A Masterpiece of Revenge Page 10

  I realized that I knew every brush stroke as if I had done them myself. I knew why he had put such and such an architectural caprice there, what diagonal he had used to give the effect of the horizon, what mixture of colors he had used to get that yellow.

  Never would I create something as sublime. I had knowledge; I lacked genius. I needed to accept that mine was a modest talent.

  “Modest talent.” The words did not accord well with my passionate temperament. Something was pushing me into believing I could find a way.

  Suddenly my whole body was flooded with a sense of relief, with the conviction that leaves no room for doubt: I would create a Lorrain. The artist himself would guide me.

  I knew I had found my destiny, Papa. I also knew exactly how the thing could be done. It was a flash of genius — a total vision.

  The minute I got home to Oxford I ran to my lab and found the painting Fd bought from Quentin.

  The first thing I needed to do was remove all traces of the original paint from the canvas — but preserve the varnish deposited there over the course of the centuries. Using a mild solvent, I removed these layers one by one. I would reuse the varnish later, because the dust embedded in it was authentic, and therefore would confirm the finished painting’s age.

  Whenever I could — weekends, holidays — I locked myself away in my laboratory to analyze, decompose, and then reconstitute all the pigments necessary.

  I had already compiled a complete list of the paints Lorrain used, as well as details of their chemical composition. I knew, for example, that the blues in his oceans consisted of fine particles of lapis lazuli dissolved in white lead. I couldn’t use just any lapis, at least not the sort you find on the open market, which comes from Brazil or Africa. I needed old lapis, extracted from the legendary mines near the mouth of the Amu Darya River in Tajikistan. The crystal composition is unique.

  For the blue of the sky, I would need azurite, a copper deposit you can find on fragments of bronze Roman statuary, mixed with equal amounts of palm pulp.

  Lorrain’s vermilion consisted of mercury sulfide. The green, copper oxidized in a natural resin. The yellow was not natural ocher, but a massicot, a lead-tin oxide.

  In one week, using an X-ray spectrometer, I had reconstituted the entire color palette Lorrain had used during his Italian period. This palette did not include, for example, the English vermilion, which he didn’t adopt until the end of his life.

  The quality and origins of the fur Lorrain used in his brushes was the subject of further painstaking research, because a few hairs always remain behind, lodged in the painting. The presence of any modern element in the finished work would give the whole thing away.

  I took all my materials to my flat in London, where I had the basic equipment I needed.

  By then I had decided my painting would be Lorrain’s missing masterpiece, The Port of Naples. It had disappeared sometime in the nineteenth century, but there are various engravings and copies that give us a very good idea of what it must have been like. The original drawing could of course be found in the Libro di Veritá. All I needed to do was increase the scale of that drawing and come up with a precise schematic.

  I carefully removed the painted canvas from its frame, taking care to put each hand-wrought iron tack back into its original hole. Then I secured the canvas to my worktable.

  The next step involved removing the pictorial layers, abrading them by hand until I hit canvas. Using solvents on the varnish-free paint would have meant running the risk of leaving a mark on the back of the canvas.

  Over the years, I had categorized the various fabrics Lorrain used while in Italy. His preference was for what is termed armure toile, a simple canvas of threads, woven in pairs or singly, forming a weave with a density often to thirteen threads per square centimeter. The disposition of the threads and the weave were common at the time in France and Italy. Luck was with me. The density of the weave and the direction of the width of the painting from Quentin’s attic painting corresponded perfectly.

  The tightly woven linen canvas retained a part of its original preparation, though no further trace of the original landscape. I double-checked that every trace of it was gone. The last thing I needed was to have a “ghost” image of the original appear while the finished painting was being examined.

  Using broad strokes, I applied a supplementary base of red ocher, fabricated according to a formula employed by many painters in the seventeenth century: a combination of ferruginous clay, rich in silicates and relatively poor in oxides, and linseed oil.

  Once this thick layer of colored ocher was dried, I spread a thin transitional layer, made up of equal parts of clay and lead oxide, plus carbon I obtained from burning antique wood. The composition of this layer was one of Lorrain’s trade secrets. It rendered the colors in his finished paintings even more luminescent.

  You must understand, Papa, that these primary coats, these intermediaries between the canvas and the pictorial elements, were of critical importance for the survival of a painting over the course of centuries. That is why the masters attended to them with such care.

  Funny, isn’t it? If you hadn’t forced me to study biochemistry, I never would have been able to accomplish any of this. Then again, had I gone to art school and become a painter, I doubt I would have even imagined imitating a seventeenth-century painter — though I might have mastered some of the techniques necessary. This Lorrain came to be at the end of a tortuous path, Papa. A path you set me on.

  I knew that for the actual painting I needed an actual painter, not a dreamer and a dabbler like me. I needed a forger of real genius.

  I chose the man who had painted that Poussin I had uncovered several years earlier, the one I told you about. I had been right in thinking that one day I might have need of his services. That day had come.

  His name was Imre Dagy. He was a compatriot of the Hungarian counterfeiter Elmy Hoffmann of Hory, and had taken refuge in London after the failed 1956 uprising in Hungary. Dagy earned a living by giving painting lessons. His talent was undeniable, but his linguistic and commercial skills were not at the same level, and he soon found himself involved with a network of art forgers in the employ of a disreputable London dealer, a sort of Fagin of the art world.

  Dagy’s ill health and his phobia of the world had kept him from reaching the attention of the public. For my purposes, this was ideal.

  Finding him took time, but find him I did. He was living in a studio off Portobello Road. To reach his studio you went through a courtyard where a dealer stored his goods, and down a long, dark hallway, until you came to a steep set of stairs, covered in grime, leading to his attic. It was like something out of Dickens, I swear. The whole place reeked of dust and decrepitude.

  I knocked. The door opened a crack. Then the artist himself appeared, his face barely visible by the hall light.

  “You are looking for someone?” he asked with a thick accent, but with a gentle smile. I don’t think he had many visitors.

  He was not a handsome specimen, this Hungarian. His nose was elongated at the bottom, his forehead sloped, and he had long, stringy gray hair. His eyes were half closed under heavy lids. And he had a way of not looking straight at you.

  Yet his hands were rather beautiful, though marred by liver spots and paint.

  He invited me into his hovel. Among the dusty bric-a-brac my eye kept on returning to the torso of a woman in plaster, her eyes looking ecstatic and her breasts extended. Such vulgarity. There were figurines in painted plaster — the sort you see in souvenir stalls.

  “Do you like these statues? I am the sculptor of them.”

  I thought I must have the wrong address. This man could not possibly have created that wonderful Poussin. He seemed incapable of creating anything of beauty.

  Next to catch my eye was a hideous creation depicting naked women standing on plinths in front of a grove of trees; others were hidden in the folds of theater curtains. Truly ghastly.

  “I am a
specialist of the trompe l'oeil,” he said, a note of pride in his voice.

  How was I to reply to that? They were staggeringly ugly.

  Yet something intrigued me about him. He seemed so — I don’t know — empty. Like a hollow husk of a man.

  I stayed for a few hours in his home, listening to him talk, trying not to look at the eyesores around me. Like many lonely people, he talked when given half the chance. The details he provided of his life left an indistinct picture. Something about it lacked life.

  His father had been a sculptor who in the ‘30s had been awarded a Rome Prize, and had taken advantage of it to abandon his wife and son and move to Italy with his model. The poor wife did her best to raise her son by herself, and sent him to school in Budapest.

  Young Imre was talented at many things, but his youth in Communist Hungary consisted of a series of failures. He’d never been able to find his place, though he considered the Soviet regime’s inability to recognize his gifts as proof of his genius.

  Having been utmost a medal winner in painting at the School of Fine Arts in Budapest, he failed to get a degree in architecture. That didn’t stop him from drawing up plans for the new parliament, though the name that went on the plans was that of some incompetent apparatchik. He had left his country in the chaos that followed the 1956 uprising. His mother had died by then, and there was no reason to remain behind.

  He came to London, where as I said he eventually turned to doing forgeries.

  As he grew older, he dreamed more and more of the day when the world would recognize his gifts, when he could return to a Budapest liberated from the Communist yoke. There, life was cheap. For several thousand pounds a year you could live like Prince Esterházy.

  When Dagy seemed to have finished recounting the pathetic story of his life, I asked him about the Poussin copy I’d discovered some years earlier. Had he indeed been the painter of that flawed but magnificent piece of work?

  He regarded me suspiciously, offering no reply. Then a glimmer of pride and pleasure came into his eyes. He could tell I had not asked him this in order to report him to the authorities.

  “Yes, miss. That was my painting.”

  Without revealing to him that I had been the one to discover it was a fake, I made him my proposition: hiring him for some confidential work for which he would be handsomely compensated. I named a sum. He looked at me as if I were the angel of the Annunciation. We had a deal.

  That same evening, having paid off his room and his debts with some money I gave him, Dagy moved into the guest room of my London flat. I had turned it into a studio, thinking that one day I might use it to paint. It was large, and very bright, and had a pretty view of an inner courtyard with a garden. Dagy was like a man transformed. He began to take on life.

  10

  This was a magical period in my life. I felt keenly alive to the truths to be found in Lorrain’s work by participating in the creation of a fake. Rather paradoxical, don’t you think, Papa? Imre threw himself into our adventure with enormous passion. We engaged in deep and protracted analyses of Lorrain’s work. We pored over reproductions of his paintings. As often as we could we went to museums to look at Lorrain’s paintings in the flesh, and spent hours studying them.

  Most of all, we studied the copies of The Port of Naples as if our very lives depended upon memorizing every detail. How wonderfully ironic that the Libro di Veritá,, poor Lorrain’s hedge against imitations, was proving so useful a tool for creating a copy.

  It was rather romantic, actually. Imre and I were living through Lorrain. Everything we saw was filtered by his eye, his vision. When we walked through Hyde Park we would discuss how Claude — as we began to refer to Lorrain familiarly — might have painted it. We dreamed of Arcadian worlds. Most of all, we tried to express what it is about Lorrain’s use of light that gave his paintings such life. How did he create those reflections? How did he manage to capture the gradual intensification of daylight and then dissipate it into mists?

  After a month of talk and research, Imre sat down and began work. After a second month of intensive work, he had completed the initial sketch. Watching him was mesmerizing. He composed with astounding assurance, without hesitation or second-guessing. At times I felt I was watching Lorrain himself at work.’Imre was possessed. There is no other word for it.

  Toward the end, he began using his beautiful hands to blend the colors. Lorrain often did this, you see. Luckily none of the prints were clean enough for positive identification.

  Then it was finished. He signed it “Claudio G.I.V. 1636 Napoli.”

  The inner fire that Imre had brought to his work was extinguished the moment he set down his brushes. He had exhausted himself. He looked as he had when I first met him at his hovel off Portobello Road. He counted his money and slipped it into an inside pocket of his coat. When we said our farewells, however, a glimmer of triumph shone in his eyes.

  “Thanks to you I have done my masterpiece. Now I can die in peace.”

  He used the money to return to Budapest. He died of cancer soon afterward.

  I am sorry for this. Imre would have rejoiced at the news that his life’s achievement had been authenticated.

  My real work began after his departure. First I threw myself into studying how paintings age, so that I could reproduce the sort of very fine craquelures and fissures that appear over time. The uneven pace with which the layers dry — much depends on the binders and individual colors involved — makes aging a complex process. Add to that the scars that result from the stretching caused by the wood frame, as well as the scratches and scrapes that happen to all paintings as soon as they leave the artist’s studio.

  Few paintings escape the ravages of time. There are some pristine examples, such as those belonging to the British royal family. But most works of art have been affected by wars, fires, and changing ownership. The percentage of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings that have survived intact is actually quite small.

  I had studied and evaluated most of the means by which forgers try to accelerate the aging process. Methods that had worked in times past, even as recently as a generation ago, no longer sufficed, given new technology. I was therefore forced to seek new ones. Of particular help were articles written by museum curators, who readily disclosed all their findings and conclusions as a way of proving their meticulous superiority in such matters — and the indisputable authenticity of the works in their collections.

  For example, I learned that the age and composition of dust trapped in the paint often give fakes away. Therefore I was careful to use venerable dust, carefully harvested from beams in old churches.

  The cracks gave me the most difficulties. I applied coats of varnish, composed of the resins I had taken from the original painting, to create the right network of craquelures, which, in any old painting, are never perfectly superimposed.

  At long last the painting was finished. I checked and double-checked my work until I was convinced I had done everything humanly possible.

  I provided the first certificate of authenticity for The Port of Naples. After all, I had appointed myself the official restorer of Quentin’s painting. I declared that this was indeed a genuine Claude Lorrain. My opinion would carry some weight, of course, though I knew it would not be definitive.

  Oh, but Papa, with what maternal anxiety did I send the painting off to Los Angeles for its second appraisal. The whole time it was gone I was biting my nails. There was always the possibility, the distinct possibility, that I had overlooked some detail. I imagined the work under ultraviolet light, being bombarded with X rays and gamma rays. I saw men in white lab coats with magnifying lenses scrutinizing every square inch of the surface. Then there would be the spectrometer test, and after at that, chemical analyses.

  I tried to stay calm, reminding myself that even the most brilliant experts using the most advanced equipment can make mistakes. Five French experts had authenticated a phony van Gogh. Abraham Bredius, the famous Dutch specia
list, had declared that a Vermeer copy painted by Van Meegeren was “certainly one of Vermeer’s finest works.”

  Then I panicked again, remembering that ten years after the Van Meegeren episode, a relatively obscure restorer noted that the painting contained an anachronism and was therefore most certainly a fraud. In the work was a jar with two handles — of a sort not available in Vermeer’s day.

  In my Lorrain were all sorts of objects that might shout anachronism to someone knowing what to look for. Those masts and loading docks. The drawing in the Libro di Veritá hadn’t provided every detail. Had we gotten them right?

  But the Griffith supported my claim, Papa. They said I had found a true Claude Lorrain, and none other than The Port of Naples, listed as painting number six in the Libro di Veritá. The work had gone missing sometime in the nineteenth century.

  Soon the world will have the news. Art experts and critics will bow their heads. “Genius!” they will say when they look at this forgery.

  Sotheby’s has agreed to manage the sale. I insisted it be done in New York. Can you imagine? The whole room will quiver with amazement when the painting is carried in. Thunderous applause will follow the final tap of the ivory hammer.

  We will be rich, Papa. I’m told the painting will bring millions.

  There was one last hurdle. Sotheby’s requested the work be submitted to Charles Vermeille for a final, and decisive, evaluation.

  I was afraid this would happen. I had also expected it. If Vermeille decided the work was a forgery, all would have been lost.

  Vermeille’s involvement, inevitable though it perhaps was, put everything at risk. I couldn’t allow that. Thinking about it kept me awake nights. What could I do? Not permit the work to be submitted for his evaluation? Not possible. Make him disappear? I knew he was in good health. Fd learned a great deal about him since I began working on my Lorrain. I knew his life, his habits, his rituals. I knew all about his legendary integrity.