The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

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  The ringing telephone dredges her from a deep sleep. She gets up and navigates blearily through the house, a hand against the hallway wall to steady herself. She doesn’t pick up the receiver in time and the call goes to the answering machine. There’s a certain satisfaction in hearing Helen formulate her words into an impromptu speech. “Ah, hi, Ellie, look, it’s Helen Birch here from the gallery and I’m wondering if we might schedule a time for you to come into the lab. I’ve been performing some technical analysis on the three de Vos pictures and have found a few anomalies and whatnot. Perhaps I can talk you through my findings in person. Anyway, I’m ducking off for the rest of the afternoon—dentist appointment, sounds lovely, doesn’t it?—but I’ll be in first thing tomorrow. Just come by any time before noon if you have a chance and we’ll go through the data. Okay, cheerio then.”

  Ellie goes back out to the veranda to see what’s become of the miniature shipwreck.

  Manhattan

  SEPTEMBER 1958

  With its French walnut paneling and ferns in copper planters, the auction house on West Fifty-Seventh makes Marty uneasy. It reeks of old money and makes him self-conscious, puts him in mind of venerable old steak houses and New England boarding schools. He’s arrived an hour before the auction and waits for Eleanor Shipley to pull up in the car he’s sent for her. The employees of Thornton and Morrell, the department heads and cataloguers, dress like pallbearers except for their vivid bow ties. The doorman has the bearing of a Renaissance scholar whose post out on the sidewalk is due to some kind of clerical mishap. Marty thinks of the jaunty, grinning Sotheby’s doorman, who looks like a bouncer from an upscale London nightclub.

  He stands by the front windows, waiting for the car service to pull up. The street has thinned out after the frenzy of lunch hour, a lull in the middle of an Indian summer afternoon. A florist and a watch repairman stand in front of their adjacent storefronts, chatting and smoking cigarettes. When the black Cadillac arrives, he waits for the driver to come around to open a rear passenger door, waits to see Eleanor Shipley’s face revealed in the doorframe, but the front passenger door opens and a loping blonde hops out on the traffic side. A passing taxicab honks. The driver emerges in his chauffeur’s cap, a little too slowly, mortified, looking down the sidewalk to see if anyone has seen this crazy bird from Brooklyn riding up front. As she passes the front of the Cadillac, she lifts her left high heel and adjusts an ankle strap while steadying herself against the hood. The driver takes her elbow and guides her toward the auction house. A few feet from the entrance she stops and cranes up at the facade, her mouth opening slightly. The driver dismisses himself and hurries to the car that’s flashing its hazards by the curb. So this is his first impression of her—a tall, ungainly woman who seems oblivious to social norms and probably hasn’t worn heels in a very long time. She’s pretty in an offhand, Anglican sort of way—her hair pulled back tight, her features freckled, pale, and strong, a darting intelligence in her green eyes. The nose is slightly snubbed, he notices, watching the doorman greet her, an echo of brewers or weavers or convicts from the English Midlands, he thinks. But those electric green eyes suggest a devastating IQ smuggled into the colonies like an embezzled diamond. How did I become such a deplorable snob, he wonders, crossing to the double glass doors, then: She has stolen something priceless from me.

  When she steps inside, he says, “Miss Shipley?”

  Her eyes must be adjusting to the dim interior because she seems shocked to find someone standing in front of her. “Mr. Alpert. Pleasure to meet you. Remember, call me Ellie.”

  “And please call me Jake.”

  He looks at her face, tries to discern any note of caution. He likes the fact that she’s not wearing lipstick.

  A little sternly, she says, “I have to warn you, this is my first auction. The art crowd thinks this is all a bit seedy and untoward.”

  “Oh, it is,” Marty says, “a comedy of manners complete with little wooden paddles. You’re going to love it. I’ll teach you all the brutal customs. Don’t worry that you’re green—it’s your expert eyes I want to lease for the afternoon.”

  “Speaking of eyes…” she murmurs, rummaging through an enormous leather handbag. Eventually, she produces a pair of black-framed reading glasses and perches them on the bridge of her nose, blinking as if the room is just now coming into focus.

  He says, “Shall we take a stroll and see what’s what?”

  “By all means. Lead the way.”

  Marty moves to the far corner of the room, where there’s a clearing in the inventory of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish Old Masters.

  “Now, I like to make a quick perimeter check of the sale items before the auction. No use being bogged down by anything until you know the lay of the land. The auction catalogue is useful but prone to vagueness. There’s a lot of circle ofs and attributed tos and this or that school. Those are for the amateurs fresh off the boat. I prefer attribution, a provenance with some teeth. So I mentally cross the phantoms off my list as I walk around.”

  “You have a system,” Ellie says brightly.

  “The system is try not to be cheated. What do you see here that grabs you?”

  She digs through her handbag again and produces something that looks like a jeweler’s loupe on the end of a lanyard. She wears it like a necklace. “I’ll need a few minutes. Why don’t I report back once I’ve walked the circuit? You want to stick to Holland and Flanders?”

  “I do,” says Marty. “How about we rendezvous at sixteen hundred?”

  “Is that four o’clock?”

  “I’m joking.”

  “Of course.”

  “In fifteen minutes?”

  “See you then.”

  He watches her step off uncertainly, both hands in the pockets of her flowing skirt. She stops in front of a painting, positions the loupe, and leans in, one hand clenched into a fist behind her back, a girl peering through a keyhole. By now a few dozen people have gathered in the salesroom and he sees her get some attention from some Upper East Side types and one of the grim-looking cataloguers in a silk bow tie. Marty begins to walk the floor. A seventeenth-century oak panel from Antwerp, A Rocky Landscape with Christ on the Road to Emmaus by Gillis Claesz. The estimate in the catalogue says two to three thousand dollars, but he doubts it’s worth fifteen hundred. Next is A river landscape by a lock, with elegant company on horseback and villagers on the bank. Sometimes the titles are short essays and it always makes him wary, as if they commissioned a toothpaste copywriter to tell the viewer what he’s looking at. A winter village landscape with huntsman and travelers on a track is estimated at four to seven thousand dollars. These are all middling novelties, he thinks, and he suddenly worries that Ellie will think him an armchair collector, a weekend gallery warrior—she might beg off if she thinks her talents will go untapped. He looks over at her and sees her face just inches from the weave of a canvas, as if she’s smelling the pigments. She straightens, looks over, gives him a self-conscious wave, then begins in his direction. He watches her handbag swing as she lopes across the room.

  He says, “This lineup’s weak. I feel like I’m at a garage sale in Newark.”

  A little breathily, she says, “I think I found something. There’s a private collection, four pictures, and what’s wonderful is that they’re all from the same two-year period, but some from Holland and some from Flanders. Come take a look.”

  He says, “Some widow is converting her assets to cash or an heir is lobbing off Granny’s depressing old paintings.”

  He’s surprised when she takes him by the elbow, not affectionately, but a little forcefully, and leads him to the corner of the room where the four paintings lean against easels. He flips through the sales catalogue for the right entry: From the private collection of the late Mr. J. A. Simmons.

  He says, “Thornton and Morrell specialize in the private collections of the dead or dying.”

  Ellie stands beside a floral still life—C
hristoffel van den Berghe’s Tulips, Roses, Narcissi, Crocuses, an Iris, a Poppy, and Other Flowers in a Gilt Mounted Porcelain Vase on a Ledge, with a Queen of Spain Fritillary, a White Ermine, and a Magpie Butterfly.

  “Oh, they kill me,” says Marty. “It’s like Charles Darwin wrote half these titles.”

  Ellie laughs, the loupe pinched between her fingers. “I agree, the title is a little on the descriptive side. But they write long descriptions since the painters didn’t give the works names. It helps to keep them straight. Here’s the wonderful thing. This is from Middleburg, a northern Dutch port city that was incredibly isolated in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Picture this lonely place sticking out into the North Sea like a sore thumb at the end of a chain of islands. Swamp and black mud channels, the sloppy branches of the Rhine. The Middleburg flower painters kind of invented this stuff, and it’s long before the Holland tulip mania, so here is the most exquisite floral still life, the height of the art form, taking place on this little muddy nugget of land, miles from anything else. And virtually none of these flowers bloom at the same time, so everything you’re looking at is amalgamated and invented in the painter’s mind. So the year here is 1616 or so. Then, let’s take a look at its neighbor.”

  Marty notices that her cheeks have flushed.

  “So, then, over in Antwerp, Bartholomeus Grondonck is painting his only signed work, dated 1617.”

  Marty stares at The Kermesse of Oudernarde. It depicts peasants and children frolicking in a village during a festival. The light is blue-green and spectral.

  “This is quintessentially Flemish,” Ellie says. She puts one hand on her hip. “Look at the guy pissing against the doorpost.”

  This comment catches Marty off guard and he folds his arms in delight, leaning back to better take her in.

  “Classic Brueghelian narrative, the innocence of children juxtaposed with the excess and debauchery of their parents. Now,” she says, moving along, “we see this elegant and lush river landscape by Anton Mirou, also Flemish, not wonderful, but still interesting, and finally this divine de Momper, with his winter landscape. You can feel the bracing cold in this one. See how the horseman’s mantle covers everything but his eyes and nose, making him look a little like a hangman. But there’s not much wind and some pallid-looking sunshine is straining through the clouds. See the tree encrusted with frost, glimmering with ice—that’s just beautiful!”

  They both stand for a moment studying the tiny pendants of ice on the tree. There’s a look of quiet reverie on her face.

  He asks, “Are you religious, Ellie?”

  She gives him a quizzical look. “Agnostic at best. Why do you ask?”

  “Most people in the art world are looking for something divine in old paintings. Atheists looking for meaning and so on. When you look at these paintings there’s a look of devotion on your face.”

  She shakes her head. “I’m terribly shortsighted. I’m sure that’s it. I’ve been accused of daydreaming my whole life, but it’s really just myopia.”

  He takes a step back so he can see all four paintings at once. “So which one do you think I should bid on?”

  She brings her jeweler’s loupe up to one eye and hunches over the de Momper, studying the brushwork and humming. She straightens and says, “If it were me, and I had the means, I’d take them all. The real value is in the collection, the fact that a single moment of the seventeenth century is chronicled, from that beautiful golden parrot tulip painted in Middleburg to this Flemish peasant frolic.”

  Marty looks down at the catalogue and takes a quick mental tally. The estimated price for all four is a little north of eighty thousand dollars. He swallows, flips pages, imagines briefly that Ellie knows exactly who he is and this is his punishment for trying to flush her out.

  Regaining composure, he looks up and says, “What ties them together, besides history and geography?”

  “For one thing, oil on copper. They’re all on the same metal support. Whoever Mr. J. A. Simmons was, he didn’t want his paintings to age. Apart from a few tiny dents, the paint is pristine with virtually no cracking. Good as new. Look at those jewel-like finishes, the bright pigments…”

  “I noticed the craquelure is nonexistent,” he says, then wonders if he sounds pompous.

  “Metals don’t react to humidity changes the way canvas or wood does.”

  From behind, they hear a commotion and turn to see the auctioneer making a sound check at the dark wood rostrum. A few men in overalls are rearranging chairs to make more room. A solid crowd has gathered in the foyer and gallery area and Marty suspects it will be standing room only.

  “We better get in position,” he says. “The socialites like to sit up front so they can be seen.”

  They take their seats a few rows from the front and watch as the auctioneer—a middle-aged man in a bespoke suit—continues counting into the microphone. Every once in a while he hoods his gaze beneath the lights and checks in with someone at the back of the room.

  Marty says, “Notice the accent. The auction houses all hire Brits or Swiss or Belgians to flog off their art. It distracts you from the fact that this is not that different from a horse auction. I have a friend who’s the auctioneer for Sotheby’s and he tells me the house hires a voice coach who studies his performances. He’s trained to avoid verbal tics and colloquialisms. Elocution and strong body language sell paintings, apparently.”

  “I had no idea,” Ellie says.

  Marty turns around to assess the crowd, hoping he won’t see anybody he knows.

  She says, “I’ve read that brown paintings don’t sell as well as brighter colors. Is there any way that could be true?”

  “Absolutely. And buxom female nudes sell better than skinny ones or males. Which seems intuitive enough. Also, size matters. If you can’t fit it into an uptown elevator then it adds a layer of complication.”

  A few minutes later the salesroom is packed and there’s a small crowd standing at the back. The lights dim in the house and come up on the rostrum. The auctioneer strides onto the little stage with his folio notebook. He takes a moment to make eye contact with the audience and smile. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today’s sale of Old Masters. Before we begin, I’m obliged to read the rules concerning the conditions of sale.” In a clipped Oxbridge accent, he recounts the return policy, the waivers and disclaimers, the commission fees. Marty notices that Ellie writes some of these down on the back of an envelope. A few of the auction house staff stand off to the side, sizing up the crowd.

  Marty leans close to Ellie, close enough to notice that she smells more like acetone than perfume. “He’s standing up there with a seating chart in his book. It’s a map of the money. The people who RSVP get special placement so he knows where his bids are likely to come from. The rest of us walk-ins are harder to estimate…”

  The auctioneer raises his gavel and turns it gently in his hand. “Let’s begin with lot one, shall we, the Jacques de l’Ange on my right.” A colored slide of the painting appears on a screen behind him. Marty flips through his catalogue to see that it’s titled An Allegory of Avarice. It seems like a ruefully appropriate place for the auction to begin.

  “In this case six thousand starting…”

  A paddle in the front row wafts the air. “We have six thousand. Now six five. Do I see seven thousand dollars?”

  Marty says, “Sometimes he starts with what they call chandelier bids. He calls out a series of bids that haven’t actually come from the salesroom.”

  When she doesn’t respond, Marty looks over at Ellie. She bites her bottom lip, spellbound; she could be watching a boxing match with that look of bloodlust. The bidding continues through Italy and back to the lowlands of the seventeenth century, the swamps and fens and backwaters that were somehow a hothouse for the flourishing of painterly technique, the whole Golden Age a fluke of rheumatic temperament and history. Marty punctuates the litany of artist names with this whispered commentary. He
tells her to watch the range of bidding gestures, the finger salutes and paddle swipes, the big hand waves and curt head nods. She turns in her seat to better take in the spectacle.

  When the first oil on copper goes up, Ellie looks outraged that they’re being sold off separately. On the back of her catalogue she writes, These paintings shouldn’t be orphaned. Apparently, Marty and Ellie are not the only ones who’ve scoped out the handpicked private collection, the brilliant depictions on four-hundred-year-old copper. Bids come from all sides in a flurry. Marty generally likes to take the temperature of the room before he makes a bid, so the auctioneer is saying going once on the Van den Berghe when he throws up his hand. Ellie’s leg twitches as she tries to restrain herself. They’re starting with the most valuable of the four paintings, the floral still life that could have been painted last week for all its color saturation. It’s at thirty-six thousand dollars and Marty doesn’t quite know how he’s waded into these waters. The painting is beautiful in its own way, but he’s not feeling the libidinal pull that usually guides him at auction. The artwork is merely a vehicle to further entrapment of those who wronged him. He stares straight up at the rostrum but scans his peripheral vision for competing bids. Someone from up the back must wink or pull an earlobe, because a staff member signals to the auctioneer from the sidelines. Ellie looks over at him, her eyes widened back. Marty leans close and says, “You’re terrible at this,” and then throws up his hand again without turning away from her. She closes her hands into fists.