The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 15

  “I have a cousin who’s an auctioneer,” says Pieter. “Mostly horses and farms, but he makes a swift living.”

  The auctioneer looks up but does not respond.

  Pieter persists. “How did you do today? Overall. It’s a percentage, if I’m not mistaken, of the total.”

  “What is?”

  “The auctioneer’s fee.”

  The man brings his attention back to the ledger and the money. Pieter can tell he’s a practical man, that he auctions off paintings and jewels and dead men’s clothes with the same impunity.

  On a whim, Pieter says, “I’ve been following the funeral notices. I don’t recall the name of the artist who passed away. Usually the guild makes a big to-do of the passing of an illustrious member.”

  The auctioneer looks up at him. “The guild did not publish the name.”

  “And, yet, a simple questioning of the neighbors would reveal that.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Pieter paces a little, then turns back. “Well, I can only assume that there was some sort of scandal with the dead painter.” He examines his fingernails. “Perhaps it was a suicide. That never looks good for a guild.”

  The auctioneer begins to stack his money into a cloth bag.

  Pieter says, “I notice there is another painting in the next room.”

  Squinting for a moment at the ledger, the man says, “That picture is not for sale.”

  Pieter knows from the look in the auctioneer’s face that he’s pressing against something. The man scribbles beside a column of figures.

  Pieter says, “Perhaps it is not presently for sale. But perhaps an auctioneer might represent a potential buyer like myself with the guild in this matter. Hypothetically, and for a handsome commission, that auctioneer might tell the guild predicant or bureaucrat or whoever he is that a good reputation is worth a lot. Priceless, in fact. Scandal and gossip can ruin the standing of a guild, especially when your average monger or merchant thinks they should all be abolished. Those membership fees amount to taxes, and clearly this artist was driven to sell his unsigned work on the black market to survive and took his own life under an extremity of circumstances.”

  The auctioneer sits before his splayed ledger, formulating some tactic of his own. Quietly, he says, “He’s as good as dead.”

  Pieter waits.

  “From what I hear, the husband and wife were both painters, former members of the guild with debts thereto. Going bankrupt, they were selling work on the side. The guild does not permit—” The auctioneer’s voice breaks off and he looks back down at the floor. “The wife is selling everything off before going to work for one of the husband’s creditors. He has abandoned her and the poor wretch must now fend for herself. I’m told that the guild was considering her readmission, but now things have changed.” The auctioneer stands abruptly and crosses to the door with his ledger and bag of money. “This is all I know.”

  Pieter says, “Tell the guild servant that I will offer a hundred guilders for that painting and with that comes discretion and peace of mind.”

  The man hesitates, his eyes lifting toward the window.

  Pieter says, “Your commission for this transaction will be ten percent, which I think you’ll recognize as generous.”

  “Twenty,” the man says, still standing there, looking out onto the Amsterdam rooftops, his voice unabashed. “For twenty percent, sir, I can secure you that painting.”

  Pieter knows that he’s revealed his attachment to the painting and that the balance of power has shifted. The auctioneer has plucked it from his hands like a pebble. Pieter nods but says nothing. The auctioneer disappears into the passageway and Pieter listens as he plods down the stairs. From the attic window he watches the street below, sees the guild member and the auctioneer confer. After a few moments he sees a woman approach in a long cape, her face pale and bereft, her hands clutching a small basket in front of her. The auctioneer hands the cloth bag of money to the guild servant, who shifts from foot to foot, addressing the woman. The three of them seem to be talking, but the woman’s eyes are averted. At one point the servant cranes up at the narrow facade of the house and the woman follows his gaze. For a brief moment, Pieter is staring directly into her face, her features narrowed into a squint. He’s not sure whether she can see him behind the reflection of the glass.

  Sydney

  AUGUST 2000

  Two men are hauling a Kelvinator fridge over to Scotland Island in a metal dinghy. Ellie watches them from the veranda, peering through the hem of trees with her field binoculars. A small crowd has gathered at the ferry dock to watch the spectacle unfold, somebody’s father or uncle too cheap to hire one of the cargo launches. It’s been a few days since the Dutch cases were opened, and Ellie waits for her life to be cleaved in two by a ringing phone. It could be a call from Max Culkins, or Marty de Groot, or Helen Birch, the museum’s conservation scientist.

  Max’s version of handling the delicate situation was to insist on thorough testing of all three de Vos paintings now that Marty de Groot had delivered his painting to the museum. When Max called Ellie he said, “Compare and contrast, back up the claims with data.” His voice was casual and academic. Meanwhile, the thought of Marty de Groot walking into the art gallery fell like a hammer through her whole body. Max said that once the examination was complete and the test results were in hand, he would personally communicate with the owner of the forgery and arrange for the return of the painting. “Let me be the one to handle that,” she’d said. “I feel partly responsible for this mess.” But Max ignored her offer and continued in a conspiratorial tone: “They take it personally, Ellie, they always do. What if both the Leidens are fakes? They’ll be very humiliated. Or, heaven forbid, what if Mr. de Groot is lugging around a bad egg?”

  Helen Birch has spent several days with the paintings. A small-town veterinarian who got a Ph.D. in material science after a devastating divorce, she’s the only person at the museum who wears a lab coat. Helen has the reputation of being a data person with no inherent feeling for art. She’s called in like a ballistics expert to conduct examinations in microscopy, X-ray, infrared, and spectroscopy. The handful of times Ellie has interacted with Helen she’s always gone away with a sense of a misplaced calling, that Helen should have become a UN weapons inspector instead of a painting conservator.

  Normally, any testing would be done in the presence of the courier and after the exhibition has concluded, but the maintenance team is still repairing some water damage to the skylights and no paintings have been approved for hanging in the gallery space. Somehow, Max Culkins has persuaded the Leiden museum to permit the testing without the presence of Hendrik Klapp, who has flown back to the Netherlands.

  The two men with the fridge have come to the choppy midpoint of the bay, the smaller man now throttling the outboard into a high-pitched whinny. The sound unzips over the watery basin, the sandstone cliffs bear it across the bay like the skin of a drum. The boat’s gunwales are just inches from the waterline and through the binoculars Ellie can see the bigger man’s mortification.

  Ellie wants to believe that if it weren’t for the lead-tin yellow, her replica might be considered a copy made by the artist herself, a common practice in a seventeenth-century painting studio overflowing with apprentices. But anyone with a cursory knowledge of de Vos knows that she was exiled from traditional practice and probably not inclined to copy her own work. Even the packers know about the twin paintings now, about the planet and its orbiting moon. Q and his men have taken up a nickname for the upcoming exhibition—Dutch Doppelgängers. They can’t be sure exactly how, or when, but every curator, packer, and conservator suspects—and hopes—that someone is going to be humiliated by the conclusive evidence of a fake, either a rich American or that imperious little Dutchman with his ornate packing crates.

  Ellie goes inside, pours herself a glass of wine, and comes back out onto the veranda. Her thoughts return to Sara de Vos and the funeral painting—Winter wi
th a Child’s Funeral Procession. It keeps pulling her back, like an undercurrent to her dread. Not only does the picture extend Sara’s life beyond what Ellie has published, but it also throws into doubt her whole theory about the painter’s career. Ellie had claimed in her book that At the Edge of a Wood was the high-water mark of Sara’s career, a moment of transcendence before she might have abandoned the medium altogether. She’d speculated that the daughter’s death had loosed something in Sara, a savage kind of grief that burned onto the canvas. But she’d also wondered whether it depleted something in the artist, made it difficult for Sara to move on with her life. The trail of paintings went cold, after all. She’d never come out and said that the painting was a fluke of circumstance, a historical accident, but it somehow seemed implied. Now, the new painting suggests a kind of rebirth, an artist who continued to evolve in her mastery.

  She often sees Sara in her dreams—a woman in a bonnet, a sallow, slightly drawn expression, peering in through a window. But she has never allowed herself to think of Sara as a martyr or a sage. She routinely warns her graduate students not to project mysticism onto the lives and canvases of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. They’re often tempted to view Rembrandt’s delicate blue hazes as a sign of spiritual nuance, but she reminds them that they were more technical feats than a hungering for God. Religion had its place, but it was both practical and mercantile; it endured like a sturdy table in a polished kitchen. Here was a republic of watery provinces, cut through with sluices and canals, where the threat of Old Testament plague or divine retribution or epic floods kept men awake at night. In the face of that, the lowlanders were caught between appeasing God and appeasing their appetites. By all accounts, seventeenth-century Dutchmen were inveterate worshippers, brawlers, drinkers, and womanizers. They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss. Or did Sara de Vos continue painting as a way to sharpen her view of the abyss?

  The first suggestion that the Kelvinator has fallen into the bay is the sound of the crowd at the dock groaning and cheering. Somehow she misses the heavy plunk of the fridge hitting the water. She stands with the binoculars and sees a ring of widening ripples and the fridge jackknifing out of the water, sinking by degrees, the metal dinghy overturned. The two men are thrashing their arms through the water and yelling at each other. A police boat guns it across the bay from Church Point while half the crowd walks up the hill from the dock. Ellie spies one of the retirees from the island civic council, an elderly widow, standing in a sun hat at the end of an adjacent pier, her hands on her hips. She finds herself wondering whether the Kelvinator was a gift from two wayward sons and feels a terrible sense of loss for the woman.

  Ellie goes inside and closes the glass doors behind her. The image of the woman on the pier and the pieced-together narrative of the fridge and the errant sons has worsened her mood. The red wine has amplified things by making her feel drowsy and nostalgic. She sets her wineglass down on the kitchen table, looks over at the phone, and goes back toward her bedroom. Ellie opens her closet. On the top shelf, there’s a box of memorabilia and old journals and she gives in to the impulse to take it down and unpack it across her bed.

  She begins to flip through the notebooks from her New York years and feels her cheeks burning when she sees all those scribbled notes from the forgery manifestos and manuals. There’s a strain of anger burning beneath the notes that she barely recognizes. She was the least political person she knew back then, so it certainly wasn’t a Marxist agenda that drew her in. She remembers being adrift and lonely, spending years on the periphery of a New York life until Marty de Groot faked his way into her life. There are other notebooks that date from her high school years and she follows the anger all the way back. She was angry at her father, then at the nuns and priests, then at the world. It built up for years, before reaching some kind of flashpoint when she was sixteen.

  Her art teacher, Father Barry, had arranged for her to complete summer work experience with a venerable Pitt Street art gallery and restoration business. The Franke brothers were dealers in their sixties who specialized in Dutch and Flemish paintings, long before they were in vogue with collectors. It was Ellie’s first exposure to lowland depictions of the seventeenth century outside of Rembrandt and Vermeer. Ellie spent six weeks at the firm, filling cracks and cleaning old paintings under a desk lamp, while the brothers did their best to bilk Rose Bay widows out of family heirlooms.

  Jack Franke ran the gallery downstairs and Michael cleaned paintings on the floor above, an inner sanctum he protected with handwritten Keep Out signs. Despite the Franke family’s aristocratic origins, the brothers were on hard times and always on the lookout for an easy profit. A typical ploy involved a wealthy and lonely old woman bundling up the wooden stairs for a restoration consult. She’d have a painting under one arm, wrapped in newspaper or sometimes in a David Jones shopping bag for fear of a curbside robbery. Occasionally it was something very valuable—a colonial botanist’s depiction or an unsigned modernist on the ascent—but it would be in desperate need of cleaning. Dressed in a three-piece suit, Michael would make some tsking noises with his mouth before murmuring “pity, pity.” Jack would be called in to offer counsel, turning to the woman and saying, “Madame, the prognosis is not good.” The widow would recount the history of the painting and its appraised value, to which Jack would nod and thin his lips. “The cleaning will be like jackhammering old concrete. You see, it’s been doused with copal varnish. If you leave the painting with Michael he will see what can be done.” In fact, the varnish was almost always mastic, not copal, and easily removed with turpentine. After keeping the painting for a month, they would tally up a bill for cleaning that put a sizable dent in the value of the painting and talk the widow into a fire-sale price.

  This was all part of Ellie’s induction into the art world. When she wasn’t filling in cracks and swabbing down glazes and scumbles, she was fetching the brothers meat pies and sandwiches and newspapers. They had parish connections to Father Barry and implied that they’d be happy to file a good report if she kept her head down. Standing above her worktable for hours, she’d get dizzy from the solvent fumes and feel light-headed by the end of the day. She got migraines from the eyestrain and went home to lie down in the bedroom she shared with Kate. It was summer holidays and boarding school was out, so Kate fetched her cups of tea while Maggie Shipley resented the special treatment, calling her Queen Eleanor under her breath. The rest of the time she was invisible to her parents and her closet was full of her mother’s sewing projects. For Bob and Maggie Shipley, her going away to boarding school on an art scholarship was the equivalent of moving to Ecuador or dying at a young age.

  During her last week at the firm, Michael Franke asked her if she wanted to have a go at a little inpainting. Naturally, she agreed and was invited into his studio, a glassed-in room that had once been a storekeeper’s veranda. Canvases in various states of cleaning hung on the walls along with several clocks. A teakettle and a cooktop took up one corner. On an easel stood an eighteenth-century British landscape—a coastline with cattle grazing and some backlit clouds. Michael said the sky needed patching up and he’d already got the blend right. “Five shades lighter before it goes on is the general rule. Allowing for the varnish and drying and so on. Come on and take a stab.” She liked the painting, the simple pleasure of cows on a coastal morning. She stepped in front of the easel and Michael picked up a fine brush with some paint on it. “Try to match the strokes if you can,” he said. She took the paintbrush in her hand and steadied her arm above the canvas. The painter’s brushwork was even and smooth, cutting horizontally across the grain of the canvas. She made contact with the picture with a light, steady stroke and the blue adhered nicely. She knew at once that she’d executed the brushwork perfectly; except for the wet tone, it was barely discernible from the original. Michael stood over her, smelling of acetone and damp newspapers. She made several passes wit
h the brush and each one added to the carefully blended effect. She took a step back and looked at Michael, who turned his attention suddenly to a pile of paperwork on his desk. The Franke brothers weren’t big on praise, so she fully expected something understated, a nod and a not bad. But without looking up at her Michael leafed through some invoices and said, “In twenty years I’ve never seen an apprentice quite bungle a painting like that. Maybe your sort is better suited for a different kind of trade.” She stood there for a long time, unable to move or fathom why he was being so cruel. Did your sort refer to her being female, Catholic, or the daughter of a ferryman? Then he added, “It’s almost lunchtime. Go see what Jack wants. I’ll take a hamburger with bacon.” She left the workroom in tears and trudged down the stairs, not saying a word to Jack as she walked out onto the street. She never went back, but weeks later she saw the painting she’d touched up for sale in the Franke gallery window. It was her unchanged brushwork in the sky—perfectly blended and seamless within the swath of blue.

  Something changed in her after that. The anger hardened, came back as a refrain. For years, that moment flickered back whenever she was cleaning or inpainting a canvas—a sense that she had no business engaging in this work. Sometimes her throat would bloat with rage. It should have been easy to dismiss—a miserable old man unable to offer a gifted teenage girl a simple compliment. The Franke brothers reported to Father Barry that she’d run off one lunchtime and the priest soured toward her after that. It was the beginning of a new era, of living on the periphery. Lying across her bed forty-odd years later, a little drunk on a Wednesday afternoon, she reads the notebooks from her teens and twenties and feels a presence in the room—a neglected, slightly gullible teenager. She wonders now if the forgery wasn’t a form of retribution, a kind of calculated violence—against Jack and Michael Franke, against the old boy network at the Courtauld Institute, against her own indifferent father. But mostly against the girl standing out on the glassed-in veranda who thought her talents were prodigious and therefore enough.