A Perilous Perspective (Lady Darby Mystery #10)(21)
His face lit with eagerness. “Of course. I’m at your service.”
“I can’t help but think it would be best to take as few of Barbreck’s relatives with us as possible.”
“Good luck with that,” I remarked wryly as I moved toward the door. “If I know my family, and I do,” I glanced over my shoulder to add, “Then half of them will be mounted and waiting for us the moment they discover where we’re going. They’ll use concern and politeness to mask their insatiable curiosity.”
“It seems you come by it honestly, then.”
His teasing grin stretched wider as I glowered at him from the doorway.
* * *
*
The following morning after breakfast and snuggles with Emma, I gathered up a small kit of my art supplies and asked Bree to join me in the long gallery. I half suspected to find Barbreck there waiting for me. In fact, I initially thought the wooden bench placed in the middle of the room was for him to sit on. But when he failed to join us, I began to wonder if he trusted me more than I’d believed. That, or now that he’d already confronted Miss Campbell, he hoped I would uncover definitive evidence of forgery and believed by staying away he was more likely to get it.
In any case, audience or no audience, it made no difference to me or my results. But it would be easier to work if he wasn’t hovering over my shoulder.
Warm sunlight filtered through the high windows, indirectly illuminating the paintings. I set my bag down on the bench and removed the magnifying glass I’d borrowed from the library. Then with a deep bracing breath, I turned to my task.
I began with the Van Dyck. Once again as I stood before it, I felt a sort of uneasy queasiness swirling in my gut. There was simply a sense of wrongness about it.
“This can’t be a Van Dyck,” I murmured more to myself than to Bree, who stood quietly beside me, but then I continued, explaining why I was so insistent. “Look at the folds of this gown.” I pointed. “The shapes and shadows are too . . . certain. There’s no flow or movement. No sense of life. Just like their faces. There is no light or thought behind them. No allure. And Van Dyck is known for such things.” I tilted my head, studying the painting from a slightly different angle. “And this blue.” I swept my hand in the air over the train of the gown on the second woman. “I would swear this is Prussian blue, and yet that pigment was not used in Van Dyck’s time. He would have painted with something like azurite.”
The last, I knew, was a highly subjective observation, for there was no real way to tell one pigment from the other with the naked eye. But I had seen Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling, in which he had used azurite as the background. This looked nothing like that shade.
I sighed, shaking my head. Further visual analysis was not going to change my mind. It was time to employ another method.
Bending over, I retrieved a small bottle of turpentine, a fine brush, and a linen rag from my bag. I would have preferred to examine the back of the painting first for any markings, for the rear often held more information than one would think, but there were no men nearby to assist us. I could have rung for a footman, but I felt so certain the portrait was a forgery that I decided to move forward with this swab test to try to determine its age.
A sharp pine scent filled the room as I dipped the brush in the turpentine and carefully selected a small spot in the lower left corner of the canvas and began applying it in gentle strokes over the foliage. Almost immediately I could see it beginning to have an effect, stripping away the paint. When I dabbed at the affected area with the rag, it came away smudged with pigment.
Watching over my shoulder, Bree gasped. “M’lady, isna that ruinin’ the painting?” she asked as I applied more turpentine to the same spot, in short order revealing the canvas beneath.
“Perhaps,” I conceded. “But considering the fact this proves it’s most definitely not a Van Dyck, I should think the damage is warranted.”
“Because the paint dissolved?”
Hearing her confusion, I replaced the top on the turpentine before I explained. “Van Dyck painted with oils. As I do.” I knew she would grasp the mechanics of that, for I had taught her how to assist me in mixing my pigments with linseed oil, as well as other elements of the process, when I was expecting Emma because the fumes were too harsh for me and the pigments potentially dangerous while I was in that state. “And while oil paintings are often dry to the touch within a few days to a week, it can take nearly a century for the oil to evaporate so that they dry completely.”
Her eyes widened, as she turned back to the forged Van Dyck. “And so if ye apply turpentine, a dry painting willna dissolve?”
“If you apply enough solvent, it will eventually dissolve anything, but not this swiftly with just a small amount. No, the painting before us is unquestionably of recent origin, likely painted sometime within the last fifty years. I’d hoped to discover an older layer of paint underneath—something that could possibly have even been an original Van Dyck—but there is nothing beneath it but canvas.”
That was somewhat of a precipitous statement, for I should test other places near the middle of the canvas before making such a definitive assertion. However, I felt comfortable saying so nonetheless. There was no evidence of the canvas being joined to others or expanded upon, so this was likely its original size, and so would have been painted to its edge.