The Draughtsman's Contract

Introduction

Peter Greenaway became a director of international status with this witty, stylised, erotic country house murder mystery.

At the end of the seventeenth century England began to earn a reputation as a nation of landed gentry secure in their Protestant politics and safe in their well-tended estates. To bolster their good opinion of themselves they built grand houses, planted parks and gardens, indulged in horticulture and modestly patronised the Arts. They employed painters to draw their wives and their horses, their houses and their gardens - painters who would, for a modest fee and a little hospitality gladly flatter their patron's ambition and record their wealth and possessions.

In the summer of 1694, Mr Neville, a rising and ambitious draughtsman, visits the house and estate of the landowner Mr Herbert at Compton Anstey in Wiltshire. Initially against his better judgement, for his capacity to flatter is outweighed by his boastful claim to draw the truth, Mr Neville secures a commission, not from the landowner, but from his wife. A contract is signed. For the price of twelve drawings of the moated house and its ordered gardens, Mrs Herbert is persuaded to offer Mr Neville the unrestricted freedom of her most intimate hospitality.

With a fastidious regard for recording detail, the draughtsman works at his commission drawing by drawing in the sunlight and shadow of a garden that is full of suggestive ambiguities and unexpected encounters until - he is trapped by the very talent for truthfulness he so arrogantly congratulates himself on possessing. With skilful manoeuvring and elegant blackmail that makes his own opportunism look naïve, Mr Neville is soon deep in a domestic intrigue that renders him suspect not only of adultery but of much else besides.