the other on the swing, giving a view of her legs, and her slipper had fallen off
her foot and was flying upwards through the air.
‘Edward!’ said Sarah, giggling to herself. ‘Just look where that young man’s looking! You’re very naughty showing me this one, nearly as naughty as that girl in the
picture. Haven’t you anything more decent to show me?’
Edward smiled at her. ‘All right, Sarah. Not naughty, these ones. But fantastic all the same.’
Edward took her to the first-floor landing where the world of François Boucher awaited them. This was a world where the laws of gravity and reality, of time and space, had been suspended,
a world where naked gods rode chariots across the sky and semi-naked goddesses scattered pink roses among the clouds. Clothes were the exception in these fabulous landscapes although some scanty
shifts were included from time to time so the artist could show off his brushwork. There were putti everywhere, plump little cherubs rolling back clouds or performing arabesques in the sky or
gambolling playfully on the surface of the sea. Almost everything was subordinate to the naked female figure. A judgement of Paris was constructed in such a way as to give three different
perspectives on the female form, groups of nude women frolicked on the waves, a glorious naked Venus caressed her husband Vulcan, god of fire and armourer of the gods. These were the wilder
mythological poems of the wilder mythological poets translated on to canvas in shades of pale blue and pink and diaphanous green, a world of rococo and make believe and fantasy.
‘My goodness me,’ said Sarah, ‘how absolutely wonderful. I wouldn’t tell my mother this, Edward, but I like them, I really do. I think they’re marvellous. Are there
any more?’
Edward smiled. ‘Not here. Probably in National Gallery. Nothing else as exotic as Boucher here.’
Sarah lingered in front of the rising and the setting of the sun.
‘Boucher had important patron, Madame de Pompadour, official mistress of Louis the something or other,’ Edward whispered. ‘Kept wolf from door later on by designing tapestries
for royal tapestry factory.’
‘Where now, Edward?’
He led them halfway down the Great Gallery on the first floor, past a couple of sombre Van Dycks, a gorgeous full-length Gainsborough, and a sumptuous Rubens landscape. He stopped in front of a
young man with a turned-up moustache, an elegant black hat and very fashionable clothes. Even back in the seventeenth century painters were keen to show how versatile their brushwork could be. This
young man had a beautifully depicted ruff with a dark grey kerchief hanging from it, and a very intricate white cuff on a richly embroidered jacket. A faint smile played across his lips as if he
were thinking of a secret or a joke that only he and the painter knew. It all looked totally spontaneous as if the young man had walked in and parked himself on Franz Hals’s canvas the
afternoon before.
‘That’s the Laughing Cavalier,’ said Sarah knowledgeably. ‘Everybody knows him from the advertisements. Isn’t he by Franz somebody or other?’
‘Good,’ said Edward solemnly. ‘But work originally called Portrait of a Young Man . Franz Hals. Dutchman. Early sixteen hundreds.’
‘But why,’ asked Sarah, ‘do we call The chap The Laughing Cavalier?’
‘Painting up for sale,’ said Edward, now firmly back in cryptic mode, ‘forty or fifty years ago. Nobody paid much attention. Nobody heard much of Hals chap. Fourth Marquess of
Hertford takes a fancy to it. So does a Rothschild. Big battle in the auction rooms. Sells for six times its asking price. Newspapers drawn to battle between a Marquess and a Rothschild, supposed
to be as rich as Croesus. Laughing Cavalier makes better copy than Portrait of a Young Man . Not good title. Look carefully.’
Sarah inspected the gentleman on the wall carefully. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see what you mean,’ she said,
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