Rowling's Favorite Painting and What It Suggests about Her Artistry and Meaning

Caravaggio's 'Supper at Emmaus'

Rowling's Q&A last Sunday in The Times of London was largely forgettable, as I discussed in 'Rowling's Q&A in the Sunday Times.' Her answer to an outlier question about art in that set, however, was a 'keeper' on several levels:

What’s the first piece of art you loved?
I visited the National Gallery on my own when I was around 19 or 20 and was absolutely mesmerised by Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. I had a battered print of it on my wall for years afterwards and it featured on my first ever website.

This was not a revelation. In what remains "the only authorized J. K. Rowling biography," Lindsey Fraser's 2001 Conversations with J. K. Rowling, much more of a seemingly superficial Q&A than a proper critical life history, Rowling concluded her answer to "Do you enjoy art?" this way:

Perhaps my favorite painting is Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus when Jesus reveals himself to the disciples having risen from the dead. I love it. Jesus looks very likeable – soft and rounded – and the painting captures the exact moment when the disciples realize who this man is, blessing their bread. (Fraser, 30-31)

The chapter in Beatrice Groves' Literary Allusion in Harry Potter that convinced me of that work's seminal importance and the writer's true brilliance turned on her discussion of this comment and on the painting itself. I hope today to build on Prof Groves' exegesis, to discuss the confirmation of her points in Literary Allusion  to be found in Rowling's comments on Sunday, as well as some further points about Supper at Emmaus that the "mesmerized" Rowling may be assumed to have noticed. My idea is that her use of subliminal symbols 'tracks' with Carravagio's and that we are called to a Ruskin-esque posture of "deep mining" before a painting if we are to grasp the depth of her writing.

I wrote to Professor Groves earlier this week to ask her permission to quote the passage in her Literary Allusion in Harry Potter about the Caravaggio painting, Rowling's relationship with it, and what it reveals about the remarkable Christian Everyman subtext of Harry Potter. She graciously gave me her permission so here is that remarkable passage, a key really to the Christian content of the Hogwarts Saga:

Rowling has used biblical quotation in political argument on Twitter (20 Jan 2017) and has also given an explicitly Christian answer when naming her favourite painting: Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus (which is in the National Gallery in London). The subject of this painting – the disciples’ astonished realization of who the man they have met on the Emmaus road really is – is perfectly encapsulated by Caravaggio’s realism. Caravaggio manages to make reality miraculous to the viewer in the way that he paints the moment. This painting is a revealing choice for Rowling not only because it is such a theological painting but also because its theology is what she likes about it. She describes its subject as ‘when Jesus reveals himself to the disciples having risen from the dead. I love it. Jesus looks very likeable – soft and rounded – and the painting captures the exact moment when the disciples realise who this man is, blessing their bread’ (Fraser, 30-31).

In this biblical story the disciples fail to recognize the resurrected Jesus when they meet him on the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus, and only realise who he is as he blesses the bread at their meal. The most obviously striking aspect of this picture is Caravaggio’s facility with perspective: the way that the arms of Jesus and the disciples seem to break out of the flat canvas. Rowling draws attention to a different, but related, aspect of the painting – the humanity of Caravaggio’s Jesus: he looks ‘very likeable – soft and rounded’. Caravaggio’s skill in realism – his dexterity with perspective and his unusually realistic depiction of Jesus – is used to particularly brilliant effect in this painting because it dovetails perfectly with the theology of the Emmaus story. The disciples do not recognize Jesus before he breaks bread because he is a real man: not a ghost or a ‘fake’, but a normal man you might meet on the road, a man with whom you might become friends and share a meal. Rowling’s favourite painting is a depiction of the mystery of the Incarnation: that Jesus is at once true God and true man.

Harry Potter also has a very human and ‘likeable’ hero, who, after his death in Deathly Hallows, is revealed to be something more. Harry’s sacrificial death and return to life come to the reader as a startling discovery of theological meaning. Harry is not an allegory of Christ but because (to Christian thinking) the Incarnation transforms humanity, it enables human beings to be Christ-like. As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in his poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’: ‘I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am’ (see Peter Groves, Grace: The Free, Unconditional and Limitless Love of God, 129-34). In any Christian fable the hero, because he embodies goodness, is going to reflect Christ on a narrative level. Rowling has acknowledged her hero’s embodiment of goodness – ‘he’s the hero. Harry is just good’ (2007i) – but in bringing Harry back to life, after his self-sacrificial death, Harry Potter gives this a more pointed application. The readers of Deathly Hallows, like the disciples in Caravaggio’s painting, suddenly have a theological meaning revealed to them of which they were previously unaware.

Rowling is an author who loves to spring surprises on her readers and she instinctively responds to the element of revelation in the Christian story. The Resurrection astounds Christ’s followers in Rowling’s favourite painting, and Harry Potter responds to a reading of salvation history, which puts the idea of surprise at its heart. This traditional and influential interpretation is known as the ‘guiler beguiled’ theory (Aulen, Christus Victor, 1931): it suggests that through the Incarnation God tricks or ‘beguiles’ the devil. The devil is the arch-trickster – who tricked Man with the apple in Eden – and in the ‘guiler beguiled’ model God beats him at his own game with the ultimate ‘trick’, or paradox of the God-man Jesus. Piers Plowman imagines Jesus as a knight who enters a joust dressed in the lowly armour of humanity to hide the true nobility of this nature; ‘Jesus, because of his nobility, will joust in Piers Plowman’s armour, in his helmet and mail coat, “human nature” in order that Christ will not be known to be absolute God’ (‘this Jesus of his gentries wol juste in Piers armes,In his helm and his haubergeon, humana nature./ That Crist be noght biknowe here for consummates Deus’ [Passus 18.22]).

As I wrote yesterday in 'Second Thoughts about Gainsborough and Early Twenties Rowling in London,' the critical period of Rowling's life as an artist and writer is that time period stretching from her escape to Exeter from her unhappy childhood and adolescence in Church Cottage, Tutshill, to the crisis years of 1990 and 1991 that took her to Portugal with her first Harry Potter notes and a heart and mind grieving the death of her mother and the end of an off-and-on seven-year relationship with Michael. At the university in Devon, as a 'Non-Welly' she reinvented herself as something like an 'anti-Welly' punk that floated "dreamlike" through her study program, reading Tolkien, and listening to The Smiths and The Clash. After a year in Paris improving her French, she graduated without distinction with a 2:2 degree in 1987 and moved to London where found a borderline secretarial post with Amnesty International (she worked as a 'temp' a la Robin Ellacott in Cuckoo's Calling for a spell). She left that position to move to Manchester with Michael, a problematic relationship even while at Exeter (see Smith, p 88) and one marked by mutual infidelity or breaks. The inspiration for Harry Potter on the stalled train from Manchester to London happens in 1990.

Rowling's only attempt at explicit autobiography, notes on her original website now preserved at The RowlingLibrary.com, covers this period of her life in two short paragraphs:

I left school in 1983 and went to study at the University of Exeter, on the south coast of England. I studied French, which was a mistake; I had succumbed to parental pressure to study 'useful' modern languages as opposed to 'but-where-will-it-lead?' English and really should have stood my ground. On the plus side, studying French meant that I had a year living in Paris as part of my course.

After leaving university I worked in London; my longest job was with Amnesty International, the organisation that campaigns against human rights abuses all over the world. But in 1990, my then boyfriend and I decided to move up to Manchester together. It was after a weekend's flat-hunting, when I was travelling back to London on my own on a crowded train, that the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head.

I think it plausible that Rowling "succumbed to parental pressure" because of her live encounter with Exeter's 'Sloane Rangers,' public school 'Wellys,' whose well-off status brought home to her the needs of a single lower middle-class woman to be able to find a proper job. Her inability to get that "proper job," one with more than subsistence wages, upon graduation may have led to her increasing dependence on her Exeter boyfriend Michael, about whom the late Yvette Cowles, the student whose study program most overlapped with Rowling's, recalled:

He was a fellow-student, tall, dark, and liked to go out drinking -- a bit of a laddish-type in a middle-class sort of way. Yvette observes, 'He was a typical student; she had the stronger personality. I always thought he was a bit wet. I seem to remember them being on the verge of breaking up at Exeter.' (Smith, 88)

Cowles' description of Michael as "a bit wet" and Smith's assertion that he was "middle-class" are both observations that are probably not understood or misunderstood by Americans. Being "wet," for instance, has nothing to do with enjoying more drinks than most on a night out. In the UK it means "weak," even "spineless." Hence the layered humor in Peeves' “Already wet, aren’t they?" when throwing water balloons at the first years in Goblet of Fire. And "middle-class" meant that he was a significant step up the social status ladder than lower middle class Rowling. I will defer to a future post by Nick Jeffery to explain English class distinctions, all of which came as revelations to me.

Rowling post Exeter was a woman with a private vocation as a writer without good prospects, frankly, for marriage or for success in a conventional career. She was writing -- there was a novel in progress when she met Harry on the train -- but that failed to excite even her. The only thing about this period we know anything about, besides the frustrating near-blank page of her relationships with Michael and other men, is that she spent a significant time in London's public art museums or galleries, a habit she began while still at Exeter. She spoke about this in Conversations with J. K. Rowling, a Q&A fan servicing piece put out by Scholastic in 2001:

Do you enjoy art?

I loved art at school and I still draw for pleasure. For some reason – maybe it was because I knew I would never make a living out of it – I never minded showing people my drawings and paintings. I never show my writing to anybody. My editor will tell you! I find it so hard to let go. It’s too important. I hate it when people as to see my rough drafts – they’re too personal, somehow.

I love art galleries. I’ve now been to New York on book tours several times – it’s one of my favorite places – and I’ve yet to visit any of the fabulous galleries there. I’m always desperate to go but there’s never an afternoon free.

In my early twenties, I had a passion for Gainsborough, especially a painting called The Morning Walk. It is of the most extraordinary couple – the man is very striking while the woman is quite wishy-washy – and the explanation was that this painting was done for their marriage. I wondered how that marriage worked out and something told me it hadn’t.

Perhaps my favorite painting is Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus when Jesus reveals himself to the disciples having risen from the dead. I love it. Jesus looks very likeable – soft and rounded – and the painting captures the exact moment when the disciples realize who this man is, blessing their bread.

I parsed that answer at length in 'Rowling's Passion for Gainsborough' a few days ago so I won't repeat here the various and significant 'tells' in this passage. In today’s exploration of her comments about Caravaggio's Supper, however, it's important to stress the point that Rowling said she loves art galleries. In last Sunday's Times she described her attitude about the Caravaggio painting as being "mesmerised:"

I visited the National Gallery on my own when I was around 19 or 20 and was absolutely mesmerised by Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus. I had a battered print of it on my wall for years afterwards and it featured on my first ever website.

As with class distinctions and slang, there is a lot that is lost here potentially in crossing the Atlantic. This is not like having a favorite poster of the Bay City Rollers on your wall, though Rowling may have had The Smiths 'up' in her Montgomery Hall or Lafrowda cells at Exeter. The woman had traveled to London from Devon, no small thing for someone without a car or a driver's license, to visit the National Gallery, though it had no obvious connection with her program of study. This zeal for art and her fascination with Supper at Emmaus suggests that Rowling was cultivating a capacity to 'read,' if you will, and understand paintings well beyond what is normally taught in an undergraduate Art Appreciation course. As I wrote yesterday about Gainsborough and Beatrice Groves wrote in 2017's Literary Allusion about Caravaggio (see above), Rowling's favorite painters and paintings became a significant influence on her written artistry.

I think we can say fairly that, in this 'close reading' or "slow mining" of works of art, Rowling was practicing what John Ruskin, perhaps the greatest art critic of the nineteenth century, preached. I wrote about this "meditative" approach to reading a book or work of art in Deathly Hallows Lectures (212-214):

John Ruskin, most famous during his life as an art critic, extended his ideas about painting to literary criticism, even political philosophy. His influence, though not especially well known today, is hard to over-estimate; M. K. Gandhi, for example, frequently cited Ruskin and Tolstoy as the greatest Western influences on his idea of satyagraha or peace-force in political action. His “reach” and continuing influence in the worlds of art and literary criticism are more profound.

And he explained both how we are to understand the sort of books Rowling writes, both the experience and work involved. In his Queen of the Air (1869), Ruskin described how a symbolist poem or story as myth affected a reader and the effort that reader would have to make to understand it fully, not surprisingly, in terms of art appreciation. Note his insistence that there is a didactic or moral layer in all good art, that the sub-surface meanings are hidden and require a key to open, and a spiritual level whose meaning probably escapes even the understanding of the inspired artist:

[The Homeric poems] are not conceived didactically, but are didactic in their essence, as all good art is. There is an increasing insensibility to this character, and even an open denial of it, among us, now, which is one of the most curious errors of modernism, -- the peculiar and judicial blindness of an age which, having long practiced art and poetry for the sake of pleasure only, has become incapable of reading their language when they were both didactic….

And even the celebrated passage of Horace about Iliad is now misread or disbelieved, as if it was impossible to believe that the Iliad could be instructive because it is not like a sermon. Horace does not say that it is like a sermon, and would have been still less likely to say so, if he ever had had the advantage of hearing a sermon. “I have been reading that story of Troy again” (thus he writes to a noble youth of Rome whom he cared for), “quietly at Praeneste, while you have been busy at Rome, and truly I think that what is base, and what is noble, and what useful and useless, may be better learned from that, than from all Chrysippus’ and Crantor’s talk put together.”

Which is profoundly true, not of the Iliad only, but of all other great art whatsoever; for all pieces of such art are didactic in the purest way, indirectly and occultly, so that, first, you shall only be bettered by them if you are already hard at work at bettering yourself; and when you are bettered by them, it shall be partly with a general acceptance of their influence, so constant and subtle that you shall be no more conscious of it than of the healthy digestion of food; and partly by a gift of unexpected truth, which you shall only find by slow mining for it; -- which is withheld on purpose, and close-locked, that you may not get it till you have forged the key of it in a furnace of your own heating.

And this withholding of their meaning, is continual and confessed, in the great poets. Thus Pindar says of himself: “There is many an arrow in my quiver, full of speech to the wise, but, for the many, they need interpreters.” And neither Pindar, not Aeschylus, nor Hesiod nor Homer, nor any of the greater poets or teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional reservation: nay, beyond this, there is often a meaning which they themselves cannot interpret, --in what they said, so far as it recorded true imaginative vision. (emphasis added in italics)

Ruskin ends this passage with the suggestion that modern critics who deny this layer of meaning do so because they are incapable of seeing, not to mention interpreting it:

For all the greatest myths have been seen, by the men who tell them, involuntarily and passively, -- seen by them with as great distinctness, (and in some respects, though not in all, under conditions as far beyond the control of their will) as a dream sent any of us by night when we dream clearest; and it is this veracity of this vision that could not be refused, and of moral that could not be foreseen, which in modern historical inquiry has been left wholly out of account: being indeed the thing which no merely historical investigator can understand, or even believe; for it belongs exclusively to the creative or artistic group of men, and can only be interpreted by those of their race, who themselves in some measure also see visions and dream dreams.”  John Ruskin, The Queen of the Air, John Wiley & Son, 1873 (1.17, pp. 15-18)

Ruskin, the giant of Victorian and Edwardian criticism, whose ideas of typological symbolism inspired the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters and several generations of 19^th century architects, thinks of the influence of literature as instructive, but “indirectly and occultly,” working its influence first by an unconscious “constant and subtle” action, and then, after the labors of “slow mining” to extract meaning, by epiphany. This mining work is necessary because the treasured gems are not on the surface; none “of the greater poets and teachers of any nation or time, ever spoke but with intentional reservation” and the anagogical meaning, “of true imaginative vision,” even they could not have understood sans explanation.

Appreciation of the best literature, ancient and modern, is the union of receptivity to the action of images and the meditative effort to understand them in their “depth or thickness,” as C. S. Lewis would have it. Dante, Spencer, Ruskin, Lewis, and Frye all speak to the necessity of getting well beneath the surface of images as multi-valent symbols if we are to grasp the artistry, genius, and meaning of a work (or its lack of same).

Professor Groves suggests strongly that what Rowling took away from her "mesmerised" "slow mining" of Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus was the central Mystery of the Incarnation of Christ, the "guiler beguiled" idea of Aulen's Christus Victor. I find that argument compelling and want to build on it. There are embedded symbols in Supper at Emmaus that I think the fascinated Rowling would have noticed as she looked at the painting in the National Gallery, at the print on her wall in Exeter and London, and at the image on her first website, symbols beyond the "realism" of the Christ as imagined by Caravaggio and the revelation at the breaking of bread of His divinity.

Kelly Grovier, a features writer at the BBC, reveals the hidden symbolism within this painting in 'The Supper at Emmaus: A coded symbol hidden in a masterpiece.' It's a wonderful piece of "slow mining" a la Ruskin and Groves that I hope very much you will read in its entirety. Grovier captures Caravaggio's intent, artistry, and meaning even before noting the "hidden" "coded symbol" in the painting that buttresses the experience of the astonished Apostles and clueless innkeeper.

The "hidden symbol" is in the fruit basket at the edge of the table, seemingly only a still life (and one that has been derided because the fruits depicted are out of season...). and in the shadow of the basket on the table-cloth. (Photo credit: Alamy)

The basket is a precarious nudge away from tumbling out of the painting altogether and into our space, spilling into reality its contents of bursting pomegranates and swollen grapes, rotting russets and radiant quince, which the artist has filled with ripeness to the core. But it's the interruption in the weave of straw that subliminally snags the eye of the mind – a fray consisting of two intersecting curves that the artist describes with calculating care – one swerving upwards, the other down, to form the unexpected, if irrefutable, shape of a stylised fish, or "Ichthys" in the parlance of ancient Christian symbolism....

By conscientiously accenting only a portion of the Ichthys outline by casting a sliver of light on one of the loose twigs while keeping the other, behind it, in relative shadow, Caravaggio approximates the rustic ritual of inscribing one half of the fish symbol. From there, an acceptance of the overture to recognise the miracle at hand is entirely up to the observer of his work. Whether we chose to receive the gesture is up to us.

Unconvinced that the artist intended to braid into his basket an encrypted Christian symbol? Look closely at the silhouette that the pile of fruit casts on to the shroud-like tablecloth to the right of the wicker bowl. There, an even more emphatic shape of a fish, with a sharp lunate tail fin forever flipping behind it, can be seen sailing headlong into the basket, pulling our gaze with it in its wake. (Emphasis added)

Grovier's exegesis of this "hidden symbol" is brilliant, I think, not only in its discovery but also in the exposition that ties it to the larger revelation of the painting that Professor Groves discussed. It's only failing is in restricting the symbolism of the Ichthys or fish to a sign shared by Christians to recognize one another safely during times of persecution:

According to early ecclesiastical tradition, the Ichthys emblem, which dates back to the 2nd Century as a sign of Christian belief, was employed as a kind of secret handshake by followers who feared persecution from non-believers. To ensure that one was in the company of a fellow adherent of the church's precepts, a semi-circular arch was traced on the ground. If that seemingly innocuous gesture was joined by a mirroring arch drawn by the stranger, thereby forming the crude outline of a fish, the silent ritual of acknowledging the dominion of Christ was considered reciprocated.

This is less the traditional meaning of the symbol than one of its historical or anecdotal usages, neglecting, too, that Ichthys is a Greek acronym. I explained the substance of this symbol of Christ in a Substack post about the "mother-of-pearl fish" pendant in Running Grave:

The fish has been a symbol of Christ since the Apostolic era, being a glyph of two intersecting circles representing heaven and earth, the seamless conjunction of which spheres is the incarnation of the Logos as Jesus of Nazareth, perfect God and perfect man. On the horizontal, this intersection of circles is the Vesica Piscis “fish vessel” or Mandorla “almond” so important to Christian iconography and vertically as below it is the ICHTHYS, Greek for ‘fish,’ that was and remains a token of recognition between Christians (the Greek word is an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior’).

That Grovier "misses" this substance beneath the symbol, that it is the Christian symbol par excellence of Christ as "true God and true man," the meeting or intersection of Heaven and Earth, the transcendent Creator joining into the immanence of time-and-space creation, is a shame because it dovetails so brilliantly with the argument of this BBC piece. Caravaggio by embedding the symbol -- and the symbol's shadow! -- provides the key to the revelatory experience of the Apostles as they recognize that the "stranger" is indeed the God-Man Christ. There is also the "Aha!" moment of surprise and recognition that Beatrice Groves mentions is a Rowling signature when the "slow mining" observer trips to the meaning of the symbol, something akin to the experience of Cleopas and Luke at the Inn in the moment depicted.

I think this is important for at least three reasons beyond what Beatrice Groves wrote about Supper at Emmaus being a key that opens the "Guiler Beguiled" subtext of Harry Potter.

(1) What Rowling was Learning as a Writer and Artist during the Critical "Lost Years," 1987-1991

The Fourth Generation of 'Rowling Studies' is bio-critical or 'Lake' heavy relative to the first three. It insists, per Rowling's Lake and Shed metaphor for her method of writing, that her personal history be incorporated into the interpretation of her artistry and meaning -- as it is for every other writer of renown. As I have argued in my Gainsborough essays here and here this week, the great blind-spot in Rowling's biography are those years after Exeter and before Porto where she matured ex machina from a poor student and anti-Welly into the writer inspired to write Harry Potter, a genre melange rich in traditional symbolism, from alchemy to psychomachia, and in intricate ring structures. How she leapt that synapse in skill and depth remains a mystery.

I don't think we'll get the biographical key to that metamorphosis until the Michael Mystery is solved. I think in Rowling's love for art galleries in "early twenties" per her testimony, the exact years in question, however, her "passion" for Gainsborough and The Morning Walk specifically, and her having been "mesmerized" by Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus with its embedded traditional symbolism we do have keys to her transformation as a writer, 1987-1991. Her "slow mining" reflection on great works of art and the techniques of those painters to layer meaning in the light, colors, and composition structure of their work transferred to her own understanding and ambitions for the effect she could have on "obsessive" readers.

(2) Her Use of the Ichthys Symbol in Running Grave

Rowling-Galbraith's latest novel, the seventh in the Cormoran Strike series, has a "mother-of-pearl fish" pendant whose symbolism is akin to that of the basket and shadow of Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus. 'Mother,' 'pearl,' and 'fish' are symbols of Christ in Rowling's repertoire as explained in this exegesis of the structure and symbolism of Running Grave's Part Nine. This is not a categorical or generalized borrowing from Caravaggio but a direct 'lift,' if you will, from his first painting of Christ in Emmaus, Rowling’s professed “favorite.”

(3) Her Use of Embedded Traditional Symbolism in Everything She Writes that can only be Unearthed by Meditative "Slow Mining"

Groves' ground-breaking exegesis of the Caravaggio's painting's influence on Rowling makes repeated references to Deathly Hallows and Harry's resurrection experience there. This is an understandable focus because the final novel's finish features Harry rising from the dead not in the presence of a symbol of Christ but, as she explains carefully, as a Christ-figure himself. It is unfortunate because it neglects to mention that in every other Harry Potter novel the hero also has a resurrection experience from a near or figurative death -- always with an embedded symbol of Christ nearby to highlight that meaning (the stone, a phoenix, a stag, etc.). In Philosopher's Stone, the first and briefest book of the series, the Boy Who Lived returns to life after three days in case anyone missed the Calvary point.

All of my contributions to Rowling Studies -- most notably the literary alchemy, the Christian content, the psychomachia, the ring writing, and renovative literary allusion -- have been made from the "slow mining" approach to her texts to find the embedded and hidden gems or the vein of precious metal well beneath the surface narrative. Rowling has said from her first interviews that the secret sauce of her super story-telling success is her dedication to planning. I fear that too many Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers take that to mean 'a care in being sure the plot works, beginning to middle and end.'

Certainly Rowling carefully plots her novels. The planning secret sauce, though, I think is in her attention to the finishing work in her writing after the plotting and intratextual parallels, when she crafts the rings-within-rings of her chapter sets and of the work as a whole, the traditional embedded symbols, the alchemical coloration, the allegory of the soul's transformation, and the subliminal retellings of myths. No, I don't think these are absolutely independent tasks; there is a weave of all that, I'm sure, even as she plots a given book. It is in this finishing artistry, "indirectly and occultly" per Ruskin, though, that Rowling's debt to the Greats in the National Gallery which "mesmerised" her as a young woman appear.

It takes an ichneutic or 'tracker' spirit to sense and find these trace elements which are the greater genius of her artistry and the subterranean vehicle of her meaning. Rowling's 'lost years' in London, those spent in her beloved art galleries and museums, I believe are the time in which she learned the art of "slow mining" herself and took on the task and acquired the skills to write stories with so many layers and symbols, one more sweet, as she once explained, that the careful reader could always find at the bottom of the bag on re-reading.

If I had only one biographical question I could ask The Presence after doping her G&T with Veritaserum, I think it would be about Michael and the circumstances of her departure for Portugal in late 1991. How much is it echoed in Gloria Conti's story or of Robin's relationship with Matt Cunliffe? If I were given a Willy Wonka golden ticket opportunity to walk with her around London, though, I'd be sure that the first stop was in the National Gallery in order to ask about her favorites and to watch her as she studied those paintings. My strong suspicion after a few days reading, thinking, and writing about Gainsborough's The Morning Walk and Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus is that this is an unploughed fallow field of rich soil that will yield a new harvest of understanding and appreciation for serious readers of J. K. Rowling.