Picture You Dead

27

Saturday, 28 September

Half an hour passed. Then another quarter of an hour. Followed by another. Harry became anxious, his mood swinging from optimist to pessimist. Maybe Freya was right. Maybe they were about to be humiliated, their hopes shattered on camera and broadcast sometime later this year to five million viewers. All their friends laughing at them. Perhaps, he thought, as time went on, and glancing continually at his watch, Desouta would have decided not to have them on camera at all. ‘What time does it finish today?’

‘I think they said six o’clock.’

He glanced at his watch yet again. It was now gone a quarter past four.

Then, suddenly, the floppy-haired runner, Roger, was standing over them. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Sorry to keep you, Mr Desouta asked for a bit more time, and he’s ready to see you now.’

As they stood up, Harry asked, ‘Do you know when this particular programme will be broadcast?’

‘At the moment, no, it might be later in the autumn schedule, but it can change.’

They followed him back over the lawn, behind all the rows of experts and the queues until they were back in front of their painting. Harry’s frayed nerves were very slightly mollified by the broad beam on Oliver Desouta’s face.

Another camera had appeared from seemingly nowhere, and there were now three – two on them and one on Desouta. In addition a bright light was shining on them. Harry was aware there was a crowd gathered around.

‘So, tell me,’ the expert asked, ‘how did you come across this wonderful piece?’

‘Well, actually,’ Harry replied nervously, stumbling on his words, repeating what he had told Desouta earlier, off-camera, ‘we found it in a car boot sale.’

Desouta’s eyes widened.

‘But not actually the painting you are looking at now,’ Freya added, sounding a lot more assured than Harry felt. ‘What my husband bought was what I thought was a hideous picture of a real old hag.’

‘I really bought it for the frame,’ Harry confessed. ‘My wife hated it.’ He glanced at her with a quivering smile. ‘It was only some weeks later that we discovered there was another painting underneath.’

The expert nodded approvingly. ‘Not uncommon at all for an original picture to be painted over,’ he said. ‘Canvases are expensive and many artists would use one with a painting on it that they perceived to be of no value. Or it could be that sometimes people wanted to mask the true painting – perhaps to conceal it during times of strife, or simply because through ignorance they didn’t realize what the original was. Now, does the expression fête galante mean anything to you?’

Both of them shook their heads.

‘Well,’ he said expansively, ‘fête galante is a category of painting first used for the French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau. His paintings show figures in ball dresses or theatrical costumes at garden parties, or fêtes, in bucolic settings, often with a romantic air about them. When Watteau applied to join the French Academy in 1717, there was no category to describe his works, so the Academy created one for him. Fête galante paintings reflected the growing shift at the time from the severe Baroque style to the more decorative, naturalistic Rococo period. What we have here, if it is original, is a wonderful example.’ He beamed. ‘And you really came across this in a car boot sale?’

‘We did,’ Harry said.

The couple waited expectantly.

Playing to his audience of not just the Kiplings but the considerable crowd, growing by the second, Desouta asked, ‘Are you familiar at all with the works of Jean-Honoré Fragonard?’

Both shook their heads.

‘He was born in the South of France, in Grasse, famous for its perfumes, and began painting in earnest around 1752. Artists loved the area, because of its beautiful light. So far as we know, Fragonard’s lifetime canon of work was nearly six hundred paintings, many of which have been lost – as is the story of so many of the world’s greatest artists. Looting during wars, especially by the Nazis in the Second World War. And, of course, the French Revolution, which deprived Fragonard of all of his private patrons, who were either guillotined or exiled. He left Paris in 1790 to return to his native Grasse, and did not come back to Paris until early in the nineteenth century, where he died in 1806, almost completely forgotten. Today he is ranked among the greatest painters of all time. Are you aware of what one of his paintings – a portrait – sold for at a Bonhams auction a few years ago?’

‘No,’ Harry said, his hopes, which had steadily been rising, now off the scale.

‘Over seventeen million pounds!’ Desouta said.

Harry felt a cold sensation in his stomach.

The art expert smiled for the cameras and paused, theatrically, for some seconds.

‘Now, I don’t want to raise your expectations falsely, but I will tell you that in my years of working for this programme, I’ve never been so excited by a painting. But what I don’t know, of course, because I’ve not had sufficient time to examine it carefully enough, nor to carry out any tests on it such as pigment analysis, is whether this is genuine or a very clever fake. It has long been rumoured that Fragonard did a series of Four Seasons paintings, which were documented as existing prior to the French Revolution, but have never been seen since.’

Desouta stepped closer to the picture and pointed to the bottom right-hand corner. ‘There is a very small but just visible signature, his trademark signature, just a simple Fragonard. So, tell me, how much did you pay for this painting at this car boot sale?’

Harry glanced at his wife before replying. ‘Oh, we hadn’t seen the signature. It was twenty pounds.’

‘Twenty pounds,’ Desouta echoed. He gave a tilt of his coiffed head, again addressing not just Harry and Freya but the crowd around them. ‘Well, after what I’ve just told you, if it is indeed an original, have you now any idea what it might be worth?’

Both Harry and Freya shook their heads. ‘No,’ Harry tried to say, but no sound came out.

Desouta nodded and looked back at the painting on the easel. ‘I would say you might have a bit of a bargain. You would need to have this picture examined a lot more carefully than we are able to on this programme. But if this were to turn out to be in the school of Fragonard, it will be a really valuable and desirable painting.’

There was a gasp from the crowd, and Desouta paused to let it sink in. The couple were staring at him, open-mouthed.

He went on. ‘If it can be proven to have actually been painted by Fragonard himself, then it would be almost impossible to put a value on it. I would suggest that as a standalone, Summer, it could be worth, at auction, in the region of four to five million pounds.’

He paused again to allow the eruption of gasps, ooohs and wows from the crowd to be fully caught, as the camera lenses panned them, before continuing.

‘But if this is part of the full set of Fragonard’s long-lost Four Seasons, you could quadruple that, conservatively – and probably even more.’

There was an eruption of gasps from the crowd.

Harry felt faint. He gripped Freya’s hand, which felt clammy. He forgot completely their plan to try to not show their emotions.

‘Fuck me!’ he said.

‘I really could not put it better myself,’ Desouta said. ‘But as we are pre-watershed television, would you mind if we repeated your reaction without the profanity?’

‘Sure,’ Harry said, trembling. ‘Yes, yes, of course.’

Desouta turned to the camera crews. ‘We’d better do a retake.’

Moments later Roger jumped in front of them with a clapper board, arm raised. ‘Mr and Mrs Kipling reaction, take two,’ he said.

Bang.

‘Blimey!’ Harry said.

Someone a short distance away called out, ‘Cut!’

‘Perfect!’ Desouta beamed. Then he turned towards the stunned couple and said, his voice quiet now so it couldn’t be heard by the onlookers, ‘Thank you so much for bringing this to us. If you would like, Mr and Mrs Kipling, we can arrange for Security to escort you back to your car.’

Harry nodded lamely, barely able to speak, glanced at his wife and said, ‘Thank you, yes, I think we’d appreciate that.’