Marianne North: Painting in Jamaica

Marianne North at the Easel

"After about a month of perfect quiet and incessant painting at the garden house, people began to find me out. The K's rode down and made me promise to come to their cottage for a night. Their home was a thousand feet higher than mind, with a most lovely view and bamboo all round it, the first large specimens I ever saw. They made me feel in another world among their rattling, creaking, croaking, cork-drawing noises. Some of the cans must have been fifty feet high, thicker than my arm and full of varied colour. 

I began a sketch of the bamboo the next morning, then went on a mile along the ridge to stay with Captain and Mrs. H and the old deaf General Commander-in-Chief, in a bare tumble-down old house, supported by two weird old cotton trees and a sandbox tree, built on the very edge of the precipitous wall of the valley. 

Captain Lanyon came up with the Governor's orders that I was not to go down the hill without coming to stay at Craigton, but I wanted more clothes and paints, so Captain H. promised me a horse at six the next morning to take me and bring me back, but when I got up I found the house like a tomb, not a creature stirring.

I got out of my window, only a yard above the ground, and went down to the stable: all asleep too, and the sun rising so gloriously! I could not waste time, so took my painting things and walked off to finish my sketch at the K's. They sent me out some tea, and I afterwards walked on down the hill among the ebony trees and aloes, to my home. After a rummage and a bath I went up the hill again, with old Stewart carrying my portmanteau on the top of his head. I reached Craigton just after sunset. The house was a mere cottage, but so homelike in its lovely garden, blazing with red dracaenas and poinsettias looking redder in the sunset rays, that I felt at home at once. 

My first study was of a slender tree fern with leaves like lacework, then in the afternoon I painted in the garden, with the benefit of the tea and gossip which went on near me, sitting under a huge mango."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "A Vision of Eden: the Life and Work of Marianne North.")