I’ve often been asked to recall the most famous or valuable painting on which I’ve worked, and while that list is long and those names illustrious, the piece that stands so singularly in my memory carries neither fame nor fortune.
At the heart of all art is magic. The artist’s task is to stir within us an emotion we may never expect. To be responsible for restoring any work, whether historical pieces or honored family heirlooms, preserving the magic of the artist’s vision is a great honor and a tremendous privilege. However, in my last restoration, I can’t begin to explain what dwelt inside the soul of the artist who created such a piece.
I am Christopher Gardener of Gardener’s Fine Art Restoration, a second-generation studio in London. We employ the finest archival materials and techniques to conserve and restore artworks for future generations.
It was late afternoon on March 18th, 1946, when Mr. Utterson visited our studio. I can recall the precise date as it was my wife’s fortieth birthday. It chanced that on the same morning, an earthquake shook the city of London for two fear-filled minutes, the first and only in the region.
The Fake Quake, as we called it, was explained by the government as a controlled detonation of an unexploded bomb from the war. A conclusion which, for those of us who felt the force and duration, knew was highly improbable.
The truth of the phenomenon remains a mystery. However, as I reflect on the arrival of Mr. Utterson and the occurrence of the quake, I wonder if a nightmarish thing had fallen upon us that day. Had that been the beginning of it all?
He was a lean, long man, anxious in discourse, cold, even to the touch, and had hurried from his home in Dartford carrying something wrapped in an overcoat. He dripped with perspiration and relayed a peculiar tale that his most precious painting had fallen into the fireplace after the tremors of the morning. I asked to remove the overcoat, so my apprentice, Claire, and I could assess the damage. He insisted he must leave at once, assuring the restoration price was no issue. Mr. Utterson left as suddenly as he arrived, and I transported the painting to our workshop to determine the piece’s condition.
In addition to researching the painting, it’s our practice to explore the artist to learn about their working process and the materials they may have used. Due to Mr. Utterson’s swift departure, we were blind to such information. However, he referred to a woman in the painting, which we were under strict instruction to restore precisely to her original condition.
The first step of any conservation is a visual examination. Looking at the painting to gather as much data as possible, even before touching it, is essential to understanding the piece.
When I removed the overcoat, I was impressed with the extent of damage and just how precarious the piece was. The entire painting was extremely dirty, covered by a layer of soot, leaving the image beneath a mystery. There were large sections of loss across the surface. Flakes of soot-covered paint had detached away from the canvas, and there was fire damage to the lowest corners of the wooden frame. My apprentice made a list of the tools and materials required for restoration as I began the first step of conservation.
I used tweezers to carefully remove flakes of detached paint from the canvas and placed them on an acid-free foam board. After removing the fragments and seeing the wooden canvas beneath the paint layer for the first time, I discovered a peculiar arrangement of foreign lettering. The pictograms were sharp, angular, and drawn by a skilled hand. Their striking beauty resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics, and I was intoxicated by their exotic design.
After the visual observation, we performed an x-ray examination, allowing us to observe more information that may not be clear to the naked eye. As I suspected, hidden beneath the visible paint layer, the entirety of the canvas was covered in fascinating hieroglyphs, written, I presumed, vertically as though in an ancient Chinese poem.
I was insistent we worked overtime as our discoveries were becoming most exciting, and I was eager to unearth what lay beneath the soot. My apprentice reminded me it was my wife’s birthday, and I reluctantly closed the workshop for the evening and returned home.
It was that night the dreams began. I remember feeling alone. It was dark. Utter blackness, like all the light in the world had never existed. Wherever I turned, nothing awaited. I fumbled through the void, arms outstretched, until my hands found a cold wall. I blindly patted the smooth surface when I located sharp, angular carvings that were strangely familiar. An awful feeling overcame me. I was not alone in that darkness. Something was standing close behind me.
Homer’s Odyssey recalls two gates through which all shadowy dreams pass, one fashioned in ivory and the other in horn. Those dreams that pass through the gate of ivory offer no fulfillment and are to be dismissed as fictitious ramblings of an unrested mind. But dreams which pass through the gate of polished horn, those dreams are true tellings.
The following morning I considered the dream ivory-passed and focussed on the intricate process of cleaning Mr. Utterson’s painting. Typically, particulate matter, including dust, dirt, and cigarette smoke, forms a stubborn glaze across a painting’s surface as it ages. However, in this case, the layer of soot made cleaning this piece particularly difficult.
To find the least aggressive solvent, reducing any potential damage to the paint, I began with distilled water, working through various detergents, enzyme solutions, and soaps. I used cotton swabs to apply the most effective formula, employing delicate circular movements.
With each gentle stroke, the image beneath the darkness became clearer, revealing to my excitement, a single eye peering from the sea of soot. The dark, lifeless eye produced a sense that it was not a restoration I was performing but an exhumation.
I took another swab, and beneath my next effort, I discovered a second empty eye as though I instinctively possessed the knowledge of its whereabouts. It’s not uncommon to hear of portraits whose eyes follow the viewer around the room. However, the eyes peering at me from behind the soot-covered painting felt like they were communicating with me.
I remember feeling like I had in the dream and that my solitude had suddenly been disturbed. It was as though I was being watched by an unexpected and unwelcome presence. I first heard the whispering as a faint feminine utterance. I naturally assumed my apprentice had arrived at the workshop. Registering the day, I knew that couldn’t be true.
The voice grew louder, spitting in haste with an unintelligible tongue. I tried to ignore my lunacy and explain the phenomenon as a result of a poor night’s sleep, yet the voice was as clear as yours or mine. It resembled a middle-Eastern tongue, perhaps an ancient Arabic dialect. The quickening speech seized my mind as though parasitically possessing my thoughts while simultaneously circling the shadows of the workshop. I thought I was going mad. I was going mad.
I tried to ignore her, but I became acutely aware of the evil and repetitious nature of the language. Recurrent, over and over again, like foreign verses from an incantation. The hostile manner of their recital sent a shivering sense of fear through my entire being. In one final, deafening release, she spat her last breath, and then there was silence.
My panicked thoughts returned, and a deadly chill crept over me. For the longest time, I remained in limbo between consciousness and the bewildering delirium I had suffered. The anguish at what had occurred was too overwhelming, and I returned home, though I don’t recall how.
I spent several feverish days bound to my bed. My wife cared for me as best she could, knocking gently from behind the door to bring me soup and wipe my brow. Her tenderness was touching though it was solitude I desperately desired. I was tormented by a persistent malevolence intent on making its presence felt.
Now and then, I’d wake, dazed from my recent oblivion. My wife found a scrap of paper beside the bed with a note written by my hand. I must have made it during one of my wakeful periods, though I have no recollection of writing such a thing. I have since committed the lines to memory:
I woke to hear a knocking at my door. The sound that haunts my soul returns once more. I close my eyes although I’ll never sleep. That knocking, knocking, knocking, stirs me deep.
Still, as stone, I long for life alone. In me, that frightful knocking found a home. Alone, alone, alone, alone, alone. I’d flee if all my courage hadn’t flown.
Then all at once, a silence in my room. No wicked sound. No siren of my doom. Deathly drained I drift to dreamless sleep. When out the dark, a knocking from the deep.
I am not an aggressive man. I am meek-minded and make excessive efforts to avoid confrontation. Even as a child, I shied away from conflict, and it is not my nature to harm another. I have never fought. I have never lashed out at anyone before or after the incident. I have spent years after what happened on March 23rd, 1946, trying to piece together the events which led to that awful day. What remains are a series of out-of-focus images, like saturated watercolor paintings, hanging in the gallery of my mind.
My wife’s timid frame appearing around the door… Her puzzlement at the empty bed and scanning the room’s chaotic state… The look of terror when she found me, crouched in hiding atop the bookshelf… Her eyes, those lifeless, soulless eyes as those that once stared up at me from the darkness, willing me to madness… The feeling of weightlessness as I pounced… Her trembling limbs as we wrestled and rolled under the bed… The compliance of her eyes beneath my thumbs… Biting at her throat until her trembling subsided.
There are no punishments equal to my crime. My lawyers advised I plead temporary insanity or I would be hung. You may think that death is fitting for my actions, and on the surface, I, of course, agree. Yet, I did everything in my power to avoid my execution out of youthful fear and man’s primal desire for self-preservation. I am confined to a room at Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital and have been a resident here for over thirty years.
I understand the painting was returned to Mr. Utterson though I have no knowledge of what happened to either of them.
I live only to dedicate my pain, grief, and loneliness to the memory of my wife. There is no forgiveness for what I have done, not in this life or the next.
As I sit here, an old and anguished man nearing the end of his life, it is not death, I fear. It’s who waits for me on the other side of death. The shadow in the void. She, who appears each night, in the horrifying dreams which pass unquestionably through the gate of horn.