A woman standing in a smock at dawn, grinding pigments and boiling up animal glue on the stovetop. It’s the 1630s, as far as Ellie Shipley is concerned, and canvas can only be bought at the width of a Dutch loom—a little over fifty-four inches. She reads by candlelight, like a method actor, and makes obscure errands into the supply chain that is the stock and trade for period conservators and forgers alike. Cold-pressed linseed oil that does not cloud, oil of spike and lavender, raw sienna, lead white that fumes for a month in a cloud of vinegar. She paints in her kitchenette, where the northern light washes through her grimy windows and the view gives onto the streaming traffic of the Gowanus Expressway. She sees commuters on the city-bound buses, metal ribbons dotted with faces. She wonders sometimes whether those glazed passengers see her makeshift studio as an afterimage. In their mind’s eye they see her bent over the stovetop and think she’s stirring porridge instead of melting animal hide.
The smell itself limits her social life—an atmosphere of oxide and musk. Set above a Laundromat, the apartment has its own weather: a tropical monsoon during business hours and a cooler, drier climate at night. The ceilings carry watermarks and the corner above her bed fluoresces with a delicate brocade of mold. In her final year of an art history Ph.D. at Columbia, Ellie hasn’t brought anyone home the entire time she’s lived in this apartment. She should be living near the university, but she inherited the absurdly low rent and the lease from a departing student who’d grown up in Brooklyn. Despite the commute, she never quite materialized a Manhattan address. When she writes newsy letters to her parents back in Sydney, she tells them she lives in Greenwich Village, and has to remember to mail the envelopes on her way to the university. She writes about clubs and restaurants and art exhibits she’s never visited. She studies reviews in The New Yorker and works backward to find a glimmering handful of details. Her father’s a Sydney Harbour ferry captain, her mother a school secretary, and she can never decide whether these letters are written out of spite, to remind them of the smallness of their lives, or if they’re musings on a life that’s escaped her grasp. She has traveled halfway around the world, she thinks, to live in studious squalor. Her dissertation on Dutch women painters of the Golden Age sits unfinished in her apartment, a half-typed sheet of paper mildewing in the mouth of a Remington. It’s been months since she worked on it and she sometimes finds herself staring at the machine’s bullnose profile or the chrome-plated carriage return, thinking: Remington also makes rifles.
A few years ago, as a sideline, she began consulting in art restoration and conservation. She had always been good at the technical side of painting and it was easy money. Before art history, she studied at the Courtauld Institute in London and trained for a career in conservation. But despite her being the youngest and most talented of the student restorers, the plum museum jobs always seemed to go to older, male graduates, to the men who sported cable-knit cardigans and Oxbridge accents. Being Australian didn’t help her chances, either. Museum curators treated her like a novelty, a bright spark from the colonies who might find a place as a private tutor or restoring for a small regional collection. And so, about to turn twenty-one, she drifted toward America and art history, toward a department that had two women on its faculty. Three years into her Ph.D., after she’d taken her exams, her supervisor—Meredith Hornsby, an art historian specializing in the Dutch Golden Age—started to feed her restoration assignments. Hornsby favored Ellie because she was the only dissertation student not writing about some aspect of the Italian Renaissance. A British dealer named Gabriel Lodge had been looking for someone to authenticate and touch up old masterworks.
Gabriel Lodge took her out for tea a few times and asked to see photographs of her restoration work. An exile from London and a promising career at Christie’s, Gabriel wore a rumpled, moth-colored suit and carried a worn attaché case that looked like it once belonged to an embassy diplomat. He had a shambling, distracted air, but then he’d be seized by a question or a notion and his eyes would dart back to her face. Over his Earl Grey, he quizzed her about ground recipes and glazes and thread counts in baroque canvases. He hummed and nodded, held a magnifying glass up to her photographs. Apparently she passed these tea shop auditions, because within a few weeks a damaged seventeenth-century painting showed up on her doorstep.
Sometimes the paintings came to her and sometimes she went to them. She signed nondisclosure agreements and was chauffeured to private collections in the city, Long Island, and Connecticut. She killed off afternoons locked inside overdecorated rooms with her wooden case of pigments, oils, and brushes, refinishing a square inch of canvas according to another painter’s style and palette. Or a courier showed up at her apartment with a neglected seventeenth-century Flemish or Dutch portrait and she spent weeks repairing it, relining the worn canvas or restoring layers of ground and glaze. Sometimes they paid her hundreds of dollars for a day’s work, but she found herself unable to spend the money. Because she would have gladly done the work for free, it seemed ill-gotten. The money also felt like a tangible payback for years of being ignored by her male tutors at the Courtauld Institute. To spend it was to dilute its power.
By the time Gabriel came to her with the commission for At the Edge of a Wood, she had saved close to ten thousand dollars—so she technically didn’t need the money. He said the present owner wanted an exact replica made but couldn’t bear to part with the original. She remained skeptical and told him that copying an artwork was not the same as restoring it. But when he produced three high-resolution color photographs of the painting in its frame she felt her breath catch—it was unlike anything else painted by a baroque woman. Here was a winter landscape with the glaucous atmosphere of an Avercamp, the delicate grays and blues and russets, the peasants skating through the ether of twilight above the ice, but with this stark and forlorn figure standing at the tree. She was the onlooker but also the focal point, the center of gravity. This was no village frolic before the onrush of night—a common Avercamp motif—this was a moment of suspension, a girl trapped by the eternity of dusk. The girl had been lavished with very fine brushwork, the hem of her dress frayed by a hundred filaments of paint, each one half the width of a human hair. The painting’s atmosphere, even in the photographs, was incandescent, hushed. It somehow combined the devotional, religious light of a monastery portrait and the moodiness of an Italian allegory.
Gabriel talked at her while she studied the photographs, working the surfaces in tiny circles with her eyes. She felt a prickle of recognition as he talked. It was like seeing her first Vermeer at age twelve on a school trip to see a traveling exhibition—the flush of that beautiful and melancholy light coiled at the base of her spine and had to be carried through the world. Gabriel told her that not only was Sara de Vos the first woman to be admitted to a Guild of St. Luke, but this was also her only surviving work. Because the painting had been privately held for so long, it occupied a small but cultish position in the art world. Over the centuries, very few art historians had actually seen it—or even knew about it. Now she could observe it in extravagant detail with the photographs and find a way to copy it. “An unbelievable honor,” he said. Dutch women didn’t paint landscapes in the seventeenth century—that was the general understanding—because the genre required long hours spent alone outside, a clear impediment to the Holland housewife of the Golden Age. But Sara de Vos seemed to be the single exception, a trained still life painter whose only surviving work was this harrowing outdoor scene. Both her father and husband were landscapists, so she’d spent her life around the form. It was clear that Gabriel had studied up; he may have even rehearsed his monologue on the way over to Brooklyn, another passenger mumbling to himself on the subway. This was a landmark painting, a historical oddity, and Ellie was being asked to work up a faithful copy of it for its rightful owner. This was the pitch from Gabriel that would stay with her. She told him she would think about it, but the truth was she had decided to do it within seconds of seeing the photographs.
* * *
One of the photographs was taken front on, from a distance of about eight feet, one closer from the side, and the final image was a close-up of the girl leaning against the tree. It was clear the images had been taken by a trained photographer. The clarity and focus suggested a tripod, and color film was expensive, beyond the reach of most amateur shutterbugs. Someone had obviously given very clear instructions on the shots to take, knowing that a side image in raking light would reveal much of the painting’s texture.
The exact dimensions of the frame and stretched canvas were written in pencil on the back of the head-on photograph. Ideally, the painting would have filled the entire photograph. But for some reason the photographer hadn’t zoomed in all the way, so that a mahogany headboard and two pale cotton pillowcases were visible. It looked to Ellie like the image had been taken from the end of an unmade, king-size bed before noon, and the shadows suggested slanting winter light. She should have been focusing on composition, texture, and color but instead she first tried to deduce everything she could about the owners. Who would put this beautiful desolation above their bed? Her eye kept being drawn to the twin indentations on the beige cotton pillows. She could tell the husband slept on the right side of the bed because the pillowcase retained the heavier memory of his head. It was this unexpected human element that gave the exercise, at first, a sense of voyeuristic intrusion. She was plundering a private, domestic realm.
She did a lot of pacing that first week, letting the rationalizations tick over in her mind while she walked barefoot through the equatorial climate of her apartment. She was merely being paid to reproduce a painting and wasn’t privy to all the ins and outs of Gabriel’s dealings and, besides, there were collectors all over the world who copied their own masterpieces for the sake of security. It was often the copy that was on display in the part-time Tuscan villa or Paris apartment. Whatever the circumstances, she was a degree removed, at the outer edge. A conservator for hire. This was her stance. Then, one night, she woke with a pounding headache and stood naked drinking a glass of water in the darkened kitchenette. She could feel the photographs, like a presence, from across the room. Fetching her robe from the bathroom, she came back and switched on her work lamp. Methodically, she unclipped the frontal photograph from the easel, laid it flat against her drafting table, took up an X-Acto knife and a straight edge, and sliced the bottom fifth of the image away—the incriminating strip of pillowcase and headboard and plush wallpaper. The work had begun.
* * *
The puzzle of how to build and age a copy was a house with many hallways. Some passages were well lit and others impossibly dark. She sourced a larger and badly damaged Dutch seventeenth-century canvas from a dealer and planned to cut it down to size and strip it back to the ground. She’d spent many hours perfecting baroque recipes for animal hide sizing only to realize the best method for this project was to obtain a canvas of roughly the same age and leave its underlayers intact.
She had a good rapport with a venerable antique framer on Lexington and he often called her when a renowned dealer brought something in for reframing. It was always under the guise of her evolving restoration business, of studying works that never circulated in public, but she could tell Maurice thought something was amiss when she came in with sketches of the frame. “Where is the picture itself?” he asked. She told him that the measurements and hand-drawn cross-sections were precise, that she would place the stretcher into the frame and do the backing herself. He looked at her warily and then she produced a copy she’d made of the head-on photograph, only she’d cut out the image inside the frame with a razor blade. Maurice held it up and from the other side she could see one of his bespectacled eyes blinking inside the cutout. “The client won’t let me show anyone the work itself. I’ve signed papers,” she told him. The Frenchman lowered the photograph, looking betrayed, but finally he said he could match the gold leaf and the profile. She said, “The painting is Dutch, 1630s, but it looks like a later reframing. Is it eighteenth century?” Maurice flexed the photograph toward the window and said, “Seventeen-nineties, Parisian-style. Though it looks like they skimped on the gold leaf.”
The seventeenth-century Dutch built their canvases the way they built their ships—one carefully engineered step at a time. The sizing, grounding, sketching, dead coloring, working up, and glazing. The badger brush to smooth layers and blend forms. Some of them waited a year for the oils to dry and then applied a resin varnish. Obscure problems for the Dutch painter became her own—how to produce stable oranges and greens, how to approximate purple by glazing blue over a reddish underpainting. What she didn’t know about Sara de Vos’s technique she would invent based on what she knew of her Dutch contemporaries.
As an added precaution, she combed the small but vitriolic literature of fine art forgery. It was a welcome reprieve from her dissertation research at the Frick Art Reference Library, where she’d spent months poring over three-by-five black-and-white photographs of Dutch paintings. At the Columbia library she sat in a carrel and read forgery memoirs and manifestos, little screeds designed to take on the snobs of the art world. It captivated her and sometimes made her blush, as if she were translating the Kama Sutra instead of writing down how to game auction houses and the ratios for old-world gesso.
Find damaged, discarded frames at auction houses and trace the lot number or other identifying marks. Call the houses up and ask what painting had once been in the frame and what it depicted. The bastards keep meticulous records.
Van Meegeren added Bakelite to his pigments to age them before fobbing off his fake Vermeers to Göring.
In the writings of these technically brilliant but often neglected artists she recognized her own recurring anger at being overlooked. Her parents had lost a son before the two girls were born, Ellie the second of them. Long before they ignored her at the Courtauld Institute and the loneliness of the art scholarship at the Catholic boarding school, she could remember a house full of silences. Her father, when he wasn’t piloting a ferry across Sydney Harbour, hunkered down in a small ketch he moored on the Parramatta River. He walked down to the dock behind their weatherboard house in Balmain each night after dinner, leaving the girls to their homework and their mother’s weather-induced migraines. He slept most nights out there. From her bedroom window, Ellie could look out and see the tiny cabin lights of his boat swaying with the tide. It was no surprise, then, when she did everything she could to get the attention of the priests instead of the nuns at boarding school. She painted the most intricate, mythic landscapes for Father Barry, her art teacher—scenes that were heavy with alpenglow and Arcadian woodlands and engorged rivers. None of her early landscapes looked remotely Australian. The light and the foliage were distinctly European, despite the fact that she’d never left Australia. It was all absorbed from color slides and art books. “The old country is in my blood,” she would tell Father Barry. Then, on weekends, she shoplifted at the nearby Woolworth’s, shoving lipstick and batteries into the waistband of her tights. When she won the school art prize in her final year, she crossed the stage to shake Father Barry’s hand with an air of quiet vindication; then she made the mistake of looking out into the audience to see her mother sitting alone.
* * *
She peeled back the antique canvas with diluted solvents, working in small circles, one inch at a time. She saved the old varnish as she stripped it off, squeezing the cotton swabs into a mason jar. To the naked canvas, she applied a thin coat of fresh ground but retained the surface signature of the original. Next, she sketched with pale chalk before dead coloring with raw umber mixed with black. The actual painting was slow and painstaking—a week on the woods, a week on the sky, two weeks on the frozen river and ice skaters. Each passage had its own technical puzzles. The bright yellows flecked into the scarves of the ice skaters were oddly textured and she eventually decided on mixing a little sand into chrome yellow. After the transparent glazes, she bleached the painting under an ultraviolet light for a week and cured it for a month in the furnace room below the basement stairs of her building. She worked a spiderweb of cracks into the canvas from behind, using a soft rubber ball. She used a spray gun to mist the picture with the antique varnish she’d set aside. A favorite dealer trick was to pass an ultraviolet light over a canvas, causing the oxidation in the old varnish to fluoresce. That ghostly blue-white apparition was a direct product of age.
* * *
By the time Gabriel shows up at her apartment one night in November, she has finally admitted to herself that she’s painted a forgery. A month into her commission, Gabriel had begun talking about the swap and the organizer, laid out a trail for her to follow to its natural conclusion. He still does legitimate art deals, she thinks, but this must be his lucrative sideline. She suspects she knew from the very beginning what she was taking on, but somehow she’d sliced away her own ethical objections with the bottom fifth of the photograph. What surfaced in its place was a burning ambition to get every detail exactly right, to make contact with the woman behind the haunting vision.
Gabriel stands in her doorway, holding what looks to be a canvas wrapped in brown paper. In his other hand is his battered attaché case. Ellie has made the mistake several times of thinking it might contain dossiers and important memoranda instead of a spare handkerchief, a yellowed apple, a drugstore novel, a leaking fountain pen, and a cracked magnifying glass.
“Where are the horses?” Gabriel asks.
“I don’t get it.”
“Smells like a glue factory. Can I come in? I have something you might like to see.”
She moves away from the doorway and Gabriel steps inside her apartment. The entranceway leads into the kitchenette and the living space and he hovers between the two rooms. He looks cautiously at the books and papers towering against one wall, then peers into the kitchenette where ice trays and mason jars brim with inks and oils.
“Should I make us some tea?” she asks, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
“Only if you promise not to poison me.”
“I would never.”
“And you have Earl Grey?”
“I started buying it especially for you. But it’s a tea bag, is that all right?”
Smiling, he says, “I’ll stoop just this once.” He sets the frame and the attaché case down by the table.
Three buses whiz by on the expressway, trailing squares of gauzy light behind the curtains. The sound of their engines is deafening and Ellie watches Gabriel as he brings two cupped hands to his ears. There is something disarming and childlike about him, a boy borrowing clothes and mannerisms from a fussy uncle. She eyes the brown paper rectangle from the stovetop. The back burner is reserved for food and the kettle; the front is for warming chemicals and starches.
“How did it go?” she asks, then wishes she’d waited until they both had their tea. She’s not good at this game of tact and understatement.
Gabriel ignores her. “I’ll take one cube.”
“I know.”
She pours the steaming water into two mismatched mugs, adds a sugar cube to his, and keeps hers black. She’s used tea in her undertone tints before and she finds herself thinking about tannins as she stirs in the sugar. When she comes into the living area Gabriel sits down at the small Formica table. He repositions the case and the brown-papered frame closer to his feet.
She lets the tea steep for a moment. “So?”
“I don’t involve myself with the transaction itself. I leave that to the organizer.” He blows across the rim of his cup. “But apparently it went well.”
“That’s good.” She’s heard him mention runners and organizers and she suspects the former work for the latter.
He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs at his brow. “You should consider cultivating orchids. My shoes are growing tropical mold while I sit here.”
“It’s not ideal.”
They both sip their tea.
“Are you going to show me what’s in the brown paper?”
“You’ll spend a thousand hours on one canvas but you can’t finish a cup of tea.”
“Is it something to restore?” The word restore seems loaded now.
“That won’t be for a while.” He looks down at the wrapped canvas. “We were hoping to keep it here for a few days. I’m about to secure a new storage unit in Chelsea, but I’m between spaces just at the moment. Long story. Anyway, I don’t think anyone will be combing this stretch of Brooklyn looking for an obscure Dutch masterwork.”
Her cup is poised an inch from her mouth. She wants to ask who Gabriel means when he says we, whether there is a silent partner, some Latin American or European financier, or whether this is just an affectation he’s picked up from his drugstore detective novels. But the thought dims away in the surge of something else—“May I see it?” The plaintive tone in her voice suddenly annoys her, so she reaches down under the table and lifts the frame onto the table.
Gabriel takes another sip of his tea. “Merry Christmas.”
“I’m worried about the humidity. My apartment’s sweltering.”
“It won’t be for long. Perhaps you can keep it wrapped in your closet.”
She rests the frame on its side and begins to undo the tape, careful not to tear the brown paper. As the first sheets come away from the backing she can smell resin and the maritime inflection of old wood. Gabriel clears the mugs and art history journals from the table, standing at her side. She places the painting faceup and crosses to the wall to switch on the overhead light. The room blanches and she sees Gabriel blinking fussily. She comes back to the table and leans over the painting, her face just inches from the canvas. This is her way of taking in a new work. She has no interest in the composition from ten or twenty feet—that will come later. What she wants is topography, the impasto, the furrows where sable hairs were dragged into tiny painted crests to catch the light. Or the stray line of charcoal or chalk, glimpsed beneath a glaze that’s three hundred years old. She’s been known to take a safety pin and test the porosity of the paint and then bring the point to her tongue. Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste. She is always careful to avoid the leads and the cobalts.
What she does next is mentally compare her own layers and lines to the composition before her. She paints the canvas in reverse as a sustained thought. It’s like undressing a woman, she thinks, an aristocrat cloaked in yards of lace. There are a few improvisations and influences that Ellie didn’t fathom from the photographs. The sky, for example, is more like Rembrandt’s than she’d realized. And there are unexpected places where the paint rises in clots and flakes.
“How did you fare?” Gabriel asks quietly from behind her.
Ellie straightens and realizes she’s been holding her breath. “Unless they have them in the same room and stand three inches from the canvas, there’s no difference at all.” She looks at the rough, bright yellows wrapped around the skaters’ necks. Something about them catches in her mind.
Gabriel brushes a wrinkle from his sleeve. “Well, I’ll leave you two lovers together.”
He lifts the briefcase onto the table, snaps the clasps, and opens it up. Today, instead of a sad apple and a KGB novel, there’s a folded manila envelope and he hands it to her.
She refuses to take hold of the money. So Gabriel sets the envelope delicately on the table and heads for the door. She hears his careful footfalls in the barely lit hallway and waits until he’s out of earshot. For a long time she stares down at the painting, then carries it into her bedroom and props it against her dresser. She watches it for hours, until she falls asleep, mesmerized by the girl at dusk, the frozen river flashing silver and white each time a car passes by on the expressway.