The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (31 page)

Doing jigsaws stimulates bizarre theories of art history.

The same little dog appears, less suggestively, in Titian's large portrait of the Vendramin family. Everybody had a little dog like that.

I learned more about the appreciation of clouds and of Constable from doing jigsaws of
The Hay Wain
and
Salisbury Cathedral
than I learned from my first encounters with the original paintings. Now, when I see clouds, I see clouds and Constable, not clouds and the shapes of a jigsaw puzzle, but the puzzle was the medium that introduced me, that fixed my attention, that made me pause. This may sound ridiculous, but it is true. I could have learned about clouds at the Courtauld, but I didn't have the opportunity. I learned through Clementoni. The cumulus and the cirrus and the mackerel, the greys and mauves, the sullen purples, the swelling yellow bruises, the cream and sallow swathes, the white crests and mountains, the bright linings, the tints of pink and red – I studied all of these through assembling the pieces of jigsaws. Constable was very good at clouds. They are difficult, for painters and puzzle solvers alike. (And the jigsaw stonework of Constable's
Salisbury Cathedral,
although it looks much easier, was very difficult too; I was pleased to note that Constable himself commented on this 1823 painting in a letter to his friend Archdeacon John Fisher that it was 'the most difficult subject in landscape I ever had on my easel'.)

You become intimate with the painting, like those students who used patiently to copy masterpieces onto canvases on easels in the National Gallery. You rarely see these copy-makers now. Before the age of cheap reproduction, copyists used to work for profit, like Mlle Noémie Nioche in Henry James's
The American,
who is discovered by James's hero Christopher Newman as she works on a copy of Murillo's
Madonna
in the Louvre. The untutored Newman is more taken with the pretty young copyist than with
the painting, and prefers the copy of the painting to the original. Unlike David Teniers, Mlle Nioche clearly prefers a lighter, brighter version, and gives her works a high finish. (As noted, some of the reproductions in Linda Hannas's book on jigsaws look more glossily attractive than the originals, and those in McCann's book are dazzling.)

The market for Old Master copies in Europe has more or less vanished, although we are told it still flourishes in China, but, more ephemerally, pavement artists in Europe continue to produce chalk and pastel versions of Botticelli and Vermeer, and to collect small sums in token appreciation from passers-by. Like the Tibetan monks, they work from a pattern. Doing a jigsaw is less arduous and more pointless than making a copy, but it can give you a similar sense of familiarity. Once you have 'done' a painting, you feel a more personal connection with it, for better or worse. Michael Codron told me that you feel you are 'inside the mind of the painter', and this is true. It is an escape from the self and into another mindset.

Most paintings gain from this intimacy, but I began to dislike the
Venus of Urbino
as I struggled with her in jigsaw form. I took against the murky drapes and tapestries in green and dark red and beige and brown, and the background figure on her knees rummaging in a dark coffer, and the dingy slanting repetitive tiles of the floor, and the silly little floppy-eared silky pubic dog. Above all I began to dislike the woman's sprawling, basking, seal-like, solid, self-satisfied figure, her smooth mounds of naked flesh, her hazy pink nipples, her big fat sausage-like fingers. Only as I neared the end did it occur to me that what I was disliking was not Titian's masterpiece, but the poor and fuzzy quality of the jigsaw reproduction, credited to the 'Clementoni Museum Collection – the Art of Art!' If ever I get to the Uffizi again and can face the queues, I must go to pay my respects to the real
Venus.
Clementoni didn't do her justice. Their version of Botticelli's
Primavera,
though
it lopped off a few limbs round the edges, had a much better and sharper finish.

I employed an unusual technique when constructing the
Venus.
I did the frame first, of course, but then I imposed upon myself the constraint of finishing all the background before I embarked on her body. The empty unfilled outline of her body looked very striking and strangely meaningful on the dark lacquer table. I wish now I had asked Michael to take a photograph of it in this state. I will never be able to bring myself to repeat the experiment. I don't know what the empty space suggested, but it looked in some way significant. I am sure the Oulipo painters would have had a theory about it.

My Oxford grandchildren, knowing my weakness for this seemingly pointless employment, purchased for me one Christmas a 2,000 piece reproduction of a work titled
The Battle of Valmy
(1792), which clearly says on its box that it is by Jean Baptiste Mauzaisse (d.1844). (I now know exactly where in Oxford they bought this unusual item, thanks to information provided by Michael Codron; he rumbled them.) It is a Falcon Imperial de Luxe Puzzle, and the box credit reads: 'Louvre, Paris/Giraudin/ Bridgeman Art Gallery, London'. The painting portrays, in the foreground, a number of mounted officers, several dying horses, and a field hospital full of wounded and dying men. The field hospital has picturesque tiles and woodwork. Further off, in the middle ground, we see the windmill of Valmy and a line of infantry and, beyond the infantry, the cavalry. There are large explosions of shellfire from what I take to be the enemy line, and the high horizon is marked by puffs of smoke. The revolutionary French are apparently about to defeat the Prussians in a famous victory.

My grandchildren did not seem to consider the subject macabre or unsuitable for their Quaker-educated Granny Maggie. 'They all look in the pink to me,' protested Danny, inspecting the wounded
officers more closely. It is not a painting before which I would have lingered. I doubt whether, in other circumstances, I would even have noticed it. But I got to know it well.

Some curious coincidences attached themselves to this jigsaw. While I was in the course of labouring over its 2,000 pieces, in the year 2000, the windmill of Valmy, a famous revolutionary landmark, was blown down in the same violent storm that uprooted many thousands of trees at Versailles. I felt its destruction personally. The windmill has now been rebuilt, and in September 2006 it served as the site for far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen's launch of his presidential campaign. There, 'on the glorious ground of Valmy', he unsuccessfully invited the French to follow his nationalist agenda.

The second incident involved a greater act of destruction than the fall of a windmill. On the day after the collapse of the Twin Towers (which began to disintegrate as I was quietly reading
Thus Spake Zarathustra
in the British Library) I went into the National Gallery. I think I went there to reassure myself that it and its paintings were still there, and to my astonishment I beheld, high on the wall above me, a massive version of my jigsaw. I stared at it, unbelieving. What was it doing there? What did it mean? Why was this vast French painting in London? Did it have a message for me? Was I dreaming?

And
The Battle of Valmy
was not alone; three other huge canvases in a similar vein accompanied it, which I subsequently discovered portrayed the battles of Gemappes, Montmirail and Hanau.

Valmy was unmistakable.

One does not forget a jigsaw.

(Danny and Lillie: I am not Auntie Phyl. I loved my Christmas present. I am not Auntie Phyl. I loved it, dying soldiers and all.)

Now, some years later, I can clearly remember the sombre mood in which I had visited the National Gallery that day, a mood of mingled apprehension and defiance. We were afraid, in those
immediate days after the Twin Towers, that something similar was about to happen in central London, and therefore we wished to show ourselves to be part of London, to show London that we valued it. So we went out into our city, to prove we were not afraid. And there, in the Gallery, I met this old friend.

Recently, prompted by my new role as jigsaw historian, I went back to see whether those four battle paintings were still there. I had a hunch that they would have vanished, and they had. Nobody I knew had ever noticed them. More mysteriously, the helpful man on the information desk knew nothing of a painter called Mauzaisse. There was nothing in the gallery by a painter of this name and, as far as he could see, there never had been. He looked up
The Battle of Valmy
for me in the National Gallery catalogue, found the image, showed it to me, and told me that it was by a painter called Horace Vernet, and that it, with its three companions, was now hidden away in some storeroom. Was I mistaken about the image, he suggested? Was this another treatment of the same battle?

No, I was not mistaken. I've admitted to a poor visual right-brain memory (though I have, or used to have, a good left-brain word memory) but there was no possibility that this field hospital, these officers, these horses, this heavy cloudy sky, these flashes of gunfire and clouds of smoke that were glimmering at me now from a small screen on the information desk were different from those in my jigsaw. I ordered a print, to prove to myself that I was not mistaken. It cost £10. You can print out any image at the National Gallery. I suspect I am the first person ever to have requested a print of
The Battle of Valmy.

There was, as I now know, a whole family of painters called Vernet, of whom Horace was the most successful. Baudelaire hated him because Baudelaire hated the army, and Vernet glorified it. Baudelaire also hated Vernet's popularity. Or so we are told.

One does not forget a jigsaw.

The Mauzaisse is a copy of the Vernet, but there is no indication of this on the Falcon box. This raises more questions about jigsaw image copyright. Who gives permission to the puzzle manufacturer? May it be withheld? The American jigsaw artists catalogued by McCann were paid for their original work by the manufacturers, but did they have a copyright agreement?

I became more and more interested in the phenomenon of the art jigsaw, and asked around and about for an explanation of its genesis. When did it become popular, who first thought of it, and what about the question of copyright? Titian's 1,000 piece
Bacchus and Ariadne
is copyright of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery, 2002, all rights reserved, whereas Claude's 'JR de Luxe', 500-piece
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
has no copyright line, though the box tells us that the original of this work also hangs in the National Gallery. Claude has his dates on the box, but not on the puzzle. Brueghel's jumbo 1,500-piece
Spreekwoorden,
or
Proverbs
(mistranslated into French, oddly, as
Scène Religieuse),
is credited not on the box but on a slip of paper within the box: ©1990 by Koninklijke Hausemann en Hötte nv, under Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions. So some puzzle makers take copyright seriously. Not all jigsaws are pirated.

Nobody seemed to know the answer to my query about the origins of museum and art gallery jigsaws until I happened upon a possible solution in a BBC Radio 4 programme by Alan Dein titled
The World's Most Difficult Puzzle,
first broadcast on 27 March 2004. This is an account of the 340-piece puzzle based on Jackson Pollock's
Convergence,
produced in 1964 by Springbok Editions in the United States, and it is an odd and interesting story. In the placid 1950s, the jigsaw industry in the US was at a low ebb; the craze of the Depression was forgotten, and the jigsaw had become unfashionable, stuck at the bottom end of the toy market. The
images chosen by manufacturers were of scenic, snow-capped mountains, castles on the Rhine, fields of tulips, rose-wreathed cottages, English hunting scenes, and clippers at sea. Alison Lurie, the American novelist, recalls that during the summer holidays of her childhood there was always a jigsaw laid out on a table, always of traditional genre scenes of this nature – pictures on the Mary Russell Mitford, Helen Allingham, Barbara Trapido sickbed model. (It is well known that jigsaws are good for convalescence, and a Shakespeare scholar of my acquaintance claims that they are also a cure for the hangover.)

Two American enthusiasts and entrepreneurs transformed this tranquil scene. American printing executive Bob Lewin, whose family and office staff had always enjoyed puzzles, was inspired while on a business trip to England in the 1950s to try to revitalize the home industry. He had been in the habit of taking home gifts of circular Waddington puzzles, then still a novelty; now, on a visit to Leeds, he saw a Waddington display in the Queen's Hotel and got in touch with the company. He went back to the United States and, with the help of Waddington's expertise, tried out some upmarket ideas of his own. ( John Waddington Ltd was a well-known firm of Leeds-based printers, which in the 1930s had branched out into playing cards and games such as Lexicon and Monopoly. It survived until 1995.)

In 1963, Lewin founded a company called Springbok Editions, with his wife and business partner Katie. They pursued their new agenda: Katie, an art lover, went round the art galleries with 'jigsaw eyes', selecting and commissioning new work. She chose work by Salvador Dali and other celebrated artists, but her most sensational choice was Pollock's
Convergence,
painted in 1952. This represented everything that the snowy mountains and cottages and farmyard scenes had left out: turmoil, controversy, freedom, movement, modernity.

Pollock had been killed in a car accident some seven years earlier, and his name and work were notorious.
Convergence
is one of the key works of Abstract Expressionism, a rich and complex patterning of blues and yellows and reds and oranges and white swirls and drips and squiggles, against a black background. It is a sprawl of primary colours on a large canvas (93½ × 155 inches). The jigsaw version is deeply puzzling and, as American jigsaw historian Anne Williams explains in Alan Dein's radio programme, even the cutting of the pieces was a puzzle. Most mass-produced puzzles are cut on a grid, with rows of repeating shapes, but the Springbok dies were irregularly curved and unpredictable, making the puzzle even more difficult.