The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

In the year before lockdown, I started taking painting classes. I hadn’t done any art in a formal setting since school and I was unsure what to expect.

Art at school had been depressing in many ways. It was all rote and technique and not a lot of joy. Everything I liked to do, was, it appeared, wrong. I loved being in the art studio. I loved making things with my friends. I did not love being repeatedly told how rubbish I was and being sighed at by a teacher who clearly considered himself too good for us. It took me years to realise that the thing that was ‘rubbish’ was his teaching. It also took me until I started art classes again to find that my joy in making things hadn’t gone. It had just been in hiding.

This new painting teacher was the best kind of miracle. The miracle that is given to you when you didn’t know you needed one.

She was positive. She was supportive and she was and is a fantastic teacher. She would look at what you’d done and say something delicious about your work. My favourite phrase of hers was: ‘That’s extremely painterly.’

And that’s where Maggie O’Farrell comes in.

The first book by her I ever read was; ‘The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.’ It was so good I hunted out everything by her I could get my hands on and read it in gigantic, greedy gulps. Over this last bank holiday weekend I finally got around to reading her latest, ‘The Marriage Portrait’, which I was sent as an ARC some months ago. I had been saving it until I finished reading the long list for a fiction prize I'm helping out with. The Marriage Portrait was my reward for being a good girl.

One of the things I love best about O’Farrell is how painterly she is. She is extraordinarily good at making clear, vivid images of the world she creates and filling them with complex, characters who are so vital that you feel you could pick them out in a crowd.

I’d put the book down to go and do something mundane and 21st Century to find myself somewhat confused that I wasn’t walking about a 16th Century palace. Even now, a few days after finishing it, I get after images in my mind of certain scenes she describes in the book. They seem so real.

The book tells the story of Lucrezia de Medici who goes on to become the first, ill-fated and short-lived Duchess of Ferrara. It borrows from history but takes as its central tenet, the idea that Robert Browning’s poem, My Last Duchess, in which he explores the idea that the Duke murdered his bride, is the truth. We see things through Lucrezia’s eyes as the book toggles between her last days as the Duchess of Ferrara and her past as a pawn of her powerful, Florentine family.

Painting is everywhere in this story. Lucrezia herself has a gift for painting. It is where we see the ‘real’ Lucrezia, although even in this, she has to be careful not to give away too much of herself. She paints miniatures, tiny details of life, observed and captured. Several times in the book she paints things she has seen or felt that are forbidden. Once painted she quickly paints over them, cloaking them with more acceptable subjects so that only she knows what is underneath.

This is the sense of the whole book. We see the life we are meant to see and then we see the life underneath. The life that is suppressed by manners or custom, by sex or status, by the court or by cunning. Lives slide over lives like oil on board. The book is a macrocosm of the miniatures that Lucrezia paints. Life painted on top of death; vitality painted over with stillness.

‘…she takes a stiff-bristled brush and loads it with a dark greenish-brown, the colour of first shade, and with sweeping movements, she covers the image with darkness, obliterating the lovers, sealing them inside a tomb of paint…it is all gone, hidden for ever, the only sign the scene was ever there the slight undulations in the paint’s surface, like rocks on the bed of a lake.’

Not only does Lucrezia paint, but she is painted herself. Browning’s poem was inspired by the marriage portrait of the title. In the book, we see the painting taking shape. Ordered by the Duke, it is a response to the only other portrait of her, commissioned by her parents. This portrait is a power move in which he reminds everyone that she is now his belonging, to do with as he sees fit.

In the book we see not only how the Renaissance painting studios would have actually worked on a painting like this, but also how the Duke manipulates the image, just as we would airbrush an image today and for many of the same reasons. The costly dress that imprisons Lucrezia makes it impossible for her to breathe freely or move. The elaborate hair that he fixates on in their marriage bed to tie her to him, is coiled and plaited, pulled and shaped to his desires. The jewels sit in ropes and chains, weighing her down like the slave that she is. It is a portrait of imprisonment and subjugation.

In the portrait passages, the reader flicks between Lucrezia’s internal monologue and the external bustle of the studio. Her own life force is in an elaborate, beautiful cage of cloth and custom. She is directed by the whims of the painter who pushes and pulls at her as if she were just another object and her husband’s whims as he directs the process.

It is in these moments that we see her kinship with the caged tiger her father buys at the beginning of the book and which Lucrezia is so obsessed with. She is as much an exotic pet as the tiger and just as doomed.

‘She seethed with fire, her face astonishing in its livid symmetry…the furnace-bright back and sides, the pale underbelly. The marks on her fur, Lucrezia saw, were not stripes, no - the word was insufficient for them. They were a bold, dark lace, to adorn, to conceal; they defined her, they saved her.’

This is where Lucrezia triumphs. Her memory of the tiger haunts her and informs her own life. She understands how to hide in plain sight. Her husband is so obsessed with building a prison to contain her, he doesn’t fully appreciate the creature he is trying to imprison. When he first sees her as a child, he thinks of her as the mouse she holds in her hand. She is the prey. He pictures himself as the predator, the stone marten he sends her a picture of during their courtship. Initially she believes that the picture is a sign that he truly understands her, but it is a warning, not a gift.

The joy of this book is in subterfuge and in the art of looking. We see and then we see again. The perspective constantly shifts and we are always being wrong-footed by what we think we know and what actually is. This is a masterpiece that beautifully unpicks a masterpiece.