Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (116)

He took his time driving back to JFK but still managed to arrive four hours before his flight was scheduled to depart. He dined poorly in the food hall, purchased gifts for Chiara and the children in the duty-free shops, and then wandered over to his assigned gate. There he removed the check from the breast pocket of his handmade Italian sport coat—a check for the sum of $10 million, payable to Isherwood Fine Arts.

Included in the final settlement was $75,000 for the fraudulent report from Equus Analytics, $3.4 million for the forged Van Dyck, $1.1 million for the forged Albert Cuyp, $100,000 for the Old Master canvases that Gabriel used for his own forgeries, and $525,000 in assorted expenses such as first-class air travel, five-star hotel rooms, and three-olive Belvedere martinis. And then, of course, there was the $4.8 million that Sarah Bancroft had lost in the collapse of Masterpiece Art Ventures.

All in all, thought Gabriel, it was a rather satisfying end to the story.

He rang Chiara in Venice and gave her the good news.

“Reprobate,” she said, and laughed hysterically.





Author’s Note




Portrait of an Unknown Woman is a work of entertainment and should be read as nothing more. The names, characters, places, and incidents portrayed in the story are the product of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Visitors to the sestiere of San Polo will search in vain for the converted palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal where Gabriel Allon, after a long and tumultuous career with Israeli intelligence, has taken up residence with his wife and two young children. The business office of the Tiepolo Restoration Company is likewise impossible to find, for no such enterprise exists. The Andrea Bocelli song playing in the Allon family’s kitchen in chapter 6 is “Chiara,” from the 2001 album Cieli di Toscana. I listened to the CD frequently while writing the first draft of The Confessor in 2002 and gave the name to the beautiful daughter of the chief rabbi of Venice, Jacob Zolli. Irene Allon is named for her grandmother, who was one of the early State of Israel’s most important artists. Her twin brother is named for the Italian High Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, better known as Raphael.

The fictitious Umbrian estate known as Villa dei Fiori appeared for the first time in Moscow Rules, a novel I conceived during an extended stay on a similar property. The staff took wonderful care of my family and me, and I repaid their kindness by turning them into minor but important characters in the story. Regrettably, several shopkeepers in the town of Amelia suffered the same fate in the novel’s sequel, The Defector.

There is indeed a suite named for the conductor Leonard Bernstein at the H?tel de Crillon in Paris, and Chez Janou is without question one of the city’s better bistros. Nevertheless, the Swiss violinist Anna Rolfe could not have sent a low murmur through its brightly lit dining room, because Anna is the product of my imagination. So, too, are Maurice Durand and Georges Fleury, the owners of a disreputable art gallery in the Eighth Arrondissement. The art squad of the Police Nationale is in fact known as the Central Office for the Fight against Cultural Goods Trafficking—it definitely sounds better in French—but its personnel do not work in the historic building located at 36 Quai des Orfèvres.

Thankfully, there is no art-based hedge fund known as Masterpiece Art Ventures, and the crimes of my fictitious Phillip Somerset are entirely my creation. I included the names of real auction houses because, like the names of great painters, they are part of the art world’s lexicon. It was not my intention to suggest in any way that companies such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s knowingly trade in forged paintings. Nor did I wish to leave the impression that the art-based lending units of JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America would accept forged paintings as collateral. Deepest apologies to the head of security at the Pierre for Gabriel’s unconscionable behavior during his brief stay. The historic hotel on East Sixty-First Street is one of New York’s finest and would never employ the likes of my fictitious Ray Bennett.

The madcap menagerie of London art dealers, museum curators, auctioneers, and journalists who grace the pages of Portrait of an Unknown Woman are invented from whole cloth, as are their sometimes questionable personal and professional antics. There is indeed an enchanting art gallery on the northeast corner of Mason’s Yard, but it is owned by Patrick Matthiesen, one of the world’s most successful and respected Old Master art dealers. A brilliant art historian blessed with an infallible eye, Patrick never would have fallen for a forged Van Dyck, even one as skillfully executed as the painting depicted in the story.

The same cannot be said, however, for many of Patrick’s colleagues and competitors. Indeed, in the past quarter century, the multibillion-dollar global business known as the art world has been shaken by a series of high-profile forgery scandals that have raised unsettling questions about the oftentimes subjective process used to determine the origin and authenticity of a painting. Each of the forgery rings utilized some version of the same hackneyed provenance trap—newly rediscovered paintings emerging from a previously unknown collection—and yet each managed to deceive the experts and connoisseurs of the commercial art world with remarkable ease.

John Myatt, a songwriter and part-time art teacher with a knack for mimicking the great painters, was raising two small children alone in a run-down farmhouse in Staffordshire when he made the acquaintance of a clever trickster named John Drewe. Together the two men perpetrated what Scotland Yard described as “the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century.” With Myatt supplying the canvases and Drewe the counterfeit provenances, the pair foisted more than 250 forgeries on the art market—for which Drewe pocketed more than ￡25 million. Many of the forgeries were sold through venerable London auction houses, including several works, purportedly by the French painter Jean Dubuffet, that went under the gavel during a glamorous evening sale at Christie’s in King Street. In the audience that night, feeling slightly underdressed, was the forger who had created them. The Dubuffet Foundation, caretaker of the artist’s oeuvre, had declared the works to be authentic.