“I believe he committed suicide,” Stone said.
“That was the official verdict,” Steele said. “On Sunday, July twenty-ninth, 1890. He told the police later that he had shot himself in the abdomen. There has also emerged a theory that he might have been accidentally shot by one of three boys who were playing with a pistol near where he sat. The theory holds that he didn’t want to implicate the boys, and he wanted to die, anyway.”
“Now that you mention it, I think I read something about that.”
“You probably also know that Vincent’s brother, Theo, who was an art dealer in Paris, represented him in the sale of his work?”
“I do, and I believe he was singularly unsuccessful in that pursuit.”
“Quite right. No van Gogh painting was sold during Vincent’s lifetime. Theo, who believed strongly in his brother’s work, supported Vincent and dealt with all his affairs. He received a telegram on Monday morning, from the keeper of the inn where Vincent lived, telling him of the painter’s wounding. The telegraph office had been closed on Sunday. He took a train immediately for Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent had been living. When he arrived, he found several completed paintings in Vincent’s room, and he had them packed later and took them back to Paris with him on the train after the burial. But before Vincent died he told Theo that he had completed another painting.”
“And what had happened to that?”
“Vincent had taken his painting gear and his easel with him when he left the inn on Sunday morning. He painted the picture, a landscape of a local field with many flowers, then left his gear leaning against a haystack while he had lunch. The shooting, one way or another, took place soon afterward, and Vincent was able to make his way back to the inn, but he was unable to carry his gear. Later, when the police went looking for it, it was gone—including the picture he had painted.”
“Was it ever found?”
“No. It was posited that one of the boys had taken it, but all of them denied everything. There was an investigation, instigated by Theo, but it was cursory. No one ever tried to sell it, and the police had little interest in a work by a madman who was an unsuccessful artist of no reputation.”
“Then how did this painting come to be in Tillman’s hands?”
“The story continues. The young boy died many years later, and his son sold the contents of his father’s small house to a junk dealer in Arles. The painting is said to have been among his belongings. The junk dealer, failing to sell the picture, gave it to a woman who owned a framing shop, but oddly, she seemed to have no appreciation of it. She was apparently interested in framing, but not art. It reposed in the workroom in her shop for years. Upon her death it was discovered by an art dealer who had come to retrieve a picture she was framing for him, and, recognizing that a painting he saw there was a van Gogh, he bought the entire stock of the store, so that the picture’s existence would not be noticed. He then sold the picture to a Paris dealer, who then contacted Mark Tillman, to whom he had earlier sold a Monet. He needed money badly and could not wait for an auction, and Tillman paid him fifty thousand dollars for it. It was cheap, because it could not be authenticated by the usual means—no one had ever seen it and it had never been photographed.”
“Arthur, you still haven’t told me why you think the picture is a fake.”
“I believe that the whole story was contrived to support the authenticity of the painting. Have you ever heard of a man named Angelo Farina?”
“I believe I heard from my mother about him.” Stone’s mother, Matilda Stone, had been a well-known painter.
“I believe the picture was painted by Farina.”
11
STONE WAS INTRIGUED. “Why do you think that?”
“Farina, in his youth, was a very expert and successful forger of art. He worked as an art restorer, repairing hundreds of old paintings, and he learned how they were made and with what materials. He is alleged to have sold hundreds of forgeries, many of which are said to be hanging in museums all over America and Europe, undetected. When law enforcement finally took an interest in him, he stopped doing forgeries and earned his living by selling his own paintings or copies of those of others’, identified as such, and by his art restoration business.
“It has been fifteen years or so since he says he stopped forging, and the statute of limitations has expired for any fakes he may have executed. Also, he left no paper trail—no receipts, bills of sale, no provenance, nothing—so it would have been difficult to convict him, anyway.”
“You still haven’t told me why you think Angelo Farina painted the supposed van Gogh.”
“Angelo lived about two hundred yards from Mark Tillman’s house in the Hamptons.”
“So they were friends?”
“They were. Mark would go over to Angelo’s studio and watch him paint. I believe that Mark, over time, concocted the story of the painting and asked Angelo to paint it for him. If that is so, then he probably faked the theft of his painting for the insurance.”
“Could Angelo paint in the style of van Gogh?”
“Angelo could paint in any style. He needed only a picture to copy. In this case he would probably have looked at several photographs of van Goghs in museums, then copied his style and brushstrokes. And that is what makes it so difficult to deny that the picture is a fraud—it is not a copy of anything, so no direct comparisons can be made.”
“But there are differences between old and new paints and canvases. Surely that would have been checked.”
“Of course, but Angelo is highly expert at using old materials and paints.” Steele opened his briefcase and handed Stone a book, entitled Art for Art’s Sake. “He explains his techniques in his autobiography. I think you’ll find it interesting. For instance, he will buy a cheap painting from the period in question, remove the oil paint from the canvas, apply a gesso, or primer coat, of his own invention, which is made of ingredients that cannot be dated. Then he uses his own paints or old ones, the formulas of which have not changed for centuries. He has special techniques for aging the finished painting—like baking it in the sun for days to produce the cracks associated with age, and even adding what appear to be fly specks, which are common on old paintings. He uses pieces of old wood from period furniture for the backings, and he has a large collection of period frames. The results are masterful.” Arthur went back into his briefcase and came out with an 8x10-inch color transparency. “This was taken by our expert during the examination, in sunlight.”
Stone’s breath was slightly taken away. “This is glorious,” he said.
“All of Angelo’s work, that we’ve actually seen, has been glorious,” Arthur said. “The FBI has quite a collection of his, ah, works, but of course they can’t prove that he painted any of them.”
“This is all very intriguing,” Stone said.
“One more thing, and this happened when I was present as the experts were examining Mark’s picture. The man from the Van Gogh Museum wanted to clean a small area of the painting to see what might be underneath more than a century of dust and dirt. He had brought acetone, the best cleaner, with him, but Mark would not allow him to use it, saying that it might damage the painting. Instead, he offered the man a bottle of mineral spirits, which would clean the picture fairly well without damaging it. You see, the varnish on paintings hardens very slowly, over a period of decades, to the point where it will not be harmed by acetone, and even Angelo has not been able to replicate this characteristic, so he can’t allow acetone to be used.”
“Very clever of him.”