Caveat Emptor (28 page)

As I continued to study the work of artists like Seymour, Wootton, Herring, and Ferneley, I began to understand their way of thinking, their way of visualizing, the way they set up a painting, the way they designed cloud patterns, the rolling hills of the landscape with hedgerows, and the colors of their palettes. Designing new paintings in their styles came effortlessly to me. I also enjoyed inventing original sporting pictures—not based on the style of any particular artist of the period—just to see if the British would buy them. They did. But the more I spent time in the West Country and the more my love and enthusiasm for sporting art grew, the more I believed I'd finally found myself artistically.

What a pity I hadn't been born in the eighteenth century! I lamented. I was certain I could have done well. Here I was in Bath, in the land of Jane Austen, right on Milsom Street, a street no doubt familiar to artists and the aristocrats who commissioned their work. The grand houses were still here and many of the paintings too. But, alas, I had arrived a couple of hundred years too late. I loved Bath and the country life so much that I felt misunderstood, victimized by fate, and stuck in a century where I didn't belong.

As paintings “In the style of Sartorius,” “In the manner of Herring,” and “In the circle of Ferneley” began hitting the block at Sotheby's, Christie's, Phillips, and Bonhams, I was averaging around three thousand dollars for each one. My pictures almost always doubled or tripled the house's estimates. It was an intoxicating thrill to see my pictures hanging in the exhibitions and watch the experts examine them. I remembered the first time I'd visited Sotheby's and stood in the exhibition rooms, never dreaming that one day my own pictures would hang there too. It was an even bigger thrill to attend the sales and watch them sell. We always celebrated with a night at the theater and dinner at Simpson's-in-the-strand. Afterward, we often walked around Leicester Square. I was drawn to the artists who sat there and did portraits for a few pounds. I liked to watch them work, but sometimes it frightened me, and I wondered if one day I'd wind up there too.

This routine went on for about a year but it was not without its problems. First, there was the matter of customs. If I had been stopped in a random customs check, like they often made in Britain's airports, I would have had to explain away a couple of suitcases loaded with British paintings. And using suitcases limited the size of the pictures to a maximum of twenty-four by thirty inches.

I reduced the risk of the first problem by finding out how people were selected for a search by the customs agents. A travel book published for college students went into the subject at some length. The book described several profiles the sharp-eyed agents look for in flagging down a traveler. For instance, single young men with long hair and an unkempt appearance, wearing jeans, could be targets for a marijuana search. Nervous-looking people in a rush could be smugglers of some kind.

The book pointed out that to avoid being stopped, one should dress conservatively and neatly. Be clean-cut. Don't be in a rush. Don't look around as you are waiting for your bags. And, above all, never look at the agents. In other words, just blend in with the crowd and go with the flow, ignoring the agents completely. So my standard outfit was khaki pants, a blue Oxford shirt, a Baracuta jacket, and penny loafers. As an added touch, I always carried along one of those thick British travel guides that I conspicuously displayed in my hand as I pushed my cart along.

After a year or so, the suitcase maneuver gave way to Phase II. In the mid-eighties, the English country look became very popular. Fashion designers such as Ralph Lauren and Laura Ashley, who copied English design in their clothing, now moved into English home furnishings. Top decorators were in the salesrooms, buying up all the English furniture and paintings they could find. The auction houses snapped up my pictures as fast as I walked in the door with them. But the more paintings I placed in the London market, the more I had to diversify them in size and subject matter in order not to raise suspicions. As I became ever more familiar with the market, I learned that British marine paintings, which included those of James and Thomas Buttersworth, went hand in glove with the sporting pictures. In fact, the two genres were often featured together in the sales catalogs.

Once again, I was running around London buying up every book I could find on the subject. The genre of British marine painting stems from Britain's glorious maritime history. From the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, a progression of artists specialized in painting everything from the majestic battleships that protected the island fortress to beautiful clipper ships that imported goods from faraway places like India and China.

During the eighteenth century, British marine painting was dominated by such artists as Thomas Whitcombe and Charles Brooking. Later in the nineteenth century came artists like Thomas Buttersworth and Nicholas Condy. Since no respectable English drawing room is complete without a painting of a ship on the sea with the white cliffs of Dover on the horizon, it was essential that I include these paintings in my repertoire as well.

The problem of transporting larger paintings into Britain was solved one afternoon after I had dropped off a few paintings at the auction houses. With some time to kill, I decided to view a collection of nineteenth-century European paintings on display in Sotheby's exhibition rooms. Always ready to learn more, I recognized the expert in charge and struck up a conversation with him about the condition of a painting on display. He remarked that the canvas was extremely dry and brittle and would soon require a
relining
.

Relining is a process whereby an antique painting is rebacked with a new canvas. The antique painting is carefully removed from its stretcher. Then it is placed facedown on a table with a perfectly flat surface. Next, a special glue or wax is spread all over the back of the antique canvas. Then a sheet of new canvas is pressed down over the antique canvas and flattened down under pressure by various methods until the two pieces of canvas fuse together as one. The painting is then remounted onto a new stretcher. The procedure reinforces the original canvas, which has become fragile with age, and restores a flat, even surface to the painting. It is a common procedure, and nearly every painting found in a museum has been relined. While I pretended to be ignorant of a process that I routinely performed on customers' paintings back in Florida, the kind expert was eager to show me an example of what he was talking about. He removed a painting from the wall. Relining, he explained, is nothing new. In fact, relining antique paintings became common over a hundred years ago, but the particular relining he wanted to show me was of special interest.

Leaning the painting against the wall, we each got down on one knee and took a close look. It was an example of an old type of relining that I'd seen many times before—but about the history of which I had known nothing. This particular technique was called a “screw-press lining,” the expert said as he proceeded to point out its unique characteristics. He estimated that the example we were studying was from the first decade of the twentieth century.

The canvas used for the relining had a common broadcloth weave. The stretcher used to replace the original was about three inches wide and had sturdy square joints at the corners. It was a standard stretcher used at the time, sometimes referred to as an “English stretcher.” The keys used to expand the joints had rounded heads, and there was a cross brace for added strength. Another important characteristic was the beveled edge of the stretcher over which the flap or border of the relining canvas was wrapped and secured, first with a row of tacks placed along the very edge of the stretcher and then with glue to hold down the last inch of fabric to the beveled edge.

The expert went on to explain that the Industrial Revolution had produced a great demand for British paintings and old masters. The paintings were needed to fill up the mansions of a new class of wealthy industrialists in search of an instant pedigree. There existed at that time a huge reservoir of antique paintings that had never been restored. In order to make these paintings salable, large restoration mills sprang up around London and processed literally thousands of paintings. Art dealers like Duveen made millions selling these pictures to their nouveau riche clients.

Before the screw press, the adhesive used in the relining process had been beeswax. A layer of hot liquefied wax was applied between the old and new canvases, and the two were then pressed together with a hot iron. It was a long and tedious process, one that left a messy coat of wax on the back of the canvas. To speed up the relining process, the screw press was invented. It resembled a large book press. The antique painting was placed facedown on a steel bed. The back of the painting was then painted with a coat of water-based glue. Then the new canvas was placed over it. Finally, a large, flat sheet of steel was lowered down by turning a series of screws until the antique and new canvases were pressed together under great pressure. The result was a very flat relining. When viewed from the back, all that could be seen was a clean, dry sheet of canvas.

The relined painting was then mounted onto the standard three-inch-wide, square-jointed English stretcher. Although years of oxidation had turned this stretcher and canvas dark brown, thousands of these relinings are still holding up fine today, creating a characteristic appearance familiar to collectors and experts.

When my expert was finished, I helped him lift the painting back onto the hook and thanked him for a most enlightening afternoon. I walked over to Ponti's and over a cappuccino reviewed the contracts I had collected from the day's deliveries. But my mind kept wandering back to the expert's dissertation on relining. If I could simulate a screw-press relining, I thought, I could solve a number of problems at once. First of all, if I relined my paintings, I might no longer have to hunt up antique specimens to reconstitute. Instead, I could find cloth of the same weave used by the artists of the period, apply gesso, and use it as my canvas for the painting. The challenge would be to make it crack properly, and the relining would have to be “aged” in a way that would make it appear that it had been done a long time ago.

If I could paint a picture on modern cloth, which is pliable, and then reline it, I should have no problem rolling it up. And, I reasoned, if I could roll them up, I could easily bring larger paintings into Britain. The only problem would be that I would have to mount them onto the stretchers after I got to London. The idea fascinated me. Would it be possible to make fakes out of entirely new materials and fool the auction-house experts with them? I would have to revamp my whole operation.

Before I left London, I stopped and bought a legal pad. I spent the flight home in a state of excitement, drawing up a step-by-step plan to manufacture fakes out of modern materials.

Back in Florida, I searched through my inventory of old paintings and found a perfect example of a screw-press relining that had been applied to a second-rate eighteenth-century British portrait. In the privacy of my studio, I took the painting completely apart. The stretcher went straight to an accomplished woodworker. I had him make me a dozen stretchers and keys in varying sizes, constructed exactly like the old one. The tacks were no different from carpet tacks still used in upholstery work. A handful of them bought at the local hardware store went into a jar of saltwater for some quick rust.

Next, I had to find canvas that would resemble the type used by artists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I also needed heavy broadcloth of the type used in early relining. My search led me to upholstery-supply houses that carried a variety of cotton and linen weaves used as underlining in the upholstering of chairs and sofas. Some of these weaves came from places like India and China. One cloth, known as osnaburg, had all the irregularities of the cloth commonly used by artists in the eighteenth century. In fact, I learned that its manufacture hadn't changed in hundreds of years! The question remained, could I make the cracks on a modern canvas resemble antique ones? Once again, I turned to rabbit-skin glue. After working with this unique substance for years, I had become an expert in its use and its properties.

I began by tacking a piece of canvas onto a stretcher. Next I made up a thinned-out solution of glue and water, which I spread evenly over the canvas. Then I mixed up the gesso using my usual formula and, with a four-inch-wide brush, painted the gesso directly onto the impregnated canvas, using even, horizontal swipes of the brush. After a thorough drying, I observed that when held at an angle to the eye, the canvas displayed a perfect surface “signature” consistent with hand-applied gesso on canvas commonly seen on eighteenth- and some nineteenth-century paintings. Also when placed out in the sun and allowed to heat up, the tensile strength increased and stiffened the canvas. Finally, it only took the slightest pressure with the palm of my hand to send a shattering pattern of perfect cracks throughout the canvas.

For the relining, I employed a new heat-activated glue developed for restorers. The glue, which has the consistency of rubber cement, is simply painted onto the back side of the antique canvas after it has been removed from the stretcher. Then the new canvas is laid down over it and pressed on with a hot iron. The beauty of this system is that it produces a “dry” relining, without the use of wax, and the appearance is identical to a screw-press relining.

The “oxidation” of the stretcher and the relining canvas was achieved with the use of cheap poster colors thinned out with water. These earth-toned stains were brushed, sprayed, and blotted onto the stretchers and canvas, creating a mottled effect. Then, to even out the finish and simulate a layer of dust, a solution of rotten-stone powder and water was sprayed on and allowed to dry in the sunlight of the courtyard.

Once again José and I were traveling to Britain. This time, we were carrying duffel bags. One bag would carry a collection of as many as ten of my larger and improved sporting and marine pictures, all relined, varnished, and rolled up into a single bundle. Two other bags carried the “antique” stretchers, all broken down, taped together, and marked with the names of the paintings they belonged to. Indeed, the risks of being noticed by customs were increased but that just made it all the more thrilling.