The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (22 page)

He leads the way across the marble floor and they pass behind the wide staircase to a narrow passageway she assumes is designated for the servants. Tomas is tall and meticulous in his movements, smells of leather and horses. His hands against the lantern are pale and thin; they seem at odds with his tending of the stables and the grounds. She follows him up the steep wooden stairs, drenched in his shadow.

“Mr. van Schooten said you are also the gardener…”

Tomas turns to her, smiles, and gently presses a finger to his lips. “The cook is sleeping and we don't want to be poisoned at breakfast.”

They reach the attic hallway and a series of closed doors. Sara expects her sleeping quarters to be next to the storeroom, nestled beside the peat and firewood, so she's surprised to find a spacious room at the end of the house, hewn under giant crossbeams. Three dormer windows look down onto the gardens and a bed cantilevers from the wall on an iron frame. There's a small desk and an easel and a linen cupboard for her clothes. Tomas lights a candle for her and says good night. He has a kind face, she thinks, the face of a man who's spent his life around horses and roses. After he's gone she surveys the big room. It strikes her that perhaps she's been accorded special privileges, given the largest of the servant rooms, a room once reserved for a head butler. Far from smelling of sawdust and peat, the room smells of sweet woodruff and wax and lavender. She unbundles her clothes and puts on a nightdress before lying on the mattress stuffed with cotton. That first night she refuses to peel back the wool blanket or bed linens, as if this will delay her arrival.

*   *   *

Cornelis Groen is a rheumatic bachelor in his late sixties, the son of a Heemstede founder who can trace his name back to the twelfth century. After a brief career as the inspector of weights and measures in Haarlem, Cornelis became a trader for the East India Company and eventually inherited his father's fortune and retired to the Groen estate. An amateur scientist, collector, and gardener, he wears a velvet-lined dressing gown with a pair of scissors dangling from a leather belt in case he needs to snip a stem or leaf at short notice. He also uses it to shred the tobacco for his long clay pipe that he likes to wedge beside the scissors against his waistline. Decades of unmarried life have inclined him toward his own idiosyncrasies and a misplaced sense of occasion. When Sara is summoned to breakfast that first morning, before the light has flushed the treetops, she finds him standing beneath a portrait of what looks to be his father, with a faint echo of the elder's pose—hands clasped and eyes cast into the middle distances as if contemplating a heavy burden or loss. Cornelis's eyes are a startling, febrile blue.

The dining room table has been set as if for a banquet still life—sliced apples and nuts arranged on silver trays, a loaf of bread broken in a basket, a wheel of cheese in yellow wax. Two places have been set with starched cotton napkins and hand-painted china plates. Groen turns on his heels and looks at Sara for a moment, stiffening in his joints. He is pale and tall, but also stooped in the shoulders, as if a weight is pulling on his chest. There is no formality of introductions—he speaks to her as if picking up the thread of a conversation begun in a different room. “Are you much troubled by dreams, Mrs. de Vos?”

Sara crosses the room toward him. “Not all that much.”

“I had Mrs. Streek put some lavender in your linen cupboard because I've always suspected it wards off ill thoughts and troubled sleep. I liked your husband's work, but he had certain incapacities. Finishing something was one of them. I imagine he haunts your dreams and for that I'm regretful.” He looks out the window that overlooks the front acres—a tendril of sunlight is edging its way into a thicket. “Every morning I stand here and watch the sun gild the trees and the grottoes. It's like drawing a breath before the day begins in earnest. Are you hungry or could you tolerate a brief tour of the household?”

Sara hasn't eaten since Amsterdam and feels faint with hunger. “At your pleasure, Mr. Groen.”

“Perhaps a few slices of apple and some herring before we walk about. But you must call me Cornelis. We'll consider this an informal arrangement, a squaring of the ledger, yes, but certainly not servitude. Dear Father in heaven, we thank you for this bounty. Please, serve yourself.”

Sara sits and places some cheese, herring, and bread onto her plate. She waits for Cornelis to take his first mouthful before she begins eating. He slices and chews with great concentration.

“I've already hung your florals that we acquired, one of them in the
Kunstkammer
, the others in a barely used sitting room. You have a background in still lifes? I made certain enquiries in Haarlem. The cheese is from my own pastures. We have dairy cattle off toward the dunes in the west of the village. Forgive me for saying, but I don't think the florals are the best I've seen. A hair short of prodigious would be my approximation.”

Sara looks up from her plate and wonders whether Cornelis has always been so simultaneously frank and meandering. She has the sense of listening into a conversation he's having with himself or with the room around him. She realizes now that Barent had been strangely silent about his time spent at the estate, referring to the patron simply as a fussy old burgher with too much time and money on his hands. She finishes her mouthful of bread and says, “They were painted under urgent time constraints. Sir, I wonder if we might talk about the terms of my employment. I have read the court document and contract, but I'm uncertain how I'll repay my husband's debt to you.”

Groen brandishes a morsel of herring between two fingers. “Ah, let's not talk of debt. Would you pass me that butter dish, meisje?”

Sara hands him the silver dish and watches as he slathers some butter onto a heel of bread.

“Before he passed away, my father was a landscape painter and I trained in his workshop from the age of twelve. I helped my husband with his work, when I wasn't painting my own still lifes. I could continue with the landscapes if you like.”

“Eat up and we'll take that tour.” Cornelis looks back out toward the window and nods, as if approving of the sunlight's passage across his treetops.

*   *   *

Their first stop is the kitchen, where Mrs. Streek, a stout and ruddy Frisian woman, is scrubbing a copper pot. Cornelis enters tentatively and explains that there are actually two kitchens, one for cooking and one for “inventory and display.” Mrs. Streek looks up from the soapy water and asks whether they're done with the breakfast dishes. “A second sitting is in the stars, I believe, Mrs. Streek,” says Cornelis. “I'm showing our guest around the place.” Mrs. Streek rinses the pot under some scalding water and says, “A guest, is it?” She never once looks at Sara, and they demurely pass into an adjacent room glinting with copper pans, pewter dishes, a glass-fronted cupboard that displays crockery and hand-painted china. “Mrs. Streek would never do more than boil water in here. I've caught her polishing the silver on her day off. Grew up with the herring mongers of Friesland so perhaps that's part of it.”

They pass into a long hallway hung with Venetian mirrors. Sara glimpses a number of sitting rooms as they walk along, their fireplaces unlit and stacked with beech logs. Not a cinder in sight. They come through a reception room paved with marble, the chairs and tables covered in drop cloths. “My father hosted dignitaries when I was a child, but we've been short of occasion lately.” They stop in a narrow room with rose-colored leaded windows and a small wooden table arranged with delicate china. “This is where I take the tea that the apothecary prescribes. Many years ago I imported china from the oriental provinces and I had to train them to stop painting their supernatural pagan fantasies onto the dishware.” He picks up a delicate teacup and turns it in the rosin light. A white magnolia is painted on the side. “Now, let's go see the
Kunstkammer
.”

At the end of the hallway is a set of double doors and Cornelis takes a key from a chain around his waist and unlocks them. “My father may have dug the first waterways in this area and commissioned a school and church, but he had no eye for beauty. He was a pragmatist, not an aesthete. He helped the local peasants set up a bleach works and they became famous for the laundry they mangled in the village. I like to think this is the least practical room in the house.”

Cornelis throws open the doors with great ceremony, only to realize the curtains are drawn and his guest can't see anything but a sea of darkness. He rushes into the room ahead of her and begins pulling back the velvet curtains. The room blanches into view one dagger of light at a time. “I try to keep the light at bay so the paintings won't dull between viewings.”

Sara estimates the room is about sixty feet in length, with an ornate ceiling twenty feet above the white marble floor. Except for a patch of blank wall at the far end, every inch of wall space is covered with paintings. At first, she doesn't know where to cast her attention—the walls are choked with color and a maddening variety of composition. She wants to pluck a single painting off the wall and hold it by a window, her face close enough to discern the brushstrokes. But then she begins to discern a pattern: along the left wall the landscapes flow into the seascapes before a transition to still lifes at the corner and along the back wall. The right side of the room, flanking the tall windows, is filled with portraits and genre paintings. There's a general movement from nature to objects to quotidian excerpts of a man's life, a painterly route from God's kingdom to the shopkeeper's dustbin. In this moment she feels a glimmer of affection for Cornelis Groen, for the mind that has gathered all this in one place, but then he says: “Your husband helped me arrange the paintings into a natural pattern. He arranged all these works like the notes of an opera.”

She feels a sudden chill of loneliness and longing for Barent before it subsides back to steady anger. To collect herself, she walks the perimeter of the room. It's more work than she's ever seen assembled in one place and she wonders whether it rivals the court collections in Den Haag. She turns to face the back wall, from where she'd entered, and notices that it's filled with mythical allegories and histories, with rippled Greek gods and martyred saints. She shifts her weight from foot to foot, spinning slightly in place, and looks over at Cornelis, who stands by one of the tall windows. “I would recommend starting in that far corner. Many of them are from artists living in or passing through Haarlem, but there are also a few stray Italians and Flemish imports.”

The teeming room, its sheer scale, keeps her in place for a moment. She resolves to look at one painting at a time and walks over to the far corner. Each work has a small plaque below with its artist, descriptive title, and date of execution. She suspects Cornelis has devised some of the more grandiose titles himself—
Serene Landscape with Heroic Figures
and
Noble Hills in Dawn Light with Great Church
. The titles given by the artists are less emphatic, like the circular oak panel by Jan van Goyen, simply called
Landscape with an Old Tree
, from 1620. The composition is straightforward—the outskirts of a small village, a few figures on horseback, a boat on a pond, a lone tree—but the atmosphere is flushed with muted browns and sepia-tinted clouds. In the foreground Sara can see traces of walnut ink Van Goyen must have used on the tree. The whole scene is wrapped in permanent twilight. She hears Groen's halting footsteps coming across the parquet floor toward her. Somehow he's left the
Kunstkammer
to light his pipe and returned without her noticing. He says, “Van Goyen studied landscape with Esaias van de Velde, who died a few years back in Den Haag. He's hanging right above him. I try to put the master above the pupil whenever I can. That was one of my ideas and your husband liked it.” She looks up at
Summer Landscape
, from 1614. A few villagers walking along a pathway under feathered trees, it contains the same secretive tints and tones. The walkers are painted so faintly that the road can be seen through their bodies and Sara can't decide whether this is a defect or a flourish.

As she moves down toward the seascapes, Cornelis puffs at her side, studying her studying the paintings. Ships tossed about in squalls, or men climbing the rigging toward the Dutch flag of a lion on a rampart, twelve cannons bared at starboard. Into the still lifes with their staged meals, the glistening hearts of oysters against chill pewter, the husk of a bread roll, the rind and peel of half-eaten fruits. She sees her own depiction of the
Semper Augustus
tulip with a host of other flowers, the light pouring down from some unknown source. It's not a terrible painting, she thinks, but in all its technical competence it's rather forgettable. Nearby is a vanitas that achieves something lasting—a skull, a Bible, and a telescope arranged on a table, the pallid light and weak shadows perfectly capturing the chill loneliness of midwinter. They suggest there are a thousand dead white afternoons that wait for us all.

Cornelis crosses toward the back wall and gestures to a closed door. “There is one more room.”

On the other side of the wall is a small space that reminds her of a sepulcher, a place where a saint might be buried behind an altar. Only instead of it being dank and stony, a downpour of light breaks through a ceiling of wrought iron and glass. “My father used to take his naps back here before the days turned dark.” In the center of the room is a wooden table with a model village mocked up in wood and clay, painted with bright greens and dun browns. Hills and dunes have been formed from plaster and there's a narrow pathway that leads off the side of the table like a trail to oblivion. Sara stands over the tiny village and then looks up at the walls, where she recognizes Barent's landscape style—heavy skies pushing down on blanched horizons, a middle ground of stark trees and windswept dunes.