The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (20 page)

This was all part of Ellie's induction into the art world. When she wasn't filling in cracks and swabbing down glazes and scumbles, she was fetching the brothers meat pies and sandwiches and newspapers. They had parish connections to Father Barry and implied that they'd be happy to file a good report if she kept her head down. Standing above her worktable for hours, she'd get dizzy from the solvent fumes and feel light-headed by the end of the day. She got migraines from the eyestrain and went home to lie down in the bedroom she shared with Kate. It was summer holidays and boarding school was out, so Kate fetched her cups of tea while Maggie Shipley resented the special treatment, calling her Queen Eleanor under her breath. The rest of the time she was invisible to her parents and her closet was full of her mother's sewing projects. For Bob and Maggie Shipley, her going away to boarding school on an art scholarship was the equivalent of moving to Ecuador or dying at a young age.

During her last week at the firm, Michael Franke asked her if she wanted to have a go at a little inpainting. Naturally, she agreed and was invited into his studio, a glassed-in room that had once been a storekeeper's veranda. Canvases in various states of cleaning hung on the walls along with several clocks. A teakettle and a cooktop took up one corner. On an easel stood an eighteenth-century British landscape—a coastline with cattle grazing and some backlit clouds. Michael said the sky needed patching up and he'd already got the blend right. “Five shades lighter before it goes on is the general rule. Allowing for the varnish and drying and so on. Come on and take a stab.” She liked the painting, the simple pleasure of cows on a coastal morning. She stepped in front of the easel and Michael picked up a fine brush with some paint on it. “Try to match the strokes if you can,” he said. She took the paintbrush in her hand and steadied her arm above the canvas. The painter's brushwork was even and smooth, cutting horizontally across the grain of the canvas. She made contact with the picture with a light, steady stroke and the blue adhered nicely. She knew at once that she'd executed the brushwork perfectly; except for the wet tone, it was barely discernible from the original. Michael stood over her, smelling of acetone and damp newspapers. She made several passes with the brush and each one added to the carefully blended effect. She took a step back and looked at Michael, who turned his attention suddenly to a pile of paperwork on his desk. The Franke brothers weren't big on praise, so she fully expected something understated, a nod and a
not bad
. But without looking up at her Michael leafed through some invoices and said, “In twenty years I've never seen an apprentice quite bungle a painting like that. Maybe your sort is better suited for a different kind of trade.” She stood there for a long time, unable to move or fathom why he was being so cruel. Did
your sort
refer to her being female, Catholic, or the daughter of a ferryman? Then he added, “It's almost lunchtime. Go see what Jack wants. I'll take a hamburger with bacon.” She left the workroom in tears and trudged down the stairs, not saying a word to Jack as she walked out onto the street. She never went back, but weeks later she saw the painting she'd touched up for sale in the Franke gallery window. It was her unchanged brushwork in the sky—perfectly blended and seamless within the swath of blue.

Something changed in her after that. The anger hardened, came back as a refrain. For years, that moment flickered back whenever she was cleaning or inpainting a canvas—a sense that she had no business engaging in this work. Sometimes her throat would bloat with rage. It should have been easy to dismiss—a miserable old man unable to offer a gifted teenage girl a simple compliment. The Franke brothers reported to Father Barry that she'd run off one lunchtime and the priest soured toward her after that. It was the beginning of a new era, of living on the periphery. Lying across her bed forty-odd years later, a little drunk on a Wednesday afternoon, she reads the notebooks from her teens and twenties and feels a presence in the room—a neglected, slightly gullible teenager. She wonders now if the forgery wasn't a form of retribution, a kind of calculated violence—against Jack and Michael Franke, against the old boy network at the Courtauld Institute, against her own indifferent father. But mostly against the girl standing out on the glassed-in veranda who thought her talents were prodigious and therefore enough.

*   *   *

The ringing telephone dredges her from a deep sleep. She gets up and navigates blearily through the house, a hand against the hallway wall to steady herself. She doesn't pick up the receiver in time and the call goes to the answering machine. There's a certain satisfaction in hearing Helen formulate her words into an impromptu speech. “Ah, hi, Ellie, look, it's Helen Birch here from the gallery and I'm wondering if we might schedule a time for you to come into the lab. I've been performing some technical analysis on the three de Vos pictures and have found a few anomalies and whatnot. Perhaps I can talk you through my findings in person. Anyway, I'm ducking off for the rest of the afternoon—dentist appointment, sounds lovely, doesn't it?—but I'll be in first thing tomorrow. Just come by any time before noon if you have a chance and we'll go through the data. Okay, cheerio then.”

Ellie goes back out to the veranda to see what's become of the miniature shipwreck.

 

Manhattan

SEPTEMBER 1958

With its French walnut paneling and ferns in copper planters, the auction house on West Fifty-Seventh makes Marty uneasy. It reeks of old money and makes him self-conscious, puts him in mind of venerable old steak houses and New England boarding schools. He's arrived an hour before the auction and waits for Eleanor Shipley to pull up in the car he's sent for her. The employees of Thornton and Morrell, the department heads and cataloguers, dress like pallbearers except for their vivid bow ties. The doorman has the bearing of a Renaissance scholar whose post out on the sidewalk is due to some kind of clerical mishap. Marty thinks of the jaunty, grinning Sotheby's doorman, who looks like a bouncer from an upscale London nightclub.

He stands by the front windows, waiting for the car service to pull up. The street has thinned out after the frenzy of lunch hour, a lull in the middle of an Indian summer afternoon. A florist and a watch repairman stand in front of their adjacent storefronts, chatting and smoking cigarettes. When the black Cadillac arrives, he waits for the driver to come around to open a rear passenger door, waits to see Eleanor Shipley's face revealed in the doorframe, but the front passenger door opens and a loping blonde hops out on the traffic side. A passing taxicab honks. The driver emerges in his chauffeur's cap, a little too slowly, mortified, looking down the sidewalk to see if anyone has seen this crazy bird from Brooklyn riding up front. As she passes the front of the Cadillac, she lifts her left high heel and adjusts an ankle strap while steadying herself against the hood. The driver takes her elbow and guides her toward the auction house. A few feet from the entrance she stops and cranes up at the facade, her mouth opening slightly. The driver dismisses himself and hurries to the car that's flashing its hazards by the curb. So this is his first impression of her—a tall, ungainly woman who seems oblivious to social norms and probably hasn't worn heels in a very long time. She's pretty in an offhand, Anglican sort of way—her hair pulled back tight, her features freckled, pale, and strong, a darting intelligence in her green eyes. The nose is slightly snubbed, he notices, watching the doorman greet her, an echo of brewers or weavers or convicts from the English Midlands, he thinks. But those electric green eyes suggest a devastating IQ smuggled into the colonies like an embezzled diamond.
How did I become such a deplorable snob
, he wonders, crossing to the double glass doors, then:
She has stolen something priceless from me
.

When she steps inside, he says, “Miss Shipley?”

Her eyes must be adjusting to the dim interior because she seems shocked to find someone standing in front of her. “Mr. Alpert. Pleasure to meet you. Remember, call me Ellie.”

“And please call me Jake.”

He looks at her face, tries to discern any note of caution. He likes the fact that she's not wearing lipstick.

A little sternly, she says, “I have to warn you, this is my first auction. The art crowd thinks this is all a bit seedy and untoward.”

“Oh, it is,” Marty says, “a comedy of manners complete with little wooden paddles. You're going to love it. I'll teach you all the brutal customs. Don't worry that you're green—it's your expert eyes I want to lease for the afternoon.”

“Speaking of eyes…” she murmurs, rummaging through an enormous leather handbag. Eventually, she produces a pair of black-framed reading glasses and perches them on the bridge of her nose, blinking as if the room is just now coming into focus.

He says, “Shall we take a stroll and see what's what?”

“By all means. Lead the way.”

Marty moves to the far corner of the room, where there's a clearing in the inventory of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish Old Masters.

“Now, I like to make a quick perimeter check of the sale items before the auction. No use being bogged down by anything until you know the lay of the land. The auction catalogue is useful but prone to vagueness. There's a lot of
circle of
s and
attributed to
s and this or that school. Those are for the amateurs fresh off the boat. I prefer attribution, a provenance with some teeth. So I mentally cross the phantoms off my list as I walk around.”

“You have a system,” Ellie says brightly.

“The system is try not to be cheated. What do you see here that grabs you?”

She digs through her handbag again and produces something that looks like a jeweler's loupe on the end of a lanyard. She wears it like a necklace. “I'll need a few minutes. Why don't I report back once I've walked the circuit? You want to stick to Holland and Flanders?”

“I do,” says Marty. “How about we rendezvous at sixteen hundred?”

“Is that four o'clock?”

“I'm joking.”

“Of course.”

“In fifteen minutes?”

“See you then.”

He watches her step off uncertainly, both hands in the pockets of her flowing skirt. She stops in front of a painting, positions the loupe, and leans in, one hand clenched into a fist behind her back, a girl peering through a keyhole. By now a few dozen people have gathered in the salesroom and he sees her get some attention from some Upper East Side types and one of the grim-looking cataloguers in a silk bow tie. Marty begins to walk the floor. A seventeenth-century oak panel from Antwerp,
A Rocky Landscape with Christ on the Road to Emmaus
by Gillis Claesz. The estimate in the catalogue says two to three thousand dollars, but he doubts it's worth fifteen hundred. Next is
A river landscape by a lock, with elegant company on horseback and villagers on the bank
. Sometimes the titles are short essays and it always makes him wary, as if they commissioned a toothpaste copywriter to tell the viewer what he's looking at.
A winter village landscape with huntsman and travelers on a track
is estimated at four to seven thousand dollars. These are all middling novelties, he thinks, and he suddenly worries that Ellie will think him an armchair collector, a weekend gallery warrior—she might beg off if she thinks her talents will go untapped. He looks over at her and sees her face just inches from the weave of a canvas, as if she's smelling the pigments. She straightens, looks over, gives him a self-conscious wave, then begins in his direction. He watches her handbag swing as she lopes across the room.

He says, “This lineup's weak. I feel like I'm at a garage sale in Newark.”

A little breathily, she says, “I think I found something. There's a private collection, four pictures, and what's wonderful is that they're all from the same two-year period, but some from Holland and some from Flanders. Come take a look.”

He says, “Some widow is converting her assets to cash or an heir is lobbing off Granny's depressing old paintings.”

He's surprised when she takes him by the elbow, not affectionately, but a little forcefully, and leads him to the corner of the room where the four paintings lean against easels. He flips through the sales catalogue for the right entry:
From the private collection of the late Mr. J. A. Simmons
.

He says, “Thornton and Morrell specialize in the private collections of the dead or dying.”

Ellie stands beside a floral still life—Christoffel van den Berghe's
Tulips, Roses, Narcissi, Crocuses, an Iris, a Poppy, and Other Flowers in a Gilt Mounted Porcelain Vase on a Ledge, with a Queen of Spain Fritillary, a White Ermine, and a Magpie Butterfly.

“Oh, they kill me,” says Marty. “It's like Charles Darwin wrote half these titles.”

Ellie laughs, the loupe pinched between her fingers. “I agree, the title is a little on the descriptive side. But they write long descriptions since the painters didn't give the works names. It helps to keep them straight. Here's the wonderful thing. This is from Middleburg, a northern Dutch port city that was incredibly isolated in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Picture this lonely place sticking out into the North Sea like a sore thumb at the end of a chain of islands. Swamp and black mud channels, the sloppy branches of the Rhine. The Middleburg flower painters kind of invented this stuff, and it's long before the Holland tulip mania, so here is the most exquisite floral still life, the height of the art form, taking place on this little muddy nugget of land, miles from anything else. And virtually none of these flowers bloom at the same time, so everything you're looking at is amalgamated and invented in the painter's mind. So the year here is 1616 or so. Then, let's take a look at its neighbor.”