"The Last Painting of Sara de Vos"

[fiefoe]

Dominic Smith wrote the fine novel "The Goldfinch" should have been. Grief, loss, regret, redemption, it's all there. The opening section about the eponymous painter's encounter with "the leviathan" quietly bowled me over. Also love all the details about how the forgery was made.

• And who could he tell that he liked to stare up at the girl’s pale and cryptic face while he made slow, contemplative love to his melancholic wife in the years after her second miscarriage? No, he’ll keep all that to himself, like a private faith to a fickle god.
• but now that these things belong to him he finds comfort in staring at them in that hour before the first lamp is switched on. A life contained, parsed into objects.
• she’s approaching with a staid, wifely kiss, one of those rehearsed gestures she occasionally plucks from the folds of her depression.
• Clay is cut from a lineage of pious New England Brahmins like a slab of blue slate; he’s from a bloodline of clergy, intellectuals, and taciturn privilege.
• “As it happens, Sputnik Two is giving out the same signal as the first one, so if I can find the right frequency we should be able to hear the Russkie mongrel orbiting above us.
• But on the sandy track toward the coast, Sara realizes that half of Amsterdam is making a pilgrimage to see this harbinger from the deep. Barent will have plenty of competition from sketchers and painters and engravers.
• She hears: “By noon tomorrow, the devil’s bowels will burst out in all this sun and a foul pestilence will cloud the air.” The blubber oil will be sold to the soap works, the teeth used for carved ornaments, the intestinal unguents exported to Paris for musky perfumes.
• The peasant family enjoys her manner so much that they send their own son in to conclude the transaction. Everyone is chuffed by the sight of the two seven-year-olds caught up in roadside commerce—there’s even a little haggling over which apples are perfectly ripe. Sara watches it unfold from up on the wagon. The only note of discord is in the boy’s sickly eyes, a tad yellow and drowsy. His hands are well washed and his clothes are clean. Nonetheless, Sara will remember his eyes.
• a delicate brocade of mold
• 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.
• 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 puzzle of how to build and age a copy was a house with many hallways.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Since old-world grounds contain gesso, glue, and something edible—honey, milk, cheese—the Golden Age has a distinctively sweet or curdled taste.
• 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.
• In both, she wants the inflection of a deeper tone and color, something pushing behind all that white. During the dead-coloring phase, she’d underpainted the entire canvas with raw umber and black, but now she fears she used too little.
• retracing her own brushstrokes like the tenets of some delicate and inscrutable Eastern philosophy. The enigma of the brushwork and the passages of light startle her. But it also seems to wick away some of the ungodly anguish.
• There are moments when Sara feels as if everything she has lost is contained in those green eyes, as if she’s painting Kathrijn’s fleeting tenure on earth in that miniature, ocular world.
• He thinks of these as good omens, as portents, and they seem to fine-tune his senses, as if his body is being made to pay attention to his own wild good fortune. Walking along he can feel the nuances of the street, the sticky air against his palms and neck, the subtle weight of his tiepin on his rib cage, the syncopation of jazz from a passing car radio. He can discern the conversational drag between two pedestrians and know that one of them feels overwhelming guilt. For half an hour, he’s clairvoyant and fond of everything around him.
• while the exhibit has slowly fallen into place, Ellie has learned to kiss the papal ring of the shippers and handlers. They mean the difference between timeliness and inexplicable delay.
• custom packing case. It was a thing of beauty—every joint, batten, and corner pad perfectly made and aligned, his little wooden trolley of brass fixtures and trunk handles and his hot-melt glue gun at his side as he worked with a headlamp.
• She watches as he walks around the cases warily, like he’s sizing up an unknown dog.
• it becomes apparent that the boxes themselves are works of art. When he removes the foam-padded face board, Ellie sees the architecture as a cross-section—corner pads, a thick band of foam on the bottom, an inner case of half-inch plywood cradled at the center.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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!”
• 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.”
• She remembers this feeling from Kathrijn’s death, her insistence on being methodical. Wrap the body, fold the linens, send word for the coroner, hold the ragged hem of grief like a specimen between two fingers until you are alone and the windows are shuttered. She’d worked up the grief like a canvas, layer by layer, one pigment at a time. Then it would pin her in place as she filled a bucket of water or brushed out her hair.