For someone who hates to be observed, I thought I did OK. They made a TV documentary about the museum four-and-a-half years ago. It was exciting, at first: the camera lens peering at me, housed in its black exoskeleton like a hovering insect. I had smoothed myself down, ironed out my kinks and put on heels that were too high to get across a room in. My husband Jeroen was bemused by the transformation. It was not a day for cycling and he drove me in, joking that he was my chauffeur and that it was most unusual to have a client sit up there with him at the front, especially one so glamorous. It was red-carpet-day for the staff of the Frans Hals.
I had taken a pill the night before to sleep, my hair was straight and glossy and apart from initial panic-perspiration, I didn’t get overly flustered. The interviewer asked me questions which I gave extremely animated answers to, but they said it looked a little manic and that it was better to just film me at work. I settled down and let the routine calm me. It’s a pity then that it was all the stuff of me gurning and whinnying that made the cut after all. When it was shown on Vandaag, my mother sent the clip to all her friends so that they’d finally see how important her Ineke had become. I hoped this brief brush with topical television would be instantly forgotten. The problem was, after it was broadcast, the museum installed a flatscreen beside the restoration alcove and now they play it on a loop.
The Saturday crowds are waning and I’ve nipped out from the studio to bring in my supplies – not good to have untended corrosive chemicals sitting in the vicinity of masterpieces, even in the dying minutes of the day. I hear my own voice trilling about ‘Hals’ gift for snatching life from his subjects’ and it strikes me as such a silly phrase, as if he had animated his portraits with their subjects’ blood. I look over at the wittering imbecile who sounds like me and glimpse my past taut mouth speak upbeat PR that I can no longer sell to myself. Actors must have this all the time – assaulted by images of their younger, more vital selves, but I never asked for it. I never even asked to work in public, yet here I am, part of an exhibition to increase patrons’ knowledge of our work, an art restorer on display for two hours a day – a human caged in the zoo.
Now that I’m out by my work table, I pare away a speck of candle wax with the surgical blade. I know our museum visitors surreptitiously compare the eager, somewhat equine, yet attractive lady on the screen with the grubby woman bent over the canvasses in the white hazmat suit. Alright, it’s more like the garb of a crime-scene-cleaner, but it still feels like my only protection from the plague of people leaning over the red rope, breathing their rank air on me, stabbing my back with their greedy eyes. Hessel and his crack team of invigilators encourage an even, unidirectional flow of visitors like at IKEA, but all you have to do is cordon off an area to render it fascinating and oversubscribed.
I look at the lustrous hair and shiny skin of on-screen me. I am the living face and she’s the snapshot-in-time. Between us, it’s a merciless portrait. If everyone has one year in which they age five, mine came just after the documentary aired. I’m reminded of that when this happens.
‘Oh – it’s you!’
The woman addressing me is in her early fifties. She has a British accent and wears a quilted brown jacket that makes her look like a wooden barrel with a swivel head stuck on top.
‘It’s me.’
‘In the film.’
‘Yes – and here also, appearing in real life.’
She doesn’t try to hide her fascination with the discrepancy. I’m used to curious customers asking how long ago it was made and then immediately do a double-take from it to me and back again. This is normally the moment when I wish Dutch people were better liars. But this ex-pat looks like she’s having her own peculiar Eureka moment and I want no part of it.
‘Will the programme start again at the end?’
‘It never stops.’ I turn back and pretend to examine the detached frame of the picture I’m working on and let her watch old/young, present/past, deadened/hopeful me. I’d better not encourage the woman.
It’s funny, but the current fame of Frans Hals irritates me – the brushstroke genius whose name stretches over the door – all his wet-in-wet grandstanding seems to try too hard to proclaim its own damned virtuosity. That’s why I don’t like to overhear my chattered enthusiasm for him seeping out of the speakers. But that’s nothing compared to my hatred for his dullard contemporary, Verspronck, whose work is ubiquitous here, dominating a number of the rooms. He’s a patsy, a straight man to set up the joke and the joke is on him. The punchline riffs on his limitations: when they hang him next to Hals, the contrast is not in his favour.
But the real reason I don’t like him is because he didn’t like women. I can see it in the way he painted them – interchangeably, all with plain, washed-out faces. He granted personality and distinction to his men, to the ranks of his civil guards, to his regents of philanthropy, to all the moustachioed great and the good, but the ladies hanging here are blank shrews. With one of two noses. That was the selection that his women had to breathe through. Jeroen noticed that first and we wandered through these rooms counting them up.
Verspronck could only do either slightly hooked or slightly bulbous – that was his entire lady-nose repertoire. They know the names of the governesses of the almshouse he painted, but they can’t tell who’s who because they all look like the same woman, at different stages of her life. It was as if he had the one sitter with the one nose and moved her around the table as he went. The painter lived with his parents and was apprenticed to his father, who taught him the craft. If he didn’t truly know any women, then how could he paint them? On the evidence of his life’s work, he had never looked at a woman and guessed at the sort of inner life Hals could imagine. It was seemingly beyond him. It’s beyond so many men. Not Jeroen, if anything he always gave me more credit than I deserved, pale blue irises peering over his bifocals, generously assuming my hidden depths and qualities were boundless. When someone looks at you like that, your life’s work is to somehow make it true.
It’s Tuesday. I’ve been working since the start of the year on a trony and I’m only getting down to serious business now. It’s painted onto a wood panel, just thirty-six centimetres high, we think by Judith Leyster. I’d love to unearth her initials and her trademark star beneath some hack overpainting. Up until the last century, star or no star, her work was attributed to Hals because it was so damned good. I started with researching the palette and ground layers used and in what order. There’s no romance in paint sample analysis, but I enjoy the detective work. The infrared picked up Judith’s black chalk underdrawing. It’s a work of art in itself – swift, agile lines and delicate hatching for the shadows. Verspronck would’ve stuck slavishly to the sketch, but Leyster painted freely, happily deviating from the plan.
As usual, it was unknown who the subject was, so I called him Tony. A trony called Tony. My little joke. It’s a miracle that I can still make them in the comfort of my own head. He sits there watching me spruce him up, with an amused look in his eyes, an impish man with a whiff of anarchy around the nostrils – like a jester grown stately in retirement. It’s my job to delicately remove Tony’s craquelured varnish. To lift off centuries of his pore-deep filth, his discoloured neck wattle, the grey-brown grime worked deep into his creases. I’ll warrant he was craggy enough before all the wear-and-tear. This painting’s provenance is patchy at best. At first, Slive was convinced it was a fake, but slowly, Tony’s been proving himself. I wonder what rooms he’s cast his eyes over, or worse, what attics he’s been hidden in, forgotten for years. I wonder who owned all the layers of skin-dust that have come to rest on his painted face that has outlived all of theirs. I think of it as administering a chemical peel to an aging lothario. Putting the glint back in the glad eye. Old Tony may be able to get back out on the scene by the end of the year.
During my break, I turn my own mirrored face into Tony’s pose and assess it in the same way. What crevices could do with a subtle filler? How wonderful it would be to pass the spatula over my cross-hatched cheeks and plump them up with flushed youth. How I’d like to lance the dark pouches under my eyes – swollen with liquid exhaustion from squinting at his flaws. My crow’s feet are so defined that the underside of one wrinkle catches the light. Leyster could’ve captured that with a simple score of white. There’s no lack of character in this woman’s face. But what does it matter now? Verspronck wouldn’t have known what to do with me.
It’s Wednesday at a quarter past one and I peek over to see that the lagging jacket lady is back standing transfixed on the TV, staring at it as other visitors would view a painting. The difference is they only last nine seconds – the social scientists tell us that’s the average time spent dissecting each composition. I spend rather longer looking at mine. Sometimes weeks. The woman regards the screen and makes a jerky movement to zoom in and detect something she’s missed and then darts left to manoeuvre herself back to centre and reverses smack into a young man standing behind her who turns a lovely pigment: puce-red. ‘How dare you stand in my way!’ is the look she gives him and then uses her age to bluster it out and make-believe it’s his fault. He slouches off and she catches me viewing her askance – funny feeling, being watched, isn’t it?
To break the stand-off, she rustles a tissue out of her sleeve and gives a trumpet toot into it like a baby elephant. Perhaps she’s a tourist – here for a week and then I’ll never see her again.
It’s the following Tuesday. I come in and start at nine – two hours of glorious quiet before the doors open. Just me and the cleaners gleaming up the floor as I gleam up Tony’s face. The only peace I’ve ever had is when I’m engrossed in the toil. If I immerse myself in the detail, my brain stops its loop. It soothes me. I gently chip off the grains of sand, the ancient flies’ wings, the unidentifiable crud. Restoring Tony to life. Even with the most careful hands in Haarlem, tiny fragments of paint come off with the old varnish glaze. TV-Ineke used to freak out when that happened, but I’m not fazed anymore. I’m so close to the panel that it must look like I’m kissing it. And in a way, I am.
I take a hundredth picture of the upper section and the light casts a red wash over the bumps and abrasions. My unarticulated, unmentionable bias is that I actually prefer the works with the varnish left on. I like the rough, uneven sheen, the mystery of shadow. Like that small cadre of striking old men who dwarf their younger selves in presence and coarse nobility, I think Tony has improved with age. The colours deeper. The darks properly dark.
An elderly American sporting a hot-pink poncho gratefully lowers himself onto one of the antique chairs – at least one pensioner per tour-group will invariably sit down on one. It’s not just the paintings that are from the Golden Age. Today’s gentleman disarms a chiding Hessel with: ‘Thank you sir, I shudda known better.’ He’s gracious about being moved on, but really, it’s a chair, misleadingly covered in bright orange felt. And he’s old, probably on his feet since breakfast: of course he’s going to want to sit down, with two rows of gnarled knuckles covering his knees.
I may find him a little flashy, but I do like Hals’ way with hands. You could say he was very offhand with hands yet somehow made them as expressive as a face. And he could nail a dirty grin, and the life behind the eyes that went with it. He was a quick read on people and had a knack for capturing rogues. Which makes me think he was a rogue himself, eleven children and still out carousing. Yet he had no problem in fully seeing women from the cheerful innkeeper on up to his portraits of matrimonial bliss. Whatever corruption Hals knew, it hadn’t made him blind to kindness.
My steadfast observer has returned, denuded of her outer cladding, but this time with a backpack. Hessel intercepts her and makes her wear it clasped to her ample frontage like a baby-sling so it won’t side-swipe a masterwork: she’s a barrel once more. Hals would have made quick work of her.
The only way to deal with being constantly watched is to occasionally turn and watch back – to reverse the stare. But I see she’s not looking at me, or TV-me – she’s looking past us, at Tony as he emerges from his gloom. She expects a live demonstration. She wants a show. I shift around in my seat, flip down my magnifying glasses and press on with the task at hand.
I work fast and loose like Frans would. I break out the heavy tools and gouge and scratch and score my way down to the nub of Tony. I have more fun at the work-bench than I’ve had in a very long time. I zero in on his haggard skin. That’s when I get a shock. I’ve exposed a pre-Tony. A first stab at Tony where his eyebrows were half-an-inch north of where they eventually settled. I knew the outline was different, but I didn’t know she’d over-painted it. Now he looks like a double-exposure old man who plucked his brows and drew them on his forehead. While there was a good deal of cross-dressing in Dutch revels scenes, I doubt Judith meant Tony to use an eyebrow pencil.
I give a deft over-shoulder glance to see if my admirer has noticed. That’s a pose Frans Hals could have caught in his sleep. She’s trying to see Tony’s face, so I block her with my back, but I’ve also seen what she’s doing – the bag is down and she’s working fast herself. On a sketchpad.
When the scraping is done, I fix the cobweb cracks on Tony’s face, but it looks like I’ve given him botox. He doesn’t have the expression he had. He looks flat and dead. I’ve killed him. This isn’t Naer’t Leven, not anymore. And the damned eyebrows, well there’s no covering those. It’s a disaster. About as destructive as maiming a beauty with acid. The only witness is my daily visitor, my malingerer, my barrel of fun. I turn around in my chair.
‘What would you do?’
The woman stops sketching and leans forward, focussing on Tony’s double-brows for a long moment. She then shifts her gaze to me.
‘If I were in your current predicament?’
‘Yes.’
Old-me would never have thrown my fate at the feet of a random, possibly self-righteous, art-tourist, but when your Love has died and your intended future with him, all the worry and guilt and shame eventually seem to just melt away. And everything. Everything, can be faced with the same shrug. None of the things I’d dreaded had occurred at all. Just the one thing I hadn’t been able to imagine. And still cannot. Every thought is accompanied by another thought: Must tell Jeroen. And I can’t.
‘It’s a tricky one, my dear. But I think there’s really only one question you can ask yourself –
What would the artist do?’
She’s right, of course. I pull every trick in Judith Leyster’s book of stars, performing miraculous emergency reconstructive surgery on Tony and patch him up as best I know how.
And the English artist, Eleanor Nye, I had mistaken for a lonely pest, sketched and later painted a remarkable portrait of me in desperate salvage mode, while my younger self looks on, suspended forever within multiple frames.
Now I too am immortal.