Pieter de Groot attends an estate auction being held by the local Guild of St. Luke. He’s in town on business, but the delays at the shipyard have kept him casting about for distractions for three days. It’s barely dawn when he wends along the Kalverstraat, looking for the address advertised on the handbill. The night watch is returning home with their dogs and rattles while the lamplighters refill tiny pots of oil on the hog-backed canal bridges. The wooden house, when he finds it, is hemmed in by alleyways of painting studios, blacksmiths, and two dubious-looking taverns named the Thirsty Cat and the Lion’s Tale.
Inside the house, it’s a rummage of dim rooms, all set at different levels. A wiry man introduces himself as Theophilus Tromp, guild servant, and directs him up a steep flight of darkened stairs. A group of speculators and bidders has already assembled in a room that’s been set up for the auction, lined with furniture, wedding souvenirs, linens, and unframed paintings. The canvases have been organized thematically, propped against easels or along one wall—seascapes to the left, landscapes in the middle, and still lifes to the right. The buyers quietly mill among the objects. Some of the other men start conferring and strategizing and it becomes apparent that many of them know each other, that auction alliances have been forged on previous occasions. Pieter wonders if anyone will chase after the tulip still lifes. After tulipomania afflicted the provinces for several years, the whole thing went bust in February. During the boom years, when every tailor and glassblower dabbled in the short-term market for bulbs, Pieter had been one of the few Dutchmen who never fell victim to the mania. A ship is something I can understand, he would tell people, the formation of rib and hull, the combined logic of prow and sail. On principle, he has never invested in anything he can’t explain to his wife and children. Betting on a flower’s future blooming always seemed to him like betting on the motion of clouds.
He has his eye on a particular seascape—a ship tossed in a squall, besieged by foam-crested waves. On the horizon a fissure of sunlight breaks through the brooding clouds and to Pieter it suggests everlasting salvation. These seamen will not drown. The ocean is leaden and tinged with green—he’s seen those foreboding waters in the middle of the Atlantic, back in his days as ship’s carpenter. When the auctioneer appears he has the bearing of a functionary—myopic and with a sheath of papers in his inky grip. He insists on auctioning off the household items first and starts up with his droning, mercantile voice. Just to be sportsmanlike, Pieter bids on a rack with three canes. His house outside Rotterdam is set on acreage, and when guests come for the weekend they always admire his Malacca walking cane. One of the other bidders ends up with most of the pans and saucers, perhaps as gifts for a new wife starting a household. Before the auctioneer moves to the paintings, one of the other bidders says, “None of the canvases are signed.”
The guild servant nods carefully, deliberating over his words. “Although masters are licensed to sign their works and run workshops, paintings cannot be sold outside guild statutes.”
From the back of the room Pieter says, “Are we to assume the painter left behind some debts with the guild?”
The servant looks at the space in front of him, purses his lips slightly, then glances at the auctioneer, who springs into action, riffling through his papers and summoning another mercantile chant. The bidding begins with the flower paintings. Surprisingly, a manservant attending the auction on his employer’s behalf buys the whole lot of them. A crown of tulips dazed by sunshine, a vivid arrangement in the splendor of a drawing room—they might as well be portraits of demons for all Pieter cares. When the bidding starts on the seascapes Pieter comes out quickly, raising his hand in ten-guilder increments. A grizzled-looking adversary with a clay pipe rises up against him and from the look of the man’s ravaged face Pieter suspects he’s a retired sea captain, a querulous pensioner who still wakes for first watch. Pieter ups his bid and buys the painting for much more than it deserves. The retired captain pulls on his pipe, avoiding eye contact, and settles for a grim scene of a beached leviathan, its blackened hide ravaged by villagers carrying axes and pails of fat. By the time all the paintings have been sold an hour has passed and the day has grown warm outside the attic. The closed room is stifling, smelling of tobacco and varnished canvas. The auctioneer places the goods of sale into separate piles, each with a corresponding bidder’s name, and wraps the paintings in lengths of muslin for carrying out into the street. Pieter goes in search of fresh air.
He finds a back room set behind the main attic space. From the look of things it had been the artist’s workroom. It faces the street with a large shuttered window that he opens, swinging it out beneath the bell gable and the beam hoist. He guesses the room was once used for hauling and storing provisions, and it now looks as if the artist has just left to fetch something. A small city of bottles and stone bowls occupies a table, an assortment of scrapers, trowels, and brushes rising from an earthenware jar. A shelf is lined with pigments, oils, and spirits. Beneath the window Pieter notices a canvas covered with a drop cloth. His first thought is that the guild member has siphoned off something for himself, some little gem that is far superior to everything else in the next room. But when he removes the cover and takes in the scene he wonders if the painting is destined for the guild archives so as to avoid scandal.
He angles the picture to study it in the light of the window, but in the harshness of sunlight the surface recedes and flashes iridescent. Pieter brings the canvas back down and props it against one wall. He stands there for several minutes, riveted by the uneasiness of the scene. He’s never thought much about paintings or what they mean. He knows of Rembrandt and the craftsmen of Delft, has heard stories about portrait artists being summoned behind palace walls. Up until this moment, though, he has always thought of painters in the same light as stonemasons or engravers, craftsmen who ply a trade. This painting is entirely different, a scene so ethereal that it flinches in the full light of day. The boy waving from the ice with the dog at his heels, his scarf nothing more than a yellow crinkle, a shaving of lemon rind. The barefoot girl with her pale hand against the birch, leaning toward the skaters; the light on the horizon that is somehow both serene and ominous. Looking at the painting makes Pieter think of those wintry afternoons when as a boy he waited for dusk to settle over the house and for the first tallow candles to be lit. His father would become quiet and speculative and tell stories about dead relatives. The smell of supper would kindle from the stewpot in the flames of the hearth. The painting contains all this. It is about the moment before nightfall, about waiting to cross over.
He imagines the painting framed above his desk back in Rotterdam, sees it presiding over one wall during contract negotiations. He pictures shipwrights and underwriters staring up at that scene, stupefied into submission. There’s a commotion next door and he becomes aware that he’s been missing for some time. He covers the painting and puts it back where he found it. When he walks out into the hallway, many of the bidders are descending the narrow stairs with their spoils, the guild servant directing them from the landing below. Pieter enters the room and lingers by the auctioneer as the other men bundle up their supplies. He waits for the last man to leave and begins to organize his cane rack and painting. The auctioneer is entering spidery figures into a ledger and double counting the money.
“I have a cousin who’s an auctioneer,” says Pieter. “Mostly horses and farms, but he makes a swift living.”
The auctioneer looks up but does not respond.
Pieter persists. “How did you do today? Overall. It’s a percentage, if I’m not mistaken, of the total.”
“What is?”
“The auctioneer’s fee.”
The man brings his attention back to the ledger and the money. Pieter can tell he’s a practical man, that he auctions off paintings and jewels and dead men’s clothes with the same impunity.
On a whim, Pieter says, “I’ve been following the funeral notices. I don’t recall the name of the artist who passed away. Usually the guild makes a big to-do of the passing of an illustrious member.”
The auctioneer looks up at him. “The guild did not publish the name.”
“And, yet, a simple questioning of the neighbors would reveal that.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Pieter paces a little, then turns back. “Well, I can only assume that there was some sort of scandal with the dead painter.” He examines his fingernails. “Perhaps it was a suicide. That never looks good for a guild.”
The auctioneer begins to stack his money into a cloth bag.
Pieter says, “I notice there is another painting in the next room.”
Squinting for a moment at the ledger, the man says, “That picture is not for sale.”
Pieter knows from the look in the auctioneer’s face that he’s pressing against something. The man scribbles beside a column of figures.
Pieter says, “Perhaps it is not presently for sale. But perhaps an auctioneer might represent a potential buyer like myself with the guild in this matter. Hypothetically, and for a handsome commission, that auctioneer might tell the guild predicant or bureaucrat or whoever he is that a good reputation is worth a lot. Priceless, in fact. Scandal and gossip can ruin the standing of a guild, especially when your average monger or merchant thinks they should all be abolished. Those membership fees amount to taxes, and clearly this artist was driven to sell his unsigned work on the black market to survive and took his own life under an extremity of circumstances.”
The auctioneer sits before his splayed ledger, formulating some tactic of his own. Quietly, he says, “He’s as good as dead.”
Pieter waits.
“From what I hear, the husband and wife were both painters, former members of the guild with debts thereto. Going bankrupt, they were selling work on the side. The guild does not permit—” The auctioneer’s voice breaks off and he looks back down at the floor. “The wife is selling everything off before going to work for one of the husband’s creditors. He has abandoned her and the poor wretch must now fend for herself. I’m told that the guild was considering her readmission, but now things have changed.” The auctioneer stands abruptly and crosses to the door with his ledger and bag of money. “This is all I know.”
Pieter says, “Tell the guild servant that I will offer a hundred guilders for that painting and with that comes discretion and peace of mind.”
The man hesitates, his eyes lifting toward the window.
Pieter says, “Your commission for this transaction will be ten percent, which I think you’ll recognize as generous.”
“Twenty,” the man says, still standing there, looking out onto the Amsterdam rooftops, his voice unabashed. “For twenty percent, sir, I can secure you that painting.”
Pieter knows that he’s revealed his attachment to the painting and that the balance of power has shifted. The auctioneer has plucked it from his hands like a pebble. Pieter nods but says nothing. The auctioneer disappears into the passageway and Pieter listens as he plods down the stairs. From the attic window he watches the street below, sees the guild member and the auctioneer confer. After a few moments he sees a woman approach in a long cape, her face pale and bereft, her hands clutching a small basket in front of her. The auctioneer hands the cloth bag of money to the guild servant, who shifts from foot to foot, addressing the woman. The three of them seem to be talking, but the woman’s eyes are averted. At one point the servant cranes up at the narrow facade of the house and the woman follows his gaze. For a brief moment, Pieter is staring directly into her face, her features narrowed into a squint. He’s not sure whether she can see him behind the reflection of the glass.