The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  * * *

  The puzzle of how to build and age a copy was a house with many hallways. Some passages were well lit and others impossibly dark. She sourced a larger and badly damaged Dutch seventeenth-century canvas from a dealer and planned to cut it down to size and strip it back to the ground. She’d spent many hours perfecting baroque recipes for animal hide sizing only to realize the best method for this project was to obtain a canvas of roughly the same age and leave its underlayers intact.

  She had a good rapport with a venerable antique framer on Lexington and he often called her when a renowned dealer brought something in for reframing. It was always under the guise of her evolving restoration business, of studying works that never circulated in public, but she could tell Maurice thought something was amiss when she came in with sketches of the frame. “Where is the picture itself?” he asked. She told him that the measurements and hand-drawn cross-sections were precise, that she would place the stretcher into the frame and do the backing herself. He looked at her warily and then she produced a copy she’d made of the head-on photograph, only she’d cut out the image inside the frame with a razor blade. Maurice held it up and from the other side she could see one of his bespectacled eyes blinking inside the cutout. “The client won’t let me show anyone the work itself. I’ve signed papers,” she told him. The Frenchman lowered the photograph, looking betrayed, but finally he said he could match the gold leaf and the profile. She said, “The painting is Dutch, 1630s, but it looks like a later reframing. Is it eighteenth century?” Maurice flexed the photograph toward the window and said, “Seventeen-nineties, Parisian-style. Though it looks like they skimped on the gold leaf.”

  The seventeenth-century Dutch built their canvases the way they built their ships—one carefully engineered step at a time. The sizing, grounding, sketching, dead coloring, working up, and glazing. The badger brush to smooth layers and blend forms. Some of them waited a year for the oils to dry and then applied a resin varnish. Obscure problems for the Dutch painter became her own—how to produce stable oranges and greens, how to approximate purple by glazing blue over a reddish underpainting. What she didn’t know about Sara de Vos’s technique she would invent based on what she knew of her Dutch contemporaries.

  As an added precaution, she combed the small but vitriolic literature of fine art forgery. It was a welcome reprieve from her dissertation research at the Frick Art Reference Library, where she’d spent months poring over three-by-five black-and-white photographs of Dutch paintings. At the Columbia library she sat in a carrel and read forgery memoirs and manifestos, little screeds designed to take on the snobs of the art world. It captivated her and sometimes made her blush, as if she were translating the Kama Sutra instead of writing down how to game auction houses and the ratios for old-world gesso.

  Find damaged, discarded frames at auction houses and trace the lot number or other identifying marks. Call the houses up and ask what painting had once been in the frame and what it depicted. The bastards keep meticulous records.

  Van Meegeren added Bakelite to his pigments to age them before fobbing off his fake Vermeers to Göring.

  In the writings of these technically brilliant but often neglected artists she recognized her own recurring anger at being overlooked. Her parents had lost a son before the two girls were born, Ellie the second of them. Long before they ignored her at the Courtauld Institute and the loneliness of the art scholarship at the Catholic boarding school, she could remember a house full of silences. Her father, when he wasn’t piloting a ferry across Sydney Harbour, hunkered down in a small ketch he moored on the Parramatta River. He walked down to the dock behind their weatherboard house in Balmain each night after dinner, leaving the girls to their homework and their mother’s weather-induced migraines. He slept most nights out there. From her bedroom window, Ellie could look out and see the tiny cabin lights of his boat swaying with the tide. It was no surprise, then, when she did everything she could to get the attention of the priests instead of the nuns at boarding school. She painted the most intricate, mythic landscapes for Father Barry, her art teacher—scenes that were heavy with alpenglow and Arcadian woodlands and engorged rivers. None of her early landscapes looked remotely Australian. The light and the foliage were distinctly European, despite the fact that she’d never left Australia. It was all absorbed from color slides and art books. “The old country is in my blood,” she would tell Father Barry. Then, on weekends, she shoplifted at the nearby Woolworth’s, shoving lipstick and batteries into the waistband of her tights. When she won the school art prize in her final year, she crossed the stage to shake Father Barry’s hand with an air of quiet vindication; then she made the mistake of looking out into the audience to see her mother sitting alone.

  * * *

  She peeled back the antique canvas with diluted solvents, working in small circles, one inch at a time. She saved the old varnish as she stripped it off, squeezing the cotton swabs into a mason jar. To the naked canvas, she applied a thin coat of fresh ground but retained the surface signature of the original. Next, she sketched with pale chalk before dead coloring with raw umber mixed with black. The actual painting was slow and painstaking—a week on the woods, a week on the sky, two weeks on the frozen river and ice skaters. Each passage had its own technical puzzles. The bright yellows flecked into the scarves of the ice skaters were oddly textured and she eventually decided on mixing a little sand into chrome yellow. After the transparent glazes, she bleached the painting under an ultraviolet light for a week and cured it for a month in the furnace room below the basement stairs of her building. She worked a spiderweb of cracks into the canvas from behind, using a soft rubber ball. She used a spray gun to mist the picture with the antique varnish she’d set aside. A favorite dealer trick was to pass an ultraviolet light over a canvas, causing the oxidation in the old varnish to fluoresce. That ghostly blue-white apparition was a direct product of age.

  * * *

  By the time Gabriel shows up at her apartment one night in November, she has finally admitted to herself that she’s painted a forgery. A month into her commission, Gabriel had begun talking about the swap and the organizer, laid out a trail for her to follow to its natural conclusion. He still does legitimate art deals, she thinks, but this must be his lucrative sideline. She suspects she knew from the very beginning what she was taking on, but somehow she’d sliced away her own ethical objections with the bottom fifth of the photograph. What surfaced in its place was a burning ambition to get every detail exactly right, to make contact with the woman behind the haunting vision.

  Gabriel stands in her doorway, holding what looks to be a canvas wrapped in brown paper. In his other hand is his battered attaché case. Ellie has made the mistake several times of thinking it might contain dossiers and important memoranda instead of a spare handkerchief, a yellowed apple, a drugstore novel, a leaking fountain pen, and a cracked magnifying glass.

  “Where are the horses?” Gabriel asks.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Smells like a glue factory. Can I come in? I have something you might like to see.”

  She moves away from the doorway and Gabriel steps inside her apartment. The entranceway leads into the kitchenette and the living space and he hovers between the two rooms. He looks cautiously at the books and papers towering against one wall, then peers into the kitchenette where ice trays and mason jars brim with inks and oils.

  “Should I make us some tea?” she asks, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

  “Only if you promise not to poison me.”

  “I would never.”

  “And you have Earl Grey?”

  “I started buying it especially for you. But it’s a tea bag, is that all right?”

  Smiling, he says, “I’ll stoop just this once.” He sets the frame and the attaché case down by the table.

  Three buses whiz by on the expressway, trailing squares of gauzy light behind the curtains. The sound of their engines is deafening
and Ellie watches Gabriel as he brings two cupped hands to his ears. There is something disarming and childlike about him, a boy borrowing clothes and mannerisms from a fussy uncle. She eyes the brown paper rectangle from the stovetop. The back burner is reserved for food and the kettle; the front is for warming chemicals and starches.

  “How did it go?” she asks, then wishes she’d waited until they both had their tea. She’s not good at this game of tact and understatement.

  Gabriel ignores her. “I’ll take one cube.”

  “I know.”

  She pours the steaming water into two mismatched mugs, adds a sugar cube to his, and keeps hers black. She’s used tea in her undertone tints before and she finds herself thinking about tannins as she stirs in the sugar. When she comes into the living area Gabriel sits down at the small Formica table. He repositions the case and the brown-papered frame closer to his feet.

  She lets the tea steep for a moment. “So?”

  “I don’t involve myself with the transaction itself. I leave that to the organizer.” He blows across the rim of his cup. “But apparently it went well.”

  “That’s good.” She’s heard him mention runners and organizers and she suspects the former work for the latter.

  He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs at his brow. “You should consider cultivating orchids. My shoes are growing tropical mold while I sit here.”

  “It’s not ideal.”

  They both sip their tea.

  “Are you going to show me what’s in the brown paper?”

  “You’ll spend a thousand hours on one canvas but you can’t finish a cup of tea.”

  “Is it something to restore?” The word restore seems loaded now.

  “That won’t be for a while.” He looks down at the wrapped canvas. “We were hoping to keep it here for a few days. I’m about to secure a new storage unit in Chelsea, but I’m between spaces just at the moment. Long story. Anyway, I don’t think anyone will be combing this stretch of Brooklyn looking for an obscure Dutch masterwork.”

  Her cup is poised an inch from her mouth. She wants to ask who Gabriel means when he says we, whether there is a silent partner, some Latin American or European financier, or whether this is just an affectation he’s picked up from his drugstore detective novels. But the thought dims away in the surge of something else—“May I see it?” The plaintive tone in her voice suddenly annoys her, so she reaches down under the table and lifts the frame onto the table.

  Gabriel takes another sip of his tea. “Merry Christmas.”

  “I’m worried about the humidity. My apartment’s sweltering.”

  “It won’t be for long. Perhaps you can keep it wrapped in your closet.”

  She rests the frame on its side and begins to undo the tape, careful not to tear the brown paper. As the first sheets come away from the backing she can smell resin and the maritime inflection of old wood. Gabriel clears the mugs and art history journals from the table, standing at her side. She places the painting faceup and crosses to the wall to switch on the overhead light. The room blanches and she sees Gabriel blinking fussily. She comes back to the table and leans over the painting, her face just inches from the canvas. This is her way of taking in a new work. She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts.

  What she does next is mentally compare her own layers and lines to the composition before her. She paints the canvas in reverse as a sustained thought. It’s like undressing a woman, she thinks, an aristocrat cloaked in yards of lace. There are a few improvisations and influences that Ellie didn’t fathom from the photographs. The sky, for example, is more like Rembrandt’s than she’d realized. And there are unexpected places where the paint rises in clots and flakes.

  “How did you fare?” Gabriel asks quietly from behind her.

  Ellie straightens and realizes she’s been holding her breath. “Unless they have them in the same room and stand three inches from the canvas, there’s no difference at all.” She looks at the rough, bright yellows wrapped around the skaters’ necks. Something about them catches in her mind.

  Gabriel brushes a wrinkle from his sleeve. “Well, I’ll leave you two lovers together.”

  He lifts the briefcase onto the table, snaps the clasps, and opens it up. Today, instead of a sad apple and a KGB novel, there’s a folded manila envelope and he hands it to her.

  She refuses to take hold of the money. So Gabriel sets the envelope delicately on the table and heads for the door. She hears his careful footfalls in the barely lit hallway and waits until he’s out of earshot. For a long time she stares down at the painting, then carries it into her bedroom and props it against her dresser. She watches it for hours, until she falls asleep, mesmerized by the girl at dusk, the frozen river flashing silver and white each time a car passes by on the expressway.

  Amsterdam

  WINTER 1636

  She’s supposed to be painting tulips. But when Barent leaves each morning after breakfast, Sara climbs the stairs to her attic workroom and removes the other painting from a recess in the wall. This is the same room where Kathrijn took her final breath, where her fingertips turned black and the light ebbed then vanished from her eyes. It took a mere four days for her small body to become a husk wrapped in linen. The entire bed, Kathrijn’s body secured to it with ropes, was lowered from the hoist beam and taken away on the back of a covered wagon. That was almost a year ago, but Sara still can’t walk into the attic without her throat swelling with grief. For half an hour, before the composition of a painting steadies her thoughts, she feels unmoored—a woman pacing under the eaves, her hands clenched behind her back, furious with God.

  Then she wills herself to the work at hand. Today, she places the stretched canvas on an easel by the window, flanked by a flower study. She sits on a stool with her back to the big double window, running her gaze across the frozen landscape. The icy river and the sky seem too pallid to her. In both, she wants the inflection of a deeper tone and color, something pushing behind all that white. During the dead-coloring phase, she’d underpainted the entire canvas with raw umber and black, but now she fears she used too little. The lead white in the snow seems uniformly cold and flat. She studies the area around the girl at the birch. She wonders sometimes if she isn’t painting an allegory of her daughter’s transit between the living and the dead, a girl trudging forever through the snow. It seems maudlin, even to her, but she lies awake each night, listening to the old wooden house tick and moan, retracing her own brushstrokes like the tenets of some delicate and inscrutable Eastern philosophy. The enigma of the brushwork and the passages of light startle her. But it also seems to wick away some of the ungodly anguish. For days at a time, she can think of nothing else but the painting.

  Through the windowpane she can feel the cold at her back. She gets off the stool and prepares her palette for the day, mixing the pigments and oils in bowls and stone mortars. White lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. The diffusely lit clouds—the sun like a candle at the end of a dim hallway—form a dome over the entire scene. This morning she had planned to retouch the sky and snow, getting the colors just right, but it’s the girl’s face that keeps drawing her attention. There is a semblance of Kathrijn—the high cheeks and forehead and green eyes—but it’s different enough that Sara worries she will forget what her daughter really looked like. How is it possible that there are no portraits of her, that there’s just a single charcoal sketch that captures nothing of her essence? Sh
e has painted countless still lifes, even tried her hand at austere wedding portraits back in her apprenticeship days, but she never once turned her gaze and her brush to Kathrijn. She never thought to commission a friend to work up a portrait of her daughter. She swallows, standing before the canvas, and closes her eyes for a long moment. She sees Kathrijn’s face at age five or six, that look of earnest concentration whenever she floated a sabot on the canal, or the doting smile when she put a doll to bed. She’s terrified such memories will dwindle and fade, that one day she’ll wake up and remember nothing but the smell of Kathrijn’s damp, salty hair at the seaside.

  For hours, she experiments with the eyes on separate pieces of stretched canvas. A friend of her father’s, a portrait master, used to say the problem of the illuminated eyelid kept him awake at night. Now she knows why. But it’s the suggestion of light being reflected into the eye socket and the root of the nose that seems infinitely more difficult than painting the catchlight on the eyeball itself. There are moments when Sara feels as if everything she has lost is contained in those green eyes, as if she’s painting Kathrijn’s fleeting tenure on earth in that miniature, ocular world.

  * * *

  Barent wants to get them out of debt on the spoils of tulipomania, the craze that’s sweeping the provinces like some blue-lipped fever. He wants Sara to paint three identical compositions—a vase brimming with tulips in mottled light—so they can sell them in the spring, just as the first bloom of yellow crowns begins to spike through the sod. After spending months on his leviathan painting and then failing to find a buyer, he began selling quickly painted, unsigned landscapes in the taverns. When word of the illegal sales got back to the guild they were both fined, then suspended from its ranks for failure to pay. The scandal spread like poison, making it difficult for either of them to attract paying students. In desperation, Barent took a job with a bookbinder and strains by candlelight to paint at night. He comes home each day with new schemes, smelling of glue and paper. At dinner, when he tells stories of tulip speculators coming into their wild fortunes, Sara notices a new tone settling in, the hawking voice of a peddler. He recounts legends of tulip bulbs changing hands ten times a day, the man who traded twelve acres of land and four oxen for a single Semper Augustus bulb wrapped in muslin. Or the whore in Flanders who took her payments in bulbs, seeds, and crowns. The United Provinces are now shipping more tulips than ever before, he says, outranked only by gin, herring, and cheese. Then there are the tales of East India traders and Haarlem bleach-girls who’ve made it big in the flower market and retired to stone mansions on the coast.