The First Deception
The picture that was worth more once it stopped being honest
When Fournel reappears in the record, in the winter of 1733, he is starving in a in Lyon.
A pawnbroker's ledger notes that he had sold his coat, his second brush, and finally his shoes.
It is here, in the plainest poverty, that the forger we have been seeking is finally born.
He owned a single small panel in the manner of a minor Flemish master, a study of a woman reading.
The painting was genuine but , since the artist's name meant nothing to the dealers of Lyon.
In an act half of and half of , Fournel added a more famous signature to the corner.
He did not repaint the picture; he changed only the name, and with it, the entire value of the thing.
The dealer who bought it paid forty livres, roughly a year of a labourer's wages, without a moment's doubt.
The was not lost on Fournel, and it would shape everything he did thereafter.
The same brushwork that had been rejected as was now praised as a lost treasure.
Nothing in the paint had changed; only the story attached to it had been rewritten.
He understood, perhaps before anyone else of his century, that value lives in belief and not in matter.
A name, he wrote, is a promise the buyer makes to himself, and I merely supply the occasion.
There is a terrible clarity in that sentence, and it is difficult to read it without discomfort.
For he had identified a weakness not in himself, but in the very people who had scorned him.
They did not love painting, he concluded; they loved the that a great name provides.
Whether this was or is a question I have turned over many times.
A thief will often describe his theft as a lesson the victim ought to have learned already.
And yet Fournel was not entirely wrong, which is precisely what makes his case so .
With the forty livres he ate, bought new brushes, and rented a room with a north-facing window.
Within a year he had sold three more paintings, each carrying a name that was not the painter's own.
He was careful, and he was patient, and he never signed a name that could easily be checked.
The market rewarded him for the very skill his master had once called a kind of theft dressed as respect.
There is no record that Fournel felt guilt, only that he felt, at last, a kind of grim usefulness.
The mirror had discovered that a faithful reflection could be sold for the price of the original.
What he could not yet see was how completely the would come to own the .
A first lie is a door, and the room beyond it is always larger than it appears.