The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  “I see thirty-seven thousand from the gentleman at center. In the rear? Fair warning. Going once … Twice. Sold.”

  Ellie rubs the palms of her hands down her skirt front, looking down at the floor with a colossal grin.

  “On my right now we have Grondonck and in this case, the bidding starts at twelve thousand. Again I see the gentleman at center, this time taking the lead. Now I’m looking for twelve thousand five hundred.”

  Marty whispers to Ellie: “Why don’t you take over the bidding? Every time I tap my watchband you throw up your wooden paddle.”

  “No, I couldn’t,” she says.

  A bid comes from the far right, a bat of the paddle from a ferocious-looking woman in a cashmere scarf. Marty taps his watchband on going once and there’s a hesitation, a moment where Ellie seems paralyzed by some sense of etiquette or professional boundary. Marty shrugs with his hands in his lap and then her paddle shoots into the air. The auctioneer says, “And now a bid with gusto from the duo at center, excellent, and we’re at thirteen thousand five hundred.” Marty looks over at Ellie, but her eyes are still down at the floor. She rubs her hands along her skirt front again and when she turns them over he sees that her palms are glistening with sweat. He feels an odd mix of tenderness and satisfaction. There’s a mounting affection toward her but also this grim delight in seeing her out of her element, in lifting that crown of tangled hair from the photograph and giving her cause to put on heels and show her face. It’s clear to him now that she was not the calculating mind behind the forgery swap. No, she was the subject matter expert, the hired brush, the art savant who’s probably never eaten an oyster or gone to a jazz club. It strikes him that he wants to teach her things and dupe her at exactly the same time. The feeling puzzles him as he sits back, the wire transfer to the auction house already made in his mind. The whole thing has already played out. The next oil on copper displays on the screen and he leans close to Ellie’s ear. “Look at those poor sods tramping through the snow. Let’s reunite them with their siblings.” She looks up from the floor and gives him a look of sincere elation.

  Leaving Amsterdam

  SPRING 1637

  The creditor, an aging bachelor named Cornelis Groen, had commissioned Barent for a series of landscapes that were never completed. Now he’s offered Sara a year of employment to work off the debt. Through the open doorway of her house, Sara can see Mr. van Schooten, the creditor’s manservant, in the waiting gig, the paintings he bought at the auction wrapped and sitting at his feet. She walks out into the street and pulls the door behind her. As it catches, she stands for a moment on the stoop, unable to turn around, both hands on the green waxed door, palms flat, as if feeling the warmth of a kettle. She’s suddenly terrified that she won’t remember what Kathrijn looked like without the envelope of the house, without the earthly reminders of a life briefly spent. Giving herself a gentle push back, she turns to face the street. Her neighbors, many of them artists, have come out to wave goodbye.

  They catch a late-afternoon water coach along the tow-canal that connects Amsterdam to Haarlem. From there, a boat takes them down the Spaarne to Heemstede, a district of burgher estates and wooded dunes. Sara looks off at the passing fields. Sometimes, when she went sketching in the countryside with Barent and Kathrijn, they would see a tiny village in this region where dogs towed flat-bottomed boats or peasants rowed out to the fields to milk their cows. Barent would tell Kathrijn stories of childhood travels with his father, a brewer stricken by wanderlust—tales of Drenthe woodcutters living in houses that were windowless and half underground, or the fishermen of Marken who lived on pilings and tarred their wooden houses against the constant damp. He’d seen heaths and forests, could describe the way the provinces were walled in by the sea on one side and the sandy moors and marshlands on the other. She pictures him out among it now, free to roam while she lives out his punishment.

  After nightfall, the boat pilot leaves them at the dock in Heemstede with their stock of paintings. They wait for an hour in the cold fog. Sara glimpses a few houses through a lacework of tree branches, a stray candle burning behind a window that projects a faint halo through the mist. Eventually, a carriage rocks down the sandy road toward the dock. A single lantern bounces and sways next to the driver, a man in his thirties. Sara is not introduced to the driver, but she hears Van Schooten call him Tomas and she thanks him by name when he helps her up into the carriage. He gives her an appreciative nod, then climbs up onto the box seat. They ride a few miles along the narrow track, the fog clearing away from the river, before wending through a wood of elms and birches. They enter the estate through an iron gate. The lantern swags little glimpses into view, picks out a stone fountain and a bower in one of the gardens along the path. Beyond the dome of pale light the heavy facade and tall white windows of the house come into view. The steep tiled roof is run through with dormer windows that jut out like tiny caves in a cliffside.

  The front door is carved from a solid piece of oak and bears the name Groen above a coat of arms—an eagle reared up and holding a sword in its talons. They pass into the foyer and Van Schooten sets the paintings against the wall. “Mr. Groen won’t be disturbed tonight, but he will meet with you at breakfast. I have a small cottage at the back of the estate, but the others sleep up in the attic rooms. Mr. Brouwer here will show you up. Good night.” His epic errand dispensed with, Van Schooten is out the door and she hears his boots along the gravel drive. Tomas Brouwer holds the lantern, his expression blank, before he reaches for her bundle of clothes and the painting box. Reflexively, she picks them up herself, unwilling to be parted from them. In a gentle voice, he says, “I have to take the horses to the stable, but I’ll take you up first.”

  He leads the way across the marble floor and they pass behind the wide staircase to a narrow passageway she assumes is designated for the servants. Tomas is tall and meticulous in his movements, smells of leather and horses. His hands against the lantern are pale and thin; they seem at odds with his tending of the stables and the grounds. She follows him up the steep wooden stairs, drenched in his shadow.

  “Mr. van Schooten said you are also the gardener…”

  Tomas turns to her, smiles, and gently presses a finger to his lips. “The cook is sleeping and we don’t want to be poisoned at breakfast.”

  They reach the attic hallway and a series of closed doors. Sara expects her sleeping quarters to be next to the storeroom, nestled beside the peat and firewood, so she’s surprised to find a spacious room at the end of the house, hewn under giant crossbeams. Three dormer windows look down onto the gardens and a bed cantilevers from the wall on an iron frame. There’s a small desk and an easel and a linen cupboard for her clothes. Tomas lights a candle for her and says good night. He has a kind face, she thinks, the face of a man who’s spent his life around horses and roses. After he’s gone she surveys the big room. It strikes her that perhaps she’s been accorded special privileges, given the largest of the servant rooms, a room once reserved for a head butler. Far from smelling of sawdust and peat, the room smells of sweet woodruff and wax and lavender. She unbundles her clothes and puts on a nightdress before lying on the mattress stuffed with cotton. That first night she refuses to peel back the wool blanket or bed linens, as if this will delay her arrival.

  * * *

  Cornelis Groen is a rheumatic bachelor in his late sixties, the son of a Heemstede founder who can trace his name back to the twelfth century. After a brief career as the inspector of weights and measures in Haarlem, Cornelis became a trader for the East India Company and eventually inherited his father’s fortune and retired to the Groen estate. An amateur scientist, collector, and gardener, he wears a velvet-lined dressing gown with a pair of scissors dangling from a leather belt in case he needs to snip a stem or leaf at short notice. He also uses it to shred the tobacco for his long clay pipe that he likes to wedge beside the scissors against his waistline. Decades of unmarried life have inclined him toward his own idiosyncrasies
and a misplaced sense of occasion. When Sara is summoned to breakfast that first morning, before the light has flushed the treetops, she finds him standing beneath a portrait of what looks to be his father, with a faint echo of the elder’s pose—hands clasped and eyes cast into the middle distances as if contemplating a heavy burden or loss. Cornelis’s eyes are a startling, febrile blue.

  The dining room table has been set as if for a banquet still life—sliced apples and nuts arranged on silver trays, a loaf of bread broken in a basket, a wheel of cheese in yellow wax. Two places have been set with starched cotton napkins and hand-painted china plates. Groen turns on his heels and looks at Sara for a moment, stiffening in his joints. He is pale and tall, but also stooped in the shoulders, as if a weight is pulling on his chest. There is no formality of introductions—he speaks to her as if picking up the thread of a conversation begun in a different room. “Are you much troubled by dreams, Mrs. de Vos?”

  Sara crosses the room toward him. “Not all that much.”

  “I had Mrs. Streek put some lavender in your linen cupboard because I’ve always suspected it wards off ill thoughts and troubled sleep. I liked your husband’s work, but he had certain incapacities. Finishing something was one of them. I imagine he haunts your dreams and for that I’m regretful.” He looks out the window that overlooks the front acres—a tendril of sunlight is edging its way into a thicket. “Every morning I stand here and watch the sun gild the trees and the grottoes. It’s like drawing a breath before the day begins in earnest. Are you hungry or could you tolerate a brief tour of the household?”

  Sara hasn’t eaten since Amsterdam and feels faint with hunger. “At your pleasure, Mr. Groen.”

  “Perhaps a few slices of apple and some herring before we walk about. But you must call me Cornelis. We’ll consider this an informal arrangement, a squaring of the ledger, yes, but certainly not servitude. Dear Father in heaven, we thank you for this bounty. Please, serve yourself.”

  Sara sits and places some cheese, herring, and bread onto her plate. She waits for Cornelis to take his first mouthful before she begins eating. He slices and chews with great concentration.

  “I’ve already hung your florals that we acquired, one of them in the Kunstkammer, the others in a barely used sitting room. You have a background in still lifes? I made certain enquiries in Haarlem. The cheese is from my own pastures. We have dairy cattle off toward the dunes in the west of the village. Forgive me for saying, but I don’t think the florals are the best I’ve seen. A hair short of prodigious would be my approximation.”

  Sara looks up from her plate and wonders whether Cornelis has always been so simultaneously frank and meandering. She has the sense of listening into a conversation he’s having with himself or with the room around him. She realizes now that Barent had been strangely silent about his time spent at the estate, referring to the patron simply as a fussy old burgher with too much time and money on his hands. She finishes her mouthful of bread and says, “They were painted under urgent time constraints. Sir, I wonder if we might talk about the terms of my employment. I have read the court document and contract, but I’m uncertain how I’ll repay my husband’s debt to you.”

  Groen brandishes a morsel of herring between two fingers. “Ah, let’s not talk of debt. Would you pass me that butter dish, meisje?”

  Sara hands him the silver dish and watches as he slathers some butter onto a heel of bread.

  “Before he passed away, my father was a landscape painter and I trained in his workshop from the age of twelve. I helped my husband with his work, when I wasn’t painting my own still lifes. I could continue with the landscapes if you like.”

  “Eat up and we’ll take that tour.” Cornelis looks back out toward the window and nods, as if approving of the sunlight’s passage across his treetops.

  * * *

  Their first stop is the kitchen, where Mrs. Streek, a stout and ruddy Frisian woman, is scrubbing a copper pot. Cornelis enters tentatively and explains that there are actually two kitchens, one for cooking and one for “inventory and display.” Mrs. Streek looks up from the soapy water and asks whether they’re done with the breakfast dishes. “A second sitting is in the stars, I believe, Mrs. Streek,” says Cornelis. “I’m showing our guest around the place.” Mrs. Streek rinses the pot under some scalding water and says, “A guest, is it?” She never once looks at Sara, and they demurely pass into an adjacent room glinting with copper pans, pewter dishes, a glass-fronted cupboard that displays crockery and hand-painted china. “Mrs. Streek would never do more than boil water in here. I’ve caught her polishing the silver on her day off. Grew up with the herring mongers of Friesland so perhaps that’s part of it.”

  They pass into a long hallway hung with Venetian mirrors. Sara glimpses a number of sitting rooms as they walk along, their fireplaces unlit and stacked with beech logs. Not a cinder in sight. They come through a reception room paved with marble, the chairs and tables covered in drop cloths. “My father hosted dignitaries when I was a child, but we’ve been short of occasion lately.” They stop in a narrow room with rose-colored leaded windows and a small wooden table arranged with delicate china. “This is where I take the tea that the apothecary prescribes. Many years ago I imported china from the oriental provinces and I had to train them to stop painting their supernatural pagan fantasies onto the dishware.” He picks up a delicate teacup and turns it in the rosin light. A white magnolia is painted on the side. “Now, let’s go see the Kunstkammer.”

  At the end of the hallway is a set of double doors and Cornelis takes a key from a chain around his waist and unlocks them. “My father may have dug the first waterways in this area and commissioned a school and church, but he had no eye for beauty. He was a pragmatist, not an aesthete. He helped the local peasants set up a bleach works and they became famous for the laundry they mangled in the village. I like to think this is the least practical room in the house.”

  Cornelis throws open the doors with great ceremony, only to realize the curtains are drawn and his guest can’t see anything but a sea of darkness. He rushes into the room ahead of her and begins pulling back the velvet curtains. The room blanches into view one dagger of light at a time. “I try to keep the light at bay so the paintings won’t dull between viewings.”

  Sara estimates the room is about sixty feet in length, with an ornate ceiling twenty feet above the white marble floor. Except for a patch of blank wall at the far end, every inch of wall space is covered with paintings. At first, she doesn’t know where to cast her attention—the walls are choked with color and a maddening variety of composition. She wants to pluck a single painting off the wall and hold it by a window, her face close enough to discern the brushstrokes. But then she begins to discern a pattern: along the left wall the landscapes flow into the seascapes before a transition to still lifes at the corner and along the back wall. The right side of the room, flanking the tall windows, is filled with portraits and genre paintings. There’s a general movement from nature to objects to quotidian excerpts of a man’s life, a painterly route from God’s kingdom to the shopkeeper’s dustbin. In this moment she feels a glimmer of affection for Cornelis Groen, for the mind that has gathered all this in one place, but then he says: “Your husband helped me arrange the paintings into a natural pattern. He arranged all these works like the notes of an opera.”

  She feels a sudden chill of loneliness and longing for Barent before it subsides back to steady anger. To collect herself, she walks the perimeter of the room. It’s more work than she’s ever seen assembled in one place and she wonders whether it rivals the court collections in Den Haag. She turns to face the back wall, from where she’d entered, and notices that it’s filled with mythical allegories and histories, with rippled Greek gods and martyred saints. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, spinning slightly in place, and looks over at Cornelis, who stands by one of the tall windows. “I would recommend starting in that far corner. Many of them are from artists living in or passing
through Haarlem, but there are also a few stray Italians and Flemish imports.”

  The teeming room, its sheer scale, keeps her in place for a moment. She resolves to look at one painting at a time and walks over to the far corner. Each work has a small plaque below with its artist, descriptive title, and date of execution. She suspects Cornelis has devised some of the more grandiose titles himself—Serene Landscape with Heroic Figures and Noble Hills in Dawn Light with Great Church. The titles given by the artists are less emphatic, like the circular oak panel by Jan van Goyen, simply called Landscape with an Old Tree, from 1620. The composition is straightforward—the outskirts of a small village, a few figures on horseback, a boat on a pond, a lone tree—but the atmosphere is flushed with muted browns and sepia-tinted clouds. In the foreground Sara can see traces of walnut ink Van Goyen must have used on the tree. The whole scene is wrapped in permanent twilight. She hears Groen’s halting footsteps coming across the parquet floor toward her. Somehow he’s left the Kunstkammer to light his pipe and returned without her noticing. He says, “Van Goyen studied landscape with Esaias van de Velde, who died a few years back in Den Haag. He’s hanging right above him. I try to put the master above the pupil whenever I can. That was one of my ideas and your husband liked it.” She looks up at Summer Landscape, from 1614. A few villagers walking along a pathway under feathered trees, it contains the same secretive tints and tones. The walkers are painted so faintly that the road can be seen through their bodies and Sara can’t decide whether this is a defect or a flourish.

  As she moves down toward the seascapes, Cornelis puffs at her side, studying her studying the paintings. Ships tossed about in squalls, or men climbing the rigging toward the Dutch flag of a lion on a rampart, twelve cannons bared at starboard. Into the still lifes with their staged meals, the glistening hearts of oysters against chill pewter, the husk of a bread roll, the rind and peel of half-eaten fruits. She sees her own depiction of the Semper Augustus tulip with a host of other flowers, the light pouring down from some unknown source. It’s not a terrible painting, she thinks, but in all its technical competence it’s rather forgettable. Nearby is a vanitas that achieves something lasting—a skull, a Bible, and a telescope arranged on a table, the pallid light and weak shadows perfectly capturing the chill loneliness of midwinter. They suggest there are a thousand dead white afternoons that wait for us all.