The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  Lead-tin yellow radiates from the next Vermeer she shows her students, A Lady Writing a Letter. “We think her garment is all gold and yellow, trapped in the light from the window, but the lead-tin yellow is only in the highlights—a series of bright invitations to the eye. Most of the fabric is muted and overrun with delicate grays. In his way, Vermeer is asking us to complete the painting in our minds. He paints in a suggestive rather than a descriptive mode … We’re the ones who complete the image.”

  There are a few head nods out in the auditorium, a pen held against a lip in consideration. Ellie thinks about the new Sara de Vos painting of the child’s funeral and the way it extends the artist’s life beyond the known and documented. Had she taken Hendrik a little more seriously, had her ego not been riled, she would have asked detailed questions about the painting’s provenance. Just this morning, she spent several hours in a research database scanning for mentions of funeral images in the seventeenth-century catalogue—there were many, but none that matched the new scene. After the library, she’d walked across campus to her office and typed the two drafted letters on her computer—one to Max Culkins and one to the chair of her department. Both letters outline the reasons for her resignation but refer to the transgression as “an unfortunate slip of moral conscience” instead of a calculated forgery. By way of explanation, she typed: I was twenty-six and deluded about how everything worked in the world, including myself. She suspects she has let herself off too lightly in these letters. The thought of them sealed and addressed in her purse under the lectern tugs at her attention every few minutes. She’s decided that she won’t send them until she has personally returned the fake to the Leiden archive and accepted responsibility for it. Even if it ruins her financially, she will reimburse them for whatever they paid for her copy. If she were to send the letters now Max Culkins wouldn’t let her within a mile of those paintings. It lightens her mind knowing the letters are written and sealed.

  She looks up at the projector screens. “Next, let’s look at Vermeer’s The Girl with the Red Hat. The Dutch term for this kind of painting is tronien. These are busts or heads, and the figures are often wearing exotic hats or clothes. The person is usually invented, rather than depicted. This is a small painting on a wood panel and it’s possibly experimental in nature, a way for Vermeer to perfect the use of small blurred points of light.”

  A male student in a wool cap throws up his hand near the front of the auditorium. “Her mouth is slightly open. Is she about to say something?”

  Ellie says, “An open mouth was a sign of sexual availability in Dutch culture at the time. A signifier of sorts.”

  “So Vermeer’s basically perving on her…” the student says. He gets some encouraging laughter from the back.

  Ellie is about to fire off a rejoinder when an older man’s American accent comes through the semidarkness of the back row. “He’s projecting onto her, no doubt, if she ever existed to begin with. By the way, Bub, he wasn’t much older than you when he painted this. So show a little respect.”

  It’s East Coast, she thinks, probably New York or New Jersey, the kind of accent that pronounces human as yewman. For a few moments, she doesn’t connect the voice with her memories.

  The auditorium cranes to see who’s put the smartarse in his place with such gusto. Ellie wonders whether a visiting academic has decided to sit in on her class and no one bothered to tell her. Or perhaps this is the new university chancellor, an American scholar she’s never taken the time to meet and who has a reputation as a disciplinarian. Irrationally, she wonders whether he’s dropped by to hear one of her lectures before he fires her for academic misconduct. She sees an old man in a khaki vest shuffling toward the rear exit. She tries to bring her attention back to her lecture notes, then looks squarely at the boy in the wool cap. “All art contains desire. Vermeer’s just being a little more honest about it than some of the others.” Then there’s a fleeting profile as the old man closes the auditorium door gently behind him. No matter how transformed by age, it’s a face she could never forget. She stands behind the lectern in silence for a long moment. Eventually she puts a new Vermeer slide onto the screen and forces herself to talk about light.

  Heemstede

  SUMMER 1637

  Sara wants to give Griet’s children a proper burial, at least on canvas. Painting the girl by the frozen river had been a companion to her grief and she wonders if she can offer Griet some solace. She thinks of her winter scene hanging above a merchant’s desk or in an austere sitting room, a thousand hours and shades by her hand. It was never meant to be decorative—she’d somehow never imagined it hanging on a wall—but burghers like Cornelis had a habit of transforming the world’s objects. A burial shroud or a human bone from the Orient was a thing of dinnertime curiosity and philosophizing. An occasion for comment. She feels unable to paint a well-proportioned image of the ruins in falling light. It feels like a lie, like an affront to Griet’s torment.

  She thinks of the portrait commissions that arrange the dead for a widow, the children plucked from the afterlife to sit neatly at a kitchen table arranged with apples and copper pans. Or the husband ported back to the living, a hand on his paunch as he blazes with good health by the hearth. Why not rebuild the turrets and the mud-walled huts? Why not capture the procession leading down from the church in the late dusk of high summer? She sees the candles burning behind the rose-colored windows, the pallbearers trudging along in rolled shirtsleeves.

  She makes sketches in charcoal, rejoins the lines and lintels, but then finds herself unable to paint the scene on a sized canvas. After checking her proportions and reconstructions against Cornelis’s scale model, she realizes that the fault is one of atmosphere, not composition. Despite its being midsummer, the lushness of the full foliage feels orchestrated and false. It reminds her of a still life, of striated tulips in a painted vase, of curling lemon rinds against wood grain. Beautiful perhaps, but also an insult, she thinks, to the buried dead up on the hill, to the hundred or so souls who prattled with fever before they drew their last earthly breath. No, it must be in winter, the trees bare, the river frozen. Out of plague season, yes, but true to the desolation of the spirit. She tells no one what she’s painting. For all Cornelis knows it’s a summer landscape with a picturesque village in the twilight. Perhaps that’s what Barent had promised long before the whale and the apple—the comfort of nostalgia at dusk. She can’t bring herself to do that.

  Each Saturday she returns to the remains of the settlement and sits with Griet for an hour before making more sketches. Tomas takes her in the wagon and she sits up beside him on the box seat. He fishes on the riverbank until she is ready to return to the estate. She takes Griet little gifts from the main house—cinnamon cakes and sugared almonds and bottles of beer. Griet complains that such luxuries are wasted on her, but each time she unbundles them with relish. She tells stories of the town. The traveling bohemian who blew glass, who walked over the dunes one day and decided to stay. The courtship rituals of the young men, the way they used to climb a girl’s roof and attach a green branch to the ridge beam or carve their beloved’s name in a tree trunk or write it in the sand of the riverbank with a stick. “All the men were gamblers,” she tells Sara. “They wagered on the outcomes of marriages and battles during the war with Spain and whether a child would be born a son or whether the river would freeze one winter over another. They even bet on who would die from the plague and who would live. Handing over a fistful of stuivers on your deathbed was considered a way of going out with good humor and grace.”

  “You had six sons?”

  Griet nods. “The youngest, Jakob, was only six when he crossed over. He was the last to go.”

  Sara imagines the boy’s death. She sees her funeral depiction taking shape. Nothing in the world is more sinister than a child’s coffin.

  * * *

  One afternoon she climbs the old stone tower with her rucksack to see the view. Griet has told her that it was meant fo
r the burgomaster and official town business, that a bell used to ring out storm warnings and proclamations when the town was at its height. Cornelis calls it the Tower of Weights and Measures. The view from the top is a circle of trees and a flank of grassy dunes, the river a tin-white ribbon under the sun. The horizon is cloudless, the color of chalk, the sea a gauzy blue line to the west. She imagines the landscape in the full of winter, the geese gone from the riverbank, the light diffuse. Tomas waves at her from the reeds, his fishing pole kept perfectly still. She waves back at him, marveling at how small he looks. In the distance she can see the green polder off toward the coast and the glinting crosshatching of the drainage canals. She will turn everything she sees white and brittle, change the sky to a field of smelted lead.

  As she unpacks the camera obscura, it strikes her that she has never painted exactly what she sees. Surely, this is the way of all art. The painter sees the world as if through the watery lens of a pond. Certain things ripple and distort while others are magnified and strangely clear. Rembrandt, the famous and adopted son of Amsterdam, ignores the shocking newness taking shape all around him. He ignores the quayside markets of exotic animals, the armadillos in wooden cages, the Hungarian bandmaster striking up an orchestra from a houseboat lit with paper lanterns. Instead, he mostly paints in the unbroken lineage of portraits and histories.

  She doesn’t mean to paint from God’s perspective—that would be a sin of vanity—but the height inflects the scene with something godly and omniscient. She positions the camera obscura on the ledge of the stone wall. Sixty feet in the air, she bends down to hood her gaze through the eyeholes. The world blinks, sways in two, then comes back into sharp relief. Everything converges toward the pinnacle of the ruined church, the vanishing point cutting through the bright ether of the sky. She looks through the darkened chamber and then draws some charcoal lines on her paper. The camera obscura has a narrowing effect, allows her to see shadows and lines and the dapplings of sunlight as pure geometry. The crenellated wall beside the church becomes a necklace of alternating shades, a plait of dark and light.

  * * *

  When she rides home on the box seat, Tomas complains of never catching any fish. He claims that the river is barren just here, that the trout never school in places that carry a stain. Changing the subject, he asks her to explain the camera obscura.

  “I saw you using it up on the tower,” he says, staring out at the late afternoon above the horses’ heads.

  Tomas has an inexhaustible curiosity for all aspects of the painting trade. He stretches and sizes her canvases to her specifications, grinds her pigments with the utmost care, down to the last shard of lapis lazuli or flake of lead white. He has this same exacting manner with horses and plants, she has noticed. Shodding a horse or grafting a rose resembles an act of ritual under his steady hands. On more than one occasion, she has thought about painting his portrait just to capture the boyish earnestness of his gaze and the dexterity of his hands.

  She says, “It’s a small dark chamber. Picture a room where you look at the outside world through a hole in the closed curtains. It frames everything into view, throws a clear image onto the back wall.”

  “Why is it necessary?”

  “It tricks the eye. You look out at the countryside and you see the whole thing run together. The obscura lets you see the shapes and colors in isolation. Everything is captured.”

  Tomas reknuckles the reins and considers. He says, “It does some of the looking for you.”

  “Yes, it does,” she says brightly.

  “I’d like to look through it sometime.”

  “Of course.”

  They ride along in silence for a while. The uncultivated bogs and heaths out by the village make Tomas talk of all the work he has to do over the summer. She likes the sound of his voice—it’s unhurried and careful. The trimming of the hedgerows, the pruning of the fruit trees, the chopping of the winter firewood. His hours spent fishing are the only times she ever sees him at rest; he seems happiest in the throes of daily work.

  As they near the stone fence around the inner acres, his mood changes and he asks, “What happened to your husband?”

  Sara has been in Heemstede several months and it’s the first time anyone besides Cornelis has asked about Barent. She had assumed that her employer had said enough about her situation to settle gossip and speculation among the household staff.

  “Forgive me,” he says after a moment. “I have no right to ask that.”

  “We were very poor after we lost our daughter. He couldn’t make a living so he left me holding the docket.”

  He considers this, looks off at a wooded croft, the trees burnished with northern sunlight. “That is not an honorable thing to do, if I may say so.”

  “You may. No one has ever wronged me so.”

  Tomas pulls up the horses and gets down to open the gate. Cornelis insists that every gate and door be closed as a precaution against the intrusions of untamed nature—wind, humidity, malevolent humors, wandering animals. As he sets off for the gate, without looking at her, Tomas says, “I’m glad you came to us. We all are.”

  Sara smiles to herself as he carefully unlatches the gate.

  * * *

  She works on the picture for the rest of the summer, mounting a burial one brushstroke at a time. In the boy’s coffin she hopes Griet will see the whole town honored and memorialized. She is nervous to show Cornelis because she suspects he wanted a bucolic scene with ruins or the reconstructed village hunkered majestically against the dunes. Reforming the buildings turns out to be the easy part; they offer the certainty of straight lines and strict perspective. The difficulty is in the onlookers down on the frozen river and the funeral procession itself. She paints the villagers in thin, translucent layers of paint and plans to build them up slowly into full color and vitality. But one night she leaves her work for the day and returns to it the next morning to find a new effect in place. The bodies and clothes of the villagers have silvered and dimmed away slightly, the pigments absorbed back into the canvas. It’s a fault in the sizing and grounding of the canvas, either her mistake or Tomas’s, but the effect is pleasing to her. She recalls the picture Summer Landscape by Van Goyen and rushes down to the Kunstkammer to view it again. When she returns to the attic she decides to continue building up the layers of the funeral-goers and onlookers, but she will stop just shy of making them full-bodied and completely opaque. Their dark winter clothes, their hands and faces, will be faintly transparent, the lines of the landscape barely discernible but nonetheless visible behind their bodies. These are not ghosts, she thinks, but figments of a woman’s unspeakable grief.

  Even though she has only worked on a single painting all summer, Tomas continues to bring her carefully stretched and sized canvases. He prepares them out in the stables and brings them to her three and four at a time, placing them like an offering below the eaves of her attic workroom. Several times she has gone out to the horse stalls and seen him at work—standing in his breeches over the cauldron, boiling the pelt clippings into glue until it all has the texture of honey, smearing it meticulously onto the stretched canvases with a palette knife. She’d shown him the process only once and handed him a written recipe. When he handed it back to her she realized he couldn’t read. Now she has enough prepared canvases to work a year without pause.

  On the afternoon that she finishes the funeral painting he knocks tentatively on her door and she tells him to come in. Stepping inside, his eyes averted—he never looks at her work unless he’s invited to—he places three more canvases at the far end of the room.

  “You’ll have me painting for the rest of eternity,” she says.

  “Are they all right?”

  “Perfectly made, but there’s no need to make more. I’ll teach you how to do the grounding next.”

  “I’d like that.”

  She stands by the window, brush in hand, and looks back at the funeral scene. She dries the end of her brush on the sleev
e of her painter’s smock. “Tomas, would you come and tell me what you think of this?”

  He brightens whenever she uses his first name. This is something that she notices. He walks slowly toward the window, hat in hand. She’s surprised by how much she wants him to like the painting, by the sound of her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears. When he turns to look at the canvas his face turns grave, an expression of genuine sorrow darkening his features. He moves his face close to study the brushwork, just the way she has taught him, then stands back a few feet to take in the totality.

  “I was thinking of taking it to show Griet before presenting it to Mr. Groen. Do you think she’ll like it?”

  His mouth looks as if he’s swallowed a bitter almond and she fears the worst. She has labored for months over an epic failure.

  He says, “I’m no expert.”

  “You have eyes, don’t you? You have a heart and a mind.” There’s a hint of exasperation in her voice.

  He gives her a gently admonishing look, then comes back to the painting. He looks at it from several angles, cocking his head each time and biting his lip. Quietly, he says, “We are rising and looking down from a great height. How did you do that?”

  “All those sketches from the tower.”

  He swallows and folds his arms across his chest. “I can feel the cold in my hands.”

  “Is that all you have to say about it?”

  “I was raised to feel things and not speak them.”

  “But if I made you say something, what would you say?”

  In profile, as he stares at the painting, he could pass for a man moved to prayer. “It will make her weep,” he says. “It’s the saddest and most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen.”

  She’s overwhelmed with a feeling of tenderness and gratitude toward him. He turns to look at her and startles, as if he sees something new in her gaze. He looks down at the floor, runs his hand along his hatband. For the first time it occurs to her that Tomas might be courting her, however coyly, that all these canvases are a ploy, two dozen perfectly sized excuses to be in her presence. She feels her breath tighten up against her rib cage.