The Gilt Frame

At a quarter to eight on the first Monday in October, 1927, East Fifty-Seventh Street smelled of horse, gasoline and roasting chestnuts, and the doorman at Gilchrist & Lisle Galleries was polishing the brass plate beside the front door with a cloth and the air of a man buffing a cathedral.

Elias did not use the front door. Nobody who worked there did. The front door was for buyers: the steel men and the railroad widows and the young brokers who had made a million on Radio and wanted, now, to own something old. The staff went round the side, through an iron gate and down three steps to the porters' entrance, where Gorman, the head porter, sat in a glass booth with the keys to every room in the building on a board behind him, and wrote down, in a ledger, who came in and when.

"Morning," said Gorman, writing. He was a broad grey man who had been at the galleries since the old century and looked as though he had been delivered with the building. "Studio's open. Skylights cleaned Saturday. There's a boy to help you carry. Dolan!"

The boy came at a run up the basement passage with a newspaper under his arm. He was sixteen, thin, red-haired, from somewhere west of Tenth Avenue, and he talked as he ran.

"Morning! You're the new one upstairs. The picture doctor. I'm Jimmy. Yankees open Wednesday against Pittsburgh, they'll take it in four, I got a nickel on it with Mr. Gorman, don't tell nobody." He took the bag from Elias's right hand without asking. "Six floors. No elevator for staff. Mr. Gilchrist says climbing is good for the character. Mr. Gilchrist has an elevator."

They climbed. Elias had been at Gilchrist & Lisle since April, and had climbed these stairs every morning since, and still liked them: the way the building changed as it went up, like the layers of a painting.

The ground floor was the sale room. Through the double doors, as they passed, Elias could see the long gold-and-red room with its rows of gilt chairs and its velvet curtains, and the mahogany rostrum at the far end under a chandelier, and, alone at the rostrum in the empty room, Mr. Everett Gilchrist, senior partner, sixty-one, silver-haired, in a morning coat, rehearsing.

"Lot forty-seven," said Mr. Gilchrist, to the empty chairs, in a voice like warm honey. "A portrait by Frans Hals. Who will start me at forty thousand dollars? Forty thousand. Thank you, sir. Forty-five." The ivory gavel in his hand rose and paused and did not fall. "He does that every morning," whispered Jimmy. "For practice. Like a singer."

The first floor was the viewing galleries, dark at this hour, the pictures hanging under their dust sheets like sleeping horses. The second floor was the catalogue department.

"Miss Arden wants you," said Jimmy. "Before you go up. She said."

The library of the catalogue department was a long quiet room lined to the ceiling with books: auction catalogues going back to 1899, bound in green cloth by year; dictionaries of painters in four languages; card cabinets with brass handles. At a broad table in the window, in a grey suit with a white collar, sat Miss Honora Arden, head of the department for nineteen years, correcting proofs with a fountain pen. The ink was violet. Everything in the department that had been touched by Miss Arden was touched in violet: the proofs, the index cards, the labels on the drawers, the small notes pinned to the green baize board by the door.

She looked up and smiled. She had a narrow clever face and very steady grey eyes, and she was the first person at Gilchrist & Lisle who had bothered, back in April, to ask Elias what he thought of a picture before telling him what it was worth.

"Good morning," said Miss Arden. "Sit down a moment. They're bringing up the Hals."

On the table in front of her lay the proof of the Autumn Old Masters Sale catalogue, open at a full-page photograph: a man of forty or so, in a broad black hat and a white ruff, with a brown moustache and a sly, amused, half-turned face, as if somebody had just said something indiscreet behind him. Beneath it, in type: LOT 47. FRANS HALS (Antwerp 1582/3 – Haarlem 1666). Portrait of a Man in a Black Hat. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. Painted circa 1640. And below that, in smaller type, the provenance and the certificate, which Miss Arden had written, because Miss Arden wrote everything.

"Sixty to eighty thousand," said Miss Arden, "if Mr. Gilchrist has a good night. It's the best thing we've had in the house in years." She put down her pen. "It's come to us lined, and someone's put a perfectly horrible varnish on it. Brown as a boot. It needs a light surface clean and a fresh coat before the viewing on the fourteenth. Nothing heroic. Mr. Merriwether would have had it done in a week."

"Can I ask about Mr. Merriwether?" said Elias. "Nobody's ever told me why he went."

Miss Arden was quiet for a moment. She looked out of the window, at the water tower on the roof across the street.

"Thaddeus was seventy-one," she said. "His eyes were going, and his hands. He'd been in that studio since 1903. One morning in March he came down to this room, and stood just where you're sitting, and said he was going to live with his sister in Hoboken, and would I tell Mr. Gilchrist. And he went." She smiled, a little sadly. "He left his smock on the hook. I think he'd simply had enough of other people's pictures. It happens to all of us, in the end." She picked up the pen again. "His notebooks are still in the drawers up there, if you want them. He'd have liked you to have them. He was a dear man. Very old-fashioned. He thought every picture had a confession in it, if you were patient."

"Do you think so?"

"I think," said Miss Arden, "that every picture has a price. Which is a kind of confession." And she went back to her proofs.

The studio was at the top of the building, under the roof, a long white room with a wall of north-facing skylights so that the light came in even and cool all day, without shadows. There were three easels, a lining table, a cabinet of solvents with a padlock, a warm-room behind a door for drying, a sink, a stool, and a window at the far end looking out over the water towers of Fifty-Seventh Street toward the park. On a hook by the door hung an old brown smock that was not Elias's.

At half past eight, Gorman and Jimmy brought up the Hals.

They carried it between them up the last flight, slowly, in its frame: a deep, heavy, carved and gilded frame, a foot wide on every side, all acanthus leaves and scrolls, so bright with gold leaf that in the stairwell it seemed to give off its own light. They set it on the big easel under the skylight. Gorman wiped his forehead. Jimmy stood back and whistled.

"That frame," said Jimmy, "is worth more than my whole street."

"The frame's Italian," said Gorman. "Nineteenth century. The picture's the thing." He held out an envelope to Elias. "From Miss Arden. Instructions." And he went back down the stairs, with Jimmy behind him, talking about the Yankees.

Elias opened the envelope. Inside was a single index card, written in violet ink, in a quick, slanting, elegant hand.

Lot 47. Surface clean & revarnish only. Viewing 14 Nov. Do not go deeper. — H.A.

Elias turned to the painting.

The man in the black hat looked back from under the brown varnish, through it, as through a window on a foggy afternoon: the hat, the ruff, the moustache, the half-turned head, the eye about to laugh. Under the skylight, close to, the varnish was even darker than in the photograph, the colour of strong tea, and through it the whole picture was a dim gold-brown, like something seen at the bottom of a river.

It was the most beautiful thing that had ever stood on Elias's easel.

Elias pulled up the stool, sat down in front of it, and looked at it for a long time, without touching anything at all.