The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (11 page)

“How romantic,” she says. “And when did he purchase
At the Edge of a Wood
?”

“It came on the market recently.” Hendrik suddenly seems evasive, looking down at his feet.

She pictures a much older Gabriel in a shabby raincoat in Leiden, sitting in a café with a yellowed espionage novel and a forgery wrapped in brown paper, killing time before his appointment at the private gallery. She doesn't want to sound like she's prying, so she changes her tactic. Casually, she says, “I'm so surprised about the new discovery … a funeral scene, you say?”

“Yes,” he says, “
Winter with a Child's Funeral Procession
. An outdoor scene, painted in 1637.”

“Another outdoor scene? I don't know of anything for de Vos after 1636.”

“Ah, yes, well, you might have to revise your book.”

This sounds like a dig, but it's hard to tell. If she asks him whether he's read her book about seventeenth-century Dutch women painters she risks sounding vain. Instead, she asks, “Where was it found?”

“Mr. van Foort keeps those details to himself. Trade secrets. I like to think it's something like Coco Chanel's old suite at the Ritz Hotel in Paris because that would be straight from a Disney movie!” He says this with sudden glee, as if he's landed a joke that's inside her cultural tent. Another thing she recalls about her Dutch friends is that they were listening to pop music a decade beyond its prime.

Ellie says, “Well, Paris would make more sense than Cincinnati, which is where two other de Vos paintings have ended up.”

Without expression, he says, “You believe she stopped painting in 1636.” It's not a question so much as a statement of her fallacy.

They're walking through the bustle of Circular Quay during rush hour. Ferries are filling up as she leads him across the grain of pedestrian traffic. A few buskers are performing along the handrail by the water, including a troupe of painted Aboriginal dancers. The city is built for tourists, Ellie thinks. When they get into a clearing, she says, “From a few letters and archival documents we know that Sara de Vos was raised in Amsterdam, the daughter of a landscape painter but she trained in still life. She married a landscape painter from Haarlem, lived with her husband and child for some years near the Kalverstraat. The child, a daughter, died young, possibly from the plague. We don't have death records for either Sara or the husband. The guild records are mostly destroyed for that period but we know from court dockets and auction receipts that the couple was going bankrupt after the daughter's death. Her name was Kathrijn. She's buried in a pauper's grave behind a church in Amsterdam. Sorry, I'm prattling…”

Hendrik looks at her for the first time in several minutes. In the falling dark, it's hard for her to tell whether it's smugness or knowing when he says, “But no graves for the parents have been found … so de Vos could have lived another twenty years and painted many more works?”

“Technically that's true. Though I've always suspected
At the Edge of a Wood
was the high-water mark. It might have tapered off after that.”

“This new painting might throw that into doubt.”

“If it's really hers.”

“Well, you are the expert and will have to judge for yourself. But your theory may need some revising.”

In a burst of vindictiveness, she imagines adding that, by the way, not only is the new landscape probably a misattribution, but also I'm pretty sure your
At the Edge of a Wood
is a fake I painted in my midtwenties.

But they're already on the outskirts of the Rocks and she gets distracted by the rowdiness of the pubs overflowing with office workers, some of them spilling out onto the street. Ellie points to the Russell Hotel, a stone building with a turret that hugs the corner. It's not flash by any means, but cozy, within budget, and in the thick of things. It's where they put all the couriers; the VIPs stay at one of the five stars at the other end of the quay. They go inside and stand for a moment in the quaintly shabby Victorian lobby.

Ellie says, “Everything should be set up under the gallery's account.” She takes a business card from her purse. “Call me if you need anything.”

“Thank you,” Hendrik says.

“I hope you get some sleep. We'll send a taxi for you in the morning. Shall we say eleven?”

Hendrik looks at his watch and shakes his head. “Forgot to change my watch. Apparently I'm still in the Netherlands. Yes, eleven will be fine.”

Ellie says good night and walks out onto the street. The thought of taking a taxi or train back to the university and the long drive to Pittwater exhausts her. She strolls along the quay and contemplates her options. On a whim, she heads inside the InterContinental and crosses the vaulted atrium lounge, the interior of the old treasury building, and stands at the front desk. The impulsiveness of it shocks her. A corner room with a view will cost her close to four hundred dollars, but she produces her credit card unflinchingly. The desk clerk is young, Asian, and beautiful, and Ellie's surprised by how easily she lies to the woman, telling her she's just arrived from London and her luggage is delayed. The woman tells her that the concierge would be happy to arrange some clothes bought on her behalf if she phones down with her sizes. Ellie thanks her and takes the room key. She already knows she'll order room service and request a new blouse in the morning before heading back to the gallery for the case opening.

*   *   *

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 deliveries 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.