Caveat Emptor (30 page)

It was bad enough to have lost my best friend, but we had spent so much money in the battle to save his life that I was almost broke as well. The situation was desperate, and I had to come up with a plan. The idea of “finding” a Martin Johnson Heade in England had crossed my mind more than once. Through the years, I had put together a file on the subject, as was my habit with any artist or situation that caught my interest. Whenever an example of a
Gem
was published in a magazine or turned up in an auction catalog, I would cut it out and add it to the file. Now, when I most needed it, the material was there.

Before I could consider anything so ambitious, though, I had to do something for immediate cash. I went to work painting “Buttersworths,” “Charles Bird Kings,” “Antonio Jacobsens,” “Petos,” “Walkers,” and others, all on reconstituted period supports. Even though a decade had passed since the close call with the FBI, I knew I was still taking a big chance, but I had to do something.

I made calls to my old friend the picker and to some of the same dealers who had bought American pictures from me years ago. I let them know that I could offer packages of paintings, high-class American fakes, at bargain prices. Though so much time had passed since I had painted my last American pictures, my skills had greatly improved, and the new generation of paintings was better than ever. One old customer bought ten to twenty paintings at a time, for a thousand bucks apiece. Gradually, I built up some cash reserves, but, to my chagrin, it wasn't long before I noticed some of these paintings turning up at auction houses for ten times what I had sold them for.

In the meantime, I was methodically working on a collection of
The Gems of Brazil
on the side. They were perfect in every respect, and I had complete confidence that I could walk into any auction house, show them to any expert, and no one would suspect a thing.

In the spring of 1992, I packed a bag, threw in a “
Gem
,” and took off for London. The next day, I was back at the Vicarage and back to my usual routine of shopping and hanging around Notting Hill Gate until my jet lag wore off. When I was ready for action, I slipped the “Heade,” a lovely little picture of two ruby-throated hummingbirds checking each other out on a branch, into a shopping bag (Burberry) and headed to the Notting Hill tube station. I planned to pose as an American tourist and present the painting at the valuation counter of an auction house. The story I had concocted was that I'd found the painting at a car boot sale near Bristol, and that I thought I'd seen something similar once in an art magazine back home.

I took the Central Line and got out on Bond Street, just steps away from Phillips Auction House, so I thought I'd give them a try. I went to the valuation counter and produced the painting. An expert was called from the picture department. A moment later, a bored-looking young man appeared and introduced himself. “I have a painting I found at a boot sale and would like an opinion,” I said. He daintily picked it up, twirled it around once or twice, and stated definitively, “It's just some kind of study, perhaps worth fifty quid.” Then, as a final insult, he added: “You'd be better off trying to find an antique dealer to sell it to.”

Although I very much wanted to, there was no way I could enlighten him as to the painting's importance, because I was supposed to be as dumb as he was, so I thanked him and left.

Back out on Bond Street, I was seized with the feeling that this whole idea was absurd and that there probably wasn't a person in England, art expert or otherwise, who had ever heard of
The Gems of Brazil
. Well, let me go to Christie's, I thought: they usually know what they're doing. At Christie's valuation counter, I pulled out the painting. An astute woman behind the counter picked it up and looked it over carefully. She interrupted a department expert who was engaged with another customer. They whispered to each other and then informed me that they suspected it to be American. She asked me to have a seat while they called down their resident expert on American paintings. Five minutes later, an important-looking man arrived at the counter, picked up the painting, and declared: “This is a Martin Johnson Heade.” The women then directed the expert's attention to me.

“Well, this is a very interesting painting,” he said. “Tell me how you came by this.”

“Actually, I found it in a boot sale near Bristol,” I answered, and went on to explain. “I thought I once saw something like it in a magazine back home in the States.” It all added up for him, and he proceeded to give me a brief history of Martin Johnson Heade and how
The Gems of Brazil
had wound up in the collection of Sir Morton Peto. “Well, it's quite valuable,” he said. “But we'd have to take it in for research before we could give you an accurate estimate. For now, however, I would place a provisional estimate of ten thousand sterling.” Pretending to be flabbergasted when in fact I was elated that the picture was recognized, I put out my hand for a shake, and he instructed the lady behind the counter to draw up a contract.

Half an hour later, I was sitting at my usual spot at Ponti's, sipping a cappuccino. I really love Britain, I thought, as I studied the document on the table before me, which included instructions to pay my account at Harrods. Well, so far, so good, I thought, but I was still short of cash, and there was no telling when or if they would put the “Heade” up for sale. There was nothing to do now except to go home and get back to work.

It had been two years since José passed away, and I was still struggling to get by. A friend of mine who lived in New York City called one day and told me that he knew of an antique dealer who wanted to hang some of my British pictures in his shop, “no questions asked.” I loaded the car with paintings and headed north.

Paul H. was a young Englishman whose mother owned one of the biggest antique businesses in Britain. It operated out of a manor house outside London and boasted a helicopter pad for the convenience of its exclusive clientele. Paul had wanted to strike out on his own, so he'd come to New York to start a business. Unfortunately, his art and antique shop in the Village wasn't doing well, and he was looking for something to juice up the bottom line. In fact, he was a step away from closing down when I pulled up to his shop on Eleventh Street.

Almost as fast as we got the paintings hung, they started selling. It kept his business going and put nearly twenty thousand badly needed bucks in my pocket. With this new outlet in place, I was busy painting pictures and traveling back and forth to New York. Almost a year had passed, and I still hadn't heard a word from Christie's concerning the “Heade.” Discouraged, and convinced that for one reason or another the deal had gone bad, I showed some of my American pictures, including several “Heades,” to Paul. He was immediately interested and agreed to buy them and others I could supply for cash. This arrangement worked out well and enabled me to extend my visits to the city. What he did with the paintings, I didn't ask.

One freezing February night, I was walking along Sixth Avenue in the Village when I stopped dead in my tracks, turned around, and went back to a newsstand I had just passed. I thought I had caught sight of one of my paintings on the front page of a newspaper. Sure enough, there on the front page of the London
Times
was my “Heade.” The headline read: “Car boot painting set to make 34,000 pounds profit.” Apparently Christie's had been amused by my story and had given it to the press. The article described how an American tourist had made the lucky find in a West Country boot sale. It stated that the picture was set to be sold in a couple of weeks in their New York salesrooms.

I had never expected the picture to be sent to New York. When I called my answering machine back home, there were several messages from Christie's informing me that the picture was scheduled for sale in New York, along with desperate pleas for me to send them the two hundred bucks they had paid Theodore Stebbins for his authentication. The next day, I went to Christie's to see the painting and buy a catalog.

When the elevator doors opened on the second-floor exhibition rooms of their Park Avenue establishment, I was suddenly face-to-face with my old friend the dashing young auctioneer from Phillips in Bath, the very one who promoted my work in the West Country. Having come up in the world, he was now at Christie's New York, but under the circumstances neither of us was anxious to catch up on old times. Instead, we just smiled and passed each other with a wink.

On the day of the sale, the picture fetched ninety-six thousand dollars, nearly doubling its fifty-thousand-dollar estimate. The story of the “lucky find” followed the picture across the Atlantic and was picked up by the Associated Press. Apart from the sale being shown on the local six o'clock news, the story got in almost every major newspaper in the country. The
New York Post
titled it “Big Bucks Birdies, The Art of the Steal.” Even my mother read about the sale in a local Florida newspaper and called to tell me to “look around for paintings of little hummingbirds next time you go to England.” Indeed, a month later, I was sitting in the bank at Harrods, battling the flu and collecting my ninety g's in cash.

Thanks to “Big Bucks Birdies,” the pressure for money was relieved, at least for the time being, and I could concentrate on my next project.

I was in my studio one day reviewing files and trying to decide what to paint next when inspiration walked right in through the door. My old buddy Mr. X, the picker, came by carrying one of the most beautiful nineteenth-century American frames I'd ever seen. It was a deep-fluted cove frame with a palm decoration in each corner, a common pattern up to the Civil War, but the quality of the carving, the beauty of the patina, and the weight of the frame set it apart as an outstanding example. An expensive frame made expressly for an important painting, it was about five inches in width and would accommodate a painting only twelve by twenty inches in size.

Ever since my friendship with Old Man Jory, my love for antique picture frames had never waned, often leading me to prefer to hang empty frames about the house rather than my own pictures. Antique frames frequently served as inspiration for me, and as soon as I laid eyes on my friend's frame, I knew exactly what belonged in it.

Mr. X knew it was an outstanding frame, and wanted to swap it for a painting. I offered him a beautiful little “William Aiken Walker” that was hanging on the wall. He took it, and the frame became mine. My friend was barely out the door before I lunged for the filing cabinet and pulled out a folder marked “Passionflowers.”

The original collection of
The Gems of Brazil
painted by Heade was a series of small canvases, approximately ten by twelve inches each, depicting pairs of hummingbirds in tropical settings. As time went on, he expanded the series to include exotic flowers along with the birds. These paintings were larger than the original
Gems
, some as large as eighteen by twenty-four inches. Heade used three or four different orchids, which he repeated in painting after painting, but he only used the passionflower in a few known paintings.

The passionflower series is regarded by many collectors as Heade's most beautiful, rare, and mysterious work. To find a passionflower Heade would be the dream of any collector. In these beautiful paintings, the deep red of the passionflower contrasts dramatically against the lush green background, and once again the colorful little hummingbirds are carefully placed about on branches and vines.

I knew that Heade had painted a number of these pictures in a vertical format, and my guess was that that format was close to the size of the frame before me. I opened the file and spread out prints of every example of these pictures I had found over the past decade. A quick check of the sizes confirmed my belief. More than one was executed on a twelve-by-twenty canvas. This initial observation also revealed another important point. Just as Heade used the same orchid in painting after painting, so it was with the passionflower. Obviously painted with the use of a stencil, the same red passionflower down to the smallest detail appeared in painting after painting. This repetition was also true of the birds. In fact, my choice of a bird was made easier by a print of a surviving sketch Heade had made of a passionflower study. Heade had placed a little crimson topaz, a bird he used over and over again, on a vine with the passionflower.

The next step was to check my inventory of antique paintings. The twelve-by-twenty canvas was a common size in the nineteenth century, and I had more than one example to choose from. I took it as a good omen that everything was falling into place so rapidly. By the following day, I was making paper cutouts of the flowers and birds, just as Heade himself had done. On a sketch pad, I traced out a twelve-by-twenty rectangle, the same size as the canvas. After drawing in a tropical background in the typical Heade style, I arranged the paper cutouts of the flowers and birds in just the right positions, traced them in, and then connected everything together freehand with a tangle of twigs and vines.

Generally, one of my “Heade” paintings could be completed in two sessions: one day for the background, which consists of the sky, foliage, and landscape, and then, after that is dry, the flowers, birds, vines, and other details are added. Before the week was over, I had a perfect example of Heade's rarest paintings.

It would need a month to dry in the Florida sun before I could begin the aging process. But the temptation to place it in the frame was irresistible.

I locked the doors, turned off the phone, and sat back in a chair, entranced by the painting hanging on my wall. I would never know what type of painting the frame had once held, but I couldn't help but feel that this masterpiece of carving, made perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago, had been waiting for just this moment and for just this painting.

Now that my picture was finished, I turned my thoughts to strategy. If I were to present the painting as “restored,” it would be highly unlikely and even suspicious if such a painting had not been published in a catalog or book in the past. Therefore, I decided that, even though the risks might increase, my masterpiece would be a “long, lost Heade” that hadn't seen the light of day since it was painted. The rule among savvy dealers and collectors was that if you found an important picture, you sprang it on the auction market in its original unrestored condition without showing it to anyone.