Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

8. Room 18

I needed a quiet place where things weren’t happening too fast; I have often found tranquillity at the National Gallery so I went there now. There was a gentle rain coming down when I emerged from Charing Cross tube station; the streets were bright with reflections, the buses were intensely red. Trafalgar Square was crowded as always and on the National Gallery porch tourists heavy with lenses peeped through viewfinders at Nelson on his column, at the fountains jetting their white water into the grey rain, at the bronze lions, and at other tourists wet and gleaming.

I headed directly for Room 18, a tiny room containing only the black perspective box or peepshow by Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678). I’d been hoping to have it to myself for a moment or two but a Japanese couple were occupying both peep-holes. As they left, a rush of schoolgirls filled the room with the smell of rain, their hot and feral fragrance, and their chatter; then they were gone like a flight of starlings and I was alone with the peepshow.

It’s about as big as a medium-large fish tank and the peep-holes, one at each end, offer two apparently three-dimensional views of the interior of a seventeenth-century Dutch house: in it are a number of red side chairs with leather seats, on one of which is a letter with the signature of the artist; there are pictures on the walls; there are windows and there are doorways to other rooms. In one of those rooms a woman lies in a curtained bed. Is she ill, is she dying? No one knows. In another room a woman sits reading while a man outside the window looks in at her. Elsewhere a solitary broom, that frequent emblem of Dutch tidiness, leans against a wall. There is of course one of those patterned marble floors one sees so often in Vermeer and de Hooch; alternate black and white concentric squares encouraging belief in the idea of order in the universe. On the floor sits a black-and-white spaniel of some kind; from the look on that dog’s face I’ve always assumed it to be male. I call him Hendryk.

One side of the box is fitted with clear glass; probably in the seventeenth century that side was covered with translucent paper and the box placed near a window or a candle for illumination; now it has its own special lamp. When you look through the glass it becomes clear that the apparent reality seen through the peep-holes is all illusion: things are not always in proper scale or relation one to the other: seats and backs of chairs go up walls, legs lie on the floor; the head of the woman in the bed is like a pancake.

Hendryk has his lower part flat on the floor and his upper part going up the wall but when you see him through the peep-hole he sits solidly on the floor with space all around him. There are no lenses in the peepholes and no mirrors in the box; the illusion is achieved by distorting a two-dimensional painting and controlling the angle and field of view in such a way that an undistorted three-dimensional scene is made to appear through the peep-holes.

It would have been a great deal simpler and certainly no more time-consuming to build a three-dimensional model of this interior but no, the illusion is the thing; and to produce this illusion van Hoogstraten had to work out the most abstruse calculations in perspective before painstakingly painting the walls and floor of the box. And the custodian of this illusion, the one who steadfastly contemplates it and meditates on it, is Hendryk. Inside his painted head he has of course his own illusory thoughts; we’ve had many interesting conversations and as often as not I find him helpful. Today, however, Hendryk gave me nothing. ‘What,’ I said, ‘am I all alone then?’

‘Never, dear boy!’ said the voice of Mr Rinyo-Clacton. Yes, there he was, no more smartly dressed than I, wearing jeans and a blue anorak, his smell compounded and intensified by the wet Gore-Tex.

‘Have you been following me?’ I said.

‘Not really. You just happened to be ahead of me as I was coming here. That dog is really something, eh? That dog is at the heart of the illusion of reality, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I’d prefer not to say just now if you don’t mind.’

‘Mind? Why should I mind? I respect your intellectual privacy. Let’s have lunch, shall we?’

‘Thank you but I think I need to be alone for a while.’

‘Right you are, Jonathan. I’m off then, see you tonight at the opera.’

I didn’t say anything. I watched him go, then I tried Hendryk again and again he gave me nothing. I abandoned the peepshow and fell back to a secondary position, Room 16 and de Hooch’s The Courtyard of a House in Delft. The clean-swept courtyard and its tutelary broom, the goodwife with her daughter, and seen through a red-brick archway, the shadowy figure of a second woman with her back to the observer, standing like a sentinel guarding that cloistered domesticity — everything in that picture invited me to rest awhile in its quiet world. But today there was no rest. I had a solitary lunch at The Brasserie, then I went out into the rain again.