Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer Read online

  Kingdom Swann

  The Story of a Photographer

  MILES GIBSON

  In memory of Kingdom Swann

  1825–1916

  ‘’Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.’

  The Earl of Gloucester

  King Lear, Act IV

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  ‘Not everybody trusts paintings, but people believe photographs,’ wrote the pioneering American photographer Ansel Adams, who was my spark of ignition for Kingdom Swann, the key to the tragedy and comedy of this novel’s story. Kingdom Swann – that great Victorian painter, master of the heroic nude, pupil of Hippolyte Fletcher-Whitby, seduced by the camera.

  There’s no denying the tremendous impact that the development of photography had on the work of nineteenth-century painters. Portraitists, especially, felt their livelihoods threatened by the camera, while artists as various as Alma-Tadema, Courbet, Toulouse-Lautrec and Delacroix took full advantage of the new technology as reference and inspiration. Degas, in his sixties, became an enthusiastic amateur photographer, placing before his camera many of the subjects he had formerly painted.

  There was a brief interlude at the dawn of the twentieth century when Art came to life and the artists’ models, those moustachioed gods and dimpled goddesses, stepped down from their pedestals to happily pose for the camera in the most explicit poses plastiques. This was the redeeming light of Modernism in the faithful reproduction of beauty, or an epidemic of mucky pictures, according to your persuasion. The argument has never been settled. ‘A painting emulates but a photograph stimulates. That’s the difference. It’s magic. It’s witchcraft. It’s stealing from life,’ declares Lord Hugo Prattle, one of Swann’s wealthy patrons.

  The book is pure mischief, seeming to delight as many readers as it infuriates. ‘Wearisome female stereotypes – decorate a bum novel indeed,’ sneered the Evening Standard, fearless in its pursuit of puns. The Times took a more considered approach, concluding that: ‘As in Daniel Defoe’s Roxanna, voyeuristic fascination plays games with high morality.’ ‘A memorable and hugely enjoyable portrait of both the man and the world he inhabited,’ was the cheerful verdict from Today.

  Writing in praise of eroticism was doomed to failure, of course, since everyone who judged the novel held themselves to be better qualified to pontificate on the subject than the author. And I’d started with a serious disadvantage, intending to breathe life into my Victorian characters without contaminating their thoughts and actions with modern notions of morality and social justice, but soon discovering the impossibility of looking at history with a clear eye, since we invariably cloud the view with our own fears and prejudices. Sociologists scratch away at history for evidence to support their own arguments. We rewrite history to suit our whims.

  I remain very fond of Kingdom Swann – the man who could ‘transform gutter-snipes into fabulous objects of desire’ – not merely for capturing the erotic dreams of his generation but for another, more elusive, reason. Let your gaze shift beyond the intentions of such photographers, study the faded images in their red morocco albums and you’re filled with a sense of tenderness, a melancholy for these commonplace beauties with their inscrutable expressions and heavy limbs, their button boots and wrinkled stockings. They are lost yet remain eternal, caught in the moment, ghosts preserved, photographs of phantoms.

  Susan Sontag captured it most vividly when she wrote: ‘All photographs are memento mori – to take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.’

  Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why pictures of the sort taken by Kingdom Swann create unease. Staring at these frankly intimate portraits of long-lost souls, we are contemplating our own mortality.

  Miles Gibson

  February 2013

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface to the 2013 Edition

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  1

  ‘Women will be the death of me,’ mutters Kingdom Swann, whistling through his whiskers. He is a large, impressive, old man with a wonderful wealth of beard. He wears a black frock-coat, unbuttoned to show a velvet waistcoat and a pair of nankeen pantaloons. At his throat he sports a necktie of crimson silk and his head is warmed by a Turkish skull-cap embellished with beads and silver threads.

  ‘Women will be the death of me.’

  He looks up at the fat, nude woman hung by her wrists from a pillar. She wears nothing but iron chains. She has neat breasts, plump arms and heavy, fully fashioned thighs that hide a voluptuous nest of curls. Her face is flushed with rouge and flowers wilt in her tangled hair.

  ‘Are you ready, Mr Swann?’ she shouts, impatiently shaking her shackles.

  Swann grunts, closes one eye and lets the hood fall over his head.

  2

  He was born in 1825 and trained, at an early age, to be a classical painter. He was accepted as a pupil of the most celebrated artist of the day, Hippolyte Fletcher-Whitby, at his studio in St John’s Wood.

  The old master was famous for his huge, allegorical paintings featuring tribes of nimble nudes. These canvases were so large that scaffolding had to be built around them during their execution. Each morning Fletcher-Whitby would send his pupils scrambling up the rigging to work among the gods where, balanced on treacherous planks, they rendered thunder clouds by the yard or drew the smoking peaks of Sodom. The old man, nearly blind and crippled with gout, remained on the ground to gild the folds of Salome’s skirt or fiddle with a slave-girl’s buttocks.

  ‘Don’t spare the pigment!’ he would roar as his students daubed at the sky. ‘Give me more thunder!’

  The young Swann was quickly promoted down the ladder, from backgrounds to foregrounds, and finally given command of the concubines at The Persians Feast in Babylon.

  By the time of the grand master’s death in 1849, Swann had already rented a studio in Piccadilly and settled down to the serious business of making money. He saw no future in Whitby’s painted hippodromes and turned his attentions, instead, to picking pockets by painting portraits. For a few guineas he lent chemists, clerics and city drapers all the majesty of Roman generals. He turned their wives into seraphim and pictured their children as cherubs. At the flick of his wrist he could turn grocers into gladiators and matrons into dimpled moppets.

  Yet, despite these beneficent talents, he was powerless against photography. In the camera craze that followed the Great Exhibition he saw the portrait business collapse. For several years he scrat
ched a living by colouring photographs for the camera studios that flourished the length of Regent Street. He submitted landscapes to summer shows and waited for fashions to change. But the great days were gone. When he married a dentist’s daughter in 1873 he had already burned his brushes and bought a brass and mahogany camera.

  The studio, with its tall north window, was perfect for this new enterprise and Swann was quick with the modern art. Photography, he discovered, was a marvel of simple arithmetic. A tiny carte-de-visite portrait could be sold for a florin or five shillings the imperial dozen. He manufactured them by the thousand and there seemed no end to the public’s demand for these gloomy paper shadows.

  It wasn’t long before he hired a redundant engraver to help him develop and print his work. The engraver’s name was Cromwell Marsh. He was a young man with a freckled face and a slick of ginger hair. He was patient and clever and full of crafty ambition. He brought new ideas to the business and quickly doubled their fortunes.

  For a trifling extra expense, and the hire of a suitable costume, clients could take advantage of exotic painted backcloths and amusing trompe-l’œil effects. Ladies might dress as the Empress of China or sit and swing in a paper moon. The men could captain a submarine or wave their hats from a canvas balloon. These scenes would be cleverly coloured and framed in gilt for a guinea.

  When his wife died in the Great Frost of 1895, Kingdom Swann was a wealthy man. He should have retired and spent his few remaining years slumped by the fire with his dreams. At the ripe old age of seventy he was ready to retreat from the world. But the world hadn’t finished with Kingdom Swann.

  It began with the Rossetti sisters. They had appeared in the shop one afternoon in the summer of 1890. They were handsome girls with fine complexions and lacquered wreaths of auburn hair. The youngest of the two sisters wore a great deal of lace and a hat embroidered with flowers. The eldest, who was no more than twenty, wore a bird of paradise on her head. They were dainty. They were charming. There was nothing in their general appearance to make the old man suspicious. When they expressed the desire to be photographed, he led them into the studio, explaining all the mechanical illusions they might use to their advantage.

  But, despite his best endeavours, the girls were not impressed. The younger Rossetti stifled a yawn. Her sister sighed and looked disappointed. They were hoping, she explained, to create a tableau in which the virtues of photographic naturalism contrived to enhance a more traditional study of antique beauty.

  Kingdom Swann frowned and played with his albert. The studio was hot. He felt his collar cutting his neck.

  ‘A study in which a brief invocation to Aphrodite might be caught, with absolute fidelity, for the admiration of an intimate circle of friends,’ suggested the younger sister.

  Swann felt distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘May we trust in your discretion, Mr Swann?’ enquired the elder.

  ‘Have we made ourselves understood?’

  Swann blew thoughtfully through his beard. He looked at the ceiling. He shuffled his shoes. He nodded. Yes. He understood. As a prayer to Psyche, in the cause of art and natural beauty, in honour of everything high and mighty, they wanted to show him their bums.

  The Rossetti sisters looked pleased with themselves. After some hesitation the elder Rossetti opened a bag and pulled out a little, morocco album. The album was entirely the work of Miss Alice Chinn, a photographer famous for her female studies. Swann took the book and modestly peeked at its pages.

  Here was Lady Woodbine Fitzherbert, stripped to her slippers and shamelessly sporting a fine, black tuft as she danced in The Dream of Pygmalion. Here was Miss Hester Pontefract, big as a walrus, diddeys let dangle, engaged in The Ritual Toilet of Venus. There were twenty or more such photographs featuring grand and expensive women and each nude study, no matter how lewd, was granted a classical epithet. A fine, plump woman wearing nought but a necklace had been blessed with The Charm of Europa. A right royal strumpet exposing her buttocks had been graced with The Shame of Lucretia.

  Swann spent no longer than he dared reviewing the naked charms of London’s high society. He knew such albums were the height of fashion but, none the less, it was work for the lady photographers. He couldn’t understand why these handsome sisters wanted him to inspect their mutton.

  ‘Miss Chinn is a very accomplished photographer,’ he said, trying to return the album. ‘No one could hope to serve you with more grace and understanding.’

  This observation had the most unfortunate effect on the younger Rossetti who promptly burst into tears. Swann was bewildered.

  ‘Poor Miss Chinn has only lately met with a terrible accident,’ confided the elder Rossetti as they helped her sister into a chair. ‘A runaway horse in the Charing Cross Road …’ She fluttered her hand. The bird of paradise ruffled its feathers. Swann made sympathetic noises and hurried to fetch a glass of seltzer.

  ‘She always thought highly of your works, Mr Swann,’ sobbed the younger Rossetti when she found the strength to speak again. ‘She spoke of you as a true artist.’ She turned her lovely dark eyes to heaven. The hat had wilted. Her tears left pink stains on the perfectly rice-powdered face.

  ‘But when we learned that you had studied under the famous Fletcher-Whitby …’ continued the elder with a sudden flush of excitement.

  ‘The great Fletcher-Whitby,’ her sister said as she wiped her nose.

  ‘The modern Michelangelo,’ declared the elder, nodding her head.

  ‘We had do doubt that you were our man.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘Quite so.’

  ‘And since the album is not yet complete,’ announced the elder breathlessly, ‘we place ourselves confidently in your hands.’

  And so, the next afternoon, the sisters shed their corsets, button boots and stockings to be artfully transformed into Concubines of Babylon. They were so absorbed in their silly charade that they soon forgot their modesty, letting Swann lead them on to the stage and chain their wrists to a plaster pillar.

  The old man spent a long time arranging their limbs and gently pulling the pins from their hair. They didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the work of his preening fingers. Wrapped in nothing but their own conceits they patiently hung from the chains and practised expressions of wistful surrender.

  When Swann was happy with the effect he retired to peep through the camera. It was an old-fashioned tailboard Winchester and he stood, hypnotised with pleasure, his head wrapped up in a black cotton cloth, admiring the charms of his prisoners.

  It wasn’t until the light failed, with the plates finished and the sisters no more than silhouettes, that he felt obliged to set them free. As soon as the chains fell away, as if released from a narcolepsy, they cried out and shivered and looked confused. At once the young Rossetti, in a state of terrible agitation, shrank from Swann’s touch and tried to cover her breasts with her hands. The elder sister turned her back when he tried to help her from the stage and tartly dimpled her buttocks. The spell had been broken. In a minute or two they were dressed for the street and buttoned through to the throat. They looked so demure in their frocks and hats. No one would guess they had ever been his fat and tempting concubines. They thanked him for his trouble and paid him into the bargain. They collected their purchase the following day and he never heard from them again.

  3

  It was Cromwell Marsh who saw the opportunity. He kept his eyes open. He knew the wicked way of the world. And the world wanted filthy photographs. There were, to his certain knowledge, a dozen bookshops on the Strand that had nothing to sell but grossly indecent keyhole snaps. He had recently purchased, for his own amusement, a set of German postcards that were admirably obscene. It was only a question of convincing Swann that his last great work should be The Torment of Tantalus.

  The more he thought about it, the better he liked it, until one evening in a Soho saloon, he explained the scheme to his aged employer. He didn’t approach the subject at once, but made
the photographer comfortable with several bottles of Reids’ strong stout and encouraged him to talk of the past. He watched as Swann puffed out with pride to remember himself as a painter. He listened to accounts of long-forgotten Royal Acadamy exhibitions, threats against the Impressionist smudgers and praise for the talents of Fletcher-Whitby.

  ‘I can remember when Whitby finished his masterpiece,’ dreamed Swann. ‘I think it must have been ’47. A Vandal Spoiling Roman Women.’

  ‘That must have been a sight,’ said Cromwell Marsh, to encourge him. He lit a paper cigar and blew a smoke ring into the air.

  Swann shone. ‘They stood for six hours in the rain for a chance to admire that canvas,’ he said. ‘It won medals. They had to use troops to control the crowds.’

  Cromwell Marsh sighed and shook his head. ‘Those days are gone,’ he said mournfully.

  The truth of this remark nearly crushed the old man. His face shrank on the bone, his flesh turned grey, his mouth decayed and the tufts of his eyebrows quivered. He suddenly shrivelled under his clothes, sagged and sank, until his very life seemed threatened. ‘These days it’s nothing but bicycles,’ he muttered. He had a morbid dread of bicycles, especially those with pneumatic tyres. They came spinning from nowhere, hiding in the horses’ legs, striking at you from every direction, terrible, swift and silent as death. ‘You can’t paint bicycles,’ he complained. ‘You couldn’t have painted the Duke of Wellington sitting on a bicycle.’

  ‘It’s a bugger,’ said Marsh.

  Swann stared around the saloon, searching the legs of the crowd for the blood-stained breeches of a vulcanite assassin. The glare of the gas mantles hurt his eyes. ‘What’s happening to the world,’ he grieved, trying to pull himself together. ‘A Vandal Spoiling Roman Women. These days a man wouldn’t give you tuppence.’

  ‘I was thinking,’ said Marsh. ‘I was thinking we might play some part in the public edification.’ He paused and leaned forward in his chair. ‘A selection of unwrapped classical beauties,’ he continued, in a confidential tone of voice, ‘presented for the pleasure of the common man.’