Aaron Elkins: Old Scores

He frowned. "Public comment? Of what sort?"

"Of the sort that puts me out on a limb by referring to your painting as a Rembrandt. Or as not a Rembrandt. As far as I'm concerned, the attribution is undetermined until there've been adequate tests. That's what I'll have to say to the press or to anyone else who asks."

This time, I thought, I'd gone and put my foot in it. Goodbye, Rembrandt. If there was a Rembrandt.

But Vachey responded with more of his genial laughter. "Mr. Norgren, say whatever you like to whomever you wish. I wouldn't have it otherwise. Now then: is your mind at ease?"

I was being gently dismissed. "Of course," I said, standing up.

Not by a long shot, I thought. I hadn't come close to getting Vachey to change his mind about the testing. And I sure as hell didn't know the reason why. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hooked. You bet I wanted to know how this was going to turn out.

When I got back to the Hotel du Nord, I checked frisson in my pocket English-French dictionary just for the hell of it. Shudder, chill, it said. A pleasurable sensation of terror or gloom. Great.

I went to bed and spent the afternoon sleeping off the rest of my jet lag. One thing was clear anyway: I was going to need my wits about me.

"Okay, I got a question for you," Calvin said from the sofa against the far wall.

"Mm?" I was squinting into the mirror over the bureau, trying to insert, hook, and cinch the last of the various studs, straps, and clasps involved in getting oneself into a black-tie outfit. The reason I was squinting was that the du Nord, despite its many virtues, had a French hotel's typical disdain for illumination. There was one 25-watt floor lamp (at the opposite end of the room from the mirror), and two miniature bedside "reading" lamps lit by thickly frosted little bulbs in the shape of candles and with about the same power. That was it. This garretlike gloom added a certain dusky charm to the room, but it didn't make finding yourself in the mirror any easier.

It was 5:25 p.m. At 6:00 we were due at an elaborate pre-opening dinner in the famous old kitchens of Dijon's ducal palace, rented by Vachey for the occasion. Afterward, the privileged guests were invited to a reception and private showing of the paintings at Vachey's gallery. Calvin had come to my room to pick me up, since my hotel was two blocks closer to the gallery than his was.

"Let's hear it," I said. "What's the question?"

"Okay, what are you going to do if you go look at it tonight, and then you spend all week looking at it, and you still don't know for sure if it's a forgery or not? You going to recommend we forget about it and drop the whole thing?"

"Oh, I don't think it's a forgery, Calvin. I think Vachey's too sharp for that."

"What? You didn't agree with me yesterday they were forgeries?"

"I agreed they might be fakes. There's a difference between a fake and a forgery."

Calvin looked at me, willing to be amused. "Ok, I'll bite. What's the difference between a fake and a forgery?"

"No, I'm serious. A forgery is something somebody does on purpose-paints a phony Rembrandt, doctors it to make it look old, and then palms it off as the real thing."

"And that's not a fake?"

"Well, sure, it's one kind of fake, but there are other kinds of fakes that aren't forgeries at all, and those are the tough ones. Look, Rembrandt had hundreds of students, and in those days, part of the training was to make copies of the master's paintings. The harder they were to tell from the original, the more pats on the back they'd get from Rembrandt. So there are thousands of copies-perfectly legitimate Rembrandt copies-still floating around. They also had to copy his techniques in their own paintings. So there are also a lot of pictures around that aren't really copies of anything he ever did, but that are in his style. These things are all the right age for Rembrandt, they're done on the right kind of canvas or panel, they use the right pigments and binders, they even use his brush strokes."

"Jeez," Calvin said.

"That's not all. Rembrandt would stand there, right at their shoulders, and make corrections, a lot of them, right on their work, so quite a few of these paintings really are five or ten percent genuine Rembrandt. Well, sort of."

"Maybe, but they don't have his signature on them."

"But they do. In those days, any decent piece that came out of a workshop could have the master's signature on it. So we're talking about a lot of paintings that were sold as Rembrandts not three centuries later, but right out of the studio, while they were still damp. They have 350-year-old provenances."

"Jeez," Calvin said.

"Jeez is right." I finally got the bow tie properly aligned and slipped into my jacket. "Let's go. We don't want to miss anything."

Out on the Rue de la Liberte, the main commercial street of the Old City, it was a mild evening and the sidewalks were filled with shoppers and strollers. The Rue de la Liberte was Tony Whitehead's kind of street, eclectic as they come. Rough, half-timbered buildings from the fifteenth century stood cheek-by-jowl with elegant, mansard-roofed, nineteenth-century townhouses. Even the shops at street level had some odd juxtapositions. At the corner of Rue de Chapeau, for example, was Moutarde Maille, busy purveyor of mustards, on the very premises where messieurs Grey and Poupon first got together for business in 1777. Two doors down was an equally thriving McDonald's, busy doling out beignets d'oignon and frites, along with the occasional hamburger.

Strolling along, our tuxedos and patent leather shoes not drawing a second glance, I continued giving Calvin the bad news about fake Rembrandts.

"And then, of course, you can't forget about the crooks who came along centuries later and forged his signature on some of the old student paintings that he hadn't signed. That's all they had to fake, was the signature. A lot easier than a whole painting. And a lot harder to detect, since the rest of the picture checks out technically."

"No, no, something's wrong here," Calvin said. "Okay, maybe they check out as far as the materials and stuff go, but these are just art students, right? And we're talking about Rembrandt here, right? I mean, the Rembrandt. You're telling me it's that hard to tell the difference?"

I laughed. "Rembrandt had some pretty fair students: Fabritius, Aert de Gelder, Hoogstraten, Dou, Bol, Maes…"

Calvin regarded me doubtfully, which was understandable. This was hardly a Who's Who of the world's great painters to most people. But to the educated person (you or me, for example), they were artists of the first rank.

"Take my word for it, Calvin, we're talking about some world-class painters here. And they didn't necessarily stop when they got out on their own. De Gelder was still turning out paintings in Rembrandt's style fifty years after Rembrandt died. I wouldn't want to bet my life, or yours either, on whether some particular painting was a Rembrandt, or a de Gelder in the style of Rembrandt. Not just from looking at it."

Calvin gave all this some thought. "Well, then," he said brightly, "I'd say you've got yourself a problem."

He didn't know the half of it. There are probably more dubious Rembrandts around than paintings by anyone else except maybe for Corot. According to Department of Customs records, 9,428 works by Rembrandt were imported into the U.S. from 1910 to 1950 alone. That works out to better than one every other day. Four a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for over forty years. Let it suffice to say that the figures are somewhat in excess of Rembrandt's actual rate of production. There is never a time when three or four of them are not the center of controversy. And that doesn't count the number, at least equal, in Europe. Or the U.S. Customs figures since 1950, which I didn't know and didn't want to know.