformed into two-dimensional images, materialising on the page with a 2B Staedtler, or on canvas with a brush, is to witness a form of magic.
But I always knew not to ask for too much. My father was a painter, not a conjuror; art was no trick. I hoped that he would one day draw my brother or me, if only in the margins of The Scotsman, or somewhere in a sketchbook. I wanted to see how he saw us, what he would make of us children. But it never happened. When I left for university, he gave me something else, something he prized, and which had been handed down through his family – a dictionary; words instead of images.
It was an ideal gift to wing me on my way, at least to my parents. For I was off to study literature, and here was the whole world of words in one volume. But alas, I was only able to think in images, first, and so it has remained, my sense of life coming through streams of pictures before anything forms into sentences, let alone dictionary-definition language. This is only the first of the reasons why I treasure Dutch art – so democratic, so all-embracing, so infinite in its reach through everything seen, experienced, imagined, remarked upon, remembered, from the gusting ship to the herring to the girl spellbound by a letter, from the bee in the dropsical blossom to the bright canal, the energetic burgher and every single terracotta brick in a fine Dutch wall. It feels to me like the direct speech of life, the words we utter, the stories we tell. Something like a dictionary of the world in itself.
Dutch art is the first I ever knew in any degree, apart from the paintings of my Scottish father. Not just the cobbled streets and gable houses, or the skaters in the frozen waterland of Christmas cards, nor even the ruffed burghers in the black and white portraits in the Scottish National Gallery. That was not – is not – what this art means to me, so much as a mysterious kind of beauty, a strangeness to arouse and disturb, an infinite and fathomless world. For me it is the music man on the edge of existence, the glisk in the riverbank, the lit windows in Rembrandt’s house of darkness.
My father was almost 40 when I was born. He had all this life of which I knew nothing. And it seems to me that this remarkable span, this first great mystery – what our parents’ lives were like before we came into existence – is still almost unknown to me. I knew him, touched his face, held his hand, loved him, rejoiced in his zany humour and his silky black hair, which he used to parody 70s hairspray ads to coruscating effect, all of my ideas of life and art come originally from our conversations. He died in my arms, and yet how can it be that I know so little of his first years?
He was born in 1922 in Dunfermline, in the East Neuk of Fife, as that windy corner of the Scottish coast is known. His father was superintendent of the local swimming baths, his mother a factory worker who went on to have three children over the space of seven years, the youngest born in such traumatic circumstances that he was given the full name of the doctor, John Murray Black, in gratitude for saving both mother and child.
James Cumming was their firstborn, my beloved father Jimmy. He swam 100 lengths in those baths every morning before high school. Were his discipline not evident from his meticulously beautiful paintings, or his lifelong craving for knowledge – from science and philosophy to art and anatomy – it would be apparent from my bookshelves even now. There are his prizes for Latin and medieval poetry, for geometry, piano and painting, all bearing the high school bookplate. I have the parrot that won him the national competition at the age of eight and the watercolour of the Dunfermline wall, every brick given the attention of a Dutch painting.
No sooner had he started at Edinburgh College of Art than war was declared. Like all those boys who lied about their age, he tried to sign up for pilot training straight away. It was two years before he was accepted.
There is a fading photograph of him with his navigator in Terrell: two flyboys, Jimmy on the right, earning their wings over the immense flatlands of Texas. My father’s mind was so often up in the air, dreaming, imagining, cogitating, to use a word he loved; watching the planes overhead, waiting for Apollo to land on the moon, for the undreamed-of wonders of the space age.
After the war, he went back home to live with his parents. Like other demobbed servicemen, in those grey postwar days when clothes and food were still rationed, and money out of reach, he wore his wartime uniform to paint at the easel.
He won a travelling scholarship in the late 1940s. This was a time when other students yearned for the Mediterranean, for the Matisse Chapel in Vence, Picasso’s Barcelona, Giotto in Padua. But not my father: he asked for time instead of distance, and went no further than the Outer Hebrides. There he found a croft at the northern end of the Isle of Lewis, where the rain gathered in pools beneath his iron bed and he caught 17 mice in one record fortnight. The money for two or three months of European art was eked out for 12, and then for another whole year by teaching art at the village school.
Callanish was where he lived and painted. It was barely more than a few crofts and a post office. The village gives its name to the towering figures known in these parts as The Men: the Stones of Callanish, high slabs of ancient gneiss that have watched over the landscape for five millennia, older than Stonehenge and standing in a cruciform arrangement. In his descriptions, they are watchers on the shores of Loch Roag or formidable dark verticals in the gloaming. The present was to him coterminous with the ancient ways of living.
After two years of extreme thrift, the money finally ran to its end and he returned home to Dunfermline again. The paintings he made from his time in Lewis continued for almost 18 years, all the way through meeting and marrying my mother and the arrival of us two children. He was sustained entirely by the memory.
Callanish became one of many Lewis names indelibly commemorated in his art. I remember the hamlet of Garynahine – he cycled there once, at two o’clock in the morning, to see if there was any truth in the sightings of spectres at a crossroads (he saw nothing). I remember Breasclete, where the grazings committee used to gather between two crofts. My father talked about the way the cold and dark reached into his bones, the island atmosphere filling his imagination with premonitory visions.
The past was present everywhere and to everyone; and to some people, so were events in the future. He encountered many islanders with the foretelling gift known on Lewis as second sight. They included the minister who wished to be rid of what he regarded as its curse, the carpenter who bleakly knew the dimensions of each coffin before a death had even occurred, the woman with second sight who brought milk to Callanish in an iron urn.
Nobody is more associated with second sight in the isles than the so-called Brahan Seer, also known in Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar, or Grey Kenneth. Born in the early 17th century near the village of Callanish, his visions foretold the future sometimes whole centuries in advance. There are those who say he never existed; but others claim direct descent from a real man, whose nickname comes from Brahan Castle on the Black Isle, where he worked for the Earl of Seaforth as a labourer.
There is a myth of origin. According to this legend, the Seer’s mother helped a spirit who was lost on earth, like Orpheus, back through his grave in a Lewis cemetery to the safety of the underworld or afterlife. In return, this spirit gave the woman a special gift: foresight for her young son. This part of the story may seem implausible; but those who do not believe in the Brahan Seer have against them his immense body of predictions, which were passed down the generations for centuries after his death and published as a book in the 19th century.
He sees: a black metal horse belching fire and steam through the glens. He sees: the battle of Culloden, with its terrible harvest of lopped heads. He sees: a vision of a Scottish parliament, come again only when men can walk from England to France. He predicts the Highland clearances, the building of the Caledonian Canal and quite possibly the discovery of North Sea oil. “A black rain will bring riches to Aberdeen.” Some of this is a matter of interpretation, and yet his visions are not hard to parse. The metal horse is of course a train.
All of these prophecies take the form of visions – specifically, pictures. The Seer has need of these because he lives in a place without much writing, at a time when very few people can read; pictures will lodge best in memory. There is a great beauty to the Seer’s pictures, of skies and glens and rowan berries, of seas and lochs, of crofters tilling the land and trawling their nets through the water. And eventually, when he is somewhere between historic figure and deathless legend, the Brahan Seer becomes a picture himself.
* * *
People have to imagine him, for there is no portrait from the life. No matter how various the faces given to him, the hair, the colouring or even the age, the Seer always carries his special attribute – a blue adder stone, a stone with a hole through the centre through which he looks to see his prophesies. He holds it up to his eye, like another eye, and through its circular window the pictures appear. And of all the pictures of the Brahan Seer himself, there is one in which the stone becomes the eye, and it is a vision by my father.
The Brahan Seer wears the stone in my father’s eponymous painting, which is more than half the size of life. All the visions he has had and will have in his mysterious existence are held in the polished blue of this eye. The great body moves to the left, yet the head turns, and the eyes look to the right as if he saw something in the past or was noticing something in the future. The clear light in the eye, the flash of white moustache and the silver bonnet, seem reflected in a shining metal gorget. He is of the landscape, one with it, made of the island itself.
Of all the Hebrideans my father painted, the Brahan Seer made the greatest demand on his originality and imagination. To be credible in paint, the prophet of Lewis required an iconography, and one far removed from the costume drama that commonly illustrates his legend. He was after all a real person to the islanders; his prophesies are still widely believed.
The painting glows, the figure shines, as if surrounded by St Elmo’s fire, the great boots grow from the rocky shore. And if one looked at him, eye to eye, through the mist of the Lewis hills, would it turn out that he was really looking at us – seeing all of us far away in the distant future, according to his gift? Who knows. I only have a slide. The painting itself has vanished.
I have tried to find it. I thought it might be in the Netherlands, or the US, or somewhere in Scotland. It was last seen at a show in the 1960s. Perhaps it is hanging here in London, where I live, on someone else’s walls.
The slide is small and bright as the thing it most resembles, a single cinematic frame of a celluloid strip. Held up to the light, it turns into something brighter than a photograph and yet immaterial, ephemeral, fluctuating with the sunshine. The vision is there, but only momentarily; something like a memory or a dream. And that seems inherent to the painting itself: even its static reproduction on the page seems to hover.
The Dutch painting, and the Scottish painting: pictures of seeing through the mind’s eye.
This is an edited extract from Thunderclap by Laura Cumming, published by Chatto & Windus on 6 July (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
