THENEWYORKER,MARCH23, 2020 9
1
ATTHEMUSEUMS
TECHNIQUE
T
en days before the Metropolitan
Museum of Art closed its doors to
the public, owing to concern over Covid-
19, it celebrated an opening, or really a
reopening, of its British Galleries, after
a renovation that took more than a year.
The space consists of ten rooms, includ-
ing three lavish interiors that were im-
ported from England and reassembled
here. In the past, these had been easy to
miss as you made your way from the
wonders of medieval Europe to the
armor and the American Wing.
Not long before the reopening, an
artist named James Boyd was hanging
around a broad stairway that had been
transferred from Cassiobury, an estate
in Hertfordshire. He was preparing to
add some varnish to a wainscot. Through-
out the renovation, he’d been working
with the curators to bring eigh-
teenth-century Britain to life; which is
to say, he’d been painting murals and
trompe-l’oeils by himself—twelve to
fourteen hours a day, seven days a week,
for sixteen months. “I’m total toast,” he
said. “But it was a real sabbatical for me.”
What it was a sabbatical from was
Boyd’s regular work, with his longtime
partner, Anne Reath, of decorative in-
terior painting—murals, wall finishes,
wallpaper friezes, stencilling, fabric de-
sign, verre églomisé—for wealthy clients,
about whom he won’t say much. Billion-
aires, Russians, Greenwich, the Hamp-
tons, cycles of boom and bust. A lot of
Boyd’s clients are big into gilding. For
one job, he’d conveyed, by bicycle, about
fifty thousand dollars’ worth of gold leaf,
from a dealer downtown.
“These clients are like the people who
built these extraordinary rooms,” Boyd
said, gesturing toward the stairway. This
would make him more like the anony-
mous artisans who did all the extraor-
dinary work. He is not a representative
of the ruling class. Boyd, sixty-six, was
reared in New Jersey but left “as soon as
possible” to attend an experimental col-
lege (now defunct) in California. For a
time, he lived on a boat on the Calaveras
River, in an eccentric art commune/squat
called Darrahville. He met Reath, and
they found work in Los Angeles hand-
painting upholstery fabrics. “We painted
on everything,” Boyd said. “Anne had
painted her shoes. One day, a woman
saw her on Rodeo Drive. ‘Where’d you
get those shoes?’ So we made fourteen
thousand pairs of hand-painted espa-
drilles. We were clueless capitalists.”
They earned enough to move to Flor-
ence for a few years. “That’s when I first
thought about traditional art,” he said.
In 1985, they settled in New York and
studied with a master of classical paint-
ing named Michael Aviano. “He taught
in the eighteenth-century style—struc-
tured palette, umber underpainting,”
Boyd said. “Here’s thousands of years of
technique passed down. Then we hit
modernism and it’s all thrown away.
Pretty much any teacher who had tech-
nique has been dead for fifty years.” Theyalso became friendly with the interior
designer Jed Johnson, Andy Warhol’s
lover. Johnson hired them to paint fab-
rics and wall surfaces. “We did whatever
we were asked to do,” Boyd said. “We
learned more as we went along.” For four
decades, this has been their business.
“Recently, it’s been a bit more of a strug-
gle,” he said. “For forever, wealth’s taste
ran back to eighteenth-century France.
And now it has changed dramatically.”
On the Cassiobury staircase, Boyd
had painted tromp-l’oeil wainscoting
that mimicked the elaborately carved
balustrade. He’d relied on a few old
black-and-white photographs from
Hertfordshire. “At first, Jim’s version was
just too good, far too realistic,” Wolf
Burchard, a curator, said. “It was com-
peting with the balustrade.”
For a nearby dining room taken from
an estate in Oxfordshire, Boyd had
painted three huge canvases—each sev-
enteen feet by nine feet—depicting the
Capability Brown-designed gardens as
they would have looked in the eigh-
teenth century (in late afternoon, in late
summer). Boyd had mimicked the dusky
shading that was popular in the land-
scape painting of the time. (“People went
outside in tinted glasses, or with what
they called a Claude glass, to make the
landscapes appear as dark as they looked
in Claude Lorrain’s paintings from the
century before,” he said.) Each canvas
was mounted behind a window, on a
curving surface, to enhance the illusion
that one was gazing outside.
In a third room, from a London es-
tate, he’d painted murals of a view out
of three large windows. As a reference,
Boyd had studied eighteenth-century
nightscapes by Abraham Pether. “Pether
was the Thomas Kinkade of the time,”
Boyd said. “The curators were pleasantly
surprised that I got into the scholarship
so deeply.” At the Met, he felt immersed
in the exertions of his forebears. “There’s
a monastic chant murmuring through
the place,” he said. “Like voices in the
forest.” And yet, as an anonymous prac-
titioner of esoteric methods, he also has
an unromantic view of art: “It’s more like
mathematics mixed with physical labor.”
Walking out through the galleries, past
teapots, gaudy majolica, and ceramic
Wally Birds, Boyd said, “The people who
made all this stuff—these are my folks.”
—Nick Paumgartenthe script discussion, an actor had ven-
tured, “This might be opening a can of
worms, but should we be mentioning
coronavirus?” The consensus was: wait
and see. “Who knows?” Farmer said.
“We may end up performing this thing
under a plastic tent.” The comment
proved half prescient. Days later, it was
decided to postpone the show until Au-
gust. The real Coachella had already
been pushed to October. Maybe there
was a new joke to be made about natu-
ral disasters, or cancel culture.
—Bruce Handy
James Boyd