The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (38 page)

“The painting we bought years back,” says Hendrik in Dutch, “the child's funeral scene. Do you have others by Sara de Vos?”

Mrs. Zeller chews and thinks. “I'm afraid I've never heard that name.”

Ellie feels a wave of sudden fatigue, a burst of jet lag. “Do you mind if we look through your collection?”

The widow looks up from her bowl of stew. “It's spread all over. Some in the attic, some in the sitting rooms, some who knows where. My lawyer in Heemstede township makes up the papers when I make a sale. I think he took an inventory at one point.”

They finish their dinner and speak no more of paintings. Later, when the plates have been cleared and half the lights in the house have been extinguished, Mrs. Zeller brings some extra towels down to their rooms. The towels are stiff and rough and smell like lemons. Ellie thanks her, stands out in the hallway to chat with her before bed. Out of nowhere, Mrs. Zeller asks her whether they'll be going out to see the ruins tomorrow. “Out by the old settlement. A nice spot for a picnic,” she says. “In the Netherlands we have many ruins but very few castles. The Dutch do not like lords and ladies.” Ellie wants to bring up the Dutch adoration of Queen Beatrix but instead she confirms what she's just heard. “What ruins are those?”

“The old village,” the widow says.

“From the painting?”

She nods but then appears suddenly wary and frightened. Ellie wonders, not for the first time, whether she has dementia.

Hendrik has come out of his room to listen in. In Dutch, he says, “Mijn vrouw, are these the ruins of the village in the painting? The picture of the funeral procession.”

The widow says, “The whole town was buried out there. I will make you cheese sandwiches for a picnic lunch.” She says good night and walks down the long hallway.

*   *   *

Sara wakes in the thin blue hours of the night, the big house dark and bloated all around her. She's marooned in firelight, in a narrow feather bed in the tearoom. She knows this is the place where Cornelis tends his melancholy and imbibes the Orient one cup at a time. She's burning up beneath a mountain of blankets, her hair drenched with sweat under a cotton bonnet. She tries to sit up and throw the bedspread off, but she falls back with exhaustion. A fire is ablaze in the hearth and she sees Barent slumped in a chair, the folded pages of a gazette across his lap. It takes her a moment to realize that it's Tomas sitting there, that this is a different time, a different life. She has been dreaming of Barent, of following Kathrijn through the woods and into a cave. There are afterimages when she closes her eyes. Black tulips and gleaming ribs of ice. She sits up in bed again and looks out the window at the snowdrifts. She's very thirsty, but she doesn't want to wake Tomas. She sees them swimming together across a placid lake, then they are fording a river beside a field of running horses. She wakes again from another dream.

In the morning there is a doctor from Haarlem and Tomas at his side. The physician wears an apron with a tiny island of blood on the hem. Is it mine? she wonders. She wants to ask, but speaking requires formidable strength. She glimpses her frostbitten toes, the blackened nail beds. They are no more hers than the milky glass apothecary bottles on the mantel or the slurries of melted snow pooling in the orchard. She looks at her hands, overcome by a sense of relief—these bony pink fingers alone are mine. She points to a goose quill and a half-written letter on the writing desk, one of the sad epistles Cornelis writes to foreign correspondents. On the back of it she writes
I want to be in my own cottage, in my own bed
. The doctor says she cannot be moved. But there is the matter of the blood on his apron and the way it pulls crimson from the wintry light. It's in the shape of a reared lion, just like the provincial flag. Emissaries have been sent for her; they will come bearing myrrh and tulip bulbs wrapped in muslin, the daughter offsets of
Semper Augustus
.

*   *   *

Ellie and Hendrik bicycled out to the ruins earlier in the day, dutifully packed along their cheese sandwiches and macintosh squares for a picnic. Now Ellie has returned alone, her forgery removed from the frame and stretcher, folded into triangles in her backpack like a flag she's about to unfurl. Hendrik thinks the painting is back in Leiden in safe storage until she flies to America. For a fleeting moment she thought they would find the high perch where Sara stood to paint the funeral scene. Instead they found mounds of rubble and brickwork, the occasional base of a chimney, a lintel or casement, but nothing revealing. Still, this is hallowed ground, a place where Sara had passed through or lived. The broken headstones in the cemetery are mostly illegible, a few engraved dates and names blackened with age. This sense of ceremony—burning the canvas down by the river—is probably misplaced. She has always been an atheist and mistrusted the rituals of the believer. But there's something about the idea of setting it alight as a kind of offering to Sara de Vos that appeals to her. From under the widow's kitchen sink she has brought matches and lighter fluid. She spreads out the canvas on the riverbank and douses it with fluid. When she strikes the match there's an after-burn of sulfur in the air. The corners of the canvas blacken and curl. She watches the layers of paint buckle, the image stripping away into striations of smoke. The canvas chars in the corners first, in the places where the paint is thinnest. When the bright yellows of the skaters' scarves catch, she sees something flare like a tiny starburst or an incineration of glass. It's beautiful to watch it kindle slowly against the grass of the riverbank. As it burns, she wonders if she will ever paint something of her own again.

*   *   *

On the third day of fever, she asks for a hand mirror and a hairbrush. She sits up in bed and brushes her long dark hair out, holding each length between her fingertips. The face in the oval frame belongs to a stranger. Cheeks ablaze, wind-chapped lips, a look of fatigue about the eyes. She hands the mirror back to Tomas in disgust and says, “Do you remember how to size and ground a canvas?” Her voice has recovered, but it remains low and hoarse, some damage to the throat is what the doctor says. He looks at her impatiently, arms folded. “It's how I won you over. Of course I remember.” She holds her hands up to show him the size and requests a ground of warm, earthen tones. “Are you sure you're well enough to paint?” he asks. “The doctor forbade any form of exertion.”

She sinks back down to the pillows and closes her eyes. “I'll paint in bed just to keep you happy.”

A prepared canvas appears beside the bed that afternoon. It's a foot square, mounted on a wooden strainer made from fence palings. The ground is a little darker than she'd like—more russet than warm clay—but it's well made, pumiced smooth and even. On the bedside table are the ground pigments that make up her palette: white lead, smalt, yellow ocher, a touch of azurite. She can't imagine how long she's been asleep. Tomas is beside her again, bearing soup on a tray. “What are you going to paint?” he asks.

She shrugs and looks out the window. The bare elms are streaked with twilight up on the hill. “Nothing with snow or ice in it.”

He smiles, touches her shoulder, and leaves her to eat and work.

She knows this will be the last thing she ever paints. It briefly overwhelms her with the magnitude of choosing the right subject. Before that first line of pale chalk, before the underdrawing fleshes out into shapes and proportions, there is a stab of grief for all the things she didn't get to paint. The finches wheeling in the rafters of the barn, Cornelis reading in the arbor, Tomas bent over his roses in the flower garden, apple blossoms, walnuts beside oysters, Kathrijn in the full bloom of her short life, Barent sleeping in a field of lilacs, the Gypsies in the market, the late-night revelers in the taverns … Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it's really noonday sun.

Then she begins, banishing the feeling of remorse with gentle lines of pale chalk. Her hands are unsteady, so she first practices on the back of the canvas. She settles on a pose and a depiction before turning the canvas over. She paints a series of lines and textures for an entire afternoon, retooling her hand and her eye. There are bouts of exhaustion, hours where she sleeps with the canvas laid faceup, across her chest, one layer drying at a time. She wants to paint something she has never set down before, something true. Her fevered dreams are overrun with the berry-black eyes of the fish along the riverbed, the scraping of Tomas's skates up above, the pallid moon through the window of ice. Her skin burns with the memory of it. Sometimes she wakes herself up with her own moaning. Opening her eyes is to come ashore again, to find the stone cottage abundantly solid and straight-edged. She paints another hour, then stares out the window for long stretches. One day, sometime near dusk, Tomas rides his horse up to the window and smiles at her from across the big mare's white-diamond forehead. It's called a star, she remembers, this marking on a horse's head. She wants to remember the names. She wants to remember him looking back at her in the twilight.

*   *   *

Ellie takes a flashlight and a pair of gloves up to the attic rooms. As she climbs the narrow staircase, the smell of damp is a living thing. It catches in the back of her throat, a visceral reminder of Brooklyn. She fears the worst, that even if there are dozens of paintings up here—squirreled away from the Nazis, is the widow's claim—that they'll be damaged beyond repair. The rooms are littered with newspapers and desiccated insects, the walls blotted through with continents of mold. Boxes of mildewing books and clothes, a crate of wooden toys. No one has been up here for a very long time. She continues down the passageway toward a triptych of north-facing windows opaque with grime. Pigeons appear to be nesting in the roof because the floor is splattered with their droppings. Cut into one wall is a crawl space with a little wooden door. She opens it and shines her flashlight into the musty interior, but there's nothing inside but exposed electrical wiring and cobwebs. She goes back out into the hallway, opening each door. In a tiny room she finds some mutilated luggage and begins to open tattered suitcases and trunks. There are yellowing black-and-white photographs from the 1920s, snapshots from family vacations and postcards from foreign hotels. Children brimming with smiles beside statues in parks and running along northern beaches. Inside a metal trunk, wrapped in a twill blanket, she finds eight canvases, each one rolled and coiled with a ribbon, the tiny puncture holes visible along the edges where they've been carefully removed from a stretcher. She cinches her gloves and spreads out the blanket. She unrolls each canvas and finds something to pin down its corners with. Before long she has a spread of Flemish, Dutch, and English paintings, a few from the nineteenth century but a few also from the 1600s. There's one that feels familiar to her, something about the brushwork and the light. A young woman is sitting at an easel but turned toward the viewer. It's an open, youthful face, her dark hair pulled beneath a bonnet and her chin set against a broad disc of lace collar. Despite the loose brushwork and the easiness of her pose—elbow propped on the chair, one hand holding a paintbrush like a quill—she's dressed formally. A working artist would never wear a crimson velvet dress and a high church collar to paint in. She has dressed herself for something momentous. In her left hand she clutches the wooden palette, a dozen brushes, a piece of cloth. Beside her is a half-finished canvas resting against the easel—a young man on horseback framed by a leaded window, peering in, the angling northern sunshine like a corona around his head. He appears to float through space, to radiate off the canvas and into the artist's workroom. She is still young, the painter, despite the date of 1649 in the lower left corner. She is twenty again and just starting out, turning to take us in as we come through the door, her lips parted as if she's about to speak.

 

ALSO BY
DOMINIC SMITH

Bright and Distant Shores

The Beautiful Miscellaneous

The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre

 

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Professor Frima Fox Hofrichter for her expertise on Dutch women painters of the seventeenth century; Stephen Gritt, director of conservation at the National Gallery of Canada, for his insights into the technical aspects of art restoration and conservation; and Ken Perenyi, master art forger, for vetting my fabrications.

Forgery techniques are derived from interviews and from details found in three sources:
The Fake's Progress
by Tom Keating, Geraldine Norman, and Frank Norman;
Caveat Emptor
by Ken Perenyi; and, most important,
The Art Forger's Handbook
by Eric Hebborn. The chapter that contains a night fishing scene on the Hudson River draws from reportage about eels, shipwrecks, shellfish, and the Shellfish Protector found in Joseph Mitchell's iconic
New Yorker
essay “The Bottom of the Harbor.” The advertisement for the Rent-a-Beats in the first chapter is taken from Fred McDarrah's 1960 real-life ad in
The Village Voice
.

Deep gratitude to the late Wendy Weil, for her guidance and wisdom, and to my agents, Emily Forland and Gaby Naher, for their encouragement and expertise. Many thanks to my editors, Sarah Crichton and Jane Palfreyman, for their faith and insight, and to my early readers—Karen Olsson, S. Kirk Walsh, Michael Parker, and James Magnuson. And a big thank-you to Jeremy Pollet for being my driver, tour guide, and lunch date in and around Edgewater, New Jersey.

A final and enormous thank-you to my wife, Emily, and my two daughters, Mikaila and Gemma, for always believing in me and helping me steal the time to write.