Unfinished Portrait

I SHALL NEVER finish what would have been my twentieth novel. When I started it, it was to be called Iridescence, but after I had been working on it for a while I changed the working title to Butterfly. The opening image was of bubbles floating over a hedge into a neighboring garden, bubbles blown by two fair-haired Polish girls. This in time linked itself in my mind to the image in Thomas Gainsborough’s celebrated painting of his two daughters chasing a butterfly (c. 1756), a work which remained, like many of his family portraits, unfinished. The grandfather of the narrator in my novel was to have been an Oxford entomologist, and for a while I interested myself in insects, attending a short course on diptera at the Natural History Museum in Oxford, and buying myself a microscope. The bubbles, the butterflies, and Gainsborough remained interwoven in my memory, long after I had abandoned my novel, and when I saw in the newspaper a preview of a Gainsborough exhibition of family portraits that was to be held at the National Portrait Gallery in London in November 2018, I knew I would need to see it.

I had been