A Masterpiece of Revenge (12 page)

Quentin's estate was situated deep in the forest. It was a kind of Gothic folly, built during the medieval revival in the midnineteenth century with turrets and crenellated walls and leaded windows. A man's castle, that sort of thing — though it had undeniable charm and a stunning view.

We spent the afternoon nosing around the place and looking in forgotten corners. There were not more than fifteen rooms, each one crammed with dusty and rather hideous hunting trophies.

After a picnic lunch in the dining room, whose ceiling, not unattractively, was painted after the Italian fashion, we decided to have a look round the attic. I have always adored attics. Every dusty trunk or hat box might contain some treasure.

We found trunks of dresses with Belgian lace and corsets, porcelain vases, boxes of letters, pictures without frames, frames without pictures. In a corner under a canvas stiff with age was a very old-looking framed painting. It had been long neglected, but we could just make out the dim outlines of a landscape, the tops of a few trees, and, in the left-hand corner, painted prettily though covered with grime, some classical ruins.

I dabbed at the painting with a handkerchief to see what was hiding beneath the dust.

“Who knows,” I said to Quentin. “It may be worth something.”

We brought the painting closer to a window and I examined it from all angles. All I could make out was a confusion of indistinct and damaged images, spotted with mold. Time and humidity had taken their destructive toll on the poor old thing. The painting was a shambles. Still, the frame and supports were in reasonably good shape, and the canvas didn't seem to have been too damaged.

“Looks like a total loss, I'm afraid,” said Quentin. “I'll have it carted out to the rubbish.”

One should never say such a thing to a restorer. My new career involved bringing “unreadable” paintings back to life.

“Quentin, I'll tell you what. I'll buy the painting from you for a hundred pounds. Have it sent to Oxford. If I manage to restore it, and if it turns out to be worth something, we'll split the proceeds fifty-fifty. Sound all right?”

Quentin of course wanted to give me the painting outright, but I insisted. In the end he gave in with a grin.

My initial bravado behind me, I put the painting in my Oxford storehouse and in the back of my mind, telling myself that one day I'd have a crack at it.

Anyway, as I say, I was pacing around the storeroom when it caught my eye. This was the time to have a look at the thing, I suddenly thought. I took it to the lab, rolled up my sleeves, and went to work. Two precious days I spent trying to salvage that wreck, only to discover in the end that it was a pleasant and innocuous landscape of absolutely no distinction. A few cattle grazing among Roman ruins. It had doubtless been painted in the seventeenth century by some Italian hack. Most certainly no masterpiece.

I might have gotten three hundred pounds for the painting, but I decided to keep it. I liked the frame, which was original. And, God knows why, I thought it might one day prove useful.

Meanwhile, I continued to look for ways to make money. I needed it for you, for me, and to pay off my debts. I spent money I didn't have to place advertisements for my laboratory in art magazines, in the hope of attracting the notice of European curators.

And I continued to marvel at the works of Lorrain wherever I traveled.
Temple in Delphi
in Rome; the religious works in the Prado;
Hagar, Ishmael, and the Angel
at the Pinakothek in Munich;
Dido and Aeneas
in Hamburg; and the extraordinary
Psyche Saved From the Water
at the museum in Cologne.

The more of his work I saw, the more I seemed to discover things about myself.

Yes, Papa, I know. Some might find this passion for Lorrain just a little strange. Most people might not even stop to look at his paintings when passing by them in a museum.

Understanding his work takes time. His is a world of visual poetry and subtle harmony. One needs to find a way to respond to him.

Lorrain's universe is not for everyone. His work provides a refuge, a place of dreams, of airy landscapes and inner peace. The whole point is not just to look at what he is showing you, but to experience it. The gentle breeze wafting through those magnificent valleys and refulgent landscapes. The sun descending behind trees and mountains. The smell of roses at that magic moment when dawn dissolves to day. Lorrain gives us visions of paradise lost, and one's reaction can only be that of deep longing. What are those lines of poetry, I forget whose?

To hear the lark begin his flight

And, singing, startle the dull night,

From his watch-tower in the skies

Till the dappled dawn doth rise;

* * *

The strange pains I'd experienced earlier came back while I was returning from a trip to Rome. Tingling in the fingers, painful inflammation in the legs, terrible migraines.

“Not to worry,” my doctor told me over the phone. “You're tired and you're under stress. It's nothing.”

I waited for the symptoms to go away, but after a week they didn't. I went to see the doctor and again he sent me to the hospital for yet more tests.

Do you know that pain that seizes your entrails and makes you think the world is coming to an end? For five days in hospital I lived face to face with this dreadful reality. After the second exam — a myelograph test, I think — I knew what the doctors were looking for. Their elliptical comments made it all the more clear: the shaking, the migraines, the ataxia, the paresthesia. It all amounted to one thing: multiple sclerosis.

I felt condemned, Papa, condemned to a death that would come in small installments. Each crisis would get worse. I've seen someone die that way before. It is the way you are dying. And while waiting for it I would live in terror of the next attack. What would be the first to go? My eyes? My mind? Would I have to be restrained? The interval between the two first crises had been short. The disease would now progress rapidly.

I would die unsatisfied, unfinished. The imminence of death posed unbearable questions: Why had I been born? What had I done with my life? I had spent my life waiting. “I wasted time and now time doth waste me.”

On the fifth day of my stay in the hospital, my doctor came into my room and sat on my bed. He was smiling.

“Miss Caldwell, you've got an hour to pack your bags and leave. After midday, checkouts are postponed to the next day”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“What I mean is that there is absolutely nothing whatever the matter with you.”

He explained that the symptoms had been caused by a virus that went undetected the first time around, and whose symptoms are exactly the same as for multiple sclerosis.

The first thing I did when I got out of the hospital was run to see you to tell you the joyful news. I half expected my release would bring about your own.

We shared a glass of champagne. Don't you remember, Papa? I sat with you until late into the evening, near the window, watching night fall over the trees in the park.

In my euphoria — my tipsiness, I suppose — I felt as if something had happened between us. Something, well, like the breath of life, life that would continue to be mine for a little longer. Perhaps you felt something.

Then my joy seemed to collapse under the weight of the certainty that it was too late for you and me. Always, forever, too late. You were somewhere else now. You always had been. Light-years from me.

I left you, Papa, to go and taste something more of life. I wanted to make life. I went to the house of a former lover and simply gave myself to him. I didn't have to say anything. We rolled together in a voluptuous union that had the urgency of death. Time's winged chariot.

The next morning I faced once again our financial problems. I, Jane Caldwell, thirty-eight years old, beautiful, gifted, filled with regrets about her life yet driven by a crazy desire to do something grand, something wonderful, something that would turn her life around.

I would create an immortal work of art before death, which had brushed against me once, made a second pass.

A revelation came to me during one of my meditative visits to the National Gallery.

I was sitting on a bench in the little rotunda that houses the Turner painting, the one the artist himself had bequeathed to the museum — with the stipulation that it be surrounded by two Lorrain paintings that he had also donated. As usual, I was lost in reverie before these luminous portals, but this time my feelings of immersion were tempered.

I realized that I knew every brush stroke as if I had done them myself. I knew why he had put such and such an architectural caprice there, what diagonal he had used to give the effect of the horizon, what mixture of colors he had used to get that yellow.

Never would I create something as sublime. I had knowledge; I lacked genius. I needed to accept that mine was a modest talent.

“Modest talent.” The words did not accord well with my passionate temperament. Something was pushing me into believing I could find a way.

Suddenly my whole body was flooded with a sense of relief, with the conviction that leaves no room for doubt: I would create a Lorrain. The artist himself would guide me.

I knew I had found my destiny, Papa. I also knew exactly how the thing could be done. It was a flash of genius — a total vision.

The minute I got home to Oxford I ran to my lab and found the painting Fd bought from Quentin.

The first thing I needed to do was remove all traces of the original paint from the canvas — but preserve the varnish deposited there over the course of the centuries. Using a mild solvent, I removed these layers one by one. I would reuse the varnish later, because the dust embedded in it was authentic, and therefore would confirm the finished painting's age.

Whenever I could — weekends, holidays — I locked myself away in my laboratory to analyze, decompose, and then reconstitute all the pigments necessary.

I had already compiled a complete list of the paints Lorrain used, as well as details of their chemical composition. I knew, for example, that the blues in his oceans consisted of fine particles of lapis lazuli dissolved in white lead. I couldn't use just any lapis, at least not the sort you find on the open market, which comes from Brazil or Africa. I needed old lapis, extracted from the legendary mines near the mouth of the Amu Darya River in Tajikistan. The crystal composition is unique.

For the blue of the sky, I would need azurite, a copper deposit you can find on fragments of bronze Roman statuary, mixed with equal amounts of palm pulp.

Lorrain's vermilion consisted of mercury sulfide. The green, copper oxidized in a natural resin. The yellow was not natural ocher, but a massicot, a lead-tin oxide.

In one week, using an X-ray spectrometer, I had reconstituted the entire color palette Lorrain had used during his Italian period. This palette did not include, for example, the English vermilion, which he didn't adopt until the end of his life.

The quality and origins of the fur Lorrain used in his brushes was the subject of further painstaking research, because a few hairs always remain behind, lodged in the painting. The presence of any modern element in the finished work would give the whole thing away.

I took all my materials to my flat in London, where I had the basic equipment I needed.

By then I had decided my painting would be Lorrain's missing masterpiece,
The Port of Naples
. It had disappeared sometime in the nineteenth century, but there are various engravings and copies that give us a very good idea of what it must have been like. The original drawing could of course be found in the
Libro di Veritá
. All I needed to do was increase the scale of that drawing and come up with a precise schematic.

I carefully removed the painted canvas from its frame, taking care to put each hand-wrought iron tack back into its original hole. Then I secured the canvas to my worktable.

The next step involved removing the pictorial layers, abrading them by hand until I hit canvas. Using solvents on the varnish-free paint would have meant running the risk of leaving a mark on the back of the canvas.

Over the years, I had categorized the various fabrics Lorrain used while in Italy. His preference was for what is termed
armure toile
, a simple canvas of threads, woven in pairs or singly, forming a weave with a density often to thirteen threads per square centimeter. The disposition of the threads and the weave were common at the time in France and Italy. Luck was with me. The density of the weave and the direction of the width of the painting from Quentin's attic painting corresponded perfectly.

The tightly woven linen canvas retained a part of its original preparation, though no further trace of the original landscape. I double-checked that every trace of it was gone. The last thing I needed was to have a “ghost” image of the original appear while the finished painting was being examined.

Using broad strokes, I applied a supplementary base of red ocher, fabricated according to a formula employed by many painters in the seventeenth century: a combination of ferruginous clay, rich in silicates and relatively poor in oxides, and linseed oil.

Once this thick layer of colored ocher was dried, I spread a thin transitional layer, made up of equal parts of clay and lead oxide, plus carbon I obtained from burning antique wood. The composition of this layer was one of Lorrain's trade secrets. It rendered the colors in his finished paintings even more luminescent.

You must understand, Papa, that these primary coats, these intermediaries between the canvas and the pictorial elements, were of critical importance for the survival of a painting over the course of centuries. That is why the masters attended to them with such care.

Funny, isn't it? If you hadn't forced me to study biochemistry, I never would have been able to accomplish any of this. Then again, had I gone to art school and become a painter, I doubt I would have even imagined imitating a seventeenth-century painter — though I might have mastered some of the techniques necessary. This Lorrain came to be at the end of a tortuous path, Papa. A path you set me on.