Julian Barnes · Diary: Art and Memory
A bout fifteen years ago, I bought a painting at auction. Apart from the usual anxieties, there was an overriding emotional factor. My wife, who had died a year or so earlier, had for many years collected images of women reading: mainly drawings, prints and watercolours, plus one small painting. I was browsing through the online catalogue of a French sale when I was stopped by two pictures by Odilon Redon, both of his wife, Camille, reading: one was predominantly pale green, and showed her sitting in the middle distance in a garden; the other, predominantly red and purple, showed her in close-up, with elongated features and eyes cast down on her book. Redon was famously uxorious, and painted Camille constantly over a period of thirty years. He once wrote:
You can tell the nature of a man from his companion or his wife. Every woman explains the man by whom she is loved, and vice versa – he explains her character. It is rare for an observer not to find between them a host of intimate and delicate connections. I believe that the greatest happiness will always result from the greatest harmony.
