And Another Thing | 7 June 2008

‘Mr Pont, may I introduce you to Miss Austen?’

There is something infinitely touching about a creative artist who dies young, not before displaying sure evidence of a glorious gift but without having time to set up the arching parabola of developing genius. One thinks of that magic group at the beginning of the 19th century — Keats, coughing his heart out in Rome; Shelley, drowned in his crazy yacht off the stormy Ligurian shore; Girtin, about whom Turner said ‘If Tom had lived, I should have starved’; Bonnington, whose watercolours (said Delacroix) ‘shone like jewels’; and the grim and mysterious Géricault, who adored English horses ‘and the fierce Amazons who ride them’. Later there was that elongated, emaciated, evanescent, etiolated, elegant skeleton Aubrey Beardsley, whose tapering hands looked as if they were carved in Arctic alabaster and whose nose was a major work of art in itself.