Novel: What's Bred in the Bone

Overview
What's Bred in the Bone is a richly imagined fictional biography centered on Francis Cornish, a Canadian collector, connoisseur and restorer whose life is traced from modest beginnings in Ontario to formative encounters with art and patrons in Europe. The novel is the second volume of Robertson Davies's Cornish Trilogy and unfolds as a reconstruction of Cornish's personality and career, probing how temperament, upbringing and circumstance conspire to shape an artist. Its tone mixes wry comedy with earnest moral inquiry, and Davies uses the life-story form to ask who deserves credit for artistic creation and what costs accompany aesthetic achievement.

Plot summary
The narrative follows Francis Cornish from his youth in Canada through an extended sojourn in Europe and back to his final years in his native land. Early scenes sketch a curious, observant boy whose inclinations toward beauty and order are encouraged by some figures and misunderstood by others. In Europe he studies art, learns restoration and curatorship, and comes to appreciate the technical as well as the spiritual dimensions of making and preserving works of art. Those years abroad expose him to masters, patrons and teachers whose influence is subtle, sometimes beneficial and at other times morally ambiguous.
On returning to Canada, Cornish establishes himself as an eccentric heir and collector, a man of singular tastes who acquires, restores and guards artworks with a mixture of reverence and possessiveness. He becomes entangled with characters who reveal the tangled ethics of patronage, the compromises required to secure commissions and the ways in which money, influence and personal history shape both the production and reception of art. The novel's unfolding biography culminates in an assessment of Cornish's legacy: the objects he leaves behind, the stories told about him, and the unresolved questions about talent, intention and moral responsibility that his life provokes.

Main characters
Francis Cornish dominates the pages as a complex, sometimes exasperating figure: meticulous, idealistic about beauty, stubbornly private and capable of both generosity and blind self-regard. Around him orbit a range of figures who function as mentors, rivals and patrons, each illuminating facets of Cornish's character and the art world he inhabits. The narrators and compilers who reconstruct his life act as intermediaries, bringing their own prejudices and scholarly energies to the task of interpreting a life that resists simple verdicts.

Themes and motifs
Central themes include the formation of artistic temperament and the tension between innate disposition and environmental shaping. The title gesture, what is "bred in the bone", invites reflection on heredity, habit and the deep-seated impulses that make someone an artist or collector. Patronage and the economics of taste are examined with sustained attention: how patrons shape the production of art, how artists negotiate compromise, and how moral ambiguity can attend even the most elevated aesthetic pursuits. Questions of authenticity, restoration and the value of objects recur, as does the idea of transformation, whether technical, moral or psychological, as the animating process of Cornish's life.

Style and structure
Davies constructs the book as an often learned, gently satirical biography, blending pastiche of archival scholarship with lively storytelling. The prose alternates erudition with warmth and mischievous humor, and the structure, reconstruction of a life from papers, recollections and artifacts, keeps the reader attentive to the slipperiness of truth. Scenes of connoisseurship and restoration are rendered with technical detail that nevertheless serves larger moral and psychological insights.

Legacy
What's Bred in the Bone is widely regarded as one of Davies's most mature examinations of art and character, combining his novelist's love of eccentric personalities with philosophical curiosity about creativity and responsibility. It stands as a thoughtful meditation on how lives are shaped and narrated, asking enduring questions about who gets to claim authorship, of paintings, reputations and destinies, long after the maker is gone.