The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Read online

  So who is to know who first thought up the notion of the dissected puzzle? Maybe Spilsbury was no more than the clever exploiter of another's idea. Maybe a private commission from Lady Charlotte for the royal nursery set him on his path to brief prosperity and a small, posthumous fame. Maybe Mary Delany was the go-between.

  XXI

  Mary Delany, born Mary Granville, was an inventive woman. Through ingenuity and resourcefulness she made the best of a poor start in life and a dismal, semi-forced first marriage to an elderly husband, Alexander Pendarves, who died leaving her less well off than her relatives had expected. She and her friend Lady Charlotte Finch were both acquainted with marital distress. Finch's marriage to the Honourable William Finch produced four children and had at first been companionable, but shortly after her appointment as royal governess in 1762 he became mentally unstable (he died in 1766) and is said to have been violent towards her. So she left him for a life shared between Kew and an apartment at St James's, and a career caring for two families of growing children, her own and the queen's. A historian might hesitate before connecting her husband's illness with her demanding employment at court, but a novelist need not be so circumspect.

  Mary Delany, who remained childless, remarried happily some twenty years after her first husband's death, but by this time she had developed her own skills and interests, as well as a distinctively independent attitude to the social whirl. She had a keen (and often satiric) eye for fashion and display, which she loved to describe in vivid detail; fabrics, trimmings, patterns and colours ('scarlet damask, gold tabby, pale lemon lutestring, silver frosted tissue, mouse-colour velvet') glow and sparkle and flutter under her pen, and she was full of advice to country cousins about ribbons and gloves. (She would certainly have advised Alison Uttley and Auntie Phyl that ribbons for the elderly were not a good idea. She had strong opinions about ribbons.)

  Mary Delany first came to the notice of the royal eye at Queen Caroline's birthday celebrations in 1728, where she made (in her own words) a 'tearing show', like a jay in borrowed feathers, in jewels borrowed from Lady Sunderland and a gown she had designed herself. 'The Queen thanked [Lady Carteret] for bringing me forward, and she told me she was obliged to me for my pretty clothes, and admired my Lady Carteret's extremely; she told the Queen they were my fancy, and that I drew the pattern.' But Delany, much as she loved clothes, was also a true mistress of the half-arts. She took up the crafts of japanning, shell-work and cut-paper-work, creating from simple and largely inexpensive materials objects of great and sometimes lasting beauty.

  These pursuits were popular with many aristocratic women, some of whose skills went well beyond the conventional needlework, bag-making and knotting that helped to kill time. Charlotte Boyle, credited with 'real genius' by Horace Walpole, ambitiously covered the wall panels of a room at Boyle Farm, Thames Ditton, with black Japan-work (verre eglomisé) using lampblack and goldleaf applied to glass with isinglass. Elizabeth Vesey at Lucan House in Ireland decorated her dressing room with 'Indian figures and flowers cut out and oiled, to be transparent, and pasted on her dressing-room window in imitation of painting on glass'. Delany, who helped her friend Mrs Vesey with this task, thought it had 'a very good effect'.

  Delany herself was, however, the most innovative of all. Germaine Greer in The Obstacle Race (1979) generously described her as 'the most civilised person in the most civilised era of English culture', and listed with admiration her prodigious activities, which included 'the making and sticking of pincushions, Japan-works, pastel portraits, copies of great masters, designs in shell-work, lustres, candelabra, cornices and friezes in cut-paper on wood, chenille work, cornices made of shells painted over like fine carving, upholstery, quilt-making, embroidery, cross-stitched carpets, miniature playing-card painting'. Delany worried that her mind was 'too much filled with amusements of no real estimation', a characteristically self-deprecating view that women tended to take (and still take) of crafts that cannot be dignified with the name of art. Late in life, she wrote to her niece Mary:

  Now I know you smile and say what Can Take Up So Much Of A.D.'s [Aunt Delany's] time? No children to teach or play with; no house matters to torment her; no books to publish; no politicks to work her brains? All this is true but idleness never grew in my soil, tho' I can't boast of any useful employments, only such as keep me from being a burthen to my friends, and banish the spleen.

  (Greer, in a not uncharacteristic volte-face, seems somewhat capriciously to have turned against Delany since she wrote The Obstacle Race, complaining in the Guardian in 2007 that she ought to have learned how to paint instead of wasting her time in cutting up paper. This article provoked predictable indignation in twenty-first-century women artists who work in patchwork, needlework and the soft arts, a spat that reminded me of that large, American, feminist, mixed-media artwork, Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, collaboratively created in 1974–9. I saw it in a warehouse in Islington. It was interesting but ugly. The delicacy of its needlework was not its distinguishing feature, whereas the delicacy of Delany's work is undisputed.)

  Delany was modest about her achievements but, while it is true that her name is not registered in the ranks of the great masters that she copied, her creativity and originality were fully recognized in her lifetime. It is agreed that her finest works were the paper collages of her old age, made after the death of her second husband Dr Delany in 1768. She began this extraordinary composite work in 1773 or 1774, when she was in her seventies, producing over nearly ten years a 'Flora Delanica', consisting of a series of nearly a thousand exquisite, delicate and botanically accurate, closely observed series of cut-paper mosaic flowers. These remarkable artefacts, which are as beautiful, fresh and natural as they are ingenious, were made by a process of her own devising, which portrays each flower as though it were alive upon its stem. They are, it must be admitted, in a different league from Auntie Phyl's gummed elves.

  Her flowers were admired for their artistry by Reynolds, and for their accuracy by Joseph Banks and Erasmus Darwin. Queen Charlotte (who loved Delany and signed herself in letters to her as 'your very affectionate queen') plied her with rare specimens and praise, and presented her with a beautiful, gold-spangled, satin pocket case containing, as Delany's waiting-woman put it, 'a knife, sizsars, pencle, rule, compass, bodkin'. Her mosaics were miracles of craftsmanship. Her 'Burnet Rose' (Rosa spinosissima), with its delicate white and cream flowers, has a stem showing sixty-five thorns, cut in one piece with the stem, and her 'White Flowering Acacia' has literally hundreds of leaves cut in different shades of green. The simpler flowers – the Chinese lantern, the marsh vetch, the corn poppy – are also very beautiful. She wielded her scissors with genius. Occasionally she would incorporate a part of a real plant – a leaf, a floret, a seed pod—in a collage. All this creative activity can hardly be dismissed as time-wasting, although it was certainly time-consuming.

  It seems far from impossible that Mary Delany might have hit spontaneously upon the puzzle principle, so adept was she at the arts of dissection and reassembly, of combining and re-creating, of making something from almost nothing. Maybe she and Lady Charlotte Finch discussed these matters as they watched the royal children play at Kew. Maybe, as Shefrin suggests, 'future research will reveal yet another, earlier inventor'. Dates are set to be challenged. Historians love to bowl them over, one by one: 1760, 1759, 1758... How far back in time may the dissected puzzle be traced? And how far, and how quickly, did it travel?

  XXII

  It's a pity that we don't have any paintings or drawings of George III's children playing with their Finch/Spilsbury cabinet. But we have recently been introduced to a puzzle-playing child from another royal family, portrayed by Goya with a piece of a dissected map in his hand. This portrait, of the six-year-old Spanish prince Don Luis María de Borbón y Vallabriga (1777–1823), was painted in 1783, when Goya was beginning to make himself known as a supremely successful (yet supremely uncompromising) portraitist of Spanish royalty and
aristocracy. It shows the little boy formally dressed in blue breeches and tailcoat standing in front of a large map, holding a piece of a puzzle in one hand and a pair of compasses in the other. This child was the nephew of King Carlos III of Spain, and son of the king's semi-exiled younger brother, also Don Luis, and it was painted at his father's palace not far from Madrid.

  During the same visit and in the same year, 1783, Goya painted one of his most famous and expressive groups, The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, which shows the Infante Don Luis, his wife, their three children, and a beautifully differentiated retinue of attendants, in an informal and intimate late-night setting. To me, this scene seems intended to demonstrate domestic happiness and solidarity, although art historian Xavier Bray points out that the darkness and the composition also suggest isolation and exile, and perhaps foreshadow the imminent death of the ageing Infante. The Infante plays a game of solitaire (with cards identified as the powerful Ace of Coins, the Horse of Clubs and the Two of Clubs) on a candle-lit, green-baize card table, watched by his much younger wife Teresa, who is dressed in a loose white gown. Her long hair is being braided by a hairdresser, and other members of the household gather round, one or two staring inquisitively out of the frame at the viewer, others watching the play of the cards. Little Don Luis, in profile, follows the game; his younger sister Maria Teresa gazes at the figure of Goya (who has included himself and his easel in the corner of the foreground of the composition) while a round-eyed infant is held aloft in a governess's arms. It is an Enlightenment scene with a curiously free egalitarian spirit, giving interest and dignity to all its subjects, young and old, master and servant, and perhaps defiantly illustrating the family's triumph over the disapproval of the king and the difficulties encountered by progressive thought in a Catholic country still dominated by the Inquisition.

  (The devout and despotic king disapproved of his brother because he had refused to follow the career ordained for him, and had instead pursued a worldly and amorous life. Having been appointed cardinal-archbishop of Toledo at the age of seven and archbishop of Seville at the age of fourteen, Don Luis had rebelled against his ecclesiastical destiny, and had gone his own way. The little boy holding the piece of dissected map was to become President of the Regency of Cadiz during Ferdinand's captivity and has been credited with reining in the activities of the Inquisition. Jigsaws, as I maintain, are good for the character.) Paintings celebrating the ideal of the 'new' companionate marriage are a good hunting ground for images of children's playthings. The Duke of Orsuna was the head of another enlightened and progressive Spanish family much loved and much painted by Goya, and his 1788 portrait of the duke with his elegant intellectual wife and four children includes the obligatory small dog and a miniature, beautifully made, black toy carriage on a string. Surely this family must also have had dissected maps in its nursery? Lady Holland (born Elizabeth Vassall, and wife of the third Lord Holland) met the family on her travels in Spain with her husband in 1804, and wrote warmly in her journal of the duchess's liveliness, her handsome children, her 'national magnificence and hospitality', describing her as 'the most distinguished woman in Madrid from her talents, worth and taste'. She also praised the duke's exceptional library, 'chiefly of classics, history, voyages and books of science, which he intended for the use of the public; but this intention he was not permitted by the Governt. to carry into effect'.

  Lady Holland's Hispanophile husband was, one might note, the nephew of Charles James Fox and of his younger brother Harry, who was reared on fish, fairy stories and Rousseau. Charles James, the apple of his father's eye, was more spectacularly indulged as a small child by his doting father Henry Fox, the first Lord Holland. This devoted parent, having recovered from the shock of producing a baby with skin 'all shrivelled' and staring eyes who looked incredibly 'like a monkey', soon fell in love with the company and conversation of his precocious second son, whom he found 'infinitely engaging & clever & pretty'. He could deny him nothing; he is said to have allowed him to smash his father's watch, to tear up his state papers, and to ride on a saddle of mutton while paddling his feet in the gravy. (Stella Tillyard, in Aristocrats (1994), has him riding on a patriotic joint of roast beef, and she is no doubt right, but I prefer my saddle-of-mutton version.) In Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977), Lawrence Stone quotes this anecdote from Lady Louisa Stuart:

  A great dinner was given at Holland House to all the foreign ministers. The children came in at dessert. Charles, then in petticoats, spying a large bowl of cream in the middle of the table, had a desire to get into it. Lord Holland insisted he should be gratified, and, in spite of Lady Holland's remonstrations, had it placed on the floor for the child to jump in and splash about at his pleasure.

  Permissiveness, some thought, could be taken too far, and stories like this (some but not all of them apocryphal) contributed to the Victorian backlash against the early 'indiscipline' that had turned Fox into a gambler and a debauchee.

  Fox, as a little boy, was painted by William Hoare, who also painted the Quicke brothers with their dissected puzzle. Fox is shown in a silk dress, wearing a splendid headdress and clutching a King Charles spaniel. Already, as an infant, he looks like a contender who would not be content to play the game of patience.

  XXIII

  Since Mrs Hannas sold her collection in 1984, more early jigsaws have come onto the market. They are not as rare as once thought, and interest in them has increased. The Sotheby's sale catalogue of the Hannas collection stated that there were 'only six known Spilsbury jigsaws, four of which are in this collection'. Her map of Europe 'Divided into its Kingdoms' had an estimate of £200-£300 and was described as 'lacking three pieces'. Spilsbury's 'England and Wales', lacking many pieces, plus another better copy, together with 'two engraved maps coloured by hand, mounted on wood, and cut to form puzzle', formed a lot also estimated at £200-£300, the same price as that of a further lot consisting of Spilsbury's 'The World' together with 'a smaller engraved two hemispherical map dated 1762 which is Spilsbury's earliest known imprint, torn'. A map of 'Asia, divided into its Empires, Kingdoms and States', described as possibly the first jigsaw puzzle to have an interlocking border, was included in a lot estimated at £150–200.

  Interestingly, all these items went for far more than their estimates: the map of Europe fetched £1,650; 'England and Wales' went for £880; 'The World' for £984; and Asia for £352. Prices were rising, and jigsaws were becoming increasingly collectible.

  The dates shift, and the dissemination of puzzles throughout Europe and the rest of the world has not been fully charted. Nevertheless, it was the traditional founding date of 1766, true or false, that introduced me to Kevin. He sent me off on a new wild-goose chase, which was to take me far from the story of the jigsaw, and far from my Somerset evenings with Auntie Phyl. This is how it happened.

  The thrill of my first physical contact with the Spilsbury maps in the British Library was so great that I was fired with eagerness to see as many old jigsaws as possible, as soon as possible. And by soon I meant immediately, that very day. (I am not patient by temperament, which is one of the reasons why I believe jigsaws are good for me.) I returned the wooden maps in their boxes to the appropriate counter in the Map Room and decided to set off at once in search of their Victorian successors. It is not often now that I try to do two things in one day. I knew that the Museum of London had holdings of puzzles, and indeed at that stage believed that Linda Hannas had bequeathed it her collection, so I thought I would go there and see whether I could find them. At that point, I innocently trusted that they would be spread out in glass cabinets, awaiting my eager inspection. I longed to see them. I don't know how I have preserved this optimism of easy access for so long.

  It is, in theory, easy to get from the British Library to the Museum of London via King's Cross on the underground, and had I been in less of a hurry I would have gone on the tube, courtesy of my old person's Freedom Pass. But I knew from past experience t
hat the Barbican is itself a giant puzzle. Its exits and entrances, like those of the reconstructed King's Cross, are bewildering, its layers labyrinthine. So I resolved to take a cab, which would take me straight to the right hole in the fortress wall. I usually resist travelling by taxi, for reasons that do not involve expense, but I decided to save time and make an exception to my rule. I would ask to be dropped off at the correct entrance, and thus gain at least half an hour of working time.

  This was a lucky lapse of rigour. When I stated my destination, the taxi driver said to me, reasonably enough, 'Doing London in the day, are you?' I was mildly offended; I was a scholar, not an ageing tourist from out of town, going from museum to museum with nothing better to do. Did I look like an idler? So I said pompously, 'No, I'm doing some research.' He changed gear at once and politely asked about my subject. When I told him, he enquired, 'So when was the first jigsaw made?' I was able to reply, with unusual precision if not necessarily with historical accuracy, 'In 1766.'

  He thought about this for a moment, as we headed east. Then he said, 'No, that can't be right. There must be earlier jigsaws. Think about it. What about mosaics?'