Picture You Dead

2

Thursday, 15 October 2015

Charlie Porteous did not tolerate fools gladly and his charming smile could turn into a withering glare at the flick of a switch. He had long been known as a man not to mess with but whose word was his bond, and his eye for a painting had long been the envy of many of his rival art dealers. That eye had served him well during the eight years he’d been on the team of experts, many years back now, on the Antiques Roadshow, for the peanuts the BBC then paid its experts – £100 per episode and a second-class rail ticket. But, being on the programme, he enjoyed the publicity and kudos it gave him – as well as the enhancement of his art gallery’s reputation.

Eventually the relationship had soured, the BBC producer deciding his arrogance towards people who turned up with what Porteous considered to be rubbish was not in the spirit of the show. Two things had eventually led to his firing.

The first was when he’d reduced an elderly woman to tears when he’d harshly pointed out the supposed Turner seascape she’d brought him, which had been in her family for years, was nothing more than a painted-over print, cuttingly telling her that a child painting by numbers could have done a more convincing job. And the second when, in a rare error of judgement, he’d declared a sixteenth-century Abel Grimmer landscape as genuine and worth conservatively £200,000 – and it had subsequently turned out to be a fake. Concerned for his reputation, he’d stubbornly refused to back down and admit his error.

A fastidious man, with a love for beautiful things in both his private and work lives, Charlie Porteous was a creature of habit that you could set the proverbial watch by – in his case a £45,000 Rolex Submariner.

Every weekday he left his gated mansion, in Brighton and Hove’s Tongdean Avenue, on the dot of 6.35 a.m., and drove his Bentley to Brighton station car park, catching the fast train to London’s Victoria station. From there his trusty London driver, Meehat El Hadidy, would whisk him in his Mercedes S-Class to his gallery in Duke Street, arriving at 8.20 a.m., well before his five members of staff.

Four evenings a week Porteous would travel home on the train from London Victoria, and he would walk through his front door at 7.15 p.m. precisely. But on Thursdays, he would dine at his members’ club, either with a client or with a chum from the art world, before taking a late train back. Tonight, however, he had spent a delightful evening socializing with his god-daughter at an Italian restaurant close to his gallery.

His father had given him a piece of advice he now bitterly wished he had heeded. It was to only invest in what he knew. But just over two years ago, a wealthy Australian property developer client, Kerry Dundas, who had bought paintings from him to the value of several millions over the past decade, had offered him a deal that, in the words of The Godfather, was an offer he could not refuse.

A rare chance to partner the man in buying an entire forty-two-storey block of flats in north London, Reynolds Heights, which was up for a bargain price for a quick sale, due to the current owner being overstretched. And named after a famous artist, it had to be a good omen, Porteous had thought.

For a £10 million investment each, they could turn a profit of, conservatively, £5 million within a year. His judgement had been clouded by the fact that the lease on the building adjoining his gallery was coming up for sale. If he could buy it, he would double the size of his gallery, leaving his son the legacy of being the largest dealer in their field in the country.

The bank had been happy to lend Porteous his share of the money, secured against his rock-solid assets, on a two-year term loan. Then, three months later, when they were in the process of making a sale every bit as profitable as Kerry Dundas had forecast, he was suddenly unable to contact the man.

The next thing he knew, after finally engaging his solicitors, was that Dundas was in prison in Dubai, under arrest for fraud, embezzlement and forgery.

Porteous had to face that he’d been duped and lost every penny of his investment. The bank, while initially sympathetic to his plight was, as he ruefully confided to a friend, just like the old joke: that bankers were people who lent you an umbrella when it was sunny and wanted it back when it was raining.

But tonight, for the first time in many sleepless months, he had an optimistic spring in his step as he alighted at Brighton station shortly after midnight, and he had good reason.

He had recently made, he was certain, one of the sweetest purchases of his life. Very possibly the sweetest by a country mile. One that potentially could get him out of the deep doodoo in which he was now mired.

His gallery, founded after the war by his late father, had built up a specialist reputation for paintings by leading French old masters such as Nicolas Poussin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Claude Lorrain and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. His old man, a former art student at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, who had arrived in England as a penniless Jewish refugee from Poland in 1938, was a natural-born salesman with an eye for a painting and an even wider eye for a bargain.

He’d decided that his assumed name of Lewis Porteous would play better in the snooty British art world and anti-Semitic post-war climate than the one with which he’d landed in England – Jakub Lewandowski.

Charlie Porteous had inherited his father’s appreciation of landscapes, portraits and mythological scenes of the French old masters, and like his old man he, too, had a talent for spotting a bargain. As well as that same instinct, possessed by all high-end art dealers, of being able to tell, pretty much instantly, whether a work was genuine or not. Mistakes were very rare. And through his network of well-paid scouts, with his knowledge and deep pockets, he was a feared hunter at auctions, especially those of provincial house sale contents.

The art business had been easier in his father’s time, when it was much less regulated. Back then, in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, if you liked a painting, you bought it, paying by cheque or cash. Simple as that. But not any more. Today, it wasn’t just about the provenance of the picture itself, it was about the provenance of the seller, too.

In this changed world, Porteous and his staff became, necessarily, bogged down in all kinds of due diligence, including money-laundering checks on the vendor. No picture for sale could be hung on the walls of the three floors of his Mayfair gallery until every aspect of its history and how it came to be here was bullet-proof.

In theory.

Like his father, Charlie was occasionally prepared to break the rules. Just so long as a painting he was offered was not on the Art Loss Register, which listed all known stolen works of art, he would occasionally take a punt on one that to his experienced eye looked authentic, and sell it straight on to one of a select few of his art collector clients who would take his word.

Like all dealers, he was well aware there were numerous major works that had vanished for many years and which once in a blue moon resurfaced. Paintings from way back, sometimes centuries ago, which had been hidden or lost during times of civil unrest such as the French Revolution or, more recently, looted by the Nazis in the Second World War. And some, while rumoured to have existed, had never been catalogued.

It was for this reason that, while he hadn’t cared for the thin, nervous Frenchman – who gave his name as Jean-Claude Dubois – who’d come into his gallery two weeks ago with a rectangular parcel wrapped in brown paper, he’d been willing to take a look at what he had to show him. He hadn’t cared either for the man’s story about how he had come by this painting. A load of cock and bull, in Porteous’s opinion, about cleaning out his late aunt’s attic and coming across it in a trunk.

But he had cared very much about what he’d seen when he’d unwrapped the package in his office at the rear of the gallery’s ground floor. A small, ornately framed landscape in oil, ten inches wide by twelve, of a spring scene. Two beautiful young lovers in elegant eighteenth-century dress, entwined in each other’s arms in an idyllic woodland setting surrounded by daffodils, with a waterfall behind them. The depiction of the trees was simply exquisite, imposing, yet light at the same time, adding so much to the charm. It was a gem. Love’s first bloom. Divine, powerful, awe-inspiring, classic.

He’d struggled to maintain an unimpressed poker face as he questioned Dubois on the provenance of this painting. Porteous knew all of the reputable fine arts dealers in London and indeed throughout Europe, and this sharply attired man, with the darting eyes of a feeding bird, twitching forehead and strobing smiles, wasn’t on his radar.

If this painting was genuine and not an extremely good forgery – and from the surface craquelure, the spots of mould and seal on the back, the damages to the frame and its general condition, all his instincts told him it was – then he was looking at a highly important long-lost work by one of his very favourite eighteenth-century painters, Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Spring. One of the four that Fragonard was known to have painted of the four seasons, but which had been lost for over two hundred years.

These Four Seasons were reputed to have been hanging in a privately owned French chateau but vanished, believed stolen or destroyed, during the French Revolution.

He was well aware, just as the man standing in front of him must have been – unless he was a total charlatan – that at the last major sale of a Fragonard, conducted by the auctioneers Bonhams, the artist’s portrait of François-Henri, fifth duc d’Harcourt, realized a world record for his work of £17,106,500.

Calmly, Porteous had asked the man how much he was looking for. The reply had been £50,000.

‘Why have you brought it to me?’ he had asked, now convinced by the low asking price he was dealing with someone profoundly dishonest.

‘I am told you are the leading expert in this period,’ Dubois had replied in heavily accented English.

‘Why don’t you put it into an auction – at Bonhams or Christie’s or Sotheby’s perhaps, Mr Dubois?’ he’d responded, testing the man.

The shifty look in the Frenchman’s eyes told him all he needed to know. ‘I thought I would come to you for a quick sale.’

Without even having to do any calculations, if genuine, Porteous knew its true value would be in the region of between £3 million and £5 million and maybe more in the right auction. If put together with the other three, to make the full set, that value could skyrocket by multiple times that amount.

This could be the ticket out of his financial mess.