The Lover's Portrait

by Jennifer S. Alderson

  Despite the curator’s dressing down last week, Bernice Dijkstra had asked Zelda to come back and take notes during their meeting with the museum’s first claimant. Huub was not pleased, but Bernice was insistent. It was standard practice to have someone take notes during such meetings and as practically everyone working for the museum was on vacation for the rest of the summer, they had no other choice, she argued. When Bernice asked if she would be interested in helping them out once more, Zelda’s heart began to sing. She didn’t even mind she was there to take notes or that Huub was glaring at her; she was just thrilled to still be inside the museum and technically part of the project team. And to have the honor of meeting the first claimant, naturally.

  Excitement crept into the project manager’s voice as she explained how Zelda should write down everything that was said by all parties, verbatim if possible. Bernice’s twinkling eyes and trembling voice reminded her how important this meeting was going to be.

  A knock on the door brought silence to the conference room. One of the museum’s receptionists popped her head inside. “Mevrouw Dijkstra? Rita Brouwer has arrived.”

  “Fantastic, show her in please.” As the project manager rose to greet their mystery claimant, Zelda let her eyelids flutter shut as she visualized the refined owner sauntering into the room. She opened her eyes to see a pudgy, badly dressed woman in her late seventies shaking Bernice’s hand.

  “Howdy folks, it sure is nice to be here today.” It sounded like John Wayne’s sister had entered the room. Rita Brouwer stopped inside the doorway and looked around through her coke-bottle glasses, whistling softly once she spotted the painting in the far corner. Zelda could tell from the older woman’s expression that she recognized Girl with Vase immediately.

  Despite her girth, Rita was across the conference room in a heartbeat, stroking the surface of the Wederstein painting as if caressing a lost love. Zelda thought she heard the woman whisper, “Well I’ll be, it is irises,” but couldn’t be sure.

  “What are you doing?” Huub rushed over and slapped her hand away. “Step away from that painting; we do not know if it is truly yours yet.”

  Rita turned to face the curator, hands on her hips. Before she had a chance to chew him out for being so rude, Bernice jumped in between them.

  “Huub,” she scoffed, while gesturing towards the chair next to her own. “Mrs. Brouwer, please have a seat. Would you care for some tea or coffee?”

  “I want to sit here, where I can see my painting. I did just fly twenty-three hours to enjoy that privilege, you know.” The older woman plopped herself down at the head of the table, in the chair closest to the Wederstein painting. As she settled in, Rita hid a gaping sigh with the back of her hand. “I apologize in advance for yawning the whole time, it’s the jetlag. Not that meeting you all is a bore!” Huub winced as Rita guffawed. Zelda was waiting for her to slap her knee. “I sure could use a strong cup of black coffee. That’ll keep me going a while longer.”

  Bernice poured her a cup and set it down on the table before her.

  “I tell you what; I never thought I’d see her again.” The old lady gazed lovingly at the painting, absorbing every detail while a grin spread across her face. “She’s a bit dustier than I recall, but I’d still recognize her anywhere.”

  The project manager smiled politely, while the curator’s frown seemed to deepen. Huub’s apparent discomfort with her uncouth behavior made Zelda warm to the old lady immediately.

  Bernice cleared her throat, signaling the official start of the meeting. “Thank you for making such a long journey to be with us today. I must say, your telephone call took us by surprise. We were still putting the final touches on the website and collection database when you phoned. How did you happen to see it so quickly?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. I volunteer at my local library two days a week. Good for the body and mind, staying active like that. During my lunch break I was flipping through one of the new art magazines that had just come in and saw your advertisement for an exhibition of stolen artwork. It got me thinking about my daddy, so I asked one of the girls who work there to help me look up the Internet link listed in your ad. Boy, I just about fainted when that website loaded and I saw daddy’s painting right there on the homepage!” Rita chuckled. “Those girls at the library were worried I was going to have a stroke or something worse! One of them even drove me home once I got to feeling better, bless her.”

  “Now you’ve seen the painting in person, do you still believe it to be your father’s?”

  “I know it’s his, no question about it.” Rita responded immediately.

  “But how can you be so sure? It was seventy years ago, perhaps…” Huub started to ask.

  “You really think I wouldn’t recognize my own sister anymore? I may be old, but I’m not senile.”

  “Sorry?”

  Rita pointed to the young woman in the painting. “That’s a portrait of my oldest sister Iris, painted just before she turned eighteen.”

  Huub and Bernice exchanged glances. “Do you know the name of this piece?” the project manager nudged gently.

  “Irises.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Irises.” Rita over-enunciated it. “That’s the painting’s title. Well, technically Irissen.” Rita pronounced the Dutch word carefully. “Excuse my pronunciation, once we moved to America my mama stopped speaking Dutch with us; she wanted us to become real Americans, not stay foreigners.”

  Bernice looked puzzled for only a split second before a warm smile settled on her face once again. “Okay, this is a good start. In our database this piece is known as Girl with Vase, not Irises.”

  Rita stared at the project manager for a split second before her snorts of laughter filled the room. “No self-respecting artist would give such a dumb name to such a colorful painting. No, it’s called Irises, because of my sister’s name and the flowers. I should know, I heard the artist say it himself when he gave it to my daddy.”

  Huub’s eyebrows shot up as Bernice’s jaw dropped slightly. Zelda could hardly believe they’d found someone who knew both the artist and its original owner. Surely this would make Rita’s claim a cinch.

  “The artist, Lex Wederstein, he was Iris’s first steady boyfriend. They met when she was sixteen years old. That would have been in 1938. If the war hadn’t broken out they would have married, but that’s neither here nor there. He was a really talented artist. There might still be some of his paintings stored at the Rijksacademie, that’s the art school where he studied. Although that Nazi general ransacked Lex’s studio and probably destroyed any artwork he found. And there should be two pieces in the Stedelijk Museum’s collection – one with a hole in the middle where that Nazi’s boot went through it! Though I wouldn’t be surprised if that general ripped those two paintings to shreds, right then and there.” Rita doubled over in laughter, lost in her memories.

  Zelda was making notes as rapidly as she could, even though she felt as if she was hearing only part of the conversation. When she glanced up at the project manager, she saw Bernice was clearly intrigued by what Rita Brouwer had to say. The curator, on the other hand, was resting his chin on his folded hands, listening as if he was hearing a fairy tale for the first time. She could hardly believe how rude he was being.

  Why is he so skeptical? she asked herself. As Huub had repeatedly said before Rita arrived, this is an insignificant painting with no real monetary value. Why would this little old lady lie about being the owner of it? Sure, he’d also said some people wanted to find their family’s missing treasures so badly that they claimed a piece and convinced themselves it was the long-lost artwork of a long-dead relative. But Zelda could not believe Rita was making any of this up. Based on the older woman’s emotional response alone, she wanted to throw the canvas in her arms and tell her to keep it.

  “Before we talk more about the artist, perhaps you can tell us what you remember about this particular painting. When did Mr. Wederstein paint this portrait?
Was it commissioned by your father? What is your father’s full name?” Bernice asked, once Rita’s laughter subsided.

  “Philip Verbeet was his name. Lex gave it to him at Iris’s eighteenth birthday party on February 4, 1940, three months before the war started. It was as much a present as a way of paying him back for some frames daddy had made him. He owned a frame shop on the Stadhouderskade, only a few doors down from our house. It was also real close to the art academy where Lex studied. That’s how he met Iris; she used to help out in the shop on Saturdays.”

  “That was generous of your father, to accept this painting in lieu of payment,” Huub interjected.

  “Daddy wasn’t really giving Lex special treatment,” Rita quickly replied, oblivious to the curator’s sarcasm. “He traded paintings for supplies with lots of young artists, that’s how he built up his collection. Daddy would have loved to have earned a living as a landscape painter, but he didn’t have the talent for it. Not that he didn’t keep trying, mind you. He’d stink up his shop with his oils when things were a bit slow.” Rita smiled at the memories, wriggling her nose as if she smelled her father’s paints and turpentine once again.

  “What collection?” Huub asked.

  Rita grinned wickedly, tapping her temple twice before plopping her large purse on the table. “I thought you all would want to see this,” she said, while wrestling a large and very old book out of her bag. Its spine had cracked open and the black cover was curling up at the edges. Still, it held together as Rita carefully opened it.

  “My mama was always crazy about photo albums; right up to her death she was constantly gluing them together. This one has pictures of our last days in Amsterdam, when our daddy was still alive. Most of his artwork hung in our house, at least until we ran out of wall space and he had to store some of it in his frame shop. He’d switch his paintings around every few months so we could enjoy them all.”

  She tapped the first photograph on the page with a stubby finger as Huub and Bernice moved to either side of her and peered over her shoulder. “This is our street, the Frans Halsstraat. And that’s our house. The bottom two floors and garden were ours.”

  From across the table, Zelda could see what they were looking at, albeit upside down. The photo showed a long row of terraced houses running the length of the street. Rita was pointing at a door in the middle of the block. Her old family home was actually an apartment consisting of the lower half of a narrow four-story building. It was a simple-looking brick structure, distinguishable from its neighbors only by a wide metal beam decorated with five rosettes, which stretched across the façade. Their front door was on the street level; next to it was a short flight of stairs leading up to their neighbor’s home.

  Rita gently turned the page. “Here we are,” she chuckled. A large photograph of five girls in identical dresses filled the right-hand page. They were seated on a long couch in what appeared to be the living room. Hanging on the wall behind them were several paintings encased in ornate gilded frames.

  “That’s my sister Iris there. She was the oldest,” Rita explained, pointing to the girl on the far left of the couch. Zelda was captivated. With her long black hair, almond eyes and wide lips, Iris could have easily been a model. “Next to her is Fleur, Viola, Rose and that’s little ’ole me there on the end. My first name, Margriet, means Daisy. My father loved his garden so much he named us all after flowers.” Rita laughed at her younger self, an adorable little girl dressed in a navy blue dress with a sailor’s cap resting on a bed of ringlets. Zelda could hardly believe that she’d become the pudgy woman with thinning hair and thick glasses now sitting before her.

  “Let’s see here,” Rita bent down so her glasses were almost touching the paper. “The handwriting’s pretty faded but it looks like mama wrote ‘February 1940’ next to this picture. I would have been eight years old. Look at us girls! Not a care in the world.” Rita’s voice was tinged with sadness. “How things changed a few months later when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands.” She pointed to a painting in the photograph hanging above Fleur’s head. “There’s Irises.”

  Zelda squinted to make out the composition from her chair. As her eyes focused on the small rectangle, she could see this was clearly the same piece of artwork now resting on an easel across from her.

  “My father took most of these pictures.” She flipped slowly through the album, revealing more family photos of the children and parents playing and posing in their modest two-bedroom apartment. Rita’s mother was tiny in every sense of the word. A delicate lily, Zelda thought, wondering if Rita’s father called her that. Judging from the few photographs of Philip Verbeet they’d seen so far, Rita took more after him than her mother. He was a stocky, barrel-chested man with a large moustache and bowler hat. His smile was infectious and Zelda could feel her lips turning up at the edges just by looking at him.

  Most of the pictures had been taken inside the family’s home. The rooms were simply furnished and quite sparse considering five children and two adults lived in such a small space. But the walls made up for it. Every square inch was covered in paintings, sketches, watercolors and etchings, most fitted with broad, intricately-carved frames.

  “This is the photograph Lex took, the same one he used to make the portrait. Iris was seventeen at the time. He was madly in love with her, you know.” And she with him, Zelda thought. Iris’s coy smile and laughing eyes were aimed towards the camera, at her lover behind it. After seeing this picture, she could easily believe Lex had a future as an artist. The resemblance between the photograph and painted portrait was almost uncanny.

  Rita’s audience watched attentively as she slowly flipped through the album, pointing out a sketch here or a painting there. Huub Konijn appeared slightly puzzled, as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. Zelda couldn’t place his emotions or interest level until Rita turned the page again, revealing close-ups of the living room walls. A large canvas hanging above the dining table caught her eye. She recognized the artist, or at least thought she did, but couldn’t think of the name. She’d visited so many museums and learned about so many painters and sculptors during her six months of art history classes that all of their names were jumbled together in her head.

  Before she could finish scouring her brain for the answer, the curator let out a sharp gasp. “Is that a Toorop?” he asked, pointing at the same painting Zelda was trying to place.

  “Yup, my daddy had a few of her pieces. I was never really a fan of her work, all those dark colors and grim faces. I’m more partial to Jan Sluijters. The pieces he gave my daddy were so colorful; I used to beg him to let me hang them in our bedroom instead of there.” She pointed to a photograph of their stairwell, in which three large canvases hung above the handrail.

  “Charley Toorop? Jan Sluijters? Is that a Karel Appel? Where did your father get these pieces? How could he afford them?” Huub asked, obviously flabbergasted to see works by several of Holland’s most famous modern painters hanging in the Verbeet’s modest dwelling.

  Rita laughed loudly, slapping her knee. “Oh, the look on your face! Don’t you worry; he didn’t steal them or anything like that. Even the Appel’s and Sluijters’ of this world had to start at the bottom. Not all of the painters my daddy bartered with got famous; I’d bet even you wouldn’t recognize most of the artists in his collection.”

  “Is that a Carel Willink?” Zelda wasn’t sure if Huub had heard a word Rita said, he was so engrossed in the photographs before him. “I don’t recognize this piece. It must have been painted by a student trying to imitate his style,” the curator said.

  “No, that was definitely painted by Carel Willink. My mama admired his work so much she gave him pots of her homemade jam whenever he came by the shop. He lived around the corner from us, on the Ruysdaelkade.”

  “I studied his oeuvre extensively last year while working on a retrospective of his work and I do not recognize this painting. And none of Willink’s canvases are listed as missing or stolen.” H
uub’s determination wavered as he studied the photograph again. “Though it does look quite similar to some of his earlier works.”

  “That’s because it is one of his earlier works. Look, here’s another one of his, and Sluijters’, two more Appel’s and daddy’s only Corneille.”

  Huub’s expression softened slightly as he looked over at Rita with a glimmer of respect. “These paintings would help document the early changes in style and technique of some of the Netherlands’ most important painters.” As he bowed to inspect the pictures once more, skepticism crept back into his voice. “If they were really painted by the artists you say they were, that is.”

  Before Rita could respond, the curator pushed on. “Tell me, Mrs. Brouwer, why hadn’t your mother submitted a claim with the Dutch government years ago? All of these important artists, surely your family must have been interested in finding out what happened to your father’s collection? If these paintings are indeed by Appel, Sluijters and the rest, well, they would be worth a lot of money,” Huub said, gauging her reaction as he spoke of the paintings’ potential value. “You say young artists studying at the Rijksacademie frequented your shop; many famous Dutch artists taught there, including Jan Sluijters. Perhaps these pieces were made by students who were copying their teachers’ styles?”

  Zelda wondered if Huub was testing Rita, or just being a total prick. Before she could find out, Bernice jumped in to save the conversation. “Tell me, Mrs. Brouwer, how is it you still have this photo album?”

  “My mama squeezed it into our suitcases before we went to the farm.”

  “Before you went to which farm?” Bernice asked. She was clearly not having trouble understanding Rita’s southern drawl, but was running out of patience with the old lady’s long-winded explanations.