The Lover's Portrait

by Jennifer S. Alderson

  Zelda lead him towards the first display describing four different methods art restorers and researchers employed to see ‘underneath’ a painting, enabling them to identify any changes the artist made to either the scene depicted or the color used while he or she was working on it. A video camera was suspended over the large workbench before them, aimed down towards a rectangular painting of a man and a woman walking through a cornfield. Florescent neon tubes were positioned around the edges of the canvas, casting a purplish glow over its surface. Via a monitor positioned to their left, they could see the lens was zoomed in on the center of the painting. Thanks to the shimmering ultraviolet light, she could make out another design underneath the cornfield, one not normally visible to the naked eye. Traces of a man’s portrait seemed to hover just below the painting’s surface.

  Hanging on the wall behind the worktable were three poster-sized prints. Blocks of text explained that these images were the results of using different types of x-ray scans to examine the same painting.

  The first of the three posters was the result of a standard x-ray, the same sort of imaging technique hospitals used to identify breaks in bones. The image was a confusing muddle of grey; the man’s portrait was visible if she squinted her eyes just right, but almost indiscernible from the cornfield above.

  The second print showed the results of infrared reflection, a technique used by art restorers since the 1970s. The man’s portrait was somewhat sharper and more distinguishable than in the x-ray, but she still had to use her imagination to fill in the details.

  The third print, created by an x-ray florescence analyzer, was a revelation. The machine could detect and analyze even the most miniscule remnant of pigment used to create every line and stroke still present on the canvas. In the poster hanging behind the workbench, the lines forming the man’s head and upper body were bright and crisp, even the coloring and shading of the hidden portrait were clearly visible. Thanks to the scanner’s ability to distinguish between the composition’s many layers, the image of the cornfield had been completely removed from the results. Looking at this digital printout, one would never suspect this portrait had been painted over. Zelda studied the third poster, then the painting on the workbench, amazed at how much information could be gained when using the right technology, and without damaging the visible painting above.

  She tried to gauge Friedrich’s thoughts as he gazed up at the three poster prints.

  “Do you really think there’s a map hidden under Iris’s portrait?” Friedrich finally asked.

  “Not underneath. It was painted before the war started. But Arjan van Heemsvliet could have easily added a drawing or text pointing to the location of the rest of his collection somewhere on the back of the painting or frame. It must have faded over the years, which is why it can’t be seen with the naked eye anymore. If Irises is a sort of treasure map then we have to assume Arjan would have wanted someone to be able to find the rest of his artwork.”

  “I don’t know, Zelda. You don’t really have any proof do you?”

  “It makes perfect sense. Why else would Karen O’Neil push so hard to get her hands on Irises and not want to wait for the claims process to run its course? She can’t risk having the experts running tests and possibly finding the hidden map before she does.” Zelda knew she shouldn’t shout in a museum, but they were alone in a gallery full of replicas. Any security guards eyeing them through the electronic surveillance probably wouldn’t intervene unless she knocked one of the fake Van Gogh’s off its easel.

  “Wouldn’t someone working at the Amsterdam Museum have already noticed that something was amiss? Irises has been sitting in their depots for more than sixty years now, who knows how many times it’s been cleaned or studied since then. If there is a description or diagram on the back, wouldn’t somebody have spotted it by now?”

  “Why would they have? Why would the museum waste their precious man-hours and research dollars running expensive tests on it? Irises is an insignificant painting created by an unknown artist. It’s not the sort of piece that would get lent out for exhibitions or be studied by art history students. Think about it Friedrich, it would have been the perfect painting to hide a clue to the whereabouts of Arjan’s collection.” She began pacing back and forth in front of the display, excited to share her theory.

  “Van Heemsvliet must have left a letter or other document behind in his study which explained what he’d done. Karen O’Neil’s grandmother took all of his business records with her to America, the same documents Karen O’Neil eventually inherited. That’s why she’s been so unbelievably keen to get her hands on Irises,” Zelda finished smugly, sure she was right.

  “I suppose if Karen knew it would lead her to the rest of Arjan’s collection, it could explain her persistence. But if that were true, wouldn’t that explain why Rita was so interested in it, too?”

  “No,” she replied doggedly, “think about it. Rita and her sisters want Irises back so badly because of its sentimental value. It’s a portrait of Iris painted by the girl’s first love. Besides, their father gave or sold his entire collection to Arjan after they’d all left for Venlo. How could Rita or her sisters have known what he’d done?”

  “Arjan must have decided to make that painting the key to finding the rest because it was the least valuable piece in his collection of masterpieces,” Zelda continued, convinced she’d figured out the secret Karen O’Neil was trying so hard to keep from the exhibition’s project team. “If he was being blackmailed, you’d think he would have tried to hide his more valuable paintings from that Nazi. Maybe the clue added to Irises was meant for his brother Gerard, so he could find the rest, even if Arjan was arrested or killed.”

  Friedrich folded his skinny arms across his chest and rocked on his heels, mulling over her theory.

  A few moments later he patted her roughly on the back, smiling as he said, “Zelda Richardson, you might be on to something.”

  To her great delight, his smile and tone were genuine.

  “But how are you going to prove it?”

  THIRTY

  “When did you get so smart, Zelda?” Jasper de Vries teased.

  They were in one of the restoration department’s laboratories, tucked away in a canal house across the street from the Amsterdam Museum. The senior conservator’s workplace was the largest, but even so the windowless lab was jam-packed with chemicals, powders, paints and tools. The only space relatively free from clutter was the long white table in the center of the square room. Irises rested in the middle of it; a soft spotlight shining down onto its surface made the paint glisten. Small metal picks and tiny brushes were lined up on one side as if someone was preparing for surgery. Jasper and Zelda sat on bar stools, their drinks resting on the edge of the hip-high table. Despite the audible hum coming from the ventilation system, the room still reeked of linseed oil and turpentine. She tried to breathe through her mouth and not think about how nasty her clothes would smell after even a short visit to the art restorer’s workshop.

  “Conservation and restoration weren’t part of your study. I’m surprised you’ve seen an ultraviolet light, let alone know how it works. Have you been studying books on art restoration behind my back? Or did you visit the Van Gogh Museum recently?” Jasper smiled easily before taking a swig of the koffie verkeerd she had brought him, taking care not to spill any on the table.

  She still had to laugh every time she ordered the Dutch equivalent of a latte, translated into English as ‘coffee wrong’, but knew it was his favorite drink. Not that a bribe was necessary. During her brief internship at the Amsterdam Museum, Jasper had been her favorite lunch companion, thanks mostly to his witty sense of humor. He was always hanging around the staff lunch room, cracking jokes and spreading gossip. Old enough to be her father, he’d taken a shine to her right away – to her utter delight. She reminded him of his oldest daughter, he liked to say, the same one who’d immigrated to San Francisco years ago. Zelda didn’t really care why; she owed h
im a debt of gratitude for making her feel so welcome.

  “The exhibition in the Print Room is pretty interesting, isn’t it?” she said neutrally, unsure of how to explain her theory to Jasper. She knew he was one of the few people in the museum she could ask anything of, but she was still worried he might laugh her out of his workplace if she told him what she suspected.

  She didn’t need to fret; he saw right through her. “Very interesting. However, I’ve already run several tests on Irises and am certain there is no painting, sketch or other message hidden anywhere on the canvas or frame.”

  Zelda frowned at the portrait; sure he must have missed something. “And there were no documents or papers stuck between the canvas and frame?”

  “No. The original owner, Philip Verbeet wrote his address onto one of the stretcher bars with a fountain pen, but you already knew that. The only strange thing about Irises – if you can even call it that – is that Arjan van Heemsvliet hadn’t attached his gallery sticker to the painting. I didn’t find any traces of glue either. It was standard practice for galleries to attach a label to their stock with a specific kind of rubber cement, so that even after it was sold people would know where it was purchased from. Back then gallery owners did it as a marketing ploy. Now we use these stickers to re-create a painting’s provenance. I couldn’t find any trace of adhesives on the back of Irises, leading me to believe that a sticker had never been attached to it. Even after seventy years I should have been able to find some residue.”

  She nodded in understanding, thankful Jasper was taking her seriously.

  “But then,” he added lightly, “Huub Konijn did say Irises was only in Arjan van Heemsvliet’s possession for a few days before he went missing. That could explain why his gallery’s label had not yet been glued to this piece.”

  Jasper’s answer threw her for a loop. “Huub Konijn, the curator? Did he request these tests?”

  “Yes, and he was here when I ran them this morning.”

  “But why?” Huub was the last person she thought would bother with Irises. He’d made it quite clear that he considered Karen O’Neil the rightful owner and any further research into the painting’s provenance was a waste of time. Besides, she could hardly believe he’d have risked sullying his pristine suit or shoes with chemical smells and paint by actually coming down to Jasper’s workshop.

  “Perhaps he was curious to learn more about the portrait, as you are. It’s turning out to be quite a controversial piece. But when Huub left this morning, I don’t think he was any wiser,” he said.

  Zelda was silent for a moment, trying to understand this strange turn of events, before finally asking, “Is it normal for a curator to be present when you run tests on a painting?”

  The conservator rocked on his bar stool, considering her question. “No, I guess it’s not. But it was good he was here when I removed the painting from its frame. It saved me having to clamp it down to the table first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The amount of dust and grime on the canvas and frame suggests it hasn’t been properly cleaned for several decades. Over the years that type of built-up filth can turn into a sort of glue and stick the two together. Most of the paintings I handle are much better cared for. If I’d been alone, it would have taken longer to get everything set up. Because Huub was here to hold the frame down, I was able to remove the canvas quite easily and had time to run all of the tests he requested this morning. I even had time to update the condition report.”

  “You mean you’d already written one up for Irises?” she asked.

  “During the last ten years, I’ve made condition reports for all of the paintings in the Stolen Objects collection, in preparation for this exhibition. But I didn’t have time to take them all apart and clean them, only document their current state and suggest restoration work. Since then, most of the paintings haven’t been touched. Only the pieces hanging in the exhibition were cleaned, but we didn’t have the time or money to restore any of them,” the conservator explained.

  “Once I realized the extent of testing he wanted done, I ran back up to my office and printed off the original report so I could update it as we went along,” Jasper said, chuckling and shaking his head as he recalled what had happened only a few hours ago. “When I got back, Huub had already removed all of the nails from the back of the frame. I was a little perturbed that he hadn’t waited for me to return, in case the frame cracked. I am responsible for the canvas after all, as long as it’s in my lab.”

  “Wait a second. So Huub was alone with the painting, for how long? Why couldn’t he wait to remove the nails until after you’d gotten back?”

  “He had a meeting this afternoon and didn’t want to be late. He was just trying to help,” Jasper said.

  “Huh,” was all she could muster. Her mind was swirling with possibilities. Was it easy to remove the canvas from the frame because Huub had already done so, while Jasper was upstairs in his office? Is that why the curator removed the nails, so he could examine the painting undisturbed?

  What if the location of Arjan van Heemsvliet’s artwork wasn’t written on the painting, but hidden inside of it? The narrow space between the canvas and frame was large enough to hold a slip of paper or even a key, Zelda suddenly realized. But how would Huub have known to look for something there in the first place? Did Karen O’Neil tell him Irises held the key to finding the rest of Van Heemsvliet’s collection, and ask him to look for it? Or did her repeated requests to have her own conservator examine Irises spark his interest?

  “What do you think of Huub?” she asked cautiously. She would never have dared ask anyone but Jasper such a question. She knew she could trust him to keep their conversation – and hopefully her visit – between them.

  The conservator looked at her thoughtfully before responding. “I know you’ve had your differences. Huub can be demanding, intense and sometimes irritating, but he is a consummate professional and one of the best researchers in the Netherlands. Considering his upbringing, I can’t fault him for being socially inadequate.” He sniggered before quickly straightening out his face, realizing too late that he’d said too much.

  “What do you mean ‘his upbringing’?”

  Jasper seemed nervous. “I don’t know if I should be the one to tell you, it’s really Huub’s business.”

  “Oh come on, you know he doesn’t like me. He’d never tell me himself. And now you’ve got my curiosity peaked.”

  “Well,” Jasper hesitated for a moment before confiding, “most of his family was killed during the war, shipped off to concentration camps because they were Jewish. Only he and his oldest sister Margo survived. Huub was an infant when the war started. His parents knew they couldn’t keep him quiet so they couldn’t take him into hiding with them. He and Margo were sent to live with a distant relative in Oosterbeek, a small village far from Amsterdam. His parents, three brothers and two sisters all hid in their Catholic neighbors’ attic. During a raid in 1944, they were discovered and arrested. None of them came back from Auschwitz. Most of our Jewish population didn’t make it through the war, did you know that?”

  Zelda nodded somberly. She’d recently been to the Jewish Historical Museum and was shocked to learn that of the one hundred seven thousand Jews deported from the Netherlands, only three thousand survived the concentration camps.

  “When Huub and Margo returned to Amsterdam, strangers were living in their house, claiming they’d never heard of Huub’s family. Margo didn’t know the bank had seized it and re-sold it a few months after Huub’s family went into hiding. Margo recognized their family’s furnishings and other possessions still filling the rooms, but she couldn’t do anything about it. No lawyer would talk to her, not without official documents which would stand up in court. They lost everything. She was only fifteen years old, yet she had to take a job washing sheets and cleaning rooms in a dingy hotel in the Red Light District to support them. Huub grew up in the hotel’s attic. Margo died a few years l
ater from tuberculosis. Huub had just turned ten; they put him in an orphanage, where he ended up growing up. So no, he did not have an easy childhood, but he is a survivor, I will give him that,” he said.

  “The paintings!” Zelda exclaimed suddenly, making Jasper jolt. In a calmer voice she continued, “A few days ago Huub mentioned he’d done extensive research tracing the provenance of his family’s artwork for a claim.”

  “That’s what got him noticed. He’d just started high school when he begun to look for his family’s collection, yet he doggedly followed a jumbled paper trail to find proof of his family’s ownership of several paintings, etchings and sculptures. It took him years, but he ended up submitting one of the most comprehensively documented claims ever submitted to the Secretary of State for Culture. The head of the Jewish Historical Museum asked to meet with him. At the end of their talk he encouraged Huub to make his obsession his profession, even offering to personally mentor him if he chose to study art history. Huub graduated at the top of his class and began as an assistant curator the next day.”

  Zelda nodded distractedly. She knew the curator’s earliest years must have been a sort of living hell and she should have the utmost sympathy for him. But deep down she wondered if Huub’s past didn’t just explain it all.

  What if he had discovered that several of Carel Willink’s paintings were missing during his research into the artist’s body of work last year, despite telling Rita he’d found no references to them? If he learned those pieces went missing during the war, he may have found out about other canvases which had disappeared in the 1940s. And as a senior curator at the Jewish Historical Museum he’d had unlimited access to the entire Stolen Objects collection – and the documentation associated with it – for the last ten years.

  What if he’d already found paperwork indicating the missing Willink’s were part of Arjan van Heemsvliet’s missing collection? He’d already proven himself adept at this kind of research. For someone like him – with the right motivation, knowledge and access – figuring out that Van Heemsvliet’s entire collection was missing and presumably still hidden somewhere in Amsterdam would have been a piece of cake.