The sun climbed higher in the sky, chasing the coolness of shadows underneath the budding trees. Traffic was increasing on the roads and footpaths. I glanced at my watch. It was time to head out if I was going to look at Catlin paintings at the Renwick before my appointment at the National Gallery, but yet I sat a while longer and savored a moment of quiet in all the rush and noise that was my life.
I HEADED OUT across the lawns of the Mall toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Catlin’s portraits had been hung at the Renwick, a small satellite gallery of the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum.
I expected at most a ten-minute walk, but after ten minutes I was not even clear of the Mall, so I got out my map and plotted the shortest route, which, it seemed, would take me right past the White House. As I approached that building, I was turned away by a man in uniform. “You can’t go through here,” he said, indicating the public sidewalk on the other side of the street from the edifice.
“Why not?”
“He’s coming through,” the man told me, and made one of those Move along now gestures that Irish cops make in B movies.
“Oh he,” I said. “When?” As in, Should I just wait a moment?
The guard evaded my gaze and shook his head. “Don’t know. Can’t say,” he replied, his voice flat, either with condescension or boredom, I was not sure which.
Anger boiled up inside of me. I wanted to tell him, I may be just a hick from Wyoming, but all I want to do is use a public sidewalk to walk along a public street to get to a public art exhibit—all of which are supported by the taxes I pay every time I’m lucky enough to get a job. You’re telling me that one man who lives on the other side of that big iron fence and the goons who handle him are so wigged out about getting shot at that they see fit to inconvenience the everyday business of hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens! Why doesn’t he go live at Camp David and have those who don’t need quite such high security come to him?
Rage rolled over me in waves. I began to tremble. Dear God, I thought, this is supposed to be a center of strength and power, but it’s just as shook up and scared as I am. The urge to run home to Wyoming all but flattened me to the pavement.
The cop now made a gesture that said I should get moving, right now.
Moving like an automaton, I started the long detour around the White House barricades. By the time I was halfway around, I had not yet even glimpsed the façade of the Renwick Gallery. It was time to make a beeline for the National Gallery of Art and my appointment with Emmett Jones, conservator. So much for the Catlins, I told myself. Maybe I’ll have time this afternoon, after my trip to the FBI.
I made it to the National Gallery by ten, but it took until twenty minutes after the hour to get all the way inside. Code Orange meant that I and a great crocodile-walk of other citizens had to wait in line, pass through a metal detector, and allow a uniformed matron to search our bags. Having made it through this screening, I then presented myself to another uniformed guard, who directed me to the security office, where I had to show identification, sign a form, and otherwise subject myself to scrutiny. Apparently deemed non-threatening, I was issued a visitor’s pass on a long plastic neck chain and finally was escorted by a guard with a squawking radio downstairs into the basement. Beyond a heavy door lay the Conservation Department, where a young woman with a big smile greeted me and showed me a place to wait, as if it made her deliriously happy to do so. She offered me a seat while she rustled up Emmett Jones, whom, she explained, was, “With somebody. Being chief of the department keeps him very busy. But he won’t be long.”
I nodded meekly. Even the basement of the building was grand, and I confess to feeling quite intimidated. But when the Chief of Conservation of the National Gallery of Art strolled up to fetch me, he put me entirely at ease. “Hi, I’m Emmett Jones. You must be Em Hansen,” he said, extending a broad hand to be shaken. “So,” he said, leading me into his office, “what can I do for you?”
Taking in his soaring bookshelves filled with reference texts, I said, “I’m looking for some help understanding Remington’s use of color. From a geological standpoint, that is. I’m wondering what pigments he used; which were natural mineral pigments, and which synthetic? And, if possible, I’d be curious to know where his paints came from.”
Emmett pointed to a framed photograph of an artist’s palette, a classic kidney-shaped blade of wood with a thumbhole. “He left four palettes, you know. Here’s a photograph of one of them. He died suddenly, so you can see that the paint was still on it, exactly as he’d laid it out for use. And he left some paint tubes as well.”
“Did you do analytical testing to determine what pigments he used?”
“Oh, sure,” he said. “But that didn’t give us the precise pigments.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, we could have nailed them precisely if we had cut samples for microscope analysis, or X-ray diffraction or electron microprobe, but it was important to leave them intact. So we used X-ray fluorescence spectrometry, because it’s nondestructive. The only problem is that XRF gives us the elemental analysis of the pigments—a listing of the elements that are there—but not the compounds in which those elements are grouped. This is particularly complicated because Remington was very systematic, and always put his colors in the same positions.”
He pointed at the blob of red paint in the photograph. “This red, for instance. It was probably cadmium, but you can see it’s sitting on the remains of another red, in this case chrome red. The reds are one thing, but how about the whites?” He moved his finger to the white. “If he put lead white here one day and then zinc white another—see, he always put white first, closest to his brush hand—then we get an XRF reading that gives us elements from which we can build lead white and zinc white. That’s lead sulfate and zinc oxide, easy enough to tell apart, but they also form a paint made with half lead white and half zinc white, which was also used at that time.”
“I follow the chemistry, but I’m not a painter. What’s the significance of choosing one white over another?”
Emmett leaned back in his chair and tented his short, thick fingers. “Zinc white dried notoriously slowly, and tended to crack. Lead white was notoriously toxic.”
“So you mix the two to combat both problems?”
“Yes. And some whites are ‘cooler’ than others. I mean that in the sense that yellow is a ‘warm’ color, while blue is a cooler one. But within a color, you can have warmer and cooler tones. Take egg-yolk yellow and say, lemon-yellow. You’ve handled both colors in the kitchen all your life, not thinking of them as warm or cool. But if you had to arrange the two colors between a blue and a red, you’d put the egg yellow closer to the red—that’s warm—and the lemon closer to the blue—that’s ‘cool.’ The impressionists understood this, and played it to the hilt, using cooler colors for the shadows and warmer tones for what’s closest, that sort of game.”
“But what makes those colors warm or cool?”
He shook a finger at me. “Now you’re talking about chemistry and physics, and you know what? I’ve asked chemists and physicists that very same question, and they give me a whole lot of math and hocus-pocus and diagrams on a piece of paper before they finally admit that they don’t really, really know what makes an atom one color or another.”
“Well, there’s that business about the wavelengths of light … .”
“But that’s light. We’re talking about solid matter that either reflects or absorbs certain wavelengths of light. My shirt is blue because it absorbs all the other wavelengths and reflects just this one. I stayed awake that day in class; I remember this stuff.” He chuckled. “But you know what really makes it interesting for artists, or for people who come up with the dyes for this shirt, for that matter? Not all colors are available.”
“What do you mean?”
“Say I admire a lovely tree, and I want to paint it. Do I have the right green on my palette? No. In light wavelengths, green is midway between blu
e and yellow, but perhaps none of the available pigments is that exact green. Most greens in nature are pretty warm, closer to yellow, but most green pigments are pretty cool. It’s a real hassle, let me tell you.”
“Oh.”
“And even if we have the right green, we’re again talking about the pigment, and the way light bounces off it or is absorbed, and not the light itself, as it plays in nature. So artists have to come up with all their little tricks to get the effects of color and light. Getting back to Remington, who used the Impressionist tricks and many more, let’s stick with which pigments he actually had at his disposal. Lead white was a wonderful paint in the way it behaved. It went on smoothly and didn’t crack as it dried. But it had a nasty side effect: It was indeed lead sulfate, and as such, was highly poisonous. That sulfate part won’t hurt you—but the lead, oh dear.”
Toxins seemed to be working their way into an awful lot of conversations I was having as of late. “Then artists of Remington’s generation knew about the toxicity of lead,” I said.
Emmett was beginning to grin like Mr. Hauser had done when talking about hexavalent chromium. “Yes, painters of Remington’s era knew about heavy metals, but like I said, if they wanted to get the colors and the lighting effects, they had to use the pigments that would produce them. Nowadays, we have wonderful new synthetics that are nowhere near as problematic, and they’re much more versatile. We have transparent reds and yellows to use in glazing, where we used to have mostly blues and greens.”
“Glazing?”
“Yes. A painting is far more than just one layer of paint. There’s the ground—usually white—and then an underpainting, and then however many layers, and then the glazes. The light passes down through the layers, bounces off the white ground, and reflects back up through the layers. Pigments are very complicated. Some are opaque; some are, to varying degrees, transparent. Some have high tinting strength—that’s how much impact the pigment has per unit volume—and others don’t. And you’d think the opaque ones would have the highest tinting strength, but not necessarily. And some gray out when you mix them with white, while others maintain their intensity. But, no matter; you were asking about the pigments Remington used.” He opened a file and pulled out a list and showed it to me:
Leaded-zinc white
Lead white
Zinc white
Prussian blue
Bone black
Hooker’s green
Vermilion
Chrome orange
Cadmium red
Mars red
Emerald green
Cadmium yellow
Chrome yellow
Chromium oxide green
Purple lake
“Vermilion, that’s mercuric sulfide,” I said. “Chrome yellow, that’s lead chromate. Both were extremely toxic.”
Emmett nodded. “The man died of appendicitis, not poisoning. But yes, there were artists who licked their brushes to make just the right point. It’s thought that Van Gogh’s madness might have something to do with that.”
“Any of those symptoms could also be the result of other diseases,” I noted. “I wonder if they knew?”
“Modern art technology is hardly toxin-free; there are some colors that can’t be achieved with the modern synthetics, either. That’s why cadmium is still used in reds and yellows. And then there’s the problem with all the solvents. Here, come with me.”
He got up and led the way down a network of hallways. We entered a large room with high ceilings. Several people sat at massive easels, conserving paintings. All around them, other paintings were laid out on broad tables. The woman nearest us was dipping a cotton swab into a bottle of liquid. She withdrew it and dabbed at a painting. The surface changed color, giving up the amber darkness, bringing vivid blues and reds to light.
Emmett gestured around the room. “See the vent hoods? These conservators are using all sorts of solvents, and sometimes they do use the old pigments, just to match lost portions accurately.” He led me up to the nearest table and pointed to a painting that lay face-up upon it.
I gasped. “That looks like a Rembrandt!” I said.
He grinned. “It is. And that’s a Gauguin, and over there we have a Delacroix. That woman’s working on a—”
“But they’re naked!” I said. “I mean, the colors are so bright! I thought the old masters used really mucky, boring colors.”
Emmett shook his head, obviously amused. “No, no. What colors they had were vibrant. What you’re talking about is badly yellowed varnish. That’s been stripped off here, and will be replaced with fresh, transparent varnish.”
“How do you get that off without damaging the paintings?”
Emmett rolled his eyes. “Verrry carefully. As you can imagine, we have to make sure we take off only the varnish. And then it’s time to decide what can be done for missing paint. It gets chipped over the years, and dampness and mold can wreak havoc. Aside from providing a protective layer, the varnish gave the colors a gloss, and made the light bounce nicely. So we’ll replace it with a fresh coat.”
“Won’t the new coat yellow, too?”
“Eventually. But our varnishes are much finer these days, as are the oil media. We have all those nice herbicides that we can put on our linseed crops—it’s flax, actually; ‘linseed’ is short for ‘linen seed’—to keep the weeds from growing. That way, our linseed oil is pure, and not a mixture of linseed and half a dozen other seeds. Pure linseed oil dries faster, too, so the modern product is nicer all the way around.”
I moved to the next easel, where a man was working on a panel that had great cracks and places where chunks of paint were missing, making a rendition of the Madonna look like she had terrible acne. “How do you conserve something as beat-up as this?” I asked.
“We clean and stabilize it first,” said Emmett, “and then we have to look at damage done by previous restorers. There was an era when museums would paint fig leafs over nude figures, and another when restorers used to ‘touch up’ the work of the masters. Imagine.” He pointed to a place where a large patch of paint was missing, almost half an inch square. “What was going on here, for instance? What’s missing? What if it was her hand? A gesture can be very important, even have esoteric meaning.”
Emmett beckoned me toward the far end of the room. “You’ll want to see this, as long as you’re here.” He threw a switch, and suddenly every bit of lint on his shirt glowed eerily. “Black light,” he said. “It picks up the relative ages of paint. We use it to help evaluate what’s been done by earlier restorers, because newer paint will fluoresce slightly. You might use this in your work with forgeries.”
My ear pricked to his words. He was spending a lot of time with me, and he expected information in return. Emmett turned off the black light and pointed to a big photograph that had been mounted on foam-core board. “Here’s another interesting tool for you: infrared photography. It reveals parts of the drawing underneath the painting.”
I gawked at the picture. It was something from the Italian Renaissance, a standing figure draped in robes. The painting was tightly rendered, each hair in place, each fold of fabric crisp and smooth. But in the infrared photograph, I could clearly see the artist’s initial sketch, and it was wild and loose.
Emmett said, “Sometimes we even find another painting underneath. But all of this is just a sideshow for you. You came to talk about Remington. Let’s go look at the exhibit while we’re talking.”
“The exhibit?” I said.
Emmett gave me a quizzical look. “Why, yes. The Remington exhibit. His nocturnes. I thought that must be the reason for the timing of your visit.”
“I’m … I’m here to consult with my colleague at the FBI,” I said.
He smiled. “Then this will come as a great bonus. You’re in for a treat.”
THE EXHIBIT OF Remington’s nocturnes was in the new building of the National Gallery. From the tunnel that connected the buildings, we emerged into a soaring atrium of unexp
ected geometry, as triangular as the old building was staunchly square. A mobile soared over my head. A tingling of delight coursed through me.
We rode a hexagonal elevator up two levels and crossed a balcony. Inside the gallery where Remington’s masterworks had been gathered, everything was as muted and intimate as the atrium was bright and exuberant. The walls were painted indigo blue. The floor and ceiling were a warm, medium gray. The only light came from small spots aimed precisely at the paintings. And the paintings took my breath away.
Here were paintings of moonlight, starlight, candlelight, and firelight, all moodily set in broad, dark frames. The paintings glowed—there was no other word for it—their majesty reaching out to overwhelm the viewer in this special room where everything else in the world was eclipsed.
“Here,” said Emmett, a hand sweeping out with the pleasure of serving up great riches. “This is Remington at his finest.”
I moved quickly at first, drinking in paintings of moonlight on snow, of lakes at dusk, of wolves and men and horses engulfed in starlight.
Each painting spun a different trick of light and shadow. I paused by Evening on a Canadian Lake, which showed two hearty voyageurs and their husky dog paddling a birch-bark canoe across a quiet lake. Their canoe rode a diagonal line between water that reflected the brilliant blue of the night sky and the darker, less revealing water that lay in the shadow of the trees. “The diagonal,” I said. “It has such …”
“Power,” Emmett said. “Remington was a master of composition. That diagonal gives the composition tension, as does the play between darkness and light.”
“So the tension is between the darkness and the light,” I said.
I stopped next at The Grass Fire, in which Indian braves are standing at the edge of a burning prairie. Again the image was divided diagonally between light and dark. Spits of fire bordered the boundary between ground already burned and that which had not, and even the blackened earth in the nearest foreground seemed brighter than the looming shadows cast by the row of men who waited tensely, their faces lit from below by the flames. In from the Night Herd played the same trick, this time with cowboys sleeping in the glow of an unseen campfire, their bodies forming the diagonal and casting the shadows.
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