Painting for Friday

Martin Johnson Heade
Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 1864-5

Am enamored of Heade, a painter of the Hudson River School, who made nouveau Dutch flower paintings--sweet, perfectly rendered, auction-ready, utterly sick-making. He also "went Native," first producing these sort of resort paintings in Florida, and then these wild, flourescent odes on colonialism? planting? pink? palms? theater? in Brazil and Nicaragua. First, this canvas put me in mind of a coloring book I had as a child all about a Victorian family staying in a seaside hotel with many potted plants and hammocks (a touch off the mark, I know. . . it was a first impression). Second, rather dimly again, the weather, the promise of viscous, smelly, absolute heat (the sort beyond the best efforts of my angry, spitting radiator, which makes a heat I like to call, Boarding School Corridor). Third, the basest, I imagined buying it with someone else's money and hanging it on a coffered wood wall.

And then--Guy Thwaite. Romantic hero of Wharton's unfinished The Buccaneers (1937), the tale of American beauties, the daughters of Wall Street titans, making perfectly miserable marriages to emotionally limited and/or gay Brits during the Gilded Age. Guy is meant to inherit a very old house (15th century) and a very old peerage (correct usage?) and his dissipated father's expectations of a political career. He is, of course, in need of that tricky substance, cash. Guy must go engineering in South America, removing him from his great, creepy house in order to keep it in the family, and, of course, spoiling his chance at marrying young American Anabelle (you see, he alone is the Brit with an open mind and heart, the one who can love her hot and whole). In the course of the narrative, he comes home from the West to find his lady unhappily married to a mean, sexually conflicted Duke. Guy rescues Anabelle! They run off together, forever alienating their respective and combined worlds, losing his inheritance to a bitter father, etc. There is much in that, Wharton's most favorite trope: good, young people scorned for making honest choices, refusing to be trapped or conventional. But what I'm after is the object of an exotic destination when it is met by a person who has the ancient, heavy promise of a home elsewhere. In the novel, Guy loses his country seat, his rightful still point on the moving Earth. Yet, imagine that this is not his fate, that his inheritance is as fixed as it ought to be. How is it? How is it to move through the world with certainty at your back? What do the tropics look like? Is everything one or the other, home or not-home? Is this a great luxury, as I imagine it to be? Or is it, instead, a tremendous burden? Both I suppose.