The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Page 3
They ride onto the sandy flats, tether the horses to a tree stump, and trundle their belongings down to the site of all the commotion. They set up a base of blankets and baskets. Barent puts together his easel and strainer. He’s asked Sara to work at his side and grind pigments; she will also make her own sketches that can be used back in their workroom. “I was thinking I would paint from the water’s edge, perhaps with the beast’s head in the foreground.” Sara says this arrangement should work nicely, though she believes the scene will carry more drama if painted from above—the enormity of the glassy ocean for scale, the fish marauded by antlike city-dwellers, the shadows shortening in the noonday sun. Barent might even sketch until dusk and then commit the final impressions in the waning light. But recently she’s learned that Barent prefers her ideas in the service of his own, so she says nothing.
While Barent scouts out a spot for his painting—no more than a dozen feet from the nearest artist—Sara and Kathrijn join the circling crowd. The air is heady with fishrot and ambergris, a sweetly foul odor. Kathrijn plugs her nose and holds Sara’s hand. They get a few admonishing stares from the men in leather aprons who are at work with their measuring rods and pomanders. Sara garners from overheard conversation that an official from Rekenkamer has established claim to the animal and will put the carcass up for auction. She hears: “By noon tomorrow, the devil’s bowels will burst out in all this sun and a foul pestilence will cloud the air.” The blubber oil will be sold to the soap works, the teeth used for carved ornaments, the intestinal unguents exported to Paris for musky perfumes. One red-faced chap with a logbook is arguing with a colleague over the length of the devilish beast’s unmentionable, a difference of two inches on a confirmed length of three feet. They debate it with scientific candor, calling it a sexing rod and a clamper in quick succession. Sara is glad to see that Kathrijn is oblivious to the conversations of the men—she scrutinizes the hulking mass from under the rim of her bonnet, perhaps drawn into the whorl of her own nocturnal visions.
The tail is the width of a fishing trawler, spotted with flies and barnacles and greenish parasites. The whale is slightly curled in on itself, like a sleeping cat, and before they know it, mother and daughter have wandered into an alcove of festering stench and the much-debated three-foot phallus. Kathrijn’s piping voice says, “Look, a giant sucker has attached itself to his belly,” and this gets a rowdy laugh from the nearby men. Sara takes Kathrijn by the shoulders and guides her toward the head. A villager asks them if they want to stare into the eye of the beast himself, for three stuivers each. He’s propped a ladder against the jawbone and anchored it in the sand. Kathrijn looks up at her mother plaintively. “You can go up, but I prefer the view from down here,” Sara says. She pays the man his fee and watches as Kathrijn climbs slowly up the ladder. Sara imagines the eye backlit with bafflement, a dumbfounded predator looking out from the dark cave of his own skull and mind. She imagines Kathrijn staring, awestruck, into the abyss of that eye and coming back down, now at peace with the hauntings of her dreams. But Kathrijn’s plodding ladder climb and the stilted way she leans over the eye socket suggests a girl carrying out a penance. She hoods her gaze and stares into the whale’s eye for a long time, then climbs slowly down onto the beach, refusing to say a word about what she’s encountered.
The rest of the afternoon is taken up with sketching and painting. Sara works beside Barent on a blanket, preparing his brushes and pigments, watching him work up passages of translucent green and gray, stippling in veins of yellow ocher as the light changes. There is something mysterious and commanding about his work, an intensity that evades her in the constrained view of a still life. They work for several hours, Kathrijn at their side with her own sketchbook—the pages brimming with leaves and shells and horses. Barent and Sara have no desire to be present when the animal finally expires or its innards rupture, so they make a plan with Clausz to be back on the road well before dusk. Barent captures as much of the scene and light as he can; in their workroom he will fill in the intricate details of the whale from Sara’s sketches. Kathrijn makes little forays down to the water’s edge with sticks and wildflowers. After several trips, Sara realizes her daughter has lashed together a tiny wooden raft and carefully placed some flowering heather on top. Not a funeral pyre exactly, but something to commemorate the whale or float her visions away. The earnest superstitions of seven-year-olds never fail to amaze her. Not thirty feet away, villagers debate the deeper meaning of the whale coming ashore—approaching flood or famine or Berckhey burning to the ground. “God turn away evil from our beloved fatherland,” one of the fishermen keeps muttering.
The trip back to the city is less crowded. An hour from Amsterdam, they stop on the outskirts of a small village for a snack. A peasant family has set up a roadside stand brimming with salted cod, apples, and cheese. There is a ragged-looking boy, about Kathrijn’s age, helping his parents with their stall. Kathrijn, somehow emboldened by her excursion at the beach, asks if she can be the one to buy their food. Barent gives her some money and she steps down from the wagon with the wherewithal of an East Indian trader. She handles the money with care, selecting some apples and wedges of cheese. The peasant family enjoys her manner so much that they send their own son in to conclude the transaction. Everyone is chuffed by the sight of the two seven-year-olds caught up in roadside commerce—there’s even a little haggling over which apples are perfectly ripe. Sara watches it unfold from up on the wagon. The only note of discord is in the boy’s sickly eyes, a tad yellow and drowsy. His hands are well washed and his clothes are clean. Nonetheless, Sara will remember his eyes.
This will be one of the moments Sara tallies when Kathrijn is overcome with fever three days from now. By then, Barent will have worked up the whale scene in meticulous detail—from the ivory serrations of the monster’s mouth to the leather ties on a fisherman’s jerkin. Kathrijn will pass quickly, on the fourth night, her fingertips blackened and her skin crazed with welts. Sara will watch as the only child God has granted her withers and retreats. In the throes of his grief, Barent returns to the painting for months on end, adding figures and actions they did not witness. It becomes so dark and foreboding that they fail to find a buyer for it at the markets. A hooded figure stands on the bow of the enormous head, his back to the painter, plunging an ax into the blackened flesh below. The sky is overrun with lead and smalt. Sara stops painting altogether until winter arrives and the canals freeze over. One blue afternoon, she sees a young girl trudging through a snowy thicket above a frozen branch of the Amstel. Something about the light, about the girl emerging alone from the wood, rouses her to the canvas. Painting a still life suddenly seems unimaginable.
Brooklyn
NOVEMBER 1957
A woman standing in a smock at dawn, grinding pigments and boiling up animal glue on the stovetop. It’s the 1630s, as far as Ellie Shipley is concerned, and canvas can only be bought at the width of a Dutch loom—a little over fifty-four inches. She reads by candlelight, like a method actor, and makes obscure errands into the supply chain that is the stock and trade for period conservators and forgers alike. Cold-pressed linseed oil that does not cloud, oil of spike and lavender, raw sienna, lead white that fumes for a month in a cloud of vinegar. She paints in her kitchenette, where the northern light washes through her grimy windows and the view gives onto the streaming traffic of the Gowanus Expressway. She sees commuters on the city-bound buses, metal ribbons dotted with faces. She wonders sometimes whether those glazed passengers see her makeshift studio as an afterimage. In their mind’s eye they see her bent over the stovetop and think she’s stirring porridge instead of melting animal hide.
The smell itself limits her social life—an atmosphere of oxide and musk. Set above a Laundromat, the apartment has its own weather: a tropical monsoon during business hours and a cooler, drier climate at night. The ceilings carry watermarks and the corner above her bed fluoresces with a delicate brocade of mold. In her final year of an art history
Ph.D. at Columbia, Ellie hasn’t brought anyone home the entire time she’s lived in this apartment. She should be living near the university, but she inherited the absurdly low rent and the lease from a departing student who’d grown up in Brooklyn. Despite the commute, she never quite materialized a Manhattan address. When she writes newsy letters to her parents back in Sydney, she tells them she lives in Greenwich Village, and has to remember to mail the envelopes on her way to the university. She writes about clubs and restaurants and art exhibits she’s never visited. She studies reviews in The New Yorker and works backward to find a glimmering handful of details. Her father’s a Sydney Harbour ferry captain, her mother a school secretary, and she can never decide whether these letters are written out of spite, to remind them of the smallness of their lives, or if they’re musings on a life that’s escaped her grasp. She has traveled halfway around the world, she thinks, to live in studious squalor. Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It’s been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine’s bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.
A few years ago, as a sideline, she began consulting in art restoration and conservation. She had always been good at the technical side of painting and it was easy money. Before art history, she studied at the Courtauld Institute in London and trained for a career in conservation. But despite her being the youngest and most talented of the student restorers, the plum museum jobs always seemed to go to older, male graduates, to the men who sported cable-knit cardigans and Oxbridge accents. Being Australian didn’t help her chances, either. Museum curators treated her like a novelty, a bright spark from the colonies who might find a place as a private tutor or restoring for a small regional collection. And so, about to turn twenty-one, she drifted toward America and art history, toward a department that had two women on its faculty. Three years into her Ph.D., after she’d taken her exams, her supervisor—Meredith Hornsby, an art historian specializing in the Dutch Golden Age—started to feed her restoration assignments. Hornsby favored Ellie because she was the only dissertation student not writing about some aspect of the Italian Renaissance. A British dealer named Gabriel Lodge had been looking for someone to authenticate and touch up old masterworks.
Gabriel Lodge took her out for tea a few times and asked to see photographs of her restoration work. An exile from London and a promising career at Christie’s, Gabriel wore a rumpled, moth-colored suit and carried a worn attaché case that looked like it once belonged to an embassy diplomat. He had a shambling, distracted air, but then he’d be seized by a question or a notion and his eyes would dart back to her face. Over his Earl Grey, he quizzed her about ground recipes and glazes and thread counts in baroque canvases. He hummed and nodded, held a magnifying glass up to her photographs. Apparently she passed these tea shop auditions, because within a few weeks a damaged seventeenth-century painting showed up on her doorstep.
Sometimes the paintings came to her and sometimes she went to them. She signed nondisclosure agreements and was chauffeured to private collections in the city, Long Island, and Connecticut. She killed off afternoons locked inside overdecorated rooms with her wooden case of pigments, oils, and brushes, refinishing a square inch of canvas according to another painter’s style and palette. Or a courier showed up at her apartment with a neglected seventeenth-century Flemish or Dutch portrait and she spent weeks repairing it, relining the worn canvas or restoring layers of ground and glaze. Sometimes they paid her hundreds of dollars for a day’s work, but she found herself unable to spend the money. Because she would have gladly done the work for free, it seemed ill-gotten. The money also felt like a tangible payback for years of being ignored by her male tutors at the Courtauld Institute. To spend it was to dilute its power.
By the time Gabriel came to her with the commission for At the Edge of a Wood, she had saved close to ten thousand dollars—so she technically didn’t need the money. He said the present owner wanted an exact replica made but couldn’t bear to part with the original. She remained skeptical and told him that copying an artwork was not the same as restoring it. But when he produced three high-resolution color photographs of the painting in its frame she felt her breath catch—it was unlike anything else painted by a baroque woman. Here was a winter landscape with the glaucous atmosphere of an Avercamp, the delicate grays and blues and russets, the peasants skating through the ether of twilight above the ice, but with this stark and forlorn figure standing at the tree. She was the onlooker but also the focal point, the center of gravity. This was no village frolic before the onrush of night—a common Avercamp motif—this was a moment of suspension, a girl trapped by the eternity of dusk. The girl had been lavished with very fine brushwork, the hem of her dress frayed by a hundred filaments of paint, each one half the width of a human hair. The painting’s atmosphere, even in the photographs, was incandescent, hushed. It somehow combined the devotional, religious light of a monastery portrait and the moodiness of an Italian allegory.
Gabriel talked at her while she studied the photographs, working the surfaces in tiny circles with her eyes. She felt a prickle of recognition as he talked. It was like seeing her first Vermeer at age twelve on a school trip to see a traveling exhibition—the flush of that beautiful and melancholy light coiled at the base of her spine and had to be carried through the world. Gabriel told her that not only was Sara de Vos the first woman to be admitted to a Guild of St. Luke, but this was also her only surviving work. Because the painting had been privately held for so long, it occupied a small but cultish position in the art world. Over the centuries, very few art historians had actually seen it—or even knew about it. Now she could observe it in extravagant detail with the photographs and find a way to copy it. “An unbelievable honor,” he said. Dutch women didn’t paint landscapes in the seventeenth century—that was the general understanding—because the genre required long hours spent alone outside, a clear impediment to the Holland housewife of the Golden Age. But Sara de Vos seemed to be the single exception, a trained still life painter whose only surviving work was this harrowing outdoor scene. Both her father and husband were landscapists, so she’d spent her life around the form. It was clear that Gabriel had studied up; he may have even rehearsed his monologue on the way over to Brooklyn, another passenger mumbling to himself on the subway. This was a landmark painting, a historical oddity, and Ellie was being asked to work up a faithful copy of it for its rightful owner. This was the pitch from Gabriel that would stay with her. She told him she would think about it, but the truth was she had decided to do it within seconds of seeing the photographs.
* * *
One of the photographs was taken front on, from a distance of about eight feet, one closer from the side, and the final image was a close-up of the girl leaning against the tree. It was clear the images had been taken by a trained photographer. The clarity and focus suggested a tripod, and color film was expensive, beyond the reach of most amateur shutterbugs. Someone had obviously given very clear instructions on the shots to take, knowing that a side image in raking light would reveal much of the painting’s texture.
The exact dimensions of the frame and stretched canvas were written in pencil on the back of the head-on photograph. Ideally, the painting would have filled the entire photograph. But for some reason the photographer hadn’t zoomed in all the way, so that a mahogany headboard and two pale cotton pillowcases were visible. It looked to Ellie like the image had been taken from the end of an unmade, king-size bed before noon, and the shadows suggested slanting winter light. She should have been focusing on composition, texture, and color but instead she first tried to deduce everything she could about the owners. Who would put this beautiful desolation above their bed? Her eye kept being drawn to the twin indentations on the beige cotton pillows. She could tell the husband slept on the right side of the bed
because the pillowcase retained the heavier memory of his head. It was this unexpected human element that gave the exercise, at first, a sense of voyeuristic intrusion. She was plundering a private, domestic realm.
She did a lot of pacing that first week, letting the rationalizations tick over in her mind while she walked barefoot through the equatorial climate of her apartment. She was merely being paid to reproduce a painting and wasn’t privy to all the ins and outs of Gabriel’s dealings and, besides, there were collectors all over the world who copied their own masterpieces for the sake of security. It was often the copy that was on display in the part-time Tuscan villa or Paris apartment. Whatever the circumstances, she was a degree removed, at the outer edge. A conservator for hire. This was her stance. Then, one night, she woke with a pounding headache and stood naked drinking a glass of water in the darkened kitchenette. She could feel the photographs, like a presence, from across the room. Fetching her robe from the bathroom, she came back and switched on her work lamp. Methodically, she unclipped the frontal photograph from the easel, laid it flat against her drafting table, took up an X-Acto knife and a straight edge, and sliced the bottom fifth of the image away—the incriminating strip of pillowcase and headboard and plush wallpaper. The work had begun.