Caveat Emptor (19 page)

I began by cutting out and arranging in a group every Buttersworth print with the same background, regardless of the yacht portrayed. Then I did the same with a particular yacht, regardless of the background. Drawing on the book Jimmy had given me and a couple of other books I had found on my own, I soon had several groups of yachts and backgrounds to study for common denominators. For example, I saw at once that virtually any yacht that Buttersworth painted in the America's Cup races could be placed in the Castle Gardens setting and be perfectly correct. Thus, superimposing a yacht from one painting onto the background of another painting, just as Buttersworth did himself, proved to be a simple way to create new and historically correct “Buttersworths.”

I was amazed to find similar compositional characteristics in the other artists Jimmy recommended to me. John F. Peto, a Philadelphia artist of the late nineteenth century, specialized in quiet still lifes. His favorite props—a pipe, an inkwell, tobacco tins, and books—were arranged and rearranged in endless “new” compositions. It would be child's play to isolate these props, juggle them around, and create a new “Peto” over and over again.

William Aiken Walker was an itinerant artist who traveled around the South in the nineteenth century producing countless paintings of former slaves going about their business in the fields and the shacks they lived in. These small pictures, painted on academy boards measuring six by twelve inches, are highly prized by collectors, and, as Jimmy explained, “You never know where another one could turn up, and many of them still have the original price of two dollars written on the back in pencil by Walker himself.” I made a quick study of these pictures, and once again it became obvious that figures, shacks, and even animals were repeated in painting after painting.

Martin Johnson Heade, the American artist who specialized in delightful pictures of hummingbirds and orchids, exhibited the most obvious pattern of all. He copied the same birds and the same orchids over and over again in varying compositions.

Another important American artist who Jimmy gave me a book on was Charles Bird King. He specialized in portraits of American Indians proudly wearing their silver peace medals. The medals had been presented to them in Washington, DC, by the US government in the 1830s to commemorate the signing of a peace treaty before double-crossing them.

King's clientele was fascinated by Indians. To meet his growing demand, if he couldn't find a live one, he'd simply copy one of his portraits that had been published in the McKinney and Hall book of engravings. There's no record of how many replicas King made.

I could easily see the similarities in technique between the work of these American artists and the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings that I had mastered so well, and it didn't take long to realize that identifying patterns in the work of these artists would be the key to making convincing fakes.

At last I had six small academy-board panels ready. I planned to paint three Buttersworths and three Petos. For Charles Bird King, who favored wood panels measuring approximately eleven by fourteen inches, I relied on the system I had used for the “Dutch” paintings and used the bottoms of drawers removed from pieces of antique furniture.

Next, it was time to organize my research material and design some new Buttersworths and Petos. In the case of Buttersworth, I superimposed an America's Cup yacht from a race scene off Sandy Hook onto the Castle Gardens setting. Other yachts were borrowed from Boston Harbor and placed off Sandy Hook. The same method was applied to J. F. Peto: a book that appeared in one painting was placed next to a pipe and inkwell from another. And as for Charles Bird King, there wasn't much more to do than paint a variation of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kiah's portrait and add the twenty-sixth to the twenty-five known portraits of Petalesharo.

A month later, I had completed the first prototypes of American pictures. After a thorough drying in the Florida sun, they were ready for the next step: the cracking.

Now the time had finally arrived when the experiments I'd performed with Jory's gesso on cardboard would be put to the test.

After I placed the “Buttersworths” in the hot sun for a few minutes, I could feel the academy boards stiffen, as the rabbit-skin glue's tensile strength increased. I picked up a board, held it at each end, and gently stressed it by pulling the ends down and forcing the center up. As I did so, I heard a fine crackling sound and could feel it through my fingers. The gesso was cracking, but the cracks were so fine that they were impossible to see. Only after a wash of black watercolor and soap was wiped across the surface of the painting did they become visible. And, to my amazement, they came out as long, straight cracks running diagonally across the board—just as they had on the originals.

Then, as an added bonus, as I examined each panel and held it at an angle to my eye, I was delighted to find that the crack lines actually “stood up.” This was caused by the gesso swelling from the absorption of the watercolor. The result was perfect.

In the case of the Charles Bird Kings, however, many of the originals, like the Dutch paintings on wood panels, did not have cracks. All that remained to be done was the application of a patina that I made by tinting some varnish with a yellowish dye. A final dusting with rotten stone, and the job was done.

A week later, and after each painting had been fitted up in an antique American frame, I was on a flight to New York with my precious cargo. Paul met me at LaGuardia, and on the way up to Nyack he asked me what I'd brought along.

“I've got eight pieces—three Buttersworths, three Petos, and two Charles Bird Kings.”

We went straight to Jimmy's, and once again the three of us were sitting together in the drawing room.

“Well, let's see what you've brought up for old Ricau!” Jimmy said from his easy chair. With that, I opened my suitcase and began laying paintings out. “Wait, hold on,” Jimmy said as he dragged his chair toward a wall. “Line them up against the wall here so I can study them.”

As I leaned the collection of paintings against the baseboard, Jimmy lounged back in his chair and gazed up at the ceiling until I was done. Then he looked down and passed judgment.

“I'll be damned,” he muttered. “They look good.” He leaned forward, picked up each picture to study it closely, and chuckled to himself.

“Look carefully at the cracks,” I said as I handed him a “Buttersworth” and a magnifying glass.

When Jimmy was through, he turned to me, lifted one eyebrow, and asked: “Mr. Buttersworth, I presume?”

That night, over dinner at Paul's, I made plans for what I had really come to New York for: money.

“Leave the Kings with me tomorrow,” Paul said as he poured the wine.

“Sure,” I replied. “I'm gonna take a Buttersworth to a gallery in my old neighborhood where Jimmy said they would ‘appreciate' it.”

Soon we were joined by Sandy, who just that afternoon had had a heavy session with his analyst: and at last there was some good news. Sandy, according to the shrink, was in reality “a beautiful person only temporarily trapped in an ugly body.” Reinforced with the self-confidence that this latest diagnosis gave him and desperate to get in on the action, he lunged for the “Buttersworth” and “Peto” propped up on the sofa. He begged me to let him sell them in Boston. Even though I had misgivings about him, I didn't want to be responsible for deflating his ego at this critical stage of his therapy, so I reluctantly agreed.

The next morning, the “Buttersworth” and I took the bus into the city. An hour later, I was standing before the impressive façade of Hirschl & Adler Galleries on East Seventieth Street. I took a deep breath and walked in. I explained to the receptionist on the ground floor that I had a painting by James Buttersworth that I wanted to sell. She escorted me to an office on an upper floor and offered me a seat in a small reception room.

“I'll inform the director that you have a painting you want to sell,” she said, tactfully ignoring a man's voice yelling furiously at someone behind the door in the office. From the sentence or two I heard, the man's displeasure had something to do with an associate who had failed to close on a deal. The diatribe ended the instant the receptionist knocked on the door, opened it a crack, and slipped in. After a few seconds, the door swung open, and for a split second I glimpsed a woman, completely broken down in tears, seated in a chair. A nattily dressed little man strode out with a big smile and shook my hand.

“How do you do,” he said. “I'm Stuart Feld. I understand you have a painting?”

I slipped the painting out of a shopping bag (Bergdorf's) that I'd gotten from Paul.

“A fine little Buttersworth,” he said, grabbing the painting. “How much do you want?”

“Well, I was thinking about two thousand dollars.”

“How about twenty-five hundred?” Obviously he was thrilled with the painting, and I was equally thrilled with his generosity.

“Sure,” I said. With that, he shook my hand and instructed a secretary to “write out a check to this gentleman” before disappearing behind the office door with the painting and resuming his harangue at the hapless woman.

Five minutes later, I was back out on Madison Avenue with a check for twenty-five hundred bucks and a receipt that I signed using my old address of 35 East Sixty-Eighth Street. Planning for a sale, I had brought along several savings-account passbooks that I used when I lived in the city. In fact, I had one for just about every major bank in Manhattan, always opening a new account when I moved to a new neighborhood. Fortunately, not knowing when or if I might need one again, I never closed them out, but left them open with small balances. As an added benefit, they had all been opened while I was living at addresses long since vacated, so flipping through the collection and turning out the one for Manufacturers Hanover Trust, I only had to walk two blocks to the branch at Seventy-Second and Madison, where I presented the passbook and deposited the check, with nothing more than a signature on the back. Before the day was over, I returned and withdrew most of it in cash.

“That,” I told Jimmy when I got back to Piermont that afternoon, “was the fastest twenty-five hundred bucks I ever made.” When I told Jimmy who the director was, he howled with laughter. Jimmy had a particular distaste for Stuart Feld, who he described as an “obnoxious, conniving little creep.” Jimmy said, “Of course he threw you the extra five hundred. He would have gladly paid five
grand
for a picture like that!”

No sooner had Sandy heard the story that night at Paul's than he was packing his bags for an early-morning flight to Boston. Sandy suffered from an acute fear of flying, but so desperate was his need for money that he was ready to do anything. It took half a quart of vodka and grapefruit juice to give him the courage to go to the airport and get on the plane.

Then four days went by, and we hadn't heard a word from him.

“Well, what the fuck could have happened to him?” I asked Paul while sitting in his shop.

“I have no idea,” Paul said. “I wouldn't be surprised if he wound up in a nuthouse.”

But it wasn't so: later that day, Sandy burst into the shop with a grin on his face.

“Here, this is for you!” he said, tossing me a wad of C-notes with a rubber band around them. It turned out that Sandy had sold both a “Buttersworth” and a “Peto” the first morning he got there, and then had gone on a side trip to visit friends and smoke pot for a few days.

“I sold the Buttersworth to Vose,” Sandy bragged. “They're the experts! Old man Vose told me they'd been selling Buttersworths since the artist was alive.” Sandy had scored over five grand for both pictures, and it transformed his personality. For the first time in his life, he had succeeded at something. He was in a state of euphoria, and visions of a new BMW, a girlfriend, and filet mignon for his dogs every night were dancing in his head.

“Man, if I'd had those two paintings of the Indians, I could have sold them in five minutes to a dealer up there,” he lamented. But that would have to wait for another time. Paul already had them out and was expecting a call. In the meantime, Sandy ran another “Peto” over to a wealthy collector, the owner of a sausage factory in Tarrytown, and made another three grand. The next day, a runner who worked with Paul showed up at the shop with an envelope. Inside was seven grand in cash, the proceeds from the Indians.

By the time I left Nyack, six paintings had been sold, and I had ten grand cash in my pocket, more money than I had ever had at one time in my life. Once again, as far as I was concerned, faking paintings saved my life. Now I was a believer, and I knew what Paul meant when he said that American paintings were “red-hot.” From now on, forgery wouldn't be just something to fall back on when times got tough, but rather a full-time career.

Finally, José and I were in a position to return to New York City, and we would have, had not a particularly charming house in Florida come on the market. The house, situated on the Intra-coastal Waterway in Madeira Beach and just two blocks from the Gulf, had been built in 1924 by a New Englander who'd copied the design of a whaler's cottage from his native Nantucket. It was a two-story waterfront saltbox with a center chimney and early-American paneled rooms. The money I had went for a down payment, and Madeira Beach became our home.

With a new home came new responsibility. Soon I was shuttling from Florida to New York with a suitcase full of pictures every other month. No one had ever faked American paintings in this manner. So when Paul “placed” paintings with other dealers, and Sandy went running around the countryside selling them, nobody suspected a thing. Jimmy was thrilled with my progress and insisted that I stay at his house when I came to town. He assigned me a beautiful bedroom decorated with Empire furniture and a Napoleonic sleigh bed. Another room was set aside as a studio where I could paint under his direction.