The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 18

  Cornelis crosses toward the back wall and gestures to a closed door. “There is one more room.”

  On the other side of the wall is a small space that reminds her of a sepulcher, a place where a saint might be buried behind an altar. Only instead of it being dank and stony, a downpour of light breaks through a ceiling of wrought iron and glass. “My father used to take his naps back here before the days turned dark.” In the center of the room is a wooden table with a model village mocked up in wood and clay, painted with bright greens and dun browns. Hills and dunes have been formed from plaster and there’s a narrow pathway that leads off the side of the table like a trail to oblivion. Sara stands over the tiny village and then looks up at the walls, where she recognizes Barent’s landscape style—heavy skies pushing down on blanched horizons, a middle ground of stark trees and windswept dunes.

  “They called it Groenstede, after my father. He built them a school and a church. A lot of the villagers worked at the bleach works or in my father’s gardens. They used to throw a feast in his honor once a year.”

  Sara brings her eyes back to the table. “Where is it?”

  “To the west, not more than a few miles. Technically, we own the land, but it’s always been an independent township. I decided to capture the main vistas and build a tiny replica, to set them down in the record. I hired your husband to paint the environs and then he was supposed to render the village itself in paint before it disappeared.”

  “Why would it disappear?”

  “In the last plague almost everyone died and the rest left. People for miles became convinced that it was a place of death, a cursed piece of ground. Now it’s abandoned except for a madwoman who refuses to leave. I’m sentimental about my father’s legacy and want to make sure it’s put down in the annals. I won’t have any sons, you know. There’s a nephew in Leiden—he’s my only heir.”

  “And what would you have me paint?”

  “I’d like you to continue on the town itself. To capture it.”

  Sara folds her arms. “Buildings are not my strength.”

  “Let me be blunt—given the village’s history, there’s not a painter in Haarlem who would take this commission.” He smiles thinly. “So on this front consider your debt to be a strong form of encouragement.”

  The subtlety and refinement Sara had glimpsed in Cornelis Groen’s Kunstkammer, in the painstaking assembly of so many paintings, now seems run through with something coarser. He turns and walks from the room, pipe smoking at his side, leaving her to stand beneath her husband’s paintings.

  Sydney

  AUGUST 2000

  Helen Birch has made cupcakes for somebody’s birthday and the leftovers are laid out in a Tupperware container when Ellie arrives in the conservation studio that adjoins her lab. The studio faces north, with big windows onto the Domain and a glimpse of the harbor. The room is flushed with watery light. For all the cold science and detection that goes on in here, Ellie is taken aback by the clutter—binders and books stacked in no particular order, a shelf of pigments and solvents labeled with illegible handwriting, a plastic cup brimming with brushes and cheap ballpoint pens. It reminds her of her grad school days in Brooklyn, before she left her stifling apartment and reinvented her life. There’s a sun-bleached copy of Alan Burroughs’s Art Criticism from a Laboratory on the windowsill, an early classic in the field she hasn’t read since her days at the Courtauld Institute in the early 1950s. Industrial safety manuals and videos line a wooden book cart, something Helen has apparently stolen or borrowed from the research library. In addition to being the museum’s chief conservation scientist, Helen is also the emergency safety officer. If a bomb goes off or someone sets fire to the Asian Gallery, she will be the one to lead the survivors to a designated meeting area in the parking lot. In the far corner of the room is a door that leads to the lab where Helen keeps her spectrometers, microscopes, and X-ray machines. Whenever she places a painting above the X-ray bulbs she puts a red cone and a caution sign out in the hallway. The other conservators affectionately call this area the fallout shelter.

  Ellie watches Helen lick some white icing from her fingertips. She’s got an optivisor perched on her forehead that makes her look like a welder in a white lab coat. Her hair is cropped short, almost spiked above the ears, and she’s wearing a mohair sweater under the lab coat. Somehow, Ellie wasn’t expecting the cupcakes. It’s hard to imagine Helen cooking anything beyond chemicals at high temperature.

  Helen says, “You sure you won’t try one? This bugger’s got buttermilk icing and a whipped cream center. I injected it with a piping bag. You know, because it’s important to squeeze as many additional calories into these little bombshells as possible. I’m paying for this for a week at least.”

  “Honestly, I’m fine. I had a big breakfast.”

  “What’d you have?”

  “Sorry?”

  “For breakfast.”

  “Oh, eggs and toast.”

  “I wouldn’t call that big. When we used to live out at Orange I’d make Keith, that’s the ex, the whole grill-up sort of thing. Bacon, sausages, eggs, grilled tomato. Good old-fashioned country fry-up. Now that bastard can make his own fucking breakfasts.”

  Ellie doesn’t know where to look. She sits across from Helen at a wooden desk strewn with manila folders and experimental data readouts. Helen keeps glancing up at her computer screen like she’s scanning her e-mail in-box or a favorite baking website. Bringing her back to the room, Ellie says, “So, you got all three de Vos paintings at once? Must make testing easier.”

  To her computer screen, Helen says, “Yeah, the Leiden ones were in lockup until Max got back from China. Then the other one arrived and he had a curator bring them all down at the same time. Works for me.” Helen’s gaze goes back to the frosted domes in the Tupperware tray. “Those are a bloody crime against humanity,” she says. “A death knell for menopausal women everywhere…”

  A little testily, Ellie says, “I’ve only got about half an hour before I have to go to the university.”

  “’Course, sorry, love, I got sucked into some e-mails. You ever get those ones from Nigeria, you know the crown princess in exile or a chief asking for money?”

  “Not really. I only use the university e-mail so they screen all that out.”

  “Well, they must be sending me yours. My Hotmail spam folder is choked with them.” Helen gets up from her chair with a clipboard of papers, takes a final lick of her fingertips, and then goes to wash her hands at a sink in the corner that sports a mounted first-aid kit and an industrial eyewash station. She scrubs her hands thoroughly in hot water, up onto the wrists, like a surgeon. She turns back to Ellie and says, “Well, let’s take a look at the pictures then.”

  She leads Ellie toward an alcove and flips on a few light switches. Overhead fluorescents buzz to life and a bank of tungsten spotlights, mounted on black metal stands, flares up. “Sometimes I feel like an actor walking onstage. Either that, or I’m working inside a toaster oven,” Helen says. The three paintings are still in their frames and lean against easels in the artificial sunlight. Ellie steps closer as the canvases brighten. The two Edge paintings are adjacent to each other and the funeral scene is at one end. Helen consults her clipboard while Ellie takes in the infrared and ultraviolet photographs of the paintings tacked to a cork bulletin board.

  Helen slips one hand into her lab coat pocket. “Now, I’ve imported the X-radiographs into Photoshop, so I’ll show you those last on the computer, but let’s go through the initial findings. Let’s start with the new painting, the funeral scene from Leiden. Appears fairly standard for the period … double ground, no underdrawing visible, so I’d say the artist used pale chalk since the carbon in black chalk would show up in infrared or X-ray. Brushwork and pigments are consistent with one of the other paintings and with what’s known of the time period. A little more impasto than the other two, but still consistent. A few fugitive colors in use, like here she uses some copper resinate
for the greens along the riverbank and it’s turned brown over time. Ultraviolets show very little history of cleaning and varnishing so I’d say this one probably sat in an attic somewhere for a good while. On the back you can see tiny sediment from frass on the stretcher, so that’s consistent with neglect. Like almost all paintings from the seventeenth century, the stretcher was replaced some time ago, probably in the nineteenth century, along with the frame. So, all up, I’d say we’re dealing with an authentic work here. That’s in the plus column for Leiden—a new work by the same artist.”

  Ellie turns her attention to At the Edge of a Wood and its copy. The artificial aging she’d done on her own canvas, the intricate spiderweb craquelure and varnishing, seem a bit showy in this light. “What about these two?” she asks.

  Helen sniffs back the beginnings of a winter cold or a decade of inhaling solvents. “Here’s where it gets interesting. Seems to me there were two hypotheses going into this horse race. One, the same artist or her apprentices made a replica of the work in the studio or, two, this is a later, unauthorized copy.”

  Ellie appreciates that she doesn’t use the word forgery, which seems to belong to daytime television. She says, “I’m all ears.”

  Helen takes a crumpled handkerchief from her lab coat pocket, blows her nose, then replaces it. She lowers the optivisor over her eyes and gets up close to the fake, her hands braced against her bent knees. Straightening, she continues talking, but with the visor still pulled down her words take on a magnified, robotic menace. “In many regards these paintings are cut from the same cloth, so to speak. Canvases match the style and weave of the period, ground and underlayers pan out, pigments are generally of the period.”

  “What do you mean generally?”

  She lifts the optivisor, blinking as the light hits her eyes. “You know anything about lead-tin yellow?”

  Here it is, Ellie thinks, the chemical proof itself. “I’ve read the literature, but not in a while. Remind me.” She feels her stomach clench.

  “Right, then, as you probably know it was the main bright yellow up until about 1740, but then it fell off the map for a while. After they started making synthetic yellows in the nineteenth century, some of the old pigments went by the wayside. It was one of them. There’s type one and type two lead-tin yellow, but we don’t really need to go into all that. The reason it fell away was because it was hard to make and quite poisonous—picture fusing lead, tin, and quartz at a thousand degrees and then grinding the resulting glass up and shoving it through a sieve. Not my idea of a fun project … anyway, when the art world rediscovered this pigment they found out that it gives off these metallic soaps as it ages, in this case lead soaps.”

  Helen heads back to stand in front of the original. “See this bit here, how it gets a little pebbly in the bright yellows.” She points to the bright strains in the ice skaters’ scarves.

  Ellie leans in and sees fine-grained distortions that look as if they’re coming from underneath the paint layer. “I can barely see it.”

  Helen says, “Oh, it’s there, believe me. Big time. Under the microscope the yellows look like sandpaper they’re so rough. Maybe that’s where the copyist got the idea.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “When I run the elemental analysis on the one on the left, study the gritty yellows, it shows a fair amount of silica dioxide—the main ingredient in sand. Whoever made this one used sand to try to get the same textured feel, but the metal soaps give it away. There are no lead soaps in the fake from Leiden.”

  Now that the word fake has been trundled out Ellie finds it hard to look at Helen. “Interesting,” is all Ellie can manage.

  “The metallic soaps are the clincher. Do you still want to see the X-ray images?”

  Ellie wants to run from the museum and go sit by the harbor for a day. She wants to quit her job and vanish for six months. But she says, “Sure, might as well.”

  Helen says, “The X-radiograph images just offer up some more nuance. Let’s go back to the computer and take a gander.”

  Helen switches off the lights and they walk back to her disheveled desk. She sits before her computer screen and disrupts a screensaver of intergalactic space. Adobe Photoshop resolves onto the screen. She clicks through some menus and brings up the X-ray images of both Edge paintings, side by side. Because the radiographic sheets are only slightly larger than standard paper, Helen has had to use several per painting and they come up now as skeletal quadrants separated by white lines on deep blacks and grays.

  Ellie leans in, aware of her own breathing, and looks between the two adjacent grids. Just as Helen begins to speak again she notices something in the underlayers of what must be the original. Helen waves the cursor around in the offending corner for emphasis. “I had a professor who used to call this an infrared ghost—a white figure trapped below the paint film. I first saw this one in the infrared images, and then the X-rays brought it out beautifully. There’s no way the forger could have known this was here without an X-ray.”

  In the original painting, Sara de Vos had at some point painted the outline of another figure, a woman, standing at the edge of the wood. The figure appears not to be fully formed, but there was enough lead white in the skin to show up in the X-ray. It has the otherworldly quality of an apparition, a half-woman hovering in a silver-white corona. There is the faint suggestion of two eyes, hollowed out in radiographic relief, and they’re directed at the girl standing against the tree. It’s a woman watching a girl watching the skaters at the edge of a wood. The drama was first envisioned as the act of twin observation—a witness to the onlooker—an idea that fell away as the painting unfolded.

  Helen closes Photoshop and the screen returns to a clutter of icons. Quietly, she says, “The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”

  Manhattan

  SEPTEMBER 1958

  Marty can’t believe how easy it is to open a Midtown post office box under the name of Jake Alpert. It’s the only address he gives to Ellie, but even so, he’s surprised when she sends him an invoice a week after the auction. Under the heading Art Consultation—17th Century she has charged him ninety dollars for the three hours they spent together. It galls him, because he knows he brought her an afternoon of deep pleasure as they sat in the mahogany-paneled jewel box of Thornton and Morrell’s showroom, the flawless diction of the Brit auctioneer more like a holy incantation or Vedic prayer than a sales pitch. Since he can’t write her a check—a bank would check his ID more scrupulously than the post office—he thinks about another meeting and handing her cash. At his desk, working through a patent lawsuit, he finds himself auditioning venues in his mind.

  He invites her to meet up at a jazz club one Monday night after work. He briefly considers Birdland but he’s afraid he’ll run into an acquaintance, one of the many lapsed musicians he’s encountered at the clubs over the years. Instead, he chooses the Sparrow, a second-tier basement club below Fifty-Second. He tells Rachel that he’s meeting some of his squash buddies for a night of beer and jazz. She won’t go to see bebop for the same reason he won’t go to see Impressionist exhibitions—the patterns are pretty but they don’t make sense. Once a month, sometimes more, he goes to a jazz club and relives his time as an aspiring trumpeter in the prep school marching band. He spent many hours listening to Dixieland phonograph records at three-quarter speed, slowing the notes so he could play along. Before his mother died of cancer, when he was in high school, this eccentric hobby was tolerated, even encouraged by his parents. But once his father became a widower, something hardened in the household and the trumpet was seen as a boyish indulgence. His father came into his bedroom one night where he was blowing scales in front of the mirror and simply said, “Enough with that thing. You won’t be fifteen the rest of your life.” Then he was gone, the door closed, the era over. Marty can still feel the embouchure in his facial muscles when he walks into a jazz club, the nervy tension in his jaws when he hea
rs a trumpeter cut loose.

  Ellie agrees to meet him but insists on taking a cab. He walks over from his office, up Broadway where the car showrooms are lit up as if for surgery, chrome fenders in high gloss, then he heads along Fifty-Second Street, past the sorry procession of prewar swing clubs and clip joints and Chinese restaurants. Through a steak house window he sees a ravaged old Steinway and what looks to be a sad cruise ship quartet playing to an empty restaurant. He waits outside the Sparrow and lights up a Dunhill. Within four square blocks of here, in exposed-brick basements he considers to be subterranean temples, he’s seen Charlie Parker and Art Blakey and Fats Navarro ply their trade, names that mean nothing to Rachel, that might as well be obscure baroque painters. If she had her way there would be nothing in the house but Cole Porter and French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, a soft murmuring atmosphere of crooners and blue-greens. When Marty looks at certain Cézannes he sees bluish fuzz—the powdery bloom on the skin of a Concord grape.

  Ellie arrives ten minutes late and overdressed. In her dark wool coat and white beaded dress she looks like she’s going to dinner theater circa 1928, he thinks, smiling broadly as she steps from the cab. He leans in the front window to pay the driver. When the cab pulls away, she says, “I was going to do that.”

  “Can we agree that transportation and meals are on me?”

  She nods and looks up at the club’s neon sign. “I’d be surprised if there’s great art inside.”