The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

  * * *

  At the gallery the next day, Hendrik oversees the opening with a set of blueprints in his hands, as if he’s built two miniature houses instead of two wooden boxes. He asks for a reading of the relative humidity before they begin the unpacking. Q obliges and gets to work on the bolting system with a hand wrench. He’s a stickler for manual wrenches and drills, resorts to power tools only in a pinch. Ellie stands watching in her new blouse behind a yellow line, shoulder to shoulder with a handful of dubious curatorial staff and conservators. Word of the potential forgery has dashed their hopes that the other painting is a newly discovered work in the de Vos oeuvre. And there’s still no official word from Max Culkins in China on how he intends to handle the delicate situation.

  As Q begins to dismantle the first case, it becomes apparent that the boxes themselves are works of art. When he removes the foam-padded face board, Ellie sees the architecture as a cross-section—corner pads, a thick band of foam on the bottom, an inner case of half-inch plywood cradled at the center. Q removes the inner case and places it on a stainless-steel table. By now, Hendrik has been summoned to his side. In a rare act of humility, Q asks Hendrik if he’d like to do the honors of opening the first inner case—the equivalent of washing the man’s feet. Apparently, in the span of five minutes, Hendrik has been elevated to the status of respected peer. Hendrik accepts, lamenting the fact that he couldn’t bring his own tools on the plane. He crosses to Q’s workbench and selects a small hammer, a chisel, and a specially designed cutter. Q raises the worktable to the appropriate height and Hendrik begins to chisel along the glued seam of the inner case. He taps away gently at the plywood corners and pries the case open to reveal another layer of polyethylene. Hendrik takes out the wrapped painting—about two foot square plus the frame—and lays it flat.

  As the foam and wood and tape are all peeled away, Ellie can feel her cheeks flush. She remembers in vivid detail how she made the fake, how she built up one layer at a time. She knows the tints and textures as if she’d created them yesterday—the impasto of the tree bark, the luminous underglow of the frozen river, the bone-white of the girl’s left hand against the blue-white of the snow. She also remembers the way she mishandled the bright yellows in the skaters’ scarves. In the late 1950s, very few in the conservation world knew about lead-tin yellow, a pigment favored by Dutch Masters that produces metallic soaps over time. To capture the bright, gritty texture, she’d mixed sand with synthetic chrome yellow, a mistake that has weighed on her ever since lead-tin yellow was rediscovered in the conservation journals. A kind of technical remorse.

  Eventually, Hendrik holds At the Edge of a Wood up for all to see. Ellie steps in front of the yellow line and Q permits it. The painting is propped at a slight angle and the staff members are allowed to approach it as the lights are dimmed for better viewing. She takes in the painting from a distance of three feet. Her youthful habit of consuming a picture just inches from its aromatic surface died a long time ago. Sebastian, when they were first dating, had once called it an affectation and she could never bring herself to do it again. His offhanded comment should have been a sign of future cruelties and standards of perfection, but instead she’d quickly agreed with his assessment and was grateful for his candor. She stares at the canvas, her feet anchored in place, afraid to come closer. All these years later, it strikes her that she’d dutifully copied everything that gave the original movement and life. She’d fogged it with antique varnish to create the illusion of age, but somehow she still managed to capture the breathing presence of Sara herself.

  Q has no apparent interest in the painting itself and has already turned to the other packing case. The curators are urged to stand again behind the yellow line, for reasons that Ellie can’t discern. She doesn’t risk disobeying Q, so the five of them—three with Ph.D.s—get back behind the line and wait to be invited forward again. Now Q and Hendrik work in unison, the younger deferring to the older, then the borrower deferring to the lender in some obscure packers’ ritual. They lift the inner case out—it appears to be about the same size as At the Edge of a Wood—and lay it flat under the lights. As they unwrap the foam and glassine, the first edges of frame become visible—gilded and rippled, a Florentine reframing of the eighteenth century. Q looks up at the staff and nods for them to come forward. As art experts, each in their own right, Ellie suspects that none of them will talk about what they see until they’ve absorbed it, until they’ve had a chance to develop serious opinions or doubts about the potential fake and the new attribution. For all they know Marty de Groot is the one bringing the forgery.

  Ellie notices Hendrik watching her as she moves closer to the painting. A dozen funeral-goers tramp down a hill from a slate-roofed church, its windows blackened against the pall of midwinter. Village children clamber along the frozen riverbank, apart from their parents, flanking the procession with several gamboling dogs. A few villagers stand on the ice, stilled by the harbinger of a child’s coffin. The river and the woods and the clouds are unmistakably Sara’s, but the whole scene is painted from above, as if from a steeple or treetop. She’s seeing this from a height, Ellie thinks, and it lends the scene an air of detachment, the perspective of an indifferent God. Before she’s finished taking it in fully, Hendrik is standing beside her, sounding rather pleased with himself. “Dated 1637 and signed in the lower left corner.”

  Part Two

  Amsterdam

  SPRING 1637

  After the tulip market collapsed in early February, Barent was unable to sell Sara’s floral still lifes. Dutchmen who lost everything inside the calyx and corolla of a prized flower didn’t want to be reminded of their folly. With their debts mounting, Sara searched in vain for paying workshop apprentices, but without the endorsement of the guild, no students presented themselves. Eventually, she took a job with a seed and bulb export company, painting miniature flowers for their catalogue. With the extra money she sets aside a small amount each week toward the cost of making a birthday cake for Barent, something to lighten his mood. She buys one ingredient at a time and stores them inside a pot, hidden from view. Then, one night in spring, she attends a lecture by a visiting Italian painter in one of the big canal houses and leaves with a pocket full of sugared almonds. She doesn’t remember the moment she decided to take the almonds for the top of the cake, but now she walks along with her fingertips grazing them, feeling a burst of guilt and exhilaration.

  She walks home in the rain, bundled against the chill and fog. In this wealthy district, the baroque house facades are fronted with pale sandstone, the latticed windows flanked by bright green shutters. The footpath is a tightly packed herringbone of small red bricks, lined with lindens and elms. The casement windowsills are decorated with carved stone flowers and satyrs. She braces herself for walking back into her own neighborhood near the Kalverstraat, for the plank-board walkways and the doctor’s office that displays a urinal out front, for the vegetable sellers under awnings, their cabbages rotting slightly in the rain.

  After standing to paint tiny flowers all day, sitting inside a lavish canal house was a welcome relief. The lecture hosts, a pair of wine merchants from Paris, stood by while a third-rate landscape painter condescended to the gathered guests, many of them painters, talking about the need to lower the horizon to create scale and drama. She’d sat at the back of the overheated room, her shoes split along one seam, eating as much and as quietly as she could. It’s the tail end of Lent and she feels guilty that she’s not fasting. Apparently, the French hosts were godless and oblivious to Lent—the tables were laden with haddock slices and bowls of almonds and raisins. She dips her hand back into her pocket to feel the sugar and the dry woodiness of the nuts against her fingers.

  Closer to her own neighborhood, people are preparing for the end of Lent. The children of blacksmiths and cobblers are building bonfires on corners that won’t be lit for days. Taverns that amount to little more than squalid cellars and innkeepers’ entrance halls are taking deli
veries of wine and beer, the proprietors filling stone jugs while burly men in leather aprons roll barrels along the cobblestone. It’s darker than she’s used to, an hour before the watch will emerge for the curfew. The canals are black and slick and she finds herself looking skyward to place the moon. The Lenten theme of deprivation has overtaken the city; the lanterns on several bridges have been extinguished as a yearning for God.

  She shouldn’t be out alone at this hour and she pulls her hood down over her forehead. Barent had asked her not to go to the lecture, practically pleaded before he left the house with an air of resignation. For months, his moods have been sullen and unpredictable. The ledger is no longer taken out after dinner and he’s stopped asking her about the progress of her paintings. She knows he has borrowed money from some of their neighbors—a portrait painter and his embroiderer wife—but he refuses to speak of it.

  In the evenings, he comes home from the bookbindery and puts on his dressing gown and goes to sit by the peat-box. At dinnertime, they stand to pray, eat at the ugly wooden table by the window, sing grace without inflection, and pass small eternities of silence while they eat fried eggs and tasteless bread made from bean flour. When she catches his eyes she sees the look of defeat, the humiliation of what life has levied against him. Sometimes, in the middle hours of the night, she wakes to find him sitting by the fire, muttering to himself. He’ll be upset with her when she gets in, but soon there’ll be a cake in the house, a small respite from all the gloom. She’ll set the almonds along the edges of the white icing.

  Before the onslaught of the narrow alley that leads to her street, she stops at a furniture maker who has adopted the latest French styles in cabinetmaking. Her own tables and chairs look like they’ve been cleaved from trees with blunt axes; the furniture in his window is long-lined and supple. Walnut and mahogany varnish, with inlays of ironwood. She stops and admires the display for several minutes, her feet numbing from the damp cold. A wood-paneled room has been created with a finely made desk placed at an angle. A leathered chair has been pulled out and stationery is spread across the surface of the desk, a goose quill laid across it. It looks as if an important letter is about to be written. A silver inkpot awaits. She admires the lathework of the slender desk and chair legs, the glossed lacquer against the dark grain of the wood. The idea of making something solid and practical sometimes appeals to her. There are no figments or catchments of light to contend with. But neither is there the possibility, she thinks, of rendering the smoke of human emotion itself.

  At first, when she sees her darkened house she thinks how angry Barent must be. There isn’t a lantern burning behind a single window. She removes the iron key from around her neck and fumbles with the lock in the dark. A recent ordinance requires that every twelfth house burn a lantern from its exterior until ten at night, but the nearest beneficiary of this municipal wisdom is nine houses away. She closes the door behind her and steps into the cramped entrance hall. Barent is sitting beside the peat-box wrapped in a blanket. When he looks over at her she sees there is something vacant in his gaze, as if he’s looking at an apparition six feet to her left. “I’m sorry I’m so late. Have you eaten?” When he doesn’t answer she says, “It’s pitch-black in here.” She bustles over to the lantern and lights it with some straw she dips into the peat-box. In the brightening kitchen she sees a letter on the table and an empty bottle of beer. “Thirty days,” he says, distractedly, “before they come for me with a warrant from the debtor’s prison.” She has known this moment would come and yet it seems unfathomable. Kneeling beside him she takes his cold, dry hands in hers and kisses his knuckles. His gaze remains on the embers, shifting across some landscape she cannot see.

  * * *

  A week later, Sara arranges to see the overseer of the Amsterdam Guild to plead her case. They are still hardened against Barent, but perhaps she has a chance. It’s been more than a year since she and Barent were fined and suspended. Throughout the provinces, the guilds have been cracking down on illegal activity, fining members and residents who traffic in foreign imports or unsanctioned sales. Cheap panels from Antwerp—generic landscapes with red barns and brooding clouds, painted quickly, wet-in-wet—have flooded the market. It’s possible to walk into a cobbler’s storeroom and see a dozen of these flimsily painted scenes on each wall.

  Because she doesn’t have the fare for a carriage or barouche, she walks in the blustery spring weather toward Nieuwmarkt. The guild holds its meetings and archives in the Waaggebouw, a brick-and-turret weigh house that once formed part of the city’s gate. Twenty-five years ago, when Amsterdam tore down its walls to expand, the Waaggebouw was given over to the business of commercial weighing and various guildhalls on the top floor—blacksmiths, painters, masons, and surgeons. Joost Blim, the chief overseer of the Amsterdam Guild of St. Luke, is a housepainter with political aspirations and at the end of his two-year tenure. He was only just coming to power when Sara’s guild membership was suspended, so she’s meeting him for the first time. He granted a meeting in his letter but said that due to renovations in the guildhall they would have to meet next door, in the “spacious gathering room of our illustrious friends, the surgeons.”

  The “gathering room” turns out to be the surgeon guild’s anatomical theater, over which presides Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. Sara can’t help thinking this is no accident, that the overseer wants to castigate her at the altar of St. Luke’s most famous living member. Rembrandt has largely taken over the portrait scene since moving from Leiden to Amsterdam six years ago. A few years after his arrival, he was accepted as a burgher of the city and admitted to the guild’s ranks.

  The guild servant, Theophilus Tromp, is a wiry, birdlike engraver in a doublet. He greets her at the top of the stone stairwell, and then she’s left alone in the theater while he fetches the overseer. She sits down at one end of a long wooden table, perhaps the same table where cadavers are laid out. Under Nicolaes Tulp’s supervision, the surgeon’s guild has been holding annual dissections in the theater and charging admission from physicians and curious laymen. The public displays happen in the wintertime, when colder temperatures better preserve a hanged criminal’s body. Tulp is a man on the ascent; as city anatomist he is said to have personally signed the fitness reports of the first settlers in New Netherland. With mayoral aspirations, he regularly publishes essays in the newspaper about apothecary reform and the plague and the circulatory powers of human blood.

  She has heard about but never seen the painting before and she takes it in with cold scrutiny. The name of the executed man was Aris Kindt; she remembers hearing that. A petty thief who’d been conveniently executed an hour before the scheduled dissection and portrait “sitting.” Descartes was supposed to be somewhere in that shadowy audience of onlookers, though she cynically thinks he isn’t in the painting because he didn’t commission Rembrandt to feature him among the surgeons. What was the philosopher and mathematician thinking as he sat on one of the wooden benches? That the body was so much cabinetry for the vapors of the soul?

  She notes how the surgeons are looking at the splayed anatomy textbook or directly at the viewer, as if the corpse itself is incidental. Despite the painter’s lifelike depiction—the faces mired in reflection, the translucent eyes—the hanged man’s dissected left hand and arm are sized beyond all reasonable proportion. His chest juts upward, barreled in rigor mortis, and his half-opened mouth is rife with shadow. At first, Sara thinks Rembrandt is celebrating the rarefied knowledge of the surgeons, but then she wonders whether the enlarged hand and the cadaver’s monstrous face aren’t a criticism, a protest against the harrowing of the flesh. She feels herself soften. Not toward the painting but toward the painter.

  Mr. Tromp comes back into the room with a book in a kidskin cover. Joost Blim, a portly, blunt-faced man, walks a few paces behind him, head down, hands clasped over a ponderous belly. He dresses more like an aristocrat than a housepainter—long breeches with knotted ribbons
, shoes fastened by rosettes, a short tunic with a slash in the back for a rapier. Sara’s first thought is how much he must net each year in bribes and fines. He introduces himself and both men sit at the other end of the table.

  “Thank you for meeting with me,” Sara says.

  “Our pleasure,” says Blim. “My apologies for being delayed. I just got back from a meeting with the Chamber of Orphans. A rotten affair. You see, the regents of the City Orphanage filed a complaint with the mayor that they’re being cheated out of their cut of guild sales. Now there’s going to be a full audit of our membership. One of our painters or pottery bakers or engravers so much as dreams about a piece of work and some orphan makes five percent. They treat us as if we personally murdered the parents of these waifs.”

  Sara is taken aback by his candor and his breathy, long-suffering manner. Pleasantly, she says, “I didn’t realize they receive a portion of sales.”

  “Oh, I assure you, madame, they have both hands deep in our pockets. To make matters worse, the bookbinders are trying to separate from St. Luke’s. Cleaved in two, we are. So, you see, I’m leaving office just as a civil war is breaking out. We need a glassblower at the helm. A man with torrential lungs!”

  “Goodness.” She doesn’t know what else to say.