He had recently made, he was certain, one of the sweetest purchases of his life. Very possibly the sweetest by a country mile. One that potentially could get him out of the deep doodoo in which he was now mired.
His gallery, founded after the war by his late father, had built up a specialist reputation for paintings by leading French old masters such as Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Claude Lorrain and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. His old man, a former art student at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, who had arrived in England as a penniless Jewish refugee from Poland in 1938, was a natural-born salesman with an eye for a painting and an even wider eye for a bargain.
He’d decided that his assumed name of Lewis Porteous would play better in the snooty British art world and anti-Semitic post-war climate than the one with which he’d landed in England – Jakub Lewandowski.
Charlie Porteous had inherited his father’s appreciation of landscapes, portraits and mythological scenes of the French old masters, and like his old man he, too, had a talent for spotting a bargain. As well as that same instinct, possessed by all high-end art dealers, of being able to tell, pretty much instantly, whether a work was genuine or not. Mistakes were very rare. And through his network of well-paid scouts, with his knowledge and deep pockets, he was a feared hunter at auctions, especially those of provincial house sale contents.
The art business had been easier in his father’s time, when it was much less regulated. Back then, in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, if you liked a painting, you bought it, paying by cheque or cash. Simple as that. But not any more. Today, it wasn’t just about the provenance of the picture itself, it was about the provenance of the seller, too.
In this changed world, Porteous and his staff became, necessarily, bogged down in all kinds of due diligence, including money-laundering checks on the vendor. No picture for sale could be hung on the walls of the three floors of his Mayfair gallery until every aspect of its history and how it came to be here was bullet-proof.
In theory.
Like his father, Charlie was occasionally prepared to break the rules. Just so long as a painting he was offered was not on the Art Loss Register, which listed all known stolen works of art, he would occasionally take a punt on one that to his experienced eye looked authentic, and sell it straight on to one of a select few of his art collector clients who would take his word.
Like all dealers, he was well aware there were numerous major works that had vanished for many years and which once in a blue moon resurfaced. Paintings from way back, sometimes centuries ago, which had been hidden or lost during times of civil unrest such as the French Revolution or, more recently, looted by the Nazis in the Second World War. And some, while rumoured to have existed, had never been catalogued.
It was for this reason that, while he hadn’t cared for the thin, nervous Frenchman – who gave his name as Jean-Claude Dubois – who’d come into his gallery two weeks ago with a rectangular parcel wrapped in brown paper, he’d been willing to take a look at what he had to show him. He hadn’t cared either for the man’s story about how he had come by this painting. A load of cock and bull, in Porteous’s opinion, about cleaning out his late aunt’s attic and coming across it in a trunk.
But he had cared very much about what he’d seen when he’d unwrapped the package in his office at the rear of the gallery’s ground floor. A small, ornately framed landscape in oil, ten inches wide by twelve, of a spring scene. Two beautiful young lovers in elegant eighteenth-century dress, entwined in each other’s arms in an idyllic woodland setting surrounded by daffodils, with a waterfall behind them. The depiction of the trees was simply exquisite, imposing, yet light at the same time, adding so much to the charm. It was a gem. Love’s first bloom. Divine, powerful, awe-inspiring, classic.
He’d struggled to maintain an unimpressed poker face as he questioned Dubois on the provenance of this painting. Porteous knew all of the reputable fine arts dealers in London and indeed throughout Europe, and this sharply attired man, with the darting eyes of a feeding bird, twitching forehead and strobing smiles, wasn’t on his radar.
If this painting was genuine and not an extremely good forgery – and from the surface craquelure, the spots of mould and seal on the back, the damages to the frame and its general condition, all his instincts told him it was – then he was looking at a highly important long-lost work by one of his very favourite eighteenth-century painters, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Spring. One of the four that Fragonard was known to have painted of the four seasons, but which had been lost for over two hundred years.
These Four Seasons were reputed to have been hanging in a privately owned French chateau but vanished, believed stolen or destroyed, during the French Revolution.
He was well aware, just as the man standing in front of him must have been – unless he was a total charlatan – that at the last major sale of a Fragonard, conducted by the auctioneers Bonhams, the artist’s portrait of François-Henri, fifth duc d’Harcourt, realized a world record for his work of £17,106,500.
Calmly, Porteous had asked the man how much he was looking for. The reply had been £50,000.
‘Why have you brought it to me?’ he had asked, now convinced by the low asking price he was dealing with someone profoundly dishonest.
‘I am told you are the leading expert in this period,’ Dubois had replied in heavily accented English.
‘Why don’t you put it into an auction – at Bonhams or Christie’s or Sotheby’s perhaps, Mr Dubois?’ he’d responded, testing the man.
The shifty look in the Frenchman’s eyes told him all he needed to know. ‘I thought I would come to you for a quick sale.’
Without even having to do any calculations, if genuine, Porteous knew its true value would be in the region of between £3 million and £5 million and maybe more in the right auction. If put together with the other three, to make the full set, that value could skyrocket by multiple times that amount.
This could be the ticket out of his financial mess.
3
Friday, 16 October 2015
Very reluctantly the Frenchman had agreed to leave the painting with Porteous overnight, for him to examine it further and to check with the Art Loss Register.
After the man left, Porteous knew that if he put the sale of this picture through his normal system, he would have to do all the due diligence on the Frenchman, and he doubted it would check out.
To mask his enquiry, he emailed a list and photographs of fifteen paintings, including this one, to the Art Loss Register. The following morning, he’d debated taking it to a trusted picture restorer, without revealing the artist’s name, to ask his opinion on it, but had decided against, knowing the man would ask him awkward questions.
Among the fifteen enquiries that came back from the Art Loss Register, nothing was flagged up about the Fragonard.
Later the following day, after Charlie Porteous was satisfied enough to take a punt that the picture was not stolen, or a fake, and keeping it a secret from most of his staff, for one of the few times in his career he’d paid Jean-Claude Dubois for it from the cash fund he kept for such purposes in his safe.
During the past two weeks since then, he’d discreetly put word out to the more dubious dealers in his contacts list. None of them had been offered this painting, nor any of the three other Four Seasons of Fragonard. He’d also put word out to these same people that he was interested in finding anyone who had any of the three other missing paintings, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and that he would be willing to discuss a deal.