CHAPTER 19: Radical Arts

But what Jack found instead was a harmless-looking fellow in unfashionably loose-fitting jacket and trousers that had seen much wear. He looked about Jack’s age and was of average height and build with untidy but not very long hair the color of hay bales, brown streaked with dark blond. There was more than a little of the vagabond about the fellow, but his clear grey eyes were direct behind gold wire spectacles. He carried a large, flat portfolio under his arm.

"Mr. Dance? I am Thomas Ashbrook. I’ve come about your advertisement for a painter."

Jack hefted the little file of papers, notes and calculations he now carried about with him everywhere onto the desk, to give his thundering heartbeat a moment to calm down. "You’re very alert, Mr. Ashbrook. The advertisement only just came out."

"A person in my circumstances cannot afford to be tardy."

Jack and motioned his visitor to the opposite chair. "I’m glad to hear it. We need some new scenery rather quickly. You’ve painted scenes before?"

"I am a professional artist," said Ashbrook. "With your permission . . ?"

Jack nodded and the fellow hopped up to spread his portfolio open on the desk. Sifting through the loose sheets of heavyweight paper inside, Jack found a few naturalistic landscapes done in washes with moody, suggestive colors, several tidy little studies of everyday objects and some sketchy portraits with wildly intense eyes or odd expressions on the faces. But most interesting were some finished pieces tucked away in the back. Jack could not make out what they were meant to represent, grottoes or clouds or some other fantastical realm. There was no conventional sense of perspective or proportion, both crucial to scene-painting, nor any sense of reality — flowers were as big as dogs, fish swam in the sky, people floated in the air among the stars. But the colors were rich and luscious and the quirky figures and animals lovingly rendered. As odd as they were, they were strangely haunting, like the memory of a dream.

"This is beautiful work." Jack smiled.

"Do you think so?" Mr. Ashbrook looked surprised.

"I’ve never seen anything like ‘em."

"You would, if the art academies were torn to the ground and artists were allowed to follow their own instincts," said Ashbrook. "Education is death to the artist. A school can only teach you how to paint exactly like someone else. But I believe any artistic endeavor should be a way to express oneself."

"This is certainly very expressive work," Jack agreed.
    
"Because I have had no formal training. I have only lately come to painting and have taught myself what little I know. I am inspired by the divine Blake, whose fantastical work captures not what the eye sees, but what the soul understands. I am ever hoping to soak up some tiny dewdrop of his overflowing genius in the study of his work, but beyond that, I must paint from my own heart and from that alone."

Jack glanced up into Mr. Ashbrook’s eager face. "And you say you make your living by your art?"

Ashbrook’s rapt expression gave way on the instant to a grin of cheerful candor. "I make no living whatsoever, Mr. Dance. And so you find me here."

"But you call yourself a professional artist."

"Painting is my only profession now, but it’s far from steady. My ideas on art are too radical to please a patron. I have been a journeyman portrait painter, but more often than not, the face I labor with such good intentions to capture on the canvas is rarely the one the sitter envisions. And I cannot abide the tedium of realistic landscapes that might actually have some commercial value. Why must a painted tree look like a real tree, or a duck a real duck? Nature has already perfected the tree and the duck, how could I possibly improve upon them? Should it not be the goal of art to imagine something beyond Nature, to interpret Nature in terms of art? Nature is, but human beings are blessed with imaginations to see beyond what is merely real. The artist ought to create what can only be imagined."

Jack gazed at his visitor in complete fascination. In another moment, he would talk himself out of employment.

"I am very much afraid," Jack spoke at last, "that in the scene-painting trade, you will be required to paint a tree that looks like a tree."

There was another flash of that disarmingly frank grin even as Ashbrook dropped his eyes.

"Forgive me ranting at you, Mr. Dance. I ought to have held my tongue."

"I appreciate honesty, Mr. Ashbrook. But tell me, have you any experience at all painting scenery?"
    
“I was second apprentice to the scene-painter at the Bristol Theatre for a season. I do know my way round the paint room."

Jack glanced again at the paintings on his desk. The little studies were quite good, Ashbrook could do realistic work if he had to. And Jack knew he could not afford to pick and choose.

"I can’t pay you very much," he confessed.

Ashbrook’s face brightened. "Even very little is a great deal more than nothing, which I am earning at present," he beamed. "I would be more than content with room and board. It would not be the first time I’ve slept in the paint room."

Jack smiled. "I believe I can find you some sort of salary."

"He had better work for nothing," Alphonse sighed when Jack told him of the interview, later. "I do not know how we shall bear the expense of another salary."

"There is nothing resembling a Temple of the Sun among the Fairweather’s scenes and you can’t do Pizarro without one," Jack reasoned. "Pay him out of my salary, if you must. I feel a fraud taking the manager’s share, in any case, at least until I’ve shown I can actually manage something."

"You are making a very poor start," sniffed Alphonse. "A wise man keeps what he earns."

"I’ll keep enough to get by, but Ashbrook must be employed. I’m not suggesting you forfeit your salary. Your abolitionists shall have their fair share."

Alphonse sighed again, gazing down at his ever-present account books. Jack put down his papers, regarding him.

"You have never spoken much about the time you were away," Jack noted. "Were you able to . . . accomplish anything?"

"Mr. Jepson is a very gracious host," Alphonse replied. "And a keen observer. He had a new cargo of sugar in from the Indies bound upriver to Birmingham, an abolitionist stronghold, and he arranged for me to serve as supercargo on the voyage."

"On a ship?" said Jack. Alphonse was a notoriously poor sailor.

"That is the usual means of river travel, yes."

"I admire your devotion to your cause."

"My devotion to the abolitionist cause remains unswerving. But I confess I did not think much of their methods."

"Methods?" echoed Jack. "They wish to abolish slavery and so do you. Where could you disagree?"

"As I say, it was a question of method." Alphonse shook his head. "I had a letter from Mr. Jepson, extolling the success of a plantation whose laborers are wage-earners, not slaves, such as his, with which I attended an abolitionist meeting in a public assembly room. Very well attended. There are a great many grim factories in Birmingham and I supposed the people must feel a kind of kinship with the plight of laboring slaves in the islands. But it was not . . . " He paused, considering. "It was not a place for high-minded discussion. It was rather like a theatrical performance. The public were interested in . . . sensation. The more lurid the accounts of depravity against the slaves, the better the audience enjoyed it."

"Still," Jack suggested, "if they sign their petitions or elect their members out of sentiment instead of, well, high-mindedness, does it not amount to the same thing in the end? Good works done for the wrong reason are still good works done."

Alphonse frowned at him.

"How eager would you be to strip off your shirt so the world may gasp over your scars?" he asked. Jack slowly shook his head. "Yet, my own deformity is not so easily hidden. The abolitionist leaders in Birmingham wanted me to display myself to the public as the poor, stunted Negro. The helpless cripple. As if it were slavery itself and not some accident of Nature that made me thus. Nor was it enough for them that my poor mother died of hard labor in the fields. They wanted her raped and brutalized by her oppressors into the bargain." Alphonse’s eyes narrowed. "It is not pity I seek, but justice. And that can only come when people of my complexion are perceived as people. Not savages. Not children. Not victims. Ordinary people with the same rights as ordinary people everywhere — to live free, to earn a living, to be responsible for themselves. I do the cause no good displaying myself as an object of sensation, when what's needed is a way to express the humanity we all have in common. I must find a better forum to influence public opinion."

"But you have one. Here. What better way to reach the public than from the stage?"

Alphonse frowned again. "You wish me to preach abolition in the Brewhouse? That will put a rapid end to our profits."

"There are all sorts of ways to influence the public," said Jack. "At an abolitionist meeting, however well-attended, you are preaching to the converted. But everyone comes to the theatre. Sow an idea, however radical, into their entertainment and who knows what might take root? People do not change their minds overnight. But a thing, a viewpoint, an idea repeated often enough is more likely to be viewed as normal, sooner or later, than one people feel has been forced upon them suddenly, against their will."
    
"You think we should mesmerise the public?"

Jack grinned. "That is what the theatre does. When it is done well. The more often the common humanity of African characters is presented onstage, the more outraged the public will be over slavery, and abolition will come sooner."

"A pretty enough speech," sighed Alphonse. "And how do you propose to effect this miracle?"

"I won’t. You will. I’ll put you in a production of Othello."

Alphonse gaped at him. "And who’s to be my Desdemona, Mrs. Tom Thumb? Besides, I hardly think a jealousy-maddened Negro who murders an innocent white woman will add luster to our cause."

"It is a classic," Jack protested. "There is some wonderful poetry —"

"I am not a player," Alphonse declared. "If I take up Shakespeare and you take up the account books, we shall all be ruined."

True enough, thought Jack. And yet, Shakespeare had never failed him before. Somewhere in all of Shakespeare there must be something they could use to aid the cause of freedom.

"The Tempest," he said suddenly. Alphonse blinked up at him. "Prospero and Ariel, the master magician and the sprite he enslaves through magic. The story is all about freedom, Alphonse. Prospero pledges to free Ariel if he serves him well, and in the end, he does. It’s the emotional climax of the play."

"But how does this enhance our cause?"

"Consider the symbolic value if Ariel is black."

"Meaning me?"

Jack nodded. "He may look exotic, yet his desire for freedom is absolutely human. And he earns it through his service."

"A human wrongly enslaved should not have to provide service to earn his freedom," said Alphonse.

"He should not," Jack agreed. "But might it not better serve the cause of freedom and common humanity to present an allegory of a white man honoring his pledge to a black man?"

Alphonse must be considering it very carefully, since he did not immediately reject the idea.

"Prospero has most of the speeches," Jack pressed on. "Ariel’s part is a great deal of mime, at which you excel, and when he does have lines, consider the impact of your refined speech. And if I go on for Prospero, we can throw in a lot of tumbling and acrobatics, which the public loves. They'll be converts to your cause before they even realize they've been preached to. How could they not?"

Alphonse gazed at him for another long minute. "Well," he said at last. "Let us find out." 

Top: Winds of Change,  © James Aschbacher

Above right: Abolitionist Pamphlet, 1832

Above left: Prospero and Ariel, Robert Smirke, 1821