The strange case of the.., p.1
The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter, page 1
The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter
The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter
Timothy Miller
Published 2022 by Seventh Street Books®
The Strange Case of the Dutch Painter. Copyright © 2022 by Timothy Miller. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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For my sisters, Beverly and Nancy, with love.
Prologue
John H. Watson, M.D.
Sherlock Holmes is dead. That news is news to no one by now, of course. The headlines have shouted it in every paper from San Francisco to Shanghai. It was blared endlessly on the wireless. Messenger boys went to sea for sailors rather than shoulder those bags of telegrams heavier than the burden of Atlas. The Esquimaux on his ice floe and the Bushman on the veldt heard the news within twenty-four hours of his passing, and mourned him each according to their peculiar rites. If I repeat it now, it is not because the world needs my confirmation. It’s only because I have yet to convince myself of this: Sherlock Holmes is dead.
I confess I was surprised by the public outpouring of grief. Thousands attended his memorial, marred though it was by his spiritualist associates, who did their utmost to turn the ceremony into some kind of mass séance. My friend’s career as a consulting detective had effectively ended with his retirement, over a quarter century ago. In latter years his name rarely made the papers, even here in London. A generation had come of age in ignorance of Sherlock Holmes. Or so I had thought.
Although I was grateful to see him lionized in the press, I was dismayed at the many inaccuracies (in some instances outright fictions) attached to my friend’s reputation by the ignorance or indolence of the sensational press. No, Westminster Gazette, he was not connected to the royal family by blood. He never wed once, much less twice, much less in secret to the Divine Sarah; nor was he among Lillie Langtry’s paramours. He did not serve on the front lines in the Great War, Daily Mail; General Von Stettin was alluding to an entirely different and more personal conflict. Some of the more responsible journalists camped out upon my doorstep, and I did my best to educate them. Yet there was one question they posed over and over, and for that I could supply no satisfactory answer: who was Sherlock Holmes?
Oh, I enumerated his habits, repeated his aphorisms, clothed him in his past glories. It was meat and drink enough for the gentlemen of the press. Barring his late brother, Mycroft, a man who kept his secrets closer than the Sphinx, no man knew Sherlock Holmes better than I. Even the rift that opened between us in his final years, brought on by his perverse fascination with spiritualism, was not enough to sunder our bond. I have painted his portrait in scores of accounts. But none of them ever scratched the surface: the inner man was a locked-room mystery. I was forced to admit to myself that I, who knew him better than any man living, barely knew him at all.
But Sherlock Holmes, reaching from beyond the grave, has granted me one last opportunity to peel away the mask. He has made me his heir. Not to the villa in Sussex, of course, nor to his bank account at Lloyds. Those assets, which hold no interest for me, have fluttered away to some distant relation in France whose name escapes me. What he has left me is the bulk of his private papers, a treasure trove of buckram-bound volumes and despatch boxes that makes the halls of Croesus look like a shepherd’s cot. Since the day they arrived on my doorstep I’ve been working my way through them, ferreting out case files that might be shared with his public, but also hoping to unearth nuggets of a more confidential nature that might discover the inner man to me.
Accompanying his papers Holmes left an odd assortment of miscellany, perhaps more properly called exhibits, that seem to be related to his cases. They range from the mundane—a set of brass waistcoat buttons, a spool of silk thread—to the deadly—knives, guns, cudgels, and a few crusted vials which I suspect may contain deadly poisons. Among the most unusual is a painting of a young woman playing the piano. It appears to be the work of an amateur, an amateur who harbors a grudge against paint and canvas. Even for a man with Sherlock Holmes’s abominable taste in art, it is appalling. The signature scrawled across the bottom of the canvas is a single name:
“Vincent.”
A few of my readers, versed in the kaleidoscopic fashions of the art world, may already have a nodding acquaintance with the name of the Dutch painter, Vincent van Gogh, who died some forty years ago in France. For those less conversant with that milieu, recent months have thrust his name into the headlines due to the so-called Wacker Affair: the Wackers being a pair of brothers, Berlin art dealers, who are charged with having created and sold a number of forged Van Gogh canvases (some thirty or so, I believe it was). The Wackers’ defense seems to lie with the proposition that the works in question were acquired in good faith and sold in good faith. If there was deception, they claim, it was engineered by other hands somewhere further back along a rather nebulous chain of custody. Good luck to them. The art of connoisseurship has developed over the last century into something approaching a science, with nearly infallible methods of separating the wheat from the chaff.
Not that I pretend to any authority on the subject myself. Though I can bring the discernment of an enthusiast to an after-dinner discussion of Reynolds or Gainsborough, I confess myself largely ignorant of the school of French “Impressionists” and their ilk. My own tastes are more conservative; some have said more pedestrian.
I hardly gave the painting a thought when it first came to me. Holmes’s taste in art had always bewildered me, and the portrait of the girl at the piano, crudely rendered against a background of bilious green wallpaper, only further fueled my suspicion that he believed painting to be some kind of joke. I was at that time entirely ignorant of any connection between my friend and the Van Gogh family.
However, there was a story that went with the painting, or a manuscript at least, which whetted my interest at first glance. You may imagine my disappointment when I discovered it to be written in German. Regrettably, my knowledge of that language reaches little further than the word rache. I set the manuscript aside to explore greener pastures.
Suffice it to say then, when the Wacker scandal first began to be bruited about, I was shocked to find out that the works of this once-obscure painter have increased in value from—well, you couldn’t have given away his paintings while he was still living—to some very considerable sums. In fact, after sitting down with pencil and paper and working the figures, it became apparent to me that in today’s cockeyed market, my Van Gogh might be worth as much as £12,000! Of course the painting held some sentimental value for me, but I have never been a man of means, and a sum of money like that simply couldn’t be ignored. Yet there was still a story behind the painting, and I could not think of parting with it before I had done all within my power to learn what it was. I contacted my old friend Martha Pearce, whose fluency in German had proved so beneficial to us in the run-up to the war, and whose discretion is absolute. She was more than happy to oblige. I sent her the manuscript, and in less than a month a translation was in my hands.
I poured myself a brandy and soda and settled down in my best chair to read. I read straight through, finishing at about three in the morning, poured another brandy and soda, and sat down to read it again.
As a contribution to the annals of Sherlock Holmes, the Lermolieff manuscript is an oddity. The name Sherlock Holmes is never even mentioned in the manuscript, although our old friend Inspector Lestrade does come in for a mention. My own name crops up four or five times, although I was nowhere on the scene when these events transpired, blissfully unaware that Holmes had left his digs in Baker Street, much less crossed the Channel to France.
It is the only one of Holmes’s cases in which he relies on the aid of another consulting detective—for whatever Lermolieff calls himself, he is a detective in his own right, using methods independently arrived at, but eerily similar to those of Sherlock Holmes. Without his rather unorthodox methods of producing evidence, Holmes would never have brought the case to a satisfactory close.
But what readers will want to know, since I have raised the question, is whether the Lermolieff manuscript reveals anything substantial about the private Holmes? I believe it does, if only in a roundabout manner. I have spent too long looking for Holmes among the rolling meads of Sussex, perhaps, ignoring his French antecedents. I have accused Holmes elsewhere of being a calculating machine, an automaton wi
The narrative that follows, then, is substantially the work of Dr. Ivan Lermolieff, as he styles himself, from his contemporaneous notes, with emendations by myself. In my efforts to fill in certain lacunae left by Lermolieff’s account, and make it more palatable to the popular reader, I might justifiably be accused of taking literary liberty with a few of the facts, at times even positing a person’s innermost thoughts. Since, according to Holmes, half of what I write is fiction, anyway, I believe I have nowhere violated the trust of my fallen friend.
In that spirit, we begin our book, in a dark wood wandering.
Chapter One
It was the third gallery Monsieur Vernet had dragged me to that sweltering morning. In his zeal, he had apparently forgot all about our promised luncheon beneath the cool awnings at Café Anglais, where I had hoped to sample the sole Dieppoise. I had a heel of cheese and half a paper sack of walnuts secreted in the bottom of my Glad-stone, but it would hardly do to rummage about for them in the detective’s company. Please don’t think me a slave to appetite, unless it be an appetite for fine art, but it wasn’t fine art we were likely to see. As had been our fate at the other galleries, we would be steered by some enthusiastic underling away from works by any respectable artists and into some dimly lit back room, where our eyes would be subjected to the latest embarrassments by the so-called Impressionists, or Intransigents, whatever they were calling themselves in the Year of Our Lord 1890. Paul Durand-Ruel, the chief of the Impressionist dealers, had actually been on the floor at his gallery, and treated us, ex cathedra, to a mind-numbing catalogue of his acquisitions, as if they were his ugly-but-beloved children. There were no other clientele at hand to rescue us from his depredations. At Georges Petit they left us to wander about like orphaned waifs; they sold Impressionists, but seemed loathe to admit the fact. Worst of all was the little paint shop owned by an old communard named Tanguy, where painters who couldn’t even rate an exhibition with the Impressionists were hung proudly in the front window. The old man went mad with fury and tossed us out the door as soon as Vernet admitted he indeed had relatives among the distinguished family of painters that included Claude and Horace Vernet, who according to Tanguy were somehow complicit in revanchist conspiracies to bring back the Bourbons (if only it were true!). Tanguy’s emporium actually boasted a dwarf in pince-nez, enthroned on the front counter, tossing back rotgut champagne and making ribald cracks at the clientele, like a jester at the old Hapsburg court.
Boussod et Valadon has a sterling reputation all over Europe. Its showroom in the Rue Montmartre certainly boasts the requisite deep carpets, velvet drapes, and soothing hushed atmosphere which declare a haven for serious art. I was hoping against hope that I might be treated to something new by Meissonier or even Gerome. But as soon as Vernet started dropping hints about “newer, lesser-known painters,” Monsieur Boussod handed us off to a pink-faced assistant smelling of shaving soap, who led us upstairs to the mezzanine, where the Impressionists were penned.
It was a shadowless world, bereft of line or volume. Lurid pigments warred for attention with one another, leaving the viewer to guess at the paintings’ subjects—which often enough were train stations or iron bridges or faded harlots, hardly lyric or heroic subjects. Rather than mixing their pigments on the palette, the Impressionists seem to like to mix them on the canvas, with predictable results. They paint in nervous, flat little strokes that bristle at the viewer like an alley cat among the dustbins. I could feel a familiar dull ache forming between my eyebrows.
There was really no good reason for me to be there at all, as I had complained to Vernet more than once. He was going to recite his inscrutable litany of questions, always circling round the same handful of Impressionists, whose names were beginning to stick in my head: Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Morisot, Cezanne. Each of them claimed space on Boussod’s mezzanine walls. Were they studio trained, or self-taught? Had they reputation enough to support themselves with their art, or did they rely on one or two generous patrons? Were they known among the American nouveau riche? Then he would lard in a few Old Master names, like Fragonard, Watteau, and Poussin. His acquaintance with these painters was embarrassingly rudimentary, his ideas of their merits preposterous, but at least I understood the reason he hammered at those particular nails. He might have deferred to my expertise, but he seemed determined to prove himself a boor in front of every dealer we met. So I set my jaw and played the role of silent partner. He assured me repeatedly that I was indispensable to his method. What method? It almost seemed as if he didn’t want to be taken seriously. Had I not been using an assumed name, my reputation would have been forfeit.
The dealer who had been foisted upon us spoke with a Dutch accent. He was in fact on the list of suspect dealers we had been given. Theo van Gogh was his name, I recalled. He was a slender reed of a thing, with a trembling lip beneath his clipped Calvinist moustache, and perhaps more passion for his subject than one would hope to see from such a straitlaced fellow. Vernet had him off balance, spraying questions at him, some of which seemed intended to test the depth and breadth of his knowledge, others insinuatingly personal, even asking his salary. The Dutchman bore up patient as a mule under all the rib-kicking, though his dignity must have been affronted several times over. He was a skilled enough diplomatist that I couldn’t say for certain he felt anything but bored.
“What’s that, a haystack?” Vernet pointed to a new mediocrity he had just discovered, in improbable shades of purple and blue. “Do people buy pictures of haystacks? Is that the latest mode?”
“This painter does a great deal of en plein air work. He’s not so much concerned with the subject as with the play of air and light and color that possess it for a moment. You might say he’s concerned with the conspiracy of eye and nature.”
“But it is a haystack.”
“Monsieur, it’s only one painting,” the dealer answered. “Monsieur Monet is not obsessed with haystacks, I assure you.”
The Dutchman was perhaps being disingenuous; we had seen three Monet haystacks already that day. An idée fixe, apparently.
“I was led to believe these Impressionists handle a lot of—how should I put it—risqué subjects?” said Vernet, with a ferocious leer.
“Perhaps I could show you something by Degas?”
“And that’s a fellow the Americans like?” The Americans seemed to combine obscene wealth with willful ignorance, which made them prospective marks ripe for fleecing by opportunistic Parisian dealers.
The Dutchman nodded wearily. “Monsieur Degas has made some inroads among American collectors. They tend to be a bit more adventurous in their—”
Boussod had appeared at the top of the stair and was trying to signal Van Gogh. Indeed, he had been there some time, but now his gestures were a trifle too histrionic to be ignored. He might have been directing traffic on the Champs-Élysées. Van Gogh raised a hand, both to acknowledge him and hold him off. “Please, messieurs, do look around, see what strikes your fancy . . .” He was backing away as he spoke. We could hear Boussod whispering urgently.
I could imagine their conversation. They’d wasted enough time on these two odd ducks, the proprietor judged. Neither myself nor the detective had the appearance of men of wealth. I was dressed in a charcoal morning suit of good Florentine wool, but certainly not in the latest Parisian style. As for the detective, he was got up as a comic-opera bohemian in a voluminous black frock coat, with a bright red scarf wound about his throat in defiance of the July furnace. I will admit he cut an imposing figure, tall and rapier thin, with the profile of a hawk and a silky reddish beard just coming in, that lent him rather the rapacious air of a Viking. Boussod had sized us up thoroughly and decided we were gawkers, not buyers. There was no profit in indulging our curiosity any further.
But his admonitions only managed to put the young man’s back up. Van Gogh nodded toward us, gesticulating fiercely, his whispers become a growl. I doubt he was foolish enough to defend the proposition that we had deep purses. More probably he was arguing his prerogative to pursue matters according to his own instinct, whatever the upshot. He had more spine than I’d guessed.
