I was bitterly disappointed not to set a new world record at auction. The wily Earl was hoping for more than $500 million. Eminently achievable, given that the Cézanne card players, one of five versions, fetched $261 million and my provenance is far greater than the Klimt of Adele Bloch-Bauer, which fetched $150 million.
Don’t be shocked by this apparent self-reverence; my canvas is covered with the brushstrokes of a genius and overlaid with centuries of desire, love and avarice. Each of my owners added an intangible but indelible stratum: the first was my master’s outpourings; the second was his friend Julienne’s fraternal affection and these two were followed by the admiration of the great and the downright ugly; even young Annie added a little bit of magic. These layers of appreciation, though invisible to the human eye, are detectable to those with particular powers of intuition and sensitivity.
Does this, I hear you ask, explain the insane prices for works of art and why I and my ilk are more highly prized than gold or diamonds, a more reliable investment than houses or land when we are really nothing more than a patch of cloth stretched over four slender shafts of wood? The answer is simple enough: look around at this crazy, godless, cynical world and ask in what and where can mankind put its trust? I know, you think I, Pontificating Peter, am a frightful old bore for going on like this, but in a declining, degenerate, money-obsessed era, where even Mammon lets most down, art has become a kind of religion and beauty offers a rare form of transcendence.
Like other successful religions, art has evolved and offers glorious temples and learned high priests as well as covenants and creeds. The new churches are known as museums, in which the contemplation of art has become a kind of prayer and communal activity. The very wealthy can create private chapels stuffed with the unimaginable rarities and guarantee a front seat. It was ever thus.
Back to moi : there’s been frightful row about who owns me. Annie, true to her word, relinquished all claims, so everyone else is charging around the world trying to find a relation or distant cousin of the original Winklemans. Ten thousand pretenders have stepped forward; most can be utterly discounted but there is one woman, in Israel, who looks plausible.
All I want is resolution, not restitution. There has been far too much movement and I am in desperate need of a period of peace and consolidation. My blessing is to inspire excesses in emotion; my curse is being powerless over my fate.
For now, I hang in the Prime Minister’s state dining room for ‘safe-keeping’; his main objective is to annoy the French. After three hundred years, nothing changes; France and England still quarrelling over very little. That Rock of Gibraltar, ceded to the British in 1713, is still a bone of contention with the Spanish, and the British and the Russians are still in and out of love: it was ever thus. No one talks much about Sweden these days or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there are two new players, America and China; superpowers come and go, control ebbs and flows.
Le scandale du jour was that the old Nazi took a cyanide pill in his prison cell and died frothing and foaming on the floor of HMP Wandsworth. A letter was produced claiming that the daughter knew nothing of her father’s misdemeanours; pull the other leg, as the bootjack used to say. The same letter also revealed the whereabouts of a cache of hidden paintings – Nazi loot – in a disused salt mine in Bavaria. It happened to contain eighty-four masterpieces and the Amber Room. Now there are full-on fisticuffs between Russia, France and Germany about who owns what. Since Helen of Troy, beauty has inspired warfare.
Annie was released with a full pardon. She came to lunch with the Prime Minister and brought Jesse, and a man from Wales. It just so happened that there was a problem with a blocked water closet. The man from Wales whipped off his jacket and disappeared with an orderly. Thirty minutes later he reappeared, problem solved. The Prime Minister was frightfully chuffed and banged on about good citizenship and ‘big society’. I must say the PM is a bit of a bore, but you probably have to be a little dull to want to go into politics and even duller to stay there.
The Welshman came up with another idea: what about making moi ‘The People’s Picture’. He proposed a campaign to save me for the nation with every citizen donating £3 to the great cause. The PM loved that, knowing he would be the first politician in history to introduce a tax that everyone liked.
Just before she left for America, Annie came to see me. Looking around to make sure no one could hear, she whispered into my paint.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for reawakening my belief in this world and, most of all, for making love possible again. I owe you a huge debt.’
Moments later, Jesse came up behind her, put his arm around her and kissed her gently on her head. ‘What are you thinking about?’ he asked.
‘The Improbability of Love,’ she replied, still looking at me. Intertwining her fingers into his, she rested her head on his shoulder.
One had to admit, one was quite moved.
Tomi Horshaft was confirmed as the grandchild of Ezra and Esther Winkleman. Born in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, orphaned soon afterwards, she was adopted by an American couple who relocated to a kibbutz in northern Israel. Speaking from the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Mrs Horshaft said, ‘While this discovery will never bring back my parents, grandparents or cousins, I will use the money raised in the sale of this picture to build a school in their honour.’
The people of Great Britain clubbed together to purchase moi for £240 million (a fraction of my estimated value). It was a frightful bore; every quarter, I had to move to a different regional museum. There were queues outside each as hundreds of thousands came to admire moi. Museums charged hefty fees for couples to marry under my gaze. Every year since the purchase, I have been voted the best British National Treasure, with over six times the number of votes garnered by Stonehenge, Blenheim Palace, the Giant’s Causeway or Blackpool Tower, whatever or wherever they might be.
Still, the hoi polloi give good gossip: I overheard that Annie and Jesse moved to a farmhouse in upstate New York, a place which satisfied their love of the countryside but was not too far from the city. Annie’s company, called Foodalicious, became the byword in chic, themed, high-end specialised catering. Despite offers to take Foodalicious global, Annie resisted. ‘For me,’ she told a scribe, ‘food is love, food is memory, food is suffering and hope, food is the past and the future, food is who we are and who we want to be; so cooking is all about originality and intimacy and you can’t achieve that on a big scale.’ When the journalist asked if she was the same Annie McDee who had bought the world’s most famous picture from a junk shop, gone to prison and refused £1 million in compensation from the Winkleman Foundation, Annie replied, ‘That was an entirely different person.’
Jesse, now her husband, still paints landscapes from memory in his studio, a large converted barn. I am told that these are colourful, abstract and highly sought after.
Charged with falsifying documents and concealing evidence, Rebecca Winkleman was given a five-year custodial sentence but continued to run her business from an open prison. After two-and-a-half years she was released. Most assumed that she only acted illegally to protect her beloved father; she was welcomed back with sympathy into the art world. With her extraordinary eye and steely nerve, the business flourished. In 2025, Rebecca was made a Dame in the King’s Honours list in recognition of service to the arts.
Following Memling’s unmasking, Carlo Spinetti became an independent filmmaker and won an Oscar for an ultra-low-budget spoof horror movie, My Father-in-Law, about a ruthless ex-Nazi who drank blood for breakfast. Carlo died in flagrante delicto with two young women in the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.
Vlad and Grace Spinetti married. He renounced his fortune and they moved back to his hometown of Smlinsk where they had seven children and ran a tattoo parlour. Grace considered returning to England to join her mother in the family business but chose personal freedom over professional rewards.
The Rt. Hon. Barnaby Damson lost his seat in the 2020 elect
ion. He became Albania’s media advisor.
Barty’s left arm was damaged in the shooting but he received significant compensation from the auction house. He lived till the age of 102, always dressed for every occasion, and fronted his own television show called Frightfully Common, an idiosyncratic look at the British class system.
Delores Ryan married a Moroccan taxi driver and moved to Taroudant in the Sous Valley. Following her failure to spot the Watteau, she gave up art history and mass-produced products made from argan oil.
Earl Beachendon left the auction house to run the Emir and Sheikha of Alwabbi’s museum. With an annual budget of $1 billion to spend on paintings, the Earl became one of the most powerful people in the art world.
After his ingenious idea to crowdfund the People’s Picture, Maurice Abufel was rewarded with the ambassadorship of the Republic of Dagestan. ‘It’s about the same size as Wales but a long way from Mold,’ he told everyone. His ex-wife Delia Abufel won ‘Slimmer of the Year’, remarried and settled in Pontefract.
Evie successfully completed rehab, gained her A levels and won a scholarship to Oxford University. Two years later she married Bruce Goldenheart (thirty-five years sober) and together they run a counselling service for recovering alcoholics in the Isle of Wight.
After four years of marriage, Desmond’s wife left him, citing ‘unreasonably controlling behaviour’.
And what about moi? Do you still see an old bit of canvas, eighteen by twenty-four inches, encrusted with pigments, oils, a splash of chicken soup and a dead fly? I think not.
My time is nearly up. Frankly, I am exhausted. It is hard work keeping the flame of beauty and excellence burning. Centuries of being ripped out of frames, strapped to the back of mules, loaded into ships, stuffed into plastic bags, hung above roaring fires and subjected to hot breath have all taken their toll. My warp and weft are disintegrating; the moisture has gone from the oil. Soon I will be nothing more than a tiny pile of dust. Luckily, many followers and imitators thrive and survive; some are excellent. All that matters is that artists keep reminding mortals about what really matters: the wonder, the glory, the madness, the importance and the improbability of love.
Acknowledgements
The characters in this book are inspired by many whom I have met or read about or simply hope might exist. Any likenesses are entirely accidental or intentionally complimentary. Various public personas and institutions appear as themselves, as it would be hard to imagine an art world, real or fictional, without them.
I have been lucky enough to learn from distinguished scholars and also from the directors, conservators, curators and trustees at the National Gallery, the Tate, the Wallace Collection and Waddesdon Manor. These institutions and their luminaries have provided a lifelong source of solace and inspiration.
Thank you also to Catherine Goodman for the writing room and for her insights about painters and painting.
Sarah Chalfant, agent extraordinaire, spotted this book’s potential and guided it to the distinguished homes of the peerless Alexandra Pringle, and the priceless Shelley Wanger. Thank you to everyone who sails with the Wylie Agency, Bloomsbury and Knopf, and to Sonny Mehta, Nigel Newton, Alba Ziegler-Bailey, Charles Buchan, Alexa von Hirschberg and Anna Simpson.
A particular debt of gratitude goes to my family, friends and colleagues for their support, humour and patience; to the careful readers, Jacob and Serena Rothschild, Fiona Golfar, Justine Picardie, Philip Astor, Stephen Frears, Rosie Boycott and the SP. Last and by no means least, thank you to Emmy.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Hannah Rothschild is a writer and film director. Her documentary feature films have appeared on the BBC and HBO and at international film festivals. She has written film scripts for Ridley Scott and Working Title, and articles for Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and others. Her first book, The Baroness, was published in 2012 and has been translated into six languages. She will become the chair of the National Gallery in August 2015, and is currently a trustee of the Tate Gallery and Waddesdon Manor, and a Vice President of the Hay Literary Festival. She lives in London.
www.hannahrothschild.com
@jazzybaroness
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Baroness
First published in Great Britain 2015
This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 2015 by Hannah Rothschild
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The Improbability of Love Page 47