The Bridge was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. I found a copy recently in our local street library.
This slim volume is a fictionalised account of one of British artist Philip Wilson Steer’s final painting trips to his beloved Sussex seaside town of Walberswick. It was first time I had even heard of the artist.
Author Maggie Hemmingway, in her debut novel, imagines how the events of 1892 may have changed Steer’s artistic style. As an example, here is one of his translucent Walberswick paintings (1894), titled Children Paddling.
Hemmingway’s premise is that it may have been a hopeless love affair that drained his subsequent paintings of vitality, yet also produced The Bridge, one of his most admired works.
Certainly Steer’s later paintings were more traditional, such as the following study of Richmond Castle in North Yorkshire, completed in 1903.
Source – Tate Gallery
I read The Bridge sitting by the fire, over a couple of winter evenings in The Blue Mountains of New South Wales. It brought back memories of visiting English seaside villages; so different in character to those in Australia.
Philip Steer painted young girls on the pier at Walberswick with a mature woman, possibly their mother. A married woman with daughters appears in the book as Isobel Heatherington, the object of the artist’s obsessive passion. The girls remind me of ballet dancers. In their white muslin dresses they exude freedom and innocence. But the older woman is the focus of the painting, holding the railing and gazing into the distance.
As this little book progresses there is a slowly building tension between repressed emotions and intensity of feeling. So much is unsaid, but so much is observed, and that is what ultimately brings about a tragic conclusion.
‘She spied on them from beneath lowered eyelashes and saw how they held themselves back, as though what they wanted, what they secretly wished, was too precious ever to be spoken.’
It is a story full of light and dark, often expressed through the theme of nature;
‘An inch of reed would be all manner of greens, browns, touches of ochre and streaks of blue as it waved in the wind, and then, a moment later, as the shadow of the cloud moved forward over that inch of land, it would be – dead. Almost monochrome in the absence of light. Dead as all its neighbours, bending meekly in an anonymous mass. It was light, light that was the most important thing, If one could paint in light, then every colour would resonate, and have value, in exactly the way and proportion that it did in reality.‘
Here is the painting by Steer that inspired Hemmingway’s novel. Once again the woman is holding onto the railing. The light is subdued and there is a certain malevolence depicted in her companion, who she refuses to look at.
I loved this book. Reading it was like walking into the paintings and being caught up in the unfolding story.
Maggie Hemmingway died on May 9 1993, aged only 47.
MAGGIE HEMMINGWAY – AN OBITUARY
