The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  ‘This crest is undoubtedly the same insignia that Frederick the Great, King of Prussia used but even more interestingly, this number, three hundred and twelve, is a cataloguing system that Louis XV put on pictures that entered his collection between March and September 1745.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’ Annie asked, studying the sequence of numbers.

  ‘A colleague’s life work has been cross-referencing contemporary sales catalogues and inventories from that period. Using his research we have been able to pinpoint when works went in and out of the royal collection.’

  ‘Perhaps the gallery should start hanging paintings with their backs on show,’ Jesse joked.

  ‘You might laugh but we have often discussed doing just that,’ Agatha said.

  ‘What else did you discover?’ Annie asked.

  ‘There are two other numbers – here, at the bottom, two hundred and thirty-four, and in the top right-hand corner, you can just see the outline of an eighty – the latter looks a little bit like Catherine the Great’s, but that would be far too exciting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It would mean that your little picture has the most interesting history or provenance of any work I have ever come across,’ Agatha said.

  Annie, Jesse and Agatha looked at the painting. Annie thought back to the anvil-faced man at the British Museum: was this the answer to his riddle? She tried to remember the kings’ and queens’ names. What was it he had said? Louis, Catherine and Victoria? Annie tried to remember.

  ‘Just imagine – you would be linked to some of the greatest rulers in history,’ Jesse said to Annie.

  ‘From king to queen to Miss Annie McDee, mistress of a small flat in Shepherd’s Bush, four pairs of trousers, eleven shirts, three pairs of shoes, a black dress, and a broken washing machine,’ Annie said, with more than a trace of irony.

  ‘Plus a masterpiece,’ Jesse added.

  ‘It partly explains why people want to own great works. It connects them to a glorious heritage and magnificent rulers,’ Agatha said.

  Annie made a fake royal wave at Jesse, who bowed deferentially.

  ‘Actually there is more good news,’ Agatha said, producing what to Annie looked like an X-ray. Just visible among the greys were the flowing white lines of the artist’s preparatory sketch.

  ‘We used infrared reflectography on the painting and if you look closely, you can see an underdrawing.’

  ‘What does this mean?’ Annie asked, confused.

  ‘That it is highly unlikely to be a copy. Copyists don’t need to work out where or how to place their figures – the original artist has done that for them.’

  Agatha produced a handful of photocopies of the reflectographs taken from other pictures by Watteau as comparisons.

  ‘I don’t want to raise your hopes but these images are X-rays of other paintings by Watteau and you can see certain similarities.’

  Annie looked closely, but to her the white marks could have been done by anyone.

  ‘It’s like spotting a person’s handwriting,’ Jesse explained. ‘Different artists used different strokes and techniques.’

  Picking up one example, Annie thought she could detect a faint pattern beneath the pastoral scene – a shield? Or a lance? ‘What does this mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Watteau was often too poor to buy canvas so he painted on whatever came to hand. In this case it was the back of coach doors covered in heraldic signs. We know of another painting, La Declaration, that he painted over a copperplate engraving.’

  ‘He was too poor to afford a piece of canvas?’ Annie asked.

  ‘That’s what we assume. We found another clue about his financial circumstances. Follow me,’ Agatha said, leading them through the door, along a narrow corridor and through two large doors. Beyond these were a series of rooms organised like a scientific laboratory.

  The room was small and dark. There were several computers on the table and the walls were lined with shelves laden with test tubes and scientific paraphernalia. Annie looked at Jesse in amazement. She walked past the National Gallery twice a day and assumed that it was merely a repository for paintings.

  Sitting at one screen was a man in a white coat, with wild grey hair and an irrepressibly cheerful expression.

  ‘This is Dr Frears,’ Agatha said.

  ‘The lucky lady,’ Dr Frears said, getting up from his computer and holding out his hand. ‘Most of us can only dream of walking out of a junk shop with a lovely work of art.’

  ‘Maybe it only happens to people who know nothing,’ Annie said wryly.

  ‘Would you like to see what I have been studying?’

  Annie nodded. In spite of her scepticism and Delores’s impending dinner, these engaging people and their extraordinary expertise were capturing her imagination. She followed Dr Frears to his computer and looked at an image of a mille-feuille gateau with layers of different-coloured cream and fruit.

  ‘A cake?’ she asked.

  ‘This is a cross-section of a pinprick of paint taken from the side of your canvas multiplied several million times,’ explained Dr Frears. ‘While not visible to the human eye, that little spot can tell us many stories.’

  Fascinated but entirely bewildered, Annie looked back at the image.

  ‘The pigments used in your painting are identical to others in works by Antoine Watteau. What is fascinating is this tiny fragment of Prussian blue – we know that this pigment only arrived in Paris in early 1700. How your man could have afforded it is anyone’s guess. In this lower section is an iron oxide that he often used and which we know came from a shop quite near to his lodgings.’

  Annie and Jesse leaned in to the computer to inspect the layers of gradated colour and grain.

  ‘So, as this young man suspected,’ Dr Frears nodded at Jesse, ‘we cannot discount that the picture was by Watteau’s hand.’

  ‘Surely it proves it?’ Annie said.

  ‘Unfortunately we can’t conclude that. Our work is mainly to discount rather than prove,’ Agatha said.

  ‘Another absolutely fascinating discovery is here,’ Dr Frears pointed to a tiny black mark. ‘This turns out to be part of a brush bristle.’

  Annie bit her lip – she wanted to giggle – what else would someone paint with?

  Dr Frears ploughed on. ‘There is also a trace of wine and blood and some kind of animal fat mixed in with the paint.’

  ‘Perhaps we should send his DNA to our friends at King’s College?’ Agatha suggested.

  ‘So they can clone the painter?’ Annie asked.

  Dr Frears smiled. ‘You never know!’

  An hour later, in a small pub off St James’s Square, Annie and Jesse sat at the corner table drinking white wine.

  ‘I’d love to have bought you champagne,’ Jesse said apologetically.

  ‘This is lovely, thank you,’ Annie said.

  ‘Here’s to your painting.’ Jesse raised his wine glass and Annie tapped hers against his. Having a drink with him was the least she could do. There was a clock on the wall behind the bar, it was 8.30 p.m.; Annie was tired and wanted to get home.

  ‘You must be excited about the picture,’ Jesse said.

  ‘Excited? I don’t understand this world. There is evidence to say that the picture is authentic. The restorer likes it and the scientist admires it. Age tests bear out. Paint tests stack up. There is even an engraving of the same work in a catalogue but yet none of this matters unless certain experts agree.’

  ‘Art is subjective,’ Jesse said.

  ‘So is God.’

  ‘Isn’t it comforting that beauty can’t be decided by science? That it is in the eye of the beholder?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘That is too random for me.’

  ‘Isn’t it like cooking – you can never quite tell how things will turn out?’

  ‘At least there is a time frame with food – if you go on too long it spoils or burns.’

  ‘We have found out so much in a relatively short time,’
Jesse said. ‘We know that the picture is old, that it was painted at the time Watteau lived. That it was owned by some swanky people and that it isn’t a copy.’

  ‘What next?’

  I would like to kiss you, Jesse thought. I long to take you in my arms and brush the crossness and hurt out of your shoulders and kiss your eyelids until the bewilderment passes. I want to stand next to you every minute of every day to prove that you are wonderful. I need to tell you how special and extraordinary you are to me.

  Forcing these feelings aside, he said, ‘Let’s try and prove a strong line of ownership from the present day back to the early eighteenth century and make the case far more compelling.’

  Annie looked across the pub at another couple sitting hand in hand looking at a holiday brochure. Something about the way that the woman leaned into the crook of the man’s arm made her longing to be held almost overwhelming.

  ‘Why?’ Annie asked, forcing herself back to the present.

  ‘Why what?’ Jesse asked.

  ‘Why are you helping me?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Jesse said. ‘I like you. A lot. I was hoping that you might like me enough, a little bit enough, that is, to go on seeing me.’

  Annie looked into her glass of wine, a feeling of panic welling up inside her. She could cope with meaningless encounters, but the prospect of real emotional involvement was terrifying.

  ‘I don’t feel the same way. I’m sorry.’ She stood up, pulled on her coat, rushed out of the pub and on to the street. Walking away as fast as she could, she told herself: I must not fall for anyone again, it just leads to desolation. I must not.

  Jesse sat for a few moments staring into his half-drunk glass of wine, unable to understand why his words had been so destructive. How had he misjudged the situation so badly? While it was true that Annie had never actively encouraged him, nor had she rejected him. He didn’t feel angry, just abject. Jumping up, he ran after her.

  Looking up and down King Street, he caught sight of her hunched figure heading towards St James’s. Jesse sprinted down the road and caught up with Annie as she turned the corner.

  ‘Wait, please,’ he said panting, out of breath. ‘I am not in the habit of making declarations to women – in fact, you are the first and, if you must know, I feel like an absolute idiot pursuing you like this, but I am overwhelmed, literally, by my feelings for you – I realise that this will probably be the death knell, the final straw, but even if you walk off now, even if I have got this completely wrong, at least if you ever change your mind, you know how to find me.’

  With this, without giving Annie a moment to reply, he turned and walked quickly away.

  Chapter 19

  As you may have noticed, the young curator is in love with my mistress; thank goodness she is done with all that. She’s packed up those trunks, labelled them ‘the past’ and stored them away in the attic. I am mightily relieved, as love obliterates common sense: look back through history and consider the downright foolishness and acts of moral depravity committed in love’s name. It is destructive and a waste of time. I should know, I have witnessed enough of it.

  Love can, for limited periods of time, stave off boredom and hunger but let’s not get carried away. Death is the only thing humans have to look forward to with any certainty.

  Anyway, back to the important issue. Moi. Annie needs to explore my history. Why is it so important? Humans need methods of classification and reassurance: price is one indicator of value; scholarship is another. If a great brain writes convincingly on a painter or his oeuvre, its cachet is increased. My erstwhile owner Monsieur Duveen, that impecunious dealer (who spawned today’s art market), employed one of the greatest scholars of all time, Bernard Berenson, and together they whipped up storms of desirability around many works.

  Value also accrues by association. As St Augustine said, ‘Tell me who you walk with and I will tell you who you are.’ In pictorial terms, tell me who you’ve hung with and I’ll tell you what you are worth. When a handsome, desirable young woman falls for a plain man, he suddenly becomes attractive. If a coterie pronounces on the subtleties of a great book, everyone wants to read it. As far as you, my reader, are concerned, a junk-shop owner and now a girl have owned me, so you don’t think much of me. If I tell you I have been owned by kings, queens, a Holy Roman emperor, a pope, a great philosopher and a few others, you become interested.

  As the decades rolled by, as I was passed from one illustrious owner to another, my value increased. Who wouldn’t want to own something precious to a great emperor or king? Who wouldn’t want to be linked to past glory, to monumental power? Most want their taste confirmed and ratified. Art is entirely subjective, so how soothing, how affirming it must be to share the choices of monumental figures from history. Great minds think alike.

  My history is strewn with sex and love and lust and even a dead body or two. What follows is not an ascetic history lesson; it’s a high-class first-degree romp. I am called, and I personify The Improbability of Love. I was painted to celebrate the wild cascades of amour, the rollicking, bucking, breaking and transformative passion that inevitably gives way to miserable, constricting, overbearing disappointment. At first my master imbued every tiny brushstroke with unbound ardour, untrammelled desire and unquenchable lust. During the painting of the work he had to accept that his feelings were a mirage, a chimera in his mind. This is the great tragedy of love – even if you are lucky enough to stumble on it, it never lasts. Every young person believes that their case will be different; fools, damn fools.

  Alors. My master never achieved either the fame or acclaim he deserved during his lifetime. Maybe if he had lived longer, been remotely interested in courtly life and had a more calculating dealer, things would have been different. However, he had the one thing that most powerful people want: creative talent. I have noticed that the moment people become rich and achieve their earthly desires they enter a painful, spiritual vacuum. Few wealthy people turn to religion. What’s the point when it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven? Instead they often look to the soothing power of beauty. Art makes mortals feel closer to heaven. Look at any number of popes who filled the Vatican with Michelangelos or Berninis, or the noblemen and royalty: the Sforzas and Leonardo Da Vinci; the Medicis loved Raphael; Charles V loved Titian; Philip of Spain loved Velázquez, and so on. I once met a cynical painting by Courbet who said the rich bought art because they had run out of other things to spend their money on. A Corot claimed that it was copycat syndrome – just do as others do. Nothing drives men crazier than the inability to possess.

  I have also observed that collectors buy for slightly different reasons: partly for investment, partly to big it up with their friends, partly to decorate, but mainly in the hope that the cloak of creativity could extend to cover their shoulders. Beauty has an intrinsic value. From the earliest Chinese dynasties, from the Pharaohs, to the Greeks and on through history, men have believed that beauty is transformative, that it makes them better, lifts them from the morass of their sordid business deals to a higher plane.

  My little theory is that at the heart of all human anxiety is the fear of loneliness. It starts with their expulsion from the womb and ends with a hole in the ground. In between it’s just a desperate struggle to stave off separation anxiety using any kind of gratification – love, sex, shopping, booze, you name it. My composition is about the fleeting, transformative respite over aloneness that love offers despite the cold certainty that this reprieve is only transitory.

  You will see all these impulses played out again and again with each of my owners.

  Paris was a small place in the early 1700s and when word got out that there was a painter who refused to sell a painting, it titillated the palates of all and sundry. There is nothing so desirable as the unobtainable. Though few had ever seen me, the rich and powerful sent nuncios, messengers, ambassadors and minions with gold and jewels to entice my master into
selling. It became a badge of honour, an extraordinary game to try and win me. Non, Antoine always said. My sale could have saved him, bought a decent roof over his head, the best doctors and food. Think too of the amount of work he could have produced if he’d had a studio (he squatted in others’ houses) or decent paints (he could never afford sable brushes or the best pigments). I was some kind of talisman to him. At least you embody my one great memory, he would say before weeping. He would not part with me.

  I remember one afternoon in 1709: Madame de Maintenon, who had heard from her friend, Le Comte de Caylus, one of my master’s patrons, that I existed, arrived at the house of Monsieur Crozat demanding to see the scoundrel painter who had refused to sell her minion a certain picture. Now Crozat, like any mere mortal, was absolutely terrified. Madame de Maintenon was the royal mistress, potentially the queen, and a royal command is a royal command. Crozat promised to do everything in his power to persuade my master to sell. My master wasn’t having it. (I was a little disappointed. I wanted to look around Versailles and witness court life first-hand.) His refusal to sell had direct consequences: my master failed to gain the Prix de Rome and was rejected by the Academy. An unofficial decree went out that no one was to buy his work.

  After my poor master died in abject penury in 1721 (so young, such tristesse, what a waste) there was a slight fight between his friends as to who should inherit moi. In the end, Jean de Julienne’s suit prevailed on condition that he would never sell me during his lifetime. He meant it but even the best intentions get capsized on a sea of necessity. You see, Monsieur Julienne had a problem that grew month on month; between 1726 and 1735 he oversaw and financed the publication of some 495 prints in four volumes of the catalogue raisonnée of my master’s work, the same ones that Annie examined at the British Museum. It was an unprecedented commitment to a contemporary artist. Julienne, however, was not a wealthy man. He ran into financial difficulties and decided to sacrifice the jewel in his collection, moi, for a greater cause. There were many offers but Julienne understood that I should belong to someone fitting. Emissaries from George I, from the guardians of the young Louis XV, from two popes and a host of noblemen all came to make offers, substantial offers. He turned them all down until one long dark afternoon in 1729, when there was a knock at his door. The man before him was prostrate with grief and excitement; his tale of love and woe came tumbling out. That afternoon he had met the love of his life and somehow had to convince the lady of his passion.