I looked: it was a portrait of a man in black velvet with a small ruff, fleshy face, mustache, and spade beard, his hand playing with a gold chain around his neck, a look of comfortable sensuality. The paint was thin, the fine canvas almost showing through, the brushwork free as a swallow in the skies, the palette simple, not more than five pigments. I’d never seen a Velázquez outside a museum. Nor had I ever seen a reproduction of this painting. It was a fucking unknown Velázquez, propped up on an easel in a guy’s hotel room. Sweat popped out all over me.
So after a while he said, “What do you think?”
I said, “What do I think? I think it’s a Velázquez, it looks contemporary with the ones of Cardinal Pamphili and the Pope, probably from the 1649 trip to Rome.” He seemed to be waiting for something else, so I said, “I never saw it before.”
He nodded and said, “That’s because it’s one of his lost paintings. It’s a portrait of Don Gaspar Méndes de Haro, Marqués de Heliche. An interesting face, wouldn’t you say? A man who gets what he wants.”
I agreed and asked him how he’d gotten the painting. He didn’t answer directly. Instead he asked me, did I like museums? I said I liked them fine, I’d spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in museums, that’s how you got to look at originals.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s one way, but do you like them, do you enjoy that they’re only open at certain hours, really for the convenience of the bureaucrats and the little stuffed men in their uniforms, do you enjoy the packs of whey-faced tourists shuffling endlessly through the halls, being exposed to art so they can say they saw something they can’t possibly comprehend? Wouldn’t you like to have all day to contemplate a painting, this painting perhaps, at any hour of the day, all by yourself? Like Don Gaspar did with this one, or as he did with Velázquez’s Venus, or as Phillip the Fourth did with the other paintings this man did for him? Wouldn’t that be fine?”
I agreed it would be fine, but that it was like wishing you could swim like a fish or fly like a bird, a useless desire, and then his eyes heated up and he said, “Not at all.”
He pointed to the portrait. “Do you think that man would ever think of allowing his swineherds and scullery maids into his gallery to gawp at his Venus and Cupid?
I laughed and said, “Probably not, but he’s long dead; things have changed.”
“Not as much as you think, perhaps,” he said. “There are still men like that, and I am obviously one of them, because this picture will never hang in a museum. As for the others, let’s say that they are men of great wealth, power, and discrimination, with private collections of which the world knows nothing. These are the men I deal with, Wilmot, and I assure you it is very profitable to do so.”
I didn’t get what he meant, so I said, “You might be right. I wouldn’t know, not being an art dealer.”
“No, you are a painter, and a painter as gifted as Velázquez in your way. I mean to say, if I asked you to paint me, in just that style, I have every confidence that you could do it.”
He gave me an inquiring look, and I said I probably could. He said, “When I saw that ceiling you painted, I was astounded. Because you know, it was better than Tiepolo, lusher, more lively, but still identifiable as his. Do you know, I have been following your work for many years.”
“Really? That’s strange, I haven’t painted for the gallery trade in a long time.”
“No, I meant the pastiches. The advertisements and magazine illustrations. I said to myself, this fellow, whyever is he wasting his time with this garbage? He really knows how to paint in the grand manner, and not the degraded form that has dominated that sort of painting for a hundred and fifty years-Landseer, Bouguereau, and so forth-but as the old masters painted, with penetration and density and passion. You seemed like a man born out of his time.”
I felt a bubble of tension form in my belly and rise into my throat so that I had to swallow a lump, first, because since my breakdown this was the first independent, undeniable confirmation that the miserable life I recalled was real in some objective sense; and second, because for the first time in my adult life I’d found someone who really understood who I was.
I managed to say, “Well, thank you. I’ve often felt that way myself.”
“I’m sure. I also am a man born outside of his time, so we have something in common, you and I. So when Castelli mentioned that he was repairing his palazzo and wished to hire an artist, I naturally thought of you and so he made the offer through Mark Slade.”
“Well, then, thank you, again.”
“Yes, but this is really nothing compared to what you are capable of, isn’t it so? There you were copying an existing design, but of course, you can paint from your own imagination as well, as Velázquez did, as Rubens did, and so forth. Fate has brought us together, yes?” Here a smile, a charming one, we men of the world sharing a moment. Okay, to be honest, I was bowled over a little. Like I say, stuff like this doesn’t happen to me on an average day in New York.
He led me back to the living room of the suite and had lunch served; waiters brought in a table and a whole spread, with wine and everything, and we ate convivially enough. Krebs pulled Mark out of the freezer, to which Mark responded like a toy poodle. I was a little loopy from all the wine and so it took a while for me to pick up that the conversation had swung around to me, that somehow an arrangement had been made that involved me doing something and that a million dollars was involved. Mark had neglected to tell me that I was part of some done deal.
So I said, “Excuse me, guys, I seem to be missing something. What am I supposed to do for my million?”
There fell a silence, and Krebs shot Mark a look that turned him moth-wing green. Krebs said, “I thought you had thoroughly briefed Wilmot on this project.”
Mark spluttered some lame excuse, but Krebs shut him down. He gave me a look like a stainless steel rod, no smiles now. He said, “When Velázquez was in Rome, according to reliable testimony, he made four paintings of women in the nude, in all probability for Don Gaspar himself. As everyone knows, only one of them survives, the so-called Rokeby Venus. You’re going to paint one of the others, in the same style and with the same skill. And, later, who knows? There may be other opportunities in that line.”
Okay, so at first I figured this was the Vanity Fair job again, which was cool, but then I thought, Why so much money? I recalled Mark’s crackpot scheme to sell real-fakes to the masters of the universe, and for a bit I thought this was the same on a larger scale. I asked about that, and he said, “No, I am not interested in decorations for the nouveau riche. I am interested in a painting that is stylistically and physically indistinguishable from a genuine Velázquez-accurate in every respect: the stretchers, the canvas, the pigments, all must be period. And that requires a certain skill, which I am willing to pay for.”
So then-duh!-I got it.
I said, “You’re going to sell it as genuine, aren’t you? You’re paying me a million bucks to forge a Velázquez.”
The F-word, once out in the air, didn’t seem to affect him at all. He said, “Call it what you like. You understand, Wilmot, there is an immense private demand for old masters, not to mention the attraction of the subject matter. Who would not want to have their own Venus by Velázquez? And this sort of thing has been going on for years. You go to a museum and you read the little tags and so you know, this is a Tintoretto, this is a Vermeer, and mostly that attribution is based on people like Duveen or Berenson or even your friend here, whose primary interest is in selling paintings for large sums. But the main thing is the quality of the painting, what it does to the eye and the heart. If the painting speaks to the eye and the heart, who cares if it came from the brush of Titian or from someone just as good?”