Authors: Ken Perenyi
Back at the Vicarage Gate, the bundle of paintings was unrolled and assembled. Then each painting was taken to a framer. A few days later, the paintings were distributed to the various auction houses around the city. With the addition of the marine paintings, I was able to consign two, and sometimes three, paintings at each house.
All the pictures were enthusiastically accepted at the valuation counters. I watched carefully as the experts looked over each painting, first the front, then the back. Although the paintings were created entirely of modern materials and assembled only days before, at no time did any of the experts show any suspicion.
After all the paintings had been placed, we packed our bags, rented a car, and headed out to Bath. The next month was spent exploring Cotswold villages that could have been drawn by Thomas Rowlandson, and hunting through antique markets for period frames.
For the next year, we shuttled back and forth to Britain with our cargoes of paintings in duffel bags. But to avoid suspicion, we had to keep spreading the paintings out to different places. Soon we were traveling around the countryside to place pictures in Phillips' regional auction houses in cities like Cambridge and Oxford, but our best connection was the Phillips right in Bath. Rich tourists, many of them American and eager to take home a piece of British history, often bid up prices to three times the high estimates. At one sale, I was seated next to a wealthy woman from Boston. She was buying up half the paintings. We chatted a bit, and she asked me, “Do you think it's an original?” as a “Herring” hit the block.
The auctioneer in Bath, a handsome Cambridge-educated Englishman, welcomed me with open arms every time I walked in with more paintings. My works were doing very well in his sales, and in time he realized that I was the artist as well. But he wasn't interested in the provenance; in fact, he usually gave me a hint of what he would like to have for his next sale.
Sotheby's, I discovered, had converted a fine old country place in Surrey, Somerset House, into salesrooms. For me it was a delightful day trip out in the country, especially if I was in London alone. With a painting all wrapped up in brown paper, I'd leave the Vicarage and catch a morning train to Billingsgate. Usually I sat outside between the cars in the fresh air, watching the beautiful countryside roll by. When I arrived at the station, I'd catch a cab for the short ride to Somerset House. I loved going there. It was a place where gentlemen could do their business at their leisure, a place to chat with the country squires attending an exhibition or meeting the local trade. Sometimes it served as a back door to Bond Street. “Yes, a very interesting painting indeed,” I was informed once by the resident expert. “Perhaps with your permission we could send this up to London?”
More than once, the painting never made it to the expert at all. On one occasion, I was unwrapping a lovely portrait of a bay hunter à la J. E. Ferneley outside the entrance so as not to make any noise inside. As I was doing so, I noticed, as had happened once in New York City, that I'd become the object of attentionâthis time of a group of men standing nearby and sporting Barbour jackets and flat caps. I guessed that they were country antique dealers. One gentleman in a tweed sports coat and ascot slipped away and went into the house. A second later he emerged, walked right up to me, and cheerfully asked, “Well, what have we brought today?”
I realized he was passing himself off as Sotheby's staff. Playing along with the ruse, I presented the unwrapped painting for his inspection. “I would like to have an opinion on this,” I said. Instead of offering an estimate, he asked me how much I was hoping to get. “Well, I've got seven hundred in it, but I was hoping it might be worth a couple thousand,” I replied. With that, he asked me if I'd mind, and took the painting over to his waiting colleagues. The next instant, they were hustling me over to the car park, out of Sotheby's view, and offering me fifteen hundred quid, cash. “Oh, I thought you were with Sotheby's!” I declared with feigned astonishment. “
Haw, haw, haw
,” laughed the squire. “He thought I was with Sotheby's!” he declared to his friends, and then went on to explain, all in good humor, why I would be much better off taking the fifteen hundred now instead of consigning the painting to Sotheby's and waiting months to get paid. “And besides,” he assured me as his mates looked on with glee, “they're just a bunch of thieves anyway!” Twenty minutes later, fifteen hundred pounds richer and confident the Mafia wouldn't be chasing me, I was enjoying a lunch of Cumberland sausage and a pint at the local pub.
Back in Florida, José and I began to notice an interesting phenomenon. Paintings that we'd gone to so much trouble to get into Britain and sell in the auction houses there were turning up in the United States! “Look at this!” I said over breakfast in the courtyard one morning, and handed José a decorator's magazine I was looking through. “We put that painting of a bull in a sale last winter in Ipswich! Hell, that's near the North Pole, and now it's hanging in a millionaire's home in Texas!”
“Yeah,” José said, “we could have just driven the painting over there.” Other paintings that we had sold in Britain turned up in New York auction houses as well. It was this boomerang effect that gave us the inspiration for the third and final phase of the British School.
I went into the studio and came back with a number of auction-house catalogs from New York salesrooms. As I had once done in London, I turned to the backs of the catalogs, and, with the help of a huge magnifying glass, we searched through “The Conditions of Sale.” Again and again we saw the phrase “Neither Christie's nor the consignor make any representations as to the authorship or authenticity of any lot offered in this catalog.”
“Hell, they don't guarantee anything here either!” I said.
“True,” José said. “Well, maybe we could save people the trouble of going to England and sell them right here!”
Within days, a packet of photographs was sent up to Christie's in New York. It didn't take them long to send us a reply stating that they “would be delighted” to include the paintings in their upcoming sales.
A week later, we packed up the car with paintings and headed back to the Upper East Side of New York. We pulled up to Christie's, and José waited in the car while I carried in the paintings. Minutes later, I was back in the car with a contract, and we headed downtown to Katz's for hot dogs. Thus began the domestic distribution of my British paintings.
In this phase of the operation, we needed to establish a production line and limit our personal deliveries. I was working harder than ever, often turning out two or three paintings a week. The studio was packed with pictures and it became impractical to fit each painting with an antique frame. Our solution to the problem was to order high-quality frame moldings from the best frame maker in the country. We ordered the moldings finished in real gold leaf in simple but elegant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century patterns.
After each painting underwent a “screw-press relining,” we cut and assembled a frame for it. The next step was to photograph all completed paintings. Then packets of photos were sent to auction houses in New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Washington, London, and Bath. As soon as the inevitable reply came back, we built our own crates and shipped them out. The demand was insatiable, and we soon had paintings being sold simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic.
The phones never stopped ringing. Christie's New York would call one minute and Sotheby's London the next. Occasionally they asked if I could offer a provenance on any of the paintings they'd received. “What a joke!” I said to José after getting off the line with someone from Christie's. “She actually asked if I could shed any light on the history of the âHerring.' She should see this place!”
Sometimes the situation became embarrassing, because I couldn't keep track of which pictures had gone to which auction house. When someone called to discuss estimates, illustrations, reserves, or other details, I'd often confuse the paintings being referred to. To remedy this problem, José set up a bulletin board on the wall above the desk. On large index cards, he wrote Christie's London, Sloans DC, Phillips New York, etc. with a felt-tipped pen.
These cards were tacked across the top of the board. Then photos of all pictures currently in the hands of the auction houses and awaiting sale were tacked under the houses that had them. Thus I was able to see at a glance how many pictures were out and where they were. The photos were removed as the pictures were sold, and new photos took their place. By avoiding the need to look up correspondence, this system also allowed me to continue painting while I was on a speakerphone talking with experts at the auction houses.
By the late eighties, our distribution had been fine-tuned. We judiciously selected and sent out a continual stream of British paintings from an ever-expanding repertoire to auction houses in the United States and Britain. The paintings were routinely attributed to such artists as James Barenger, Samuel Spode, James Seymour, George Stubbs, John Boultbee, J. E. Ferneley, J. F. Herring, John Nost Sartorius, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, and others of the sporting genre, and Thomas Whitcombe, Thomas and James Buttersworth, Charles Brooking, and others among the marine painters. José had set up accounts with each auction house with standing instructions to wire the sale proceeds into a number of British and American accounts held in his name. To ensure that we always had plenty of spending money for shopping, we set up a joint account in Harrods Bank, a swank little facility in the store's basement. Now when we traveled to London, we no longer took chances with customs. Instead we went to pick up cash and go on shopping sprees.
On one of our trips to Bath, we went to see a beautiful first-floor flat in the Circus. Built in the eighteenth century and just a block away from the Royal Crescent, the Circus is an architectural masterpiece inspired by the Coliseum in Rome. As its name suggests, the town houses, all thirty-two of them, form a large circle. Palladian in design, they face a common green. The understated elegance of the Circus appealed to me even more than that of the Royal Crescent. The flat was part of the estate of Barling, a famous antique dealer on Mount Street in London, recently deceased. His personal weekend retreat, it was composed of a drawing room, a study, a marble bathroom, and a sunken kitchen with a balcony reached by a hidden staircase. The entire flat was appointed with magnificent architectural details.
It didn't take us five minutes to make up our minds, and José signed a contract that very day. From a business standpoint, it was a good move in more ways than one. We could save a fortune in hotel bills, use it to store the antiques and picture frames we bought, and of course set up a studio. We left it in the hands of a local solicitor and returned to Florida, excited about getting our own place in Bath.
It was all too good to be true. Everything tumbled down soon after we got back home. José began feeling ill and went to the doctor. It was the worst news possible. He had contracted AIDS, and it had already progressed to a serious stage. It was devastating news for both of us. I was determined not to lose my best friend and insisted we fight it with all we had. For the next year, we tried every experimental drug that came along. But every visit to the doctor and every blood test only confirmed that the situation was getting worse. The deal for the flat in Bath had to be scrapped, and the studio was shut down. As a last-ditch effort we decided to fly to Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where it was reported that a clinic was having success in treating the disease with a new drug. The treatment consisted of a series of injections administered over the course of forty days.
As we could have predicted, the treatment was worthless and the situation only got worse. Our last battle to save José's life was fought at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. He got every experimental drug they had in their arsenal, but nothing could halt the progress of that awful disease. Finally we came home defeated, and José passed away in his bedroom, surrounded by his family.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Gems of Brazil
I
n 1863, the American artist Martin Johnson Heade traveled to Brazil to study the flowers and hummingbirds that flourish there. He journeyed into the mountains and was able to observe many species of rare hummingbirds in their natural habitat.
Heade went to work and produced a series of small paintings portraying the iridescent birds in beautiful tropical settings. Some of the paintings show the tiny birds fluttering around exotic flowers; others show them guarding their nests and precious eggs. He titled the collection of approximately twenty paintings
The Gems of Brazil
. An exhibition consisting of twelve of the paintings was held in 1864 in Rio de Janeiro. It received enthusiastic praise from Emperor Dom Pedro II, and Heade was awarded the Order of the Rose.
Heade returned to America with his collection of paintings in 1865. He did not intend to sell the paintings, but instead planned to reproduce them as colored lithographs in a book titled
The Gems of Brazil
. As it turned out, he had to travel to London to find a publisher willing to take on the project. But the process of chromolithography failed to capture the beauty of the birds to the satisfaction of the artist, and the project never was completed. Nevertheless, Heade profited from his efforts and received many commissions for copies of his
Gems
when the collection was displayed in London. The original collection was eventually purchased by Sir Morton Peto, a prominent art collector who lived in Bristol (and was no relation to the American painter John F. Peto).
When I first began painting pictures in the style of Heade, I had read a book Jimmy had given me,
The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade
, by Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., the world's expert on the artist and the curator of American paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. As I read the story of Heade's making copies of his
Gems
in England, I took particular note of the statement “Several of
The Gems of Brazil
have been discovered in England.”