Sorry, but no such thing. Fakes are not illegal. You can copy all the Rembrandts you want. You can sign his name to them, you can crackle and darken them so they look old, you can put bogus seventeenth-century stamps and inscriptions on the backs. All perfectly legal as long as it's all in good fun. You can even go around telling people they're the real thing. What you can't do is try to sell them as such. That's why prudent forgers never sell their own work directly to the public; it's too easy to prove fraudulent intent. But dealers are another matter. They can be duped like anybody else, after all, and they can hardly be routinely charged with intent to deceive if some of their offerings turn out to be bogus. If the Met can make mistakes, why not them?
So where do you think all those exposed fakes that you're always reading about wind up when all the hoopla dies down? Back in circulation is where. After a suitable time, of course. And eventually, many of them end as the proud property of rich, gullible private collectors all around the world. Not that I thought of Vachey as gullible; not by a long shot. If his new Rembrandt was a phony, and if there was any duping going on, Rene Vachey was the duper.
Guess who that left as the dupee.
At 39 Rue de la Prefecture, a pair of Vachey's minions stood at the door of the house, under Pepin's fussy, darting supervision, to examine our invitations and direct us up to the gallery, or rather to make sure that we didn't stray into Vachey's ground-level private quarters. Upstairs, the folding, linen-covered partitions had been moved back, opening up a sizable reception area in which the guests milled about, sipping brandy or coffee.
Naturally, the only thing I could think about was having my first look at the Rembrandt, but the entry to the main part of the show remained blocked by a table drawn up against the partitions. All that was open was the section on the landing, near Vachey's study: Villon, Duchamp, and the other Cubists. And I didn't have much interest in those. Near the table, Vachey was energetically conferring with his secretary, Marius Pepin, and with a round, fluffy, excited woman in her sixties who Calvin told me was Clotilde Guyot, Vachey's gallery manager. Evidently, the exhibition wasn't quite ready to open.
Restive and eager to get on with it, I snared a balloon glass of cognac from a passing waiter, found a corner by myself, and waited. I'd already prepared myself mentally for being face-to-face with the Rembrandt-the alleged Rembrandt-and I didn't want to have to talk to anyone before I did. The truth is, I was too jumpy for rational conversation, but that didn't bother Calvin, who located me and rattled happily on for what seemed like half an hour. I think he was generously describing for me the attributes of the young woman he'd dined with, or maybe of some of the other women there, but I couldn't swear to it either way. I gulped at the brandy and waited.
At long last there was a businesslike rapping from the front. The table blocking the entrance was moved to the side. Madame Guyot raised her great, pillowy white arms for silence and turned her sunny pink face on us.
'Ladies and gentlemen,' she announced breathlessly, 'it is my privilege to welcome you to the Galerie Vachey tonight, and to thank you all for coming, and permit me to invite you in to view the paintings, and-wait, please-kindly do not carry your beverages into the exhibition.' This was emitted in fluttery French that lacked discernible pauses (no wonder she was out of breath), after which she stepped hurriedly out of the way and behind the table, just in time to avoid being trampled by the herd.
Calvin and I, caught near the entrance with nothing to duck behind, were less fortunate. We were borne helplessly into the gallery, where more partitions necessitated an immediate choice; either go right, into the French wing, which had the Leger, or left into the Dutch wing, where the Rembrandt alcove was. Calvin was swept off to the right with the greater part of the crowd, bobbing along in the flow like a plastic cup in the surf, but I managed to fight my way to the left, where I found myself in a corridorlike space about ten feet by thirty, low-ceilinged and lined on both walls with an orderly procession of seventeenth-century paintings by Dutch masters.
I caught glimpses of a Honthorst, a Bloemaert, a Cuyp, all superb and more than enough to capture my attention under ordinary circumstances, but at the moment they couldn't have interested me less. Like most of the others, I made singlemindedly toward an alcove at the end of the corridor, where the partitions were draped with lush, green velveteen; obviously the place of honor, although its main wall was out of sight, around the corner of the corridor.
But at the last second, I got cold feet. Slipping into a nook just before the alcove, I let the others push by. Now that it had come down to it, I found that I didn't want to look at it, not yet. The moment of truth was at hand, and I wasn't quite ready to face it. For despite the reservations I'd been expressing to Tony and Calvin, and despite the distressing doubts currently being raised about the entire Rembrandt oeuvre, I knew I wasn't really going to need a whole day of analysis, or even an hour. All it was going to take for me to know if the picture on that wall was the real thing was one good, hard look.
I'm not saying that was always the case-not by a long shot, it wasn't-but when it was a painter that I knew as well as I did Rembrandt, and when I'd just done some heavy boning up, as indeed I had before I left Seattle, then I wasn't going to need very much time-or laser microanalysis or thermoluminescent discrimination, for that matter-to tell me what was what.
Sure, I'd want them for confirmation, but if it took more than three minutes to reach a conclusion, my own conclusion, for myself, I would be extremely surprised. If there was a Rembrandt in that alcove, I would know. If there wasn't, I would know that too.
I let the hubbub in the alcove die down a little, waited for a few people to come out, then took a breath and pushed around the corner. The painting leaped out at me, three feet from my face, brilliant and vivid from its recent cleaning, a handsome portrait of an elderly man. I peered at it, eyes narrowed, mind cleansed of everything else, focusing every ounce of concentration, everything I'd learned from fifteen years of scholarly absorption in Baroque art. I put the buzzing around me out of my mind. I scrutinized the brushwork, the palette, the thousand nuances of style and technique.
After a couple of minutes, I let out my breath and stepped back.
I didn't know whether the hell it was a Rembrandt or not.
Chapter 7
Well, it wasn't that simple. Not that it didn't look enough like a Rembrandt; the problem was, it looked too much like a Rembrandt-but it was the wrong Rembrandt. Not the wrong person, I mean, but the wrong style.
In the seventeenth century it had been a famous witticism that Rembrandt's paints were so thick that you could pick his portraits up by the nose. (His grumpy response had been that he was a painter, not some damned dyer.) Ever since, those clotted gobbets of color had been hallmarks of his work, along with the astonishingly free, incredibly sure brush strokes, the somber, reflective atmosphere, the pensive subjects emerging from dim, vague scrubs of shadow into pools of golden light.
When you hear the words 'Rembrandt portrait,' that's what comes to mind, right? Well, that's what I was expecting too. Reasonably enough. That's what every newly discovered Rembrandt portrait of the last fifty years had looked like, and every phony one too. That was the Rembrandt I'd spent three entire days boning up on.
But this was different, this was in the style of the artist's youth, before he'd become the Rembrandt most of us know, the most famous painter in the world. No fat globs of paint, no looping, spontaneous brushwork. This was early seventeenth-century Dutch painting-in effect, Dutch painting before the mature Rembrandt changed it forever-at its best: clean-lined, highly finished, crisply realistic. And that's what made it so intensely surprising.
Paradoxically, you see, it is the later, greater Rembrandt who is most frequently and most successfully faked. Many a second-rate painting has passed as a Rembrandt if the ochers, browns, and yellows have been slapped on gluily enough, the outlines adequately blurred, and the whole thing done with moody flair. But to imitate the precision of the early Rembrandt takes discipline, not to mention well-honed skills, and those have always been in shorter supply than flair.
So all the prepping I'd done involved Rembrandt's mature style. It had simply never occurred to me that I might be dealing with a spurious early Rembrandt. Naturally, I was thrown for a loop. Who wouldn't be?
And okay, all right, I admit it. Possibly I was-um, er-just a wee bit overconfident going in.
The picture before me was of a weathered, dissipated-looking man in his sixties, with a long nose and a scant, grizzled beard. He gazed sadly out from under a capacious black hat with an enormous plume held on by a
