The Portrait

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

A well-dressed man with a cigarette turns toward a glowing portrait, his smile sharpening as the canvas catches the only light in the room. — This is not a painting. This is a hostage.

A young man pauses in a dark doorway, his face softly backlit like a figure stepping out of an old Italian altarpiece; a fold of velvet screen is just visible at the frame's edge. — He carried his beauty the way certain children carry a candle through a fireworks show.

The attic room smelled of turpentine and crushed roses, and through the open casement the river moved in long patient strips of gold, indifferent to the small human drama being enacted within sight of it. In the center of Basil Hallward's studio, on a heavy gilt easel draped in old silk, stood the unfinished work of his life: a full-length figure of a young man, rendered with such vivid tenderness that one half-expected the painted breath to stir the loose hibiscus blossoms in the copper bowl below. The artist himself, paint-flecked and unshorn, hovered at the canvas with the particular anguish of a man who has put more of himself into a surface than any surface was built to hold. The portrait, he confided to the empty room, was the confession he could never speak aloud. Every brushstroke was an admission. He had given his sitters' admirers nothing to gossip about, and yet he had, in the privacy of pigment, betrayed his own devotion with a fidelity that would have scandalized him had he not been so in love with the act of loving. He was, in the old dangerous sense of the word, an adorer, and adoration is a profession with no union and no pension.

It was at this precise moment, when the artist was most dangerously pleased with himself, that Lord Henry Wotton drifted up the narrow staircase, trailing the scent of an expensive cigarette and a more expensive philosophy. The arrival of Lord Henry was always, in Basil's experience, a small meteorological event: a change in pressure, a sudden drop in temperature, a bright and slightly malign clearing of the air. He came in smiling, dropped a careless kiss on his host's reluctant cheek, and let his gaze travel to the canvas with the leisurely appreciation of a man who has been told a thing is wonderful and intends to be politely unimpressed. The polite unimpression lasted perhaps three heartbeats. Then his eyes widened, his smile sharpened into something less innocent, and the small portable theories he carried about in his pocket — the world as a stage, beauty as a form of cruelty, conscience as a bourgeois ghost, pleasure as the only respectable kind of atheism — all of these rearranged themselves with a soft click around the single radiant fact of the boy's face. My dear Basil, he murmured, almost to himself, this is not a painting. This is a hostage. He did not say whose. He did not, at that early hour, need to.

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The young man himself arrived shortly after, framed in the doorway like a figure from an old Italian altarpiece that had wandered out of its frame and was now, with some shy confusion, trying to decide which century to inhabit. His name was Dorian Gray, and he carried his beauty the way certain children carry a candle through a fireworks show: with no idea of the conflagration he was about to cause. Basil, with the transparent cunning of the besotted, had concealed the canvas behind a great velvet screen and tried, in his flustered way, to introduce his two companions without producing the one piece of evidence that would condemn him. Lord Henry, who had been spoiled for a long time by a great many people, allowed himself to be spoiled a little more. He took the youth's slender hand, found it cool and dry, and began at once — with the unhurried precision of a watchmaker setting a spring — to wind. Not crudely. Lord Henry was never crude; crudeness, he often said, was merely enthusiasm with the wrong etiquette. He spoke instead of flowers, of music, of the briefness of days, of the way the body is a kind of hand-me-down garment, until the boy's face — that candid and unblemished country — began to cloud over with the first faint weather of a thought. Beauty, Lord Henry murmured, lifting the word as if it were a glass of something rare, is a form of genius — in fact it is higher than genius, because it needs no explanation. He said it as one might compliment a particularly fine piece of lacquer on an old cabinet. The varnish was exquisite. What lay beneath it, neither of them had yet thought to ask.