A Lady's Dream Come True - Grace Burrowes Page 0,25
kissed me.”
“I did, didn’t I? I’d forgotten these were up here.”
She was changing the subject, flipping through the canvases one by one. They weren’t framed, and there were at least a dozen in the stack.
“They should be stored elsewhere,” Oak said, joining her. “Floors are prone to chills and drafts, and that’s hard on the paint.”
The paintings turned out to be landscapes, the majority depicting bucolic English terrain, with gently rolling hills, sunny skies, and fluffy sheep. Several were more dramatic, full of dark clouds and billowing trees pressed earthward by howling winds, and one was a nightscape, more eerie than peaceful.
“Dirk did not paint these,” Oak said.
“How can you tell? He liked to do landscapes between his more violent works.”
“Dirk Channing’s style is said to convey more in white space than many artists do with a full palette. One reason for that is his brushwork. He was willing to ruin his brushes for the sake of creating a texture that changed how the light affected his pigments. Look here, at the sheep and the clouds. Both white, and both more or less the same brushwork.”
Oak prosed on, though he was abundantly aware that Vera stood next to him in her comfortable old dress and that she’d eliminated the marriage-minded bachelors and the neighborhood widowers from consideration as lovers, but she had not eliminated him.
“Now that you mention it,” she said, “this doesn’t feel like one of Dirk’s landscapes, though I’m sure he did this exact vista several times. The view is an easy walk from here.”
“If this were a Dirk Channing painting, I could take a half-inch square from the sheep and from the clouds, and you’d know which one came from what part based on the texture and the subtle undertones in the white. The renderings here are lifelike, and the image is doubtless a good reproduction of the subject, but it’s not a Dirk Channing.”
Vera let the canvas fall back against the stack. “It’s not a treasure either.” She glanced around the attic, which held many such stacks of canvases. “Isn’t there a fairy tale about some fellow who spins straw into gold? Great huge heaps of straw?”
“Let me paint you. That will result in some gold.” Oak would like to do a series, especially now that he knew a little more of Vera’s past. The squire’s daughter had an instinctive sense for how a country estate should be run. The half-orphaned girl had a tender heart for children who’d also lost a parent or two. The widow had seen more of the world than she wanted to, and more of disappointment too.
Vera Channing was pretty, and she was more than pretty. Oak wanted to capture the more, as well as the lovely face and gracefully curved figure.
He also wanted to kiss her, and not only on the cheek.
“Who do you think did that landscape?” she said, resuming her perch on the trunk.
Oak forced himself to consider the sheep, the clouds, and the little stream running diagonally through the scene.
“Peter Denton has a tendency to structure his images with water. He’ll put a millpond or a stream at a focal point, or place his subjects on the shore of a sparkling lake. He’s also no great fan of textured brushwork, mostly because he hasn’t a gift for the technique. He and Mr. Turner were reported to have great rows about texture when they were both probationers at the Royal Academy.”
“Mr. Turner has great rows with many people. Dirk kept a cordial distance from him.”
“Mr. Turner and I have not met, though I’ve spent hours in his gallery. This might also be the work of Hanscomb Detwiler. He’s quick, accurate, and a good mimic, but he also lacks a sense of adventure when it comes to brushwork.” The painting held other clues to the artist’s identity—the specific blue of the sky, the manner in which sunlight was flatly reflected from the cottage windows—but Oak wasn’t interested in the painting.
He was interested in the woman wearing the old dress as she sat on the dusty trunk. “Will you kiss me again?”
“I want to, but I’m trying to determine my motivations. Behaving impulsively is the province of artists, not their widows.”
Oak took the place beside her. “I cannot afford to behave impulsively. I know what I want—a career as a respected painter—and like the neighboring squires and bachelors, I do not see myself becoming the unpaid steward-by-marriage at some country estate, no matter how charming the widow who owns it.”