The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (12 page)

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.

It requires some effort for him to sit upright in his straight-backed chair. He puckers his mouth, choosing his words carefully. “Word among the membership is that your still lifes were quite accomplished before things soured.”

She says, “It's regrettable, the way everything happened.”

“There's no need for us to pretend we don't know the full circumstances of your husband's activities and the shadow they've cast upon your household. Thus our meeting today and hencewise the discussion that will ensue.”

Sara can hear the housepainter straining up against his own jerrybuilt vocabulary. She pictures him at board meetings spewing legal
forthwith
s and
therefore
s to impress the handful of university-educated guild members. Sara says, “I'll come straight to the point. There are few things in this world dearer to me than painting. I would be honored if you would consider readmitting me to your ranks.”

Blim narrows his gaze, then cocks his head to one side. “Officially, you are still a member of the guild, though not a member in good standing.” Blim turns to the guild servant: “We have two current lady members, do we not, Mr. Tromp?”

“It is so, sir.”

“And tell me, Mr. Tromp, are these lady painters gainfully plying their trade? Are they helping us to keep the orphans at bay?”

This is a man, Sara thinks, who has never painted a canvas, who has somehow convinced the world and the guild that painting a house requires expertise beyond climbing a ladder and serviceable eyesight. She bristles as Mr. Tromp flips through some pages of his book.

Tromp says, “You might say that production has tapered off since both of them married several years ago. There was a portrait commission a few years back. Nothing since.”

Sara sees herself painting when Kathrijn was a baby, the small wooden crib beside the easel, one foot rocking it if she fretted, the plunge into the canvas whenever her daughter slept between outbursts of colic. She was always an unsettled child. Sara says nothing, looks from one foolish man to the other, waiting for an end to their deliberations.

“Ah, I see. And while you're in your ledger, Mr. Tromp, tell me about the fines we've imposed in the last year for illicit lotteries, raffles, and market sales. For example, innkeepers who hold illegal auctions…”

Tromp riffles back and forth between pages, seemingly flustered. “Too many to count.”

Blim looks back at Sara. “This is not a pretty picture. I believe that's the hackneyed expression that best sums it up. Do you know why I was elected to hold this office, madame?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Because when I used to paint houses I was known for never exposing a single brushstroke. I care about every single board and batten, every piece of window trim. The members thought I would bring that same diligence to the task at hand. But I'm being swallowed up, you understand. Every two years someone else takes this post and they hand down a book of scrawled numbers and recorded sales. We need an accountant, not a glassblower or painter at the helm. We should never have gotten rid of the stonemasons. They were the right kind of chiselers for this job.”

Sara fears that this kind of muddling could go on all day, so she leans forward and raises her voice slightly. “I assure you, my contributions to this guild will be swift and steady.”

As if stirred from a daydream, Blim cuts his eyes through the stony light at her. “Is that so? Tell me, mevrouw, have you and your husband been painting this past year?”

Sara knows this is a question laced with poison. “No, sir. My husband has gone to work with a bookbinder and I have worked of late for a catalogue company. But we would both like to paint again. Very much so.”

“Do you have a work in mind that would meet our exacting standards?” He leans back so the painting behind him comes into full view.

Sara imagines trying to describe the painting of the girl at the edge of a wood. In her mind, it suddenly seems absurd—a ghostly figment standing beside a tree. She knows, in this moment, that she will never show it to anyone. Folding her hands into her lap, she gives the overseer the answer he wants: “I was thinking about returning to still lifes.”

Blim looks at Tromp, then up at the ceiling, where the surgeons have painted their coat of arms. He nods, letting the idea wash over him. “Of course, the full board would have to meet and approve any work you submitted as a way of paying off your household's fines. I believe still lifes are an appropriate place for the brush of a woman. An arrangement could be made, I'm sure, if you brought us some exceptional still lifes that we could sell to clear the ledger. I believe it could be done. Do you agree, Mr. Tromp?”

“I do, sir.”