to excite those who anticipate drama. I had to introduce myself to gallery owners a half dozen times before my face started to become familiar.
12.
LACEY HAD, in the course of her work, come to know the Upper East Side. After lunch at 3 Guys, a coffee shop gone crazy with a menu as expansive as a Nebraska plain, she made routine stops at various nineteenth-century galleries along Madison Avenue. Hirschl & Adler, an elegantly staid establishment on 70th Street, held sway in the world of American paintings; they had a knack for polishing and framing a picture so it glowed, and they knew the location of just about every American picture of quality. Next, on 57th Street, was Kennedy Galleries, which had hoarded enough masterpieces to keep it active in the American market but was being sapped of its pictures through the attrition of time. All great pictures flow toward museums. They are plucked off the market by hungry institutions snaring them one by one as the decades march forward. (There are dozens of masterpieces in high apartments along Fifth Avenue, in sight of the Met, longing to make the leap into its comforting arms.)
Lacey had made herself known to the dealers, inquiring about prices and even occasionally helping them out by researching a provenance question about a picture that had passed through Sotheby’s, and her name started to come up irregularly when I traveled above 57th Street.
Mug, Pipe and Book,
John Frederick Peto, circa 1880
Size unknown.
On one of these afternoons, as summer approached and also the end of the art season—leaving the galleries’ air-conditioning blazing and floors unpopulated—she wandered into the Kenneth Lux Gallery, which specialized in more moderately priced American paintings. On the wall was a small picture by John Peto. Peto was a nineteenth-century still life painter who presented books, pipes, and mugs arrayed on a tabletop. The still lifes were rendered in dark greens and browns, the books ragged at the edges, close-ups of a tenement dweller’s humble routine. Peto was forgotten until the early 1950s, when a scholar, Alfred Frankenstein, noticed that the most popular of the nineteenth-century still life painters, W. M. Harnett, whose pictures were quite valuable, appeared to have two distinct styles. One was photographic; every object in those pictures was vivid and defined. The other was looser; the edges of the books and tabletop objects seemed to evaporate and blend softly into the surrounding air. Frankenstein discovered that the second version of Harnett’s work wasactually by Peto. Fakers, wanting to cash in on the more valuable Harnett, erased poor Peto’s signature on any of his pictures they could find and added crude monograms of Harnett. When the decades-old fraud was revealed, Peto’s prices shot up, nearly matching Harnett’s.
Herald,
William Michael Harnett, circa 1878
Size unknown.
Lacey, trying to determine a price for a Peto that was coming up at Sotheby’s, asked Ken Lux what the cost of the small picture was. “Thirty-five thousand dollars,” he said. Lacey thought the picture was fine and asked for a photo for comparison to Sotheby’s picture. “Sure,” he said, and gave her a small transparency. Then, continuing her walk, Lacey went around the corner to Hirschl & Adler, where, coincidentally, another small, comparable Peto was hanging. She inquired about the price. “Sixty-five thousand,” was the reply. Lacey, stuffed from adeli sandwich she had devoured at 3 Guys, hiccuped. The two pictures were so close in subject matter, they could be a pair.
“Oh,” she said, and she walked outside and scraped Ken Lux’s label from the transparency. Lacey had heard that art dealers don’t communicate with one another, trying to keep their offerings private so rival dealers can’t bad-mouth them. This would be a test.
She walked back into H & A, transparency in hand. “Is there someone I could talk to about a Peto I have for
12.
LACEY HAD, in the course of her work, come to know the Upper East Side. After lunch at 3 Guys, a coffee shop gone crazy with a menu as expansive as a Nebraska plain, she made routine stops at various nineteenth-century galleries along Madison Avenue. Hirschl & Adler, an elegantly staid establishment on 70th Street, held sway in the world of American paintings; they had a knack for polishing and framing a picture so it glowed, and they knew the location of just about every American picture of quality. Next, on 57th Street, was Kennedy Galleries, which had hoarded enough masterpieces to keep it active in the American market but was being sapped of its pictures through the attrition of time. All great pictures flow toward museums. They are plucked off the market by hungry institutions snaring them one by one as the decades march forward. (There are dozens of masterpieces in high apartments along Fifth Avenue, in sight of the Met, longing to make the leap into its comforting arms.)
Lacey had made herself known to the dealers, inquiring about prices and even occasionally helping them out by researching a provenance question about a picture that had passed through Sotheby’s, and her name started to come up irregularly when I traveled above 57th Street.
Mug, Pipe and Book,
John Frederick Peto, circa 1880
Size unknown.
On one of these afternoons, as summer approached and also the end of the art season—leaving the galleries’ air-conditioning blazing and floors unpopulated—she wandered into the Kenneth Lux Gallery, which specialized in more moderately priced American paintings. On the wall was a small picture by John Peto. Peto was a nineteenth-century still life painter who presented books, pipes, and mugs arrayed on a tabletop. The still lifes were rendered in dark greens and browns, the books ragged at the edges, close-ups of a tenement dweller’s humble routine. Peto was forgotten until the early 1950s, when a scholar, Alfred Frankenstein, noticed that the most popular of the nineteenth-century still life painters, W. M. Harnett, whose pictures were quite valuable, appeared to have two distinct styles. One was photographic; every object in those pictures was vivid and defined. The other was looser; the edges of the books and tabletop objects seemed to evaporate and blend softly into the surrounding air. Frankenstein discovered that the second version of Harnett’s work wasactually by Peto. Fakers, wanting to cash in on the more valuable Harnett, erased poor Peto’s signature on any of his pictures they could find and added crude monograms of Harnett. When the decades-old fraud was revealed, Peto’s prices shot up, nearly matching Harnett’s.
Herald,
William Michael Harnett, circa 1878
Size unknown.
Lacey, trying to determine a price for a Peto that was coming up at Sotheby’s, asked Ken Lux what the cost of the small picture was. “Thirty-five thousand dollars,” he said. Lacey thought the picture was fine and asked for a photo for comparison to Sotheby’s picture. “Sure,” he said, and gave her a small transparency. Then, continuing her walk, Lacey went around the corner to Hirschl & Adler, where, coincidentally, another small, comparable Peto was hanging. She inquired about the price. “Sixty-five thousand,” was the reply. Lacey, stuffed from adeli sandwich she had devoured at 3 Guys, hiccuped. The two pictures were so close in subject matter, they could be a pair.
“Oh,” she said, and she walked outside and scraped Ken Lux’s label from the transparency. Lacey had heard that art dealers don’t communicate with one another, trying to keep their offerings private so rival dealers can’t bad-mouth them. This would be a test.
She walked back into H & A, transparency in hand. “Is there someone I could talk to about a Peto I have for
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