On a recent weekend away, to walk and think, on looking at a map, I discovered that Monk’s House the previous home of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, was only a few miles away. I was unable to ignore the magnetic pull of its pared down authenticity expressive of an essential and pure truth that still lingers from past occupants.
On my last visit, I met Marie Bartholomew, a room steward and giver of garden talks. On the morning in March 1941, when Virginia Woolf went out for a walk and didn’t come back, Marie was there. She was then the gardener’s nine year old daughter, she has rich and detailed memories that extend well beyond that particular day, and she is able to paint an oral picture of the comings and goings of people and contextual flavour of the times, from the general to the exquisitely specific.
On that first visit, I had an instinct to draw her but there was no time. This time, I managed to turn up on her once a week visit to the house. She was wearing a highly patterned jumper and talking animatedly about plumbing, she really does know everything. This time I didn’t want her to get away, so I asked to sit for me. It was soon arranged that another room steward would cover for her and we agreed to meet in the garden in twenty minutes. I decided to warm up my pencil with a drawing of a bust of Virginia made by Stephen Tomlin and located in the green sitting room. The bust is famous for being half finished due to Virginia’s inability to bear Tomlin’s necessary scrutiny which caused her to abandon the sittings.
There is something perceptually marvellous about copying a famous art work. I have always been an inveterate copier, as a child I copied all my favourites, Rembrandt, Hogarth, Vermeer, Van Gogh etcetera but it was only as an adult once I got to see the originals that I understood how much I had been missing. It is my firm belief that some trace/stain/essence remains. In the case of the Tomlin bust, despite or perhaps because of its unfinished rawness, I felt a classical sensibility underpinning the work.
Ironically, I couldn’t finish it because of my appointment with Marie. We sat (Marie’s choice) in the garden in not ideal conditions as we were on the same bench, usually I prefer a bit of distance and Marie was worried about her dark lenses. However, the light was amazing and I could really see her. Marie Louise Bartholomew, named after a pear, is an amazing person and repository of endless anecdotal illustrations. She is a living link with the past and at eighty-seven, I really hope someone, the National Trust perhaps, will tape her memories for future generations.
I continued to work on both drawings from memory at home, something I don’t often do. It made me reflect on why I am driven to try and capture some unspecified, uncanny, ephemeral thing from strangers in passing and how lucky I am that my own process is founded on early study, through ‘A’ level History of Art and History of Architecture and what a loss for artistic young people now, the ruthless incursion into the present educational system, will be.
