Dorothy Dunnett: Renaissance Woman

Soon she obtained a number of commissions to paint several notable people in Scotland, including the well-known actor Duncan Macrae in the role of King James VI, and a senior judge, Lord John Wheatley.

Her family were also frequent subject, especially her husband Alastair. In an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Sue MacGregor in 1991, Dorothy was asked about why she had so many portraits of Alastair:

BBC: I’ve seen your home, just a few yards away lots of portraits of Alastair – going up the stairs – Alastair in his kilt, Alastair in an oilskin.

Most of the portraits in the Dunnett family home were of Dorothy’s husband, Alastair

DD: Yes, Alastair looking bored in almost everything, because the only pictures that you have … you know all your commissioned pictures are obviously with the owners, so all you have left are the family pictures. I was always dragooning small children, when my kids were small, because I try to exhibit in the Royal Scottish Academy every year and I get a picture of Alastair or a picture of one of the kids. I remember one year I put my three-year-old in and the door bell rang one day and there was a charming lady, with two very sweet children, one aged three and one aged five, saying, “I want you to paint my children”. I said, “Ah, well, I am afraid, actually, I don’t paint children”. And she said, “Yes, you do. You have a picture of one in the Royal Academy!”. And I said, “Well, yes, but that was mine.” And she couldn’t see the distinction, which was I can hammer mine if its not sitting still. I cannot do the same to someone else’s. But in fact, I did paint them. I then had a nanny, who would stand behind me with glove puppets and things and kill herself keeping the children quiet until I got the painting done. But now I strictly do adults only, I can tell you.”

Perhaps a little surprisingly, she only ever painted one of her characters from her novels: Archie Abernethy, from the Lymond books.  The image has been much-loved by her readers and fans and has appeared on the front cover of the Dunnett Society’s magazine, Whispering Gallery.

Sue MacGregor asked her, “Could you paint one of your heroes from your imagination?” Dorothy answered:

“Oh, I have been asked to do that often, but if you look in the room that we are sitting, along at the end, there is a painting of a broken-nosed man, with an elephant behind him. That is the only picture I have ever done of any character in my books, because to do Lymond and Niccolò is not a good idea. People have their own idea of what the heroic figure is like and it is not right, even for me, to spoil it. So, okay, forget that.

But, a man in Canada once wrote to me and said, “I want you to paint me a portrait, which I will commission, of anyone in your books. Not,” he said, “Lymond”, which was the series he had read, but he said, “I rather like Archie Abernethy, who is the elephant tamer, but choose someone else if you would prefer somebody else”.

So I thought, ‘Archie Abernethy – he is bald, he’s got a scar, he’s got a broken nose – who do I know . . . ‘ I don’t actually, so I sat watching boxers, to get the broken nose, on the television. And I got a picture of an elephant, and I put together this painting, and actually it was rather fun, of this little man called Archie Abernethy. I wrote to Canada and said, “Sorry it has taken so long, but it is finished and I am coming to the States next week and would you like me to send it up to you from there, or what?”

I got a letter back saying, “I am very sorry, but my husband, who wrote to you about the picture, died earlier this year and I am afraid I have no use for a portrait of Archie Abernethy”. So, it was very sad, and that is the reason why that is the only one I have done and why I still have got it.

In Alastair’s autobiography, Among Friends, he recalls the painting, somewhere between fond and perplexed: “There he stands now in our little gallery, with his broken nose and tough half-bald look, the wee man from Fife who intended that the court of France would believe him to be a Turk; and behind him there looms an authentic sixteenth-century elephant.” (Dunnett, Alastair. Among Friends: An Autobiography, London, Century Publishing, 1984.)

Besides, as she wrote in Checkmate, “Elephants gave you less bother, any day.”

Dorothy may not have chosen to immortalise her most famous characters in portraiture but her passion for painting is evident in her writing.  The way she describes people and places is with a painter’s eye for texture and capturing vistas in a moment of suspense.  She told Sue MacGregor:

“Yes, well, I paint and therefore my imagination is, I think, a visual one and when I am setting a scene or inventing a dialogue, I try to imagine the room or the place where it takes place exactly, what the movements of the protagonists are, how their clothes are falling. You must not put in too much of that but, I think, if you have it in your own mind’s eye, you can flesh out the dialogue and I try to present a dialogue where the reader has to read the motivation behind it. I do not explain too much. But the movements explain and the setting explains and, therefore, the visual element counts a lot in what I am trying to do.”

There are so many passages that could illustrate this, but here is one with a particularly spine-tingling quality:

Late that night, the seven ships under Thorfinn stole their way into an anchorage and, making fast, lay locked together, gently rocking in silence while the men slept.  Then the blackness around them turned to tablets of black and less than black and somewhere, a long way off, a blackbird announced a cherried sentence and the watch on each ship, stretching, began to move bending from man to man.  The wind had dropped.

They entered Loch Bracadale with the sunrise, rose-coloured oars laying darkling folds on the rose-tinted pool of the fjord.  A dusting of guillemots, asleep on the water, roused and dived with almost no sound, leaving pink and verdigris rings on the surface.  A charcoal rock needled with cormorants became suddenly bare, and from the shore came the scalloped cry of an oyster-catcher, joined after a moment by the others.  Then the longships slid past, and the sounds died away.

With no sound at all, but with a glory that bludgeons the senses, the furnace doors were thrown finally open, and the spires and pinnacles of the mountains of Skye stood suddenly stark before them, against mighty rivers of scarlet and brass. On Thorfinn’s ship, no one spoke.  The grey goose flamed, and its shadow moved, shortening.  ‘On such a day,’ Thorfinn said, ‘it would not be a hardship to die.’

 

— King Hereafter (chapter 17, p 164, Vintage Books 1998)

Sunrise over Loch Carron, by William Gray at the Lanark Camera Club

Dorothy’s work as a painter connected her to a variety of people and situations. One odd occasion she recounts: “Years ago, locked one night in the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle to paint the Crown Jewels, I was first electrified and then greatly moved by the sound of Welsh choral singing, faintly reaching my eyrie through the three-ton Chubb-locked door.” (From Woman and Home and republished in Whispering Gallery.)

When interviewed around the publication of Caprice and Rondo, Mary D. Pinto of Romance Communications asked, “Which is more fulfilling for you, portrait painting or writing?” To which Dorothy replied:

“They are about equal. When I am doing one, I can’t image myself doing the other. If I’m painting a portrait, I’m terribly excited about it. I can see it coming. I can see the thing taking shape, and I want to go on and do it. When I am in the middle of a book — I used to think I could do them both at once, you know, I could have a client in the morning and then I could work in the afternoon writing. It isn’t possible. For one thing, I’m talking all the time when I am painting; you have to put your sitter at ease. And eventually get them to do the talking. In the last sittings, they talk to you. It is very rewarding; it’s very informative, teaches you a lot about human nature, which I can use in my books. But if I do that, then I don’t have — I lose too much energy. I couldn’t write in the same day. The kind of complicated books I write, I need to have days and days and days in sequence. …”

Dorothy recounted to Sue MacGregor: “If I’m painting, I don’t want to do anything but paint – and if I’m writing, I don’t want to paint. But then my day and my week is so broken up… my diary is full of things. I can’t sink back and say, ‘Right, I’m going to spend the next two weeks in the arms of Niccolò’, or whatever, because I know I’m not.” (Interview excerpt published in Miraculous Mirror, pp.20-23)

Throughout her life, Dorothy painted with words and told vibrant stories with her art. The dynamism and talent she had shone through in both the literary and visual medium, making her all the more fascinating as a creative mind.