HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Can you draw? Insert howling laughter. A picture with words? I can try. But give me a paintbrush or a set of colored pencils, and I’m gonna…politely give them back.
But can art lead to murder? We certainly know it can! And let’s welcome our dear pal Jeannette DeBeauvoir to take us on a creative journey–with a question at the end!
When you live (and write!) in an art colony
By Jeanette DeBeauvoir
I’ll begin with a confession: I am not a visual artist. No, hang on, I lie—I can draw a duck. It’s a very fine duck, mind you, but it’s still… just a duck.
Not very impressive anywhere, and especially not here. I live in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on the very tip of Cape Cod, what some call land’s end—well, you can see why: look out to sea and the next bit of continent you’ll encounter is Portugal. And this kind of isolation attracts a certain type of person, people who might not fit in any other place.
Among those misfits are artists. As I said, I’m not one of them, so I don’t fully understand what goes into what they speak rapturously and reverently of as “The Light” or “The Provincetown Light.” It is some shimmering combination of sky and clouds and sea and spindrift and makes a certain magic they try to replicate—or at least reflect—on canvas. And they’ve been doing that since Charles Webster Hawthorne opened the Cape Cod School of Art in the summer of 1899, making Ptown today the oldest continuously operating art colony in North America. By 1915 as many as 90 students were learning his style of impressionist painting en plein air.
Eight books in, working on my Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series, I finally smacked my palm against my forehead and exclaimed, “I live in an art colony!” (It only took me 15 years to come to that conclusion.) With all the other local history, themes, and celebrations previous books in the series highlighted, I’d in fact never talked much about art.
So I took care of that, and the result is The Fine Art of Deception, out this week. An art colony can provide an excellent backdrop for all sorts of fraud and forgeries, which can in turn lead to murder, every mystery novelist’s delight.
What if, I wondered, a Charles Hawthorne wasn’t actually… a Charles Hawthorne?
If you’ve ever been down an Internet rabbit hole, then you’ll understand what happened to me as I started doing research into art fraud. The field is rich. (And shocking—a decent percentage of the great paintings we revere in museums and collections are counterfeit! There is no telling how many fakes still lie in plain sight, accepted as originals by experts and the public alike.) I read about the Knoedler Gallery in New York City; Sotheby’s refunding of money for a fake Old Master and later a Picasso in London; the Baroque and Renaissance forgeries of Eric Hebborn in Italy… the list goes on and on.
And that doesn’t even include art theft. I’m in Massachusetts, so it’s natural for me to include everyone’s favorite, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist—especially since one of the former suspects lived on Cape Cod!
It was interesting to notice how this research has changed the way I look at paintings now. Provincetown has a Friday-evening tradition called the Gallery Stroll. Galleries—and there are hundreds of them in this tiny space—time their opening receptions for Friday nights, and even where there isn’t a specific opening, wine and cheese are on hand everywhere to lure people in. I often do at least part of the Stroll, and it’s always pleasant, seeing new things, running into people I know… all very civilized.
But now I find I’m not there just for the social part: I’ve discovered I’m really interested in paintings, in technique, in results. I’m looking at art differently. I didn’t go quite full rabbit-hole, of course; I don’t look at paintings now with all the investigative and forensic considerations in mind, though they’re obviously important. But I went far enough in to have gained what I think of as Art Fraud Appreciation 101. I look at a piece now and wonder, if I were to do a fake by this artist, where would I start? What would be the most important component to capture? What is this artist’s “voice”?
It may be going at things sideways, but I’ve found that thinking about forgeries and fakes has increased my own appreciation of the “real” paintings I see. In a sense, looking for the places where fraud could occur underlines how significant those places are, and how details count. How Artist A uses our famous light, as opposed to how Artist B does it. Where they choose to sign their work, and why they made that choice. What kinds of brushstrokes do they use? How do I imagine they felt, working on this piece?
I’m thinking a lot more about the art I see, and that is the greatest gift this book could have given me. I hope you’ll read it—and have the same experience!
HANK: This is fascinating! And you know how instantly recognizable our favorite artists are, right?
Who are your favorites, and why? And hey, Reds and readers...can you draw? We know our Rhys is incredibly talented--how about the rest of you?
Jeannette de Beauvoir is a bestselling author of historical, mystery, and literary fiction (and an occasional poet!) whose Sydney Riley series is now on its ninth book. Her work has appeared in a number of literary journals and anthologies, and she is a member of the Authors Guild, the Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and the National Writers Union. Her novels are firmly rooted in a sense of place, whether a mystery series set in Montréal or historical fiction set in medieval France; she herself lives and writes from a small cottage by the seaside.
More at jeannettedebeauvoir.com, where you can read her blog, hear her podcast, and sign up for her invariably interesting newsletter!
The Fine Art of Deception
Trouble is in the wind for wedding planner and amateur sleuth Sydney Riley
Her boss Glenn has grown secretive; her best friend Mirela is hiding something, and Sydney’s daily routine at the Race Point Inn has grown stale. Sydney’s boyfriend, Ali, is in town as part of an investigation whose details he’s hesitant to share, and living together in her tiny apartment has become a challenge, to say the least. Any charm she’d found in her hand-to-mouth existence has disappeared.Something has to give—and it does: A visit from Sydney’s father turns treacherous when the investigation of a hit-and-run death leads her to the intimidating and subterranean world of high-priced art. Then Glenn vanishes as a dangerous storm races up the coast, and Sydney comes face-to-face with deception—both on canvas and in real life.Jeannette de Beauvoir’s flare for drama, detail, and suspense brings the art world to life in this ninth book in the Provincetown mystery series.
