A Masterpiece of Revenge (13 page)

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.

T
his 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 specialist, 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.

Damn him and his integrity! I found his writing on the subject of forgeries high-handed and self-serving — he had written for example a very long article about that expert who pronounced the van Gogh work authentic. Not only had the poor man betrayed his country and his honor, in Vermeille's eyes, he had betrayed history itself. The job of the art critic was sacred. Such sanctimoniousness.

It was while reading that article that I began thinking of ways to make him compromise his unflinching probity. This would not be easy Vermeille was an immensely proud man, as I had discovered in Nice. He held himself to a different standard.

There was something. Not a flaw, but a vulnerability, I discovered. He adored his son, his only child.

We would see just how dear his honor was to him when compared to the thing he most valued in the world.

How would I make him afraid for his son? It was really very simple. Nothing is more terrifying than an invisible enemy, a threat that will not declare itself I didn't want Vermeille to panic. I needed to unnerve him gradually and inexorably, like a Chinese torture that, drop by drop, would drain his spirit.

I decided to send him photos of his son. Anonymously. Mailed from all over the map.