"The Last Painting of Sara de Vos"

[fiefoe]

Marty is of course less interesting than Ellie, but somehow a fuller character. I admire the logic in the denouement of their affair.

• “The Germans from Staten Island come out here in December and take home buckets of eels. And then there’s the rivermen from up my way, around Edgewater, who still go clamming, even though most of the beds are condemned.
• Then there are the forms of imitation, the “flyspecks” that can be achieved on the back of a painting if epoxy glue is mixed with amber-tinted pigment and applied with a pinhead in a suitable pattern. Flies are drawn to the sugars in a painting’s varnish and the effect is to suggest a neglected painting languishing in an attic for decades.
• So much of the forger’s dominion is theater and subtext, she thinks, a series of enticements. An obscure provenance, suggested by visual cues, is irresistible to a certain kind of buyer—it becomes a story of their own discernment, of plucking a second self from the folds of history.
• He’s ashamed he cannot remember a time in his life without the cushioned guardrails of abundance.
• He avoids his face in the narrow mirror. Nothing good can come of that harrowing vision—a character actor hired for the day.
• No, he thinks, he’s here to pay homage to an old, scalding regret.
• back in his leather chair to absorb the curt humor. He looks like he’s taking Marty in by degrees, like a difficult painting from across the room.
• Like his ham radio buddies, most of whom he’s never met in person, these men tend to rub against the grain of convention. They drive difficult imported cars with tight gearboxes,
• He’s the right amount of Swiss and German, Marty thinks, so as not to evoke a crushing defeat at the hands of an Aryan prince of the Third Reich.
• This painting is entirely different, a scene so ethereal that it flinches in the full light of day.
• 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.
• By all accounts, seventeenth-century Dutchmen were inveterate worshippers, brawlers, drinkers, and womanizers. They covered their walls with beautiful paintings for the same reason they drank—to distract themselves from the abyss. Or did Sara de Vos continue painting as a way to sharpen her view of the abyss?
• She wonders now if the forgery wasn’t a form of retribution, a kind of calculated violence—against Jack and Michael Franke, against the old boy network at the Courtauld Institute, against her own indifferent father. But mostly against the girl standing out on the glassed-in veranda who thought her talents were prodigious and therefore enough.
• The Middleburg flower painters kind of invented this stuff, and it’s long before the Holland tulip mania, so here is the most exquisite floral still life, the height of the art form, taking place on this little muddy nugget of land, miles from anything else. And virtually none of these flowers bloom at the same time, so everything you’re looking at is amalgamated and invented in the painter’s mind.
• There’s a mounting affection toward her but also this grim delight in seeing her out of her element, in lifting that crown of tangled hair from the photograph and giving her cause to put on heels and show her face.
• It strikes him that he wants to teach her things and dupe her at exactly the same time.
• She’s suddenly terrified that she won’t remember what Kathrijn looked like without the envelope of the house, without the earthly reminders of a life briefly spent.
• Quietly, she says, “The forger was too exacting, too superficial. Only the real artist has the false beginning.”
• Marty thinks about the time he saw Charlie Parker, a little ample around the waist, his tie loosened and barely reaching his rib cage, eyes downcast as if he could see the notes burning out of the bell of his horn. He was an apparition, junked out and holy. Every saxophone player since has seemed entirely mortal.
• Each thing she divulges about her life and work is a small theft. It’s like taking ornaments off a stranger’s shelf, one by one, and dropping them into his coat pockets.
• that he enjoys the latitudes of illness more than health. They give him something to philosophize about, some tension in the pull of daily rope.
• The ideal woman, he tells Sara, combines a face from Amsterdam, a gait from Delft, a bearing from Leiden, a singing voice from Gouda, a stature from Dordrecht, and a complexion from Haarlem.
• She wonders how Kathrijn would have softened or hardened into womanhood
• the girl who is being groomed for life as a courtesan, the lackluster options that fan out before her, but the darker themes seem like a distraction, the struts beneath a beautiful bridge.
• How remarkable, she thinks, the way paintings trap light and time. Father Barry used to call it starlight, the passage of pigments on canvas across the centuries.
• If not actual and abiding happiness it was at least contentment buoyed by occasional moments of bracing pleasure.
• Rembrandt, the famous and adopted son of Amsterdam, ignores the shocking newness taking shape all around him. He ignores the quayside markets of exotic animals, the armadillos in wooden cages, the Hungarian bandmaster striking up an orchestra from a houseboat lit with paper lanterns. Instead, he mostly paints in the unbroken lineage of portraits and histories.
• Did you know that Citroën was part of the French Resistance during the war? They sold trucks to the Nazis but they lowered the oil markers on the dipsticks so the trucks just died out in the field, burned up their engines.”
• Ellie thinks of how the world is governed by couples, how unmarried women make good academics because they’ve been neutered by too much knowledge and bookish pleasure. The world hands them a tiny domain it never cared about to begin with.
• She had hoped, or imagined, that they would still be themselves during sex, and perhaps that will happen, but for now he’s a stranger, a sinner in church with a look of grim devotion on his face.
• The leather shaving bag is kidskin, so soft and smooth it feels like an organ being removed from a warm body when she takes it from under the cashmere sweater.
• but his balding scalp has the consistency of blotting paper and his skin is the color of weak tea. It’s the chromatic certainty of death.
• “But, actually, (regret) keeps you alive. It gives you something to push against.
• When the painting went missing it gave my life a ruthless kind of focus. I manufactured quite a display of indignation, talked about it until I bored everyone senseless, hired a private detective,
• She understands it now in Q’s bright, meticulous office. She never stopped painting the beautiful fake.
• He hasn’t been neutered by time exactly—there’s still a tiny high pressure weather system that hovers between them—but his potency moves in and out, at the edges of reception, muffled then surging then gone.
• There are Dutchmen who categorize the tenor of that sound and classify it against degrees of hardness. There are men who, during epic freezes, skate from Leiden to Amsterdam in a matter of hours.
• The night feels unpeeled, as if she’s burrowed into its flesh. Here is the bone and armature, the trees holding up the sky like the ribs of a ship,
• There are pockets of time, she thinks, where every sense rings like a bell, where the world brims with fleeting grace.
• Every work is a depiction and a lie. We rearrange the living, exaggerate the light, intimate dusk when it’s really noonday sun.