Images of Beckett - Index of

acutely aware of developments in modern art and his own imagery was, as we
shall see later, profoundly modified by this knowledge. But one of his most
significant contributions to the theatre was to have drawn visual inspiration
from the work of the Old Masters, and yet to have created theatrical images
that take on a distinctively modern form, and, in some cases, even assume
iconic status, as the image of the two tramps waiting for Godot certainly
has done. A look at Beckett’s personal relations with painting may help to
explain how this convergence of ancient and modern came about and
to judge how important it was for his own writing for the stage.
Ever since his youth, Beckett had an astounding, perhaps even a
photographic, visual memory for subject, form and colour in painting.
Although the central character, Murphy, in Beckett’s 1938 novel of that name,
has great difficulty in calling to mind the faces of his own mother and father,
he has a very vivid recollection of a face in a painting that Beckett saw in the
National Gallery in London just before he wrote the novel: ‘He saw the
upturned face of the Child in a Giovanni Bellini Circumcision, waiting to feel
the knife.’ 24 Even in his early eighties, Beckett could himself remember very
clearly details of Old Master paintings that he had seen many years, even
decades, before. As a young man, for example, visiting the National Gallery
of Ireland in Dublin, he had seen Salomon van Ruisdael’s landscape painting
depicting a coach halted at a coaching inn, entitled The Halt. Some sixty years
later, Beckett could still describe to me the tiny, almost indistinguishable,
figure of a boy urinating against a wall. 25 In fact, he sometimes called this
painting not The Halt but The Urinator. 26 According to Arikha, he could spend
as long as an hour in front of a single painting, surveying it, savouring its
forms and its colours, reading it, absorbing it in its most intricate details. 27
Often it was the tiny narrative or human aspects that he could remember
and pick out in a seventeenth-century Dutch canvas.
The extent of his passion for painting, its intensity and the range and
depth of his knowledge of the Old Masters, has gone largely unrecognised
until very recently – except by a handful of close friends and a very few critics.
His almost encyclopedic knowledge of art was well known, for example, to
58 IMAGES OF BECKETT
his friend and later director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Thomas
MacGreevy, with whom Beckett corresponded at length in the 1930s,
frequently about painting. But their correspondence has not been readily
available and, as I write, it can be read only on microfilm in Trinity College,
Dublin. Over the years, Beckett sent literally hundreds of reproductions,
mostly of Old Master paintings, to his friends, from postcards to poster-size
reproductions, and in turn received them back; as a priority, he visited art
galleries and churches that held important paintings, in whichever large
town or city he found himself, both before and after the Second World War;
he bought dozens of catalogues of art collections, many of which still exist
today, handed on by Beckett to Arikha; and he acquired numerous books on
painting. As faithful as the most assiduous lover, he went back to see
particular paintings that he admired, even adored, time after time after time.
In the 1930s he swapped ideas on their attributions with MacGreevy,
doubting sometimes what the curators and the official catalogues said about
the artist. And he discussed specific details of paintings: a hand, a foot, a
colour, the state of preservation of a canvas, or the restoration work that had
been done or that needed doing. He had an excellent eye. The line of the left
leg of a figure in a Giorgione painting is wrong, he suggested to MacGreevy –
and the experts concluded that the leg had indeed been painted over in the
nineteenth century. 28
Beckett’s ability to draw parallels and to make fascinating comparisons
was astounding. In 1937 he compared, for instance, the shepherd in a
Signorelli painting in the Kaiser Wilhelm Friedrich Museum in Berlin with an
El Greco that he had last seen in London two years before. 29 His confidence
in his own aesthetic judgement was (to me at least) breathtaking. His best
and most realistic idea for gainful employment in the 1930s, when writing
was bringing him in almost no income at all, was to apply for the post of
assistant curator at London’s National Gallery.
We can discern a number of important stages in Beckett’s artistic
Odyssey. He seems to have fallen in love with painting first while he was a
student at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1920s, although his interest
may already have been nurtured by his aunt, Cissie Sinclair, who was herself a