The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  Marty says, “I have to get home to my wife.”

  “Of course,” Red says, lowering the anchor again. “Now, I ask the old gentleman for a tour of his premises and he’s only too happy to oblige. He shows me his workroom with its antique chisels and pliers and he tells me how he does things. I learn about his little operation, how he numbers the jobs and keeps a logbook. The whole place is buried under dust, but he’s running a tight operation on paper. Handwritten receipts, dated entries in the log. Runs the place like a medieval monk. So eventually I’m able to get a peek in his logbook while he’s helping another customer and I go back to the months before the robbery. I flip the pages looking for reoccurring names but he’s got the handwriting of an epileptic nun. I can’t tell his g’s and j’s and s’s apart. I get a little irritated—I’ve spent two hours in there by this point—so I shove the whole logbook under my jacket and walk out of there while he’s in the back room.”

  “That seems a little drastic.”

  “I intend to mail it back when I’m all finished with it. Now, today I studied the log, combed the data, looked for patterns in the old man’s cursive. I seem to have found a lead. The same name appears five times in the ledger in the year before the theft. That makes me think an art dealer or restorer, maybe someone who works for a museum. These are not cheap frames and they’re mostly antiques. How many Flemish panels does one person have to frame in a single year? So I start cross-referencing the name Jergens with art dealers and restorers but hit another dead end. I call around and not a single one of them employs a Jergens. Then I notice that a few days after Jergens appears in the log there’s always another name, a certain Shipley from Brooklyn. Now I know there’s some fine houses in Brooklyn, but this framing shop seems very old New York to me. So there was something about Shipley that smelled like a clam left in the sun. And why was Shipley always coming within three days of Jergens? Then it came to me.”

  “I have no idea what happens next.”

  “Maybe Shipley is coming to study whatever Jergens brings in and uses it as an excuse to bring something of his own in. What if the old man tips Shipley off and he comes in to study Jergens’s paintings. What if they’re colluding, the Frenchman and the forger?”

  “All this from the log entries? It seems like a stretch.”

  “I’m thinking the Frenchman makes the frames for the forger in exchange for a cut of the profits. Probably none of it’s provable, but the logbook contains a list of client addresses. So I now have a solid location for Shipley.”

  Red hands him a scrap of paper in the half-light with an address scrawled on it.

  Red says, “I plan to stake out the apartment in Brooklyn. Since I’ll need to hire another person to work in shifts, I’ll require some extra money to cover expenses.”

  There’s something about Red’s deductive reasoning that Marty doesn’t trust. He personally knows art collectors who have things reframed all the time, so the connection between Jergens and Shipley feels tenuous. There’s also his mounting superstition that losing the painting removed some great burden, that he’s better off without it, but then he’s thinking about his Dutch grandfather kneeling to say his prayers under the painting every night for decades and he flushes with anger. He says, “What are you expecting to find?”

  “There’s always a tell. Certain people coming and going. The forger going out for meetings. We tail him until we find the hook beneath the bait.”

  The word tail reminds Marty that he’s sitting in a dinghy on the Hudson with a 350-pound gumshoe. “You can have another two-fifty for surveillance. See what happens in a week and then report back.”

  “Roger that,” says Red, smiling down at the river.

  Brooklyn

  AUGUST 1958

  The end of a beatnik summer. Ellie sleeps out on her fire escape to get some relief from the swelter of her apartment. She smokes cigarettes and watches the street below. The sensitive men of the neighborhood, the poets and dandies, dress in peacoats and moccasins and royal-blue polos. They recite unrhymed poems about inner turmoil, perform in Greenwich Village coffee shops with atonal jazz riffing quietly below their words. Kerouac is in Florida exile after On the Road, a book she pretends to have read and liked. She lives apart from the campus scene, goes to Columbia only for meetings. Over the summer, she’s added a single new chapter to her stalled-out dissertation and rewritten the introduction for the tenth time. A few days ago, she received a telephone call from Dr. Meredith Hornsby, her supervisor, summoning her to campus to discuss the new material.

  She takes the train into the city and writes in her notebook. Instead of writing newsy letters to her parents in Sydney—which receive brisk replies from her mother, with a Dad sends his love in the gutter of the aerogramme—she pours herself into compiling lists of forgery techniques. Ground recipes and methods for stripping back the upper layers while preserving the signature cracks and fissures below. Then there are the forms of imitation, the “flyspecks” that can be achieved on the back of a painting if epoxy glue is mixed with amber-tinted pigment and applied with a pinhead in a suitable pattern. Flies are drawn to the sugars in a painting’s varnish and the effect is to suggest a neglected painting languishing in an attic for decades. Or the blue chalk marks on the back of the frame, partially erased by hand, that suggest previous auction sales. So much of the forger’s dominion is theater and subtext, she thinks, a series of enticements. An obscure provenance, suggested by visual cues, is irresistible to a certain kind of buyer—it becomes a story of their own discernment, of plucking a second self from the folds of history.

  Although she’s met with a few prospective clients, she hasn’t had a restoration job in months and it’s starting to weigh on her. A demanding restoration would keep her mind off the thrill of copying the de Vos painting down to the last brushstroke. While Gabriel waits to find the right buyer, the painting is being kept in a storage unit in Chelsea. Once a week or so, Ellie is allowed to study it. She collects the key from a counter hand at a bakery down the street and spends an hour or two examining the painting under lamplight. She takes notes about color and composition and brushwork. She hasn’t told Gabriel that Sara de Vos is now the basis of a new chapter in her dissertation. It’s a risk, she knows, drawing attention to a painting that’s recently been stolen and that has never hung in a museum. Then again, she thinks, perhaps her painstaking copy will go undiscovered for generations. In the meantime, she will quietly put Sara de Vos back on the map.

  When Ellie arrives on campus, she finds the plaza filled with milling summer students, clusters of them smoking cigarettes on the stone steps of the Low Library. Every patch of the sunny lawn is taken up with undergraduates lazing. The scene reminds her how much of her time she spends alone in her apartment, how Brooklyn is another world away. She walks through the shade of the courtyard outside the art history department, then takes the stairs up to the top floor, where Meredith Hornsby keeps her office. When Ellie knocks softly on the open door, Hornsby is reading and smoking at her desk. As the first woman to hold tenure in the department, she dresses in a way that suggests an intrepid, pioneering spirit—somber blouses and blazers, sturdy wool slacks, mountaineering-grade walking shoes. Despite the sturdy footwear, Ellie can’t imagine Hornsby ever really walking very far. From what she knows of her private life, she lives with her classical archaeologist husband on the Upper West Side and never eats at a restaurant below Columbus Circle.

  Hornsby looks up from her desk, a cigarette wanly at her side, vaguely resembling—or so it seems to Ellie—Bette Davis at the end of a movie. Matter-of-factly, she says, “I’m rereading your new introduction and chapter. Question: Why are you so angry at the world?”

  Ellie can feel her face getting hot. She breathes and takes a seat in the wingback chair opposite the ornate wooden desk. As long as Ellie can remember, Hornsby starts out this way, a shot across the bow, an inflammatory question tossed off without emotion. But it’s never rhetorical—she wants actual ans
wers for her soul-scorching interrogations.

  Stalling for time, Ellie takes in the room—the wall of books on art and criticism, the geraniums on the windowsill, the smell that’s an odd mixture of Chesterfield cigarettes and damp upholstery. There’s an umbrella stand over in the corner and it’s stocked with more canes and umbrellas than Ellie thinks anyone has a right to own. She remembers hearing that Hornsby plays a formidable game of golf. “I’m not sure what you mean,” she says.

  Hornsby leans her elbows on the desk and rests her chin on her gently clenched fists. “The verbs alone suggest a diatribe more than a reasoned argument. I’ve circled them all. Testify, manifest, declare, an attack against conventional thinking … Your introduction sounds like a call to the battlements.”

  “For centuries everyone thought Judith Leyster’s paintings were by Frans Hals. I’m trying to correct the balance.”

  “You can do that without sounding as if you’re writing about the suffragette movement.” Hornsby continues to flip pages, her Mont Blanc uncapped and poised for typographic annoyances. “And tell me about the chapter on Sara de Vos. First female member of the guild, that much we know. But your theory is that she learned landscape techniques from her father and then her husband but her still life training still dominated the composition. How in the world did you come by this idea when she has one attributed work?”

  Ellie folds her arms, a little defiant. She can feel her throat tightening but wants to remain levelheaded. At first, Hornsby seemed like an ally in the department, but over the years it became clear that she was among the most conservative of the art faculty. A flag bearer for the status quo in woolen slacks. Ellie says, “In addition to combing the archives, I’ve spent time with the painting. The fine level of detail suggests still life and portraiture, but the landscape techniques are also on display.”

  Hornsby drops her hands to the desk, palms flat. “It’s here? In New York?”

  Ellie nods.

  “How did I not know about this? Is it at the Frick?”

  “No, it’s privately owned. I can’t say who, because I’ve signed a confidentiality agreement.”

  “Did this come to you via Gabriel Lodge? Because I’ve known that foppish Brit for a long time and I can’t believe he would withhold something like this from me. I was the one who sent him your way for restoration work…”

  There’s a danger that an indignant Hornsby will begin making enquiries or call Gabriel up directly, so Ellie hedges her bets by saying, “No, not through him. I happened upon it during a restoration project. He doesn’t know a thing about it.”

  “And, what, it was just sitting in their living room like a portrait of Grandpa with his hunting dogs?”

  “More or less.”

  Hornsby looks at Ellie, a little incredulous, then she licks her thumb and turns a page of the manuscript, shaking her head. “Am I to believe, then, that you will have permission to include a photograph of said painting in the dissertation? How else will you support your detailed analysis of the technique?”

  Ellie crosses her legs. She’s wearing a cotton sundress that makes her feel flimsy and exposed compared to Hornsby, who looks like she just came in from a jaunt in the Swiss Alps instead of a bagel run on Upper Broadway. Ellie says, “I don’t know if I can get permission.”

  “And then there’s the matter of you giving de Vos equal weight, right up there with Leyster and Ruysch, who between them have dozens of paintings in museums.”

  “She wasn’t just the first woman to be admitted into a Guild of St. Luke,” Ellie says. “She was the only baroque Dutch woman, as far as we know, who ever painted a landscape. Her circumstances allowed her to cross over into a male-dominated world. She was a pioneer and there’s bound to be other paintings attributed to her.”

  “Yes, but surely—”

  Ellie cuts Hornsby off, her accent broadening as she gives in to her own annoyance: “We’ve always assumed that the Dutchmen did all the landscapes since women were boiling kettles back at home, but what if she and her husband collaborated? What if they went out into the countryside together for the outdoor scenes?”

  Hornsby draws on her cigarette, her expression souring into a slight wince. “It’s speculation. What do the archives say?”

  “That they were heavily in debt, fell out with the guild, and that she lost a daughter. The work has an allegorical atmosphere, a bereft girl standing barefoot in the snow.”

  “Yes, I’ve read the descriptions. And the work is signed and dated?”

  Ellie shakes her head and looks down at Hornsby’s walking shoes swaying beneath her desk. “The provenance is well established because it’s only ever been owned by one family.”

  Meredith Hornsby combines a head tilt with an exhalation of smoke. “You’re making the centerpiece of your dissertation a discussion of an obscure painter with a single extant work that’s never been publicly exhibited.” She shakes her head. “No, I recommend against it. I think you’re backing the wrong horse. You’re projecting onto this woman, if you really want to know my opinion.”

  Ellie looks into the weave of the Turkish rug and feels her mood go blank. “I disagree,” she says.

  Hornsby stubs out her cigarette and stands behind her desk, smoothing her wool slacks. “This is not an easy profession for women, Eleanor. You know that.”

  Ellie bristles at the use of her full name, a patronizing tactic she’s seen employed by nuns, priests, and her own disapproving father.

  Hornsby crosses to the bookshelves and brings down her slim volume on Vermeer. “When all of my male colleagues were obsessed with the Italian Renaissance I slipped in through the back door, focusing on Holland. I was an oddity to them, still am, I expect. You’re in the same camp. We’re swimming upstream—because we’re women and because our profession knows very little of the Dutch Golden Age. I was lucky. I got in early and tracked Vermeer through the snow. He dragged me along for the ride.” She flips through some pages then sets the book back on the shelf. With renewed energy, she turns to Ellie again. “Even with good luck on my side, I’m here before the men every morning and I have more students than any of them. Getting tenure was blood sport, let me tell you. A goddamn coliseum.” Coming forward and leaning against the desk, she says, “It doesn’t hurt if you can marry into a department somewhere. That sounds callous, but it’s not entirely untrue.” She folds her arms. “Do whatever it takes to rein in this dissertation and get on with the next phase of your life. No one can make a career out of a minor Dutch woman painter with one canvas to her name. Keep de Vos in the margins. That’s my strong advice.”

  Hornsby hands Ellie the sheaf of papers on her desk. They are covered in loops and scrawled cursive.

  Ellie stands with the papers braced against her chest. She notices her hands are shaking and she fights back the urge to dump the pages all over Hornsby’s Turkish rug. “I don’t think that’s advice I can follow. I’m convinced that Sara de Vos was the most important female painter of her age.”

  Hornsby gives out a barely audible sigh. “If Dickens had written a single book none of us would know his name.”

  A little breathily, Ellie says, “But what if we found out he’d written a dozen others under a pseudonym or anonymously? Then wouldn’t that be the find of the century?”

  Buttoning her blazer, Hornsby says, “I was right. You are angry. And it’s unbecoming.”

  Ellie feels as if she’s just been slapped across the face by some disapproving nineteenth-century dowager. She swallows, looks down at the papers, and walks slowly toward the door.

  En Route to Sydney

  AUGUST 2000

  Somewhere over the Pacific, Marty de Groot leaves the painting for the first time. Wrapped in a woolen blanket and cinched with twine, the painting has been bought a first-class ticket under the label “personal item.” He calls it his Dutch girlfriend when somebody asks. Money at this point is an abstraction, a set of sans serif numerals too small to read on the monthly statements.
There’s plenty, always has been. He’s ashamed he cannot remember a time in his life without the cushioned guardrails of abundance. He’s up in the aisle and shuffling past the lavish buffet table of Australian fruits and cheeses and wines. Reminds him of Rachel and her rooftop soirees, the old partners dead or demented and he’s still living, alone, walking down the street for bagels each morning, carrying them back to the three-story apartment warm against his chest. The first-class steward gives him a paternalistic smile as Marty edges for the toilet. It’s the look you give a well-behaved imbecile, an insurance policy against cosmic malevolence. In the tiny compartment he sits down, because pissing these days is a matter of timing, perseverance, and Newtonian physics. Nila, the Salvadoran cook and cleaning lady, changes his sheets more than she lets on. She’s kind for not letting on. And in return, the old man overpays her and buys her teenage son extravagant gifts. She’s a single mother from Queens who comes three times a week and smells of lemon hand soap. He’s happy to have her around the apartment but also happy when she leaves. She never complains about the train wreck that is the human body named Marty. She cleans and cooks for that human body. His age—is he eighty-three? Eighty-five?—is another abstraction as far as he’s concerned, a tiny font he can’t quite decipher. He thinks of the Old Testament and men living to nine hundred, made from clay and was that Adam or Noah?

  He stands and closes the lid to flush. The supersonic thwoomp makes him think of certain prewar espresso machines, the big Italian jobs that used to be in Midtown cafés with chrome pull-down handles and steam pumps loud as Vespas. Barely anything reminds him of death—certainly not the high altitude flushing of bodily waste. This is one of the ironies of descending into his ninth decade—he’s convinced he’ll live forever, albeit with fewer functioning organs, so he has to remind himself that he’s running out the clock to gain a little gravity now and then. He suspects his final monologue will be about property taxes and a transcendent fish sandwich he once ate in Far Rockaway with homemade mayonnaise. He avoids his face in the narrow mirror. Nothing good can come of that harrowing vision—a character actor hired for the day. He carefully inspects his tan shirt and lined windbreaker that he’s kept on for twelve hours because Qantas likes to refrigerate the first-class cabin like they’re hauling steaks across the Pacific. Nila says he dresses like a game warden, but he thinks it’s more like a war journalist or bird-watcher. The field vest with a thousand pockets is somewhere in his carry-on. When did an abundance of pockets become a matter of moral principle? He wants to be zipped up and buried in the thing. His final battlefield commission.