The Portrait of Molly Dean Read online

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  Her faint, curv’d smile disturbs me: her long eyes,

  Misty with secrets, creep around my heart.

  ‘Merlin’, Mary Dean

  Melbourne, 1999

  ‘Five grand, that’s it.’ I don’t touch my wallet. Not yet.

  ‘Nup. I’ve already sunk that much into this painting – I need more.’

  ‘It’s second-rate.’

  ‘It’s a David Boyd!’

  ‘It’s a crap David Boyd and you know it. Nobody’s buying Boyd now anyway. It’s all Olsen and Blackman.’

  We both stand back and look at the painting again. Children with Ritalin eyes and feverish cheeks in a field of flowers, the whole thing a chunder of colour. But there are plenty of buyers for this sort of thing and business is supposed to be about the client’s taste, however abysmal it may be.

  ‘C’mon, five-and-a-half.’ Dave is twisting his hands together now. ‘I know you’ll be able to turn a profit, mate.’

  I snort derisively. ‘Five-and-a-half …’

  His grizzled mug starts to crack with triumph, but I’m not done.

  ‘… and you throw in the Scheltema.’

  Dave’s eyes glaze as he does the math. ‘Mate.’ He stretches both hands toward me.

  I shrug and turn away.

  ‘You always were a hard woman, Alex.’

  I turn back, the cash already in my hand.

  At that moment, an old lady with a scruffy black and tan terrier shuffles around the corner and freezes. She narrows her eyes and her head does that slow up and down thing as she takes in my black Docs, old torn jeans (not ‘distressed’), vintage jacket and messy (not ‘artfully tousled’) hair. It’s a look that comes off as trendy around the corner at Prahran Market, even at 8.30 on a Thursday morning in April. But here in the backstreets waving a wad of cash and about to shift goods from Dave’s car to mine, it clearly reads as ‘dodgy’. The old lady turns and drags her dog back the way they came. Dave and I stand there and watch her retreat before resuming our dealings. It’s just another normal day in the office.

  People like Dave inhabit the lower circle of the dealer world, a realm in which the First Commandment is, ‘Thou shalt deal cash in hand’, and the Second is, ‘Move stuff fast’. Dave is quite religious on both counts. I’m already calculating how much profit I’ll make selling these paintings up the chain to people who will think they’re quite lovely pictures. People who would be discreetly pumping hand sanitiser and questioning the authenticity of the artwork if they were approached directly by Dave. A lot of my dealings with Dave and his compatriots happen in this neighbourhood because it’s handy to a number of auction houses, such as Joel’s, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and, of course, Lane & Co.

  ‘Catch ya next time mate.’ Dave drops an arm out of the driver’s window in farewell then peels out, his car coughing and spluttering like an emphysemic Collingwood supporter whose team just went down at the final siren. I turn to my car and take a moment to wrap the two paintings in a blanket before returning them to the boot. Then it’s a short drive through the narrow backstreets, lined with workers’ cottages and one old corner shop still holding out against the convenience store tsunami. Five minutes later I pull up at Lane & Co. They have a viewing today for next week’s fine art auction and I want to get in ahead of the crowd.

  ***

  I try hard not to get noticed, but I’m barely in the room five minutes before I’m bailed up.

  ‘Alex! Great to see you!’ Rob has an auctioneer’s honeyed tones, but he also has the volume.

  ‘Rob, how are you?’ I inch away from the painting I was really looking at and feign interest in a small McCubbin. ‘A few interesting pieces this time.’

  ‘Have you seen the early Smart? Stunning work!’

  ‘Not yet. Where is it?’ Any chance to divert attention.

  We stroll across the floor of Lane & Co.’s auction room, which at this time of day is relatively empty of other punters. The single, vast space is broken up by a number of tall partitions that divide the room into quiet nooks and corners, while still deftly encouraging movement from one area to the next. The partitions, like the outer walls, are painted an unobtrusive bisque colour and on every vertical surface there are paintings. Some are bathed in spotlights, some tucked more discreetly in shadowed corners, but all represent the hopes of the sellers and the aspirations of the potential purchasers.

  ‘Anything special lately?’ Rob picks imaginary lint from his lapel.

  ‘I’ve picked up a couple of early colonial watercolours, but I already have a buyer for those. There’s a lovely little Clarice Beckett I’m trying to get. If that comes off, it’s yours for the next auction.’

  Although I can quite easily sell the Beckett myself, it pays to keep the auction houses on side. Besides, I know Rob is also trying to work out what might have caught my eye from among Lane & Co.’s current offering.

  We pass a Howard Arkley that transforms a Melbourne brick veneer house into a vibrant kaleidoscope of colour and pattern, turn left at a Streeton of Sydney Harbour gleaming with its own importance, and shuffle to a stop in front of the Jeffrey Smart. It is everything and more. Smart is best known for his freeway interchanges, traffic cones and isolated figures in desolate yet vividly coloured industrial landscapes. This painting predates those by a couple of decades, but you can see the promise of what was to come. The painting is simply titled Garage, and the viewer’s perspective is from the unlit interior. Darkness dominates the foreground, although the brightly lit facade of a building beckons from beyond the workshop door. Between darkness and light, Smart has placed the hulking shape of a 1950s ute and the figure of a man. Man and car are all black, merely shadow, and somehow possess an air of menace. It’s a gem.

  I make all the right noises and we chat for a bit. Finally, Rob catches sight of one of his regular big spenders and summarily drops me like yesterday’s art darling, managing to do it with all the charm of the consummate salesman. Exhaling, I turn and slowly wend my way back to the only thing I really want to see at Lane & Co. It is the portrait of a woman, Australian school, sitter unknown. But I know those brushstrokes and, more importantly, I have a fair idea who the pretty model was. The painter, Colin Colahan, was a member of an artistic circle known as the Meldrumites. Followers of the dynamic artist Max Meldrum, they set Melbourne society on its ear in the ’20s and ’30s.

  The painting is filthy and the varnish has discoloured to a nasty yellow, which is probably part of the reason Lane & Co. has failed to recognise the artist. But I can see the jewel tones beneath the dirt, and as I gaze at the lovely young woman with her short dark bob and mischievous brown eyes, I know I am staring into the face of Molly Dean.

  ***

  I pull the painting off the wall to give it a detailed going over. First I tilt it backwards and forwards, looking at the surface under raking light. With light hitting the canvas surface obliquely, different details and textures show up. I can see more of the brushstroke and artistic technique, but importantly I can check to see if there are any distortions in the canvas or lifting cracks in the paint.

  So far, my girl looks okay, and what I am seeing of the technique is still making me think of Colahan.

  I pull a portable UV lamp out of my bag, ready to examine the portrait under black light. Sometimes a painting is small enough for me to basically make my own dark room by sticking it and my head under my jumper, but this painting is too large. I flag down one of the auction room grunts. I know her by sight and I’m sure she knows who I am, but I don’t want her to dwe
ll too much on the painting in my hand.

  ‘Need to black light. Borrow your cupboard?’ I’m already walking toward the broom cupboard that does double duty as a dark room. ‘I think that woman by the Charles Blackman wants your help.’

  The girl mouths a response but her blonde head swivels away from me immediately. The market for Blackman’s work is really starting to heat up, and in a couple of years his paintings will probably be selling for a fortune.

  The room’s filling up a bit now, but I make it into the cupboard without anyone else noticing, keeping the painting held toward me, obscuring the subject. Tucked away in the cupboard next to a teetering stack of toilet paper, I flick on my UV lamp and kill the overhead light. Lighting up the surface of the painting, I look for dark patches that would suggest it has been touched up or altered in some way. Sometimes that’s okay. If the area is small and insignificant, I can let it slide. But if there are vast swathes of overpaint, or if the discrepancy appears in an important area such as the signature or the face of a portrait, it can be a deal-breaker.

  Or a deal-maker. You’d be surprised how many times a great work of art has been altered by some well-intentioned (but frequently talentless) person to make it more ‘attractive’. Sky not blue enough? Let’s fix it! Fancy a little more boob on your Brett Whiteley nude? No problem! Painted by Carrick Fox rather than Phillips Fox? A mere peccadillo! Then tastes change and that artist who was so unfashionable twenty years ago is now red hot. Misattributions, whether through the stupidity of the auction house or because signatures are missing or altered, have been among some of my biggest earners. I once bought a $100,000 landscape for $200 in a country auction because the painting was filthy and the signature was hidden under the frame.

  Nothing shows up under UV, so I turn on the overhead light and examine the edges of the painting where it meets the frame. No obvious signature, but a few black spikes near the bottom right give me hope there might be something to find. The back of the painting has little to tell me. No faded auction number, exhibition label or convenient title in the artist’s own hand. It sounds too easy, but sometimes it does happen. Most of the back is obscured by old brown paper, slightly tattered but largely intact. The only scrap of information is a timeworn label from a Melbourne framer that reveals precisely nothing. It identifies the company used by every half-decent artist from the 1880s right through into the post-war period.

  But that doesn’t matter, I’ve already decided I want this painting. The auction estimate is low – $400–$600 – because the sitter and the artist are unknown. There are some loose rules for valuing portraits: a well-known artist increases the value, a portrait of a woman is worth more than a portrait of a man (unless he’s someone very noteworthy), a portrait of a pretty woman is worth more than a regal old dame, and if the identity of the sitter is known, add value.

  Lane & Co. think they have a portrait of a pretty but unknown girl by an unknown artist. However, I am planning to buy a portrait by Colin Colahan of a girl who became famous for being the victim in one of Melbourne’s most sensational murders; a murder that has never been solved. Her name is Molly Dean.

  Monday’s auction can’t come soon enough.

  ***

  ‘John?’ I push open the studio door. I’m collecting a couple of minor paintings that had needed a bit of John’s conservatorial TLC. One was just a clean up, but the other was a signature reveal. I’d picked up the second painting cheaply because the McCubbin signature was obviously fake and that had scared everyone away.

  Strong northern light floods the old church hall, illuminating a myriad of colours. In the corner, a fan conjures a pleasant breeze from nothingness, making the papers on the desktop flutter. The sound of trams and traffic is just a distant hum, overlaid by the chromatic lushness of Debussy pouring from discreet Bose speakers.

  From the doorway, it looks as though something near the far wall has exploded or at the very least collapsed, spewing a haphazard mass of canvas and frames across the floor. By luck or design, the artistic avalanche only extends about halfway across the bare boards; this side of the room is holding out against the advancing tide. Closer examination shows that in fact there is a system underlying the apparent chaos. Here a careful stack of nineteenth-century frames, there a serried rank of works in progress, and throughout it all piles of auction catalogues, signposts marking a path to the farthest corner. In the centre of the room stands an empty easel, waiting for the show to begin. I take a deep breath, inhaling the heady mixture of linseed, paint and turpentine and something else: an undefinable melange of scent with top notes of dust and smoke, a heart of genteel decay and a rich base of history.

  ‘Alex!’ The voice comes from right behind me.

  ‘Christ! Was that really necessary?’ My heart is pounding in my throat. John may be a brilliant conservator, but God he can be a dick.

  ‘You’re so inscrutable at the auctions these days, I had to check you’re still breathing!’ Laughing, he shoulders past me into the room.

  ‘I’ve told you to crack a window when you’re using solvents: you’ve finally killed off your few remaining brain cells.’

  John is razor sharp when it comes to art, but he wears the guise of scatterbrained artistic type like a cloak of invisibility. Even when he talks people into paying him ridiculous amounts of money for his services, they come away thinking it was a bargain.

  ‘Sometimes I think a paint-fume buzz would help me stay sane when I’m working on all the second-rate shit auction houses give me.’

  I can believe that. John is brilliant at what he does and all the big players like to use his services when they can. It’s surprising – and depressing – how often they manage to damage paintings consigned for sale.

  ‘Pour us a drink, will you?’ John waves in the direction of the fridge as he plunges among the canvases. ‘You’re gonna be stoked.’

  It takes only a moment to pop open a couple of cans of Diet Coke, but John already has a painting on the easel.

  ‘Came up well,’ John says, taking the Coke from me.

  ‘For a Buckmaster.’ Sometimes it pains me to handle these sorts of paintings, but there is always money in pretty-but-bland floral still lifes.

  John moves to swap the painting, deliberately blocking my view of the easel. ‘Forget Bucky. This makes up for the abundance of tat you drop at my door.’

  He steps aside and a lovely country scene clamours for my attention. The not-McCubbin has benefitted from a good clean and John has also favoured it with a Thallon frame that embraces the canvas like a long-lost lover. What was two figures in a landscape is now a pair of school children in a paddock filled with golden gorse. They’re confronted by a small creek and clearly debating the wisdom of their chosen path.

  ‘Bugger me. Better than I thought.’ Then I am across the room, peering at the lower left corner of the canvas. My shoulders melt. John has revealed the true signature: J. Sutherland. I turn to look at him. His shit-eating grin mirrors my own.

  ‘Nice find, a Jane Sutherland.’

  Jane Sutherland is an artist linked to Fred McCubbin’s circle but until recently ignored by art buyers because obviously girls can’t paint as well as boys. Happily, since a couple of important exhibitions and publications in the late ’80s and early ’90s, early Australian women artists have been ‘rediscovered’.

  ‘It’s only a small landscape but it should be worth, what? Fifteen grand? Maybe twenty if I can pin down some details?’

  John nods.‘I checked a couple of the old catalogues just in case, but your library is better. Never been on the market though – at least not as a Sutherland.’

  This sort of research is a big part of what I do. Not just filling in the background history of paintings, but also doing the reverse: tracking down important pieces that have fallen off the face of the earth. My personal reference library is the key, and it’
s taken me years to build it up to what it is now. I have shelves of art books of course, but it’s the stacks of old auction records, files of clippings and extensive collection of original exhibition catalogues from as far back as the 1880s that give me an advantage.

  ‘I’ll get on it this afternoon.’ I’m feeling jazzed by my success, but I put it aside because, right now, I need John’s memory. ‘Have you ever heard of a Colin Colahan portrait of Molly Dean?’

  John narrows his eyes, partly because he’s running through his mental database and partly because he knows me. ‘Other than the nude?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Don’t think so.’ John’s memory for art is phenomenal. Plus he sees a lot of paintings that never appear on the open market. ‘You got one?’

  ‘Not yet, but I think Lane’s do – lot 186, Australian school.’

  He reaches for his catalogue and flips pages. Grunts. ‘Could be Colahan. Hard to tell from this picture.’

  ‘Luckily for me they’ve also hung it incredibly badly, but when you see it in the flesh, it’s right.’

  Each week I spend a lot of time trawling the catalogues. Not just for Melbourne, but for interstate and even overseas auctions. If there’s anything that sparks my interest, I always try to get to the viewing, even if it means hopping on a plane to Sydney or driving down to a quiet country auction in the Western District. It’s necessary if I want to find sleepers – unrecognised or underappreciated paintings I can buy cheap and turn over for a nice profit – and I need to do it all myself. It didn’t take me more than one or two stuff-ups to realise I should never trust anyone’s opinion but my own.

  Auction houses partly bankroll their executive retirement funds by employing graduates fresh out of uni, a lot of them blonde with names like Phoebe and Sybilla. Even though there may be someone with the exalted title ‘Head of Fine Art’, the grunt work of cataloguing the paintings is done by kids with virtually no hands-on art experience and minimal knowledge of artists beyond a dozen or so internationally famous names. These juniors may have degrees, but I’m sure they’d scrunch up their noses and say, ‘Freud? Isn’t he that shrink guy?’ So I never trust their written descriptions. In addition, you can never tell the condition of a painting from a small image in the catalogue. Colours may be distorted or – ahem – enhanced, repairs, flaking paint and overpainting can be hard to spot, and don’t get me started on dodgy signatures.