His work was described as painterly, relying on long, unblended brushstrokes. His art was more a blur than a snapshot, like scanning a crowd and having your gaze snag on something—the green, looming face of a woman, the bright red tights of a dancer. He was much more interested in individuals than in their surroundings, so there was usually a certain feature that he felt was distinctive and he accentuated that, letting the rest of the field float away. His gaze was not romanticized, but practical and dispassionate.
Around 1890, he painted a series—Le Lit—that featured prostitutes in bed in quiet moments of intimacy. The women were pastel, because they used to powder themselves to look whiter and younger and healthy, but the surroundings were comparatively brighter, to contrast between where they were and who they were. What you see, Toulouse-Lautrec seemed to say, is not what you’re really getting.
There was no question that Kitomi Ito’s painting fit into thisseries, with one startling departure: here, Toulouse-Lautrec had painted himself into the frame.
Beside me, I heard Eva draw in her breath, and I remembered that this was the first time she’d seen the piece in person, too.
She cleared her throat, and I shook myself out of my reverie. I had work to do. It was my responsibility to assess the condition of the painting: Was the paint peeling? Was the frame sound? And the signature—did it look like his other signatures: T-Lautrec, the T and dash almost forming an F, the sharp acute angle of the L, the tiny loop of the t at its cross mark. While I was doing this, Eva had her own job: convincing Kitomi Ito that Sotheby’s was the right auction house to sell the piece.
We knew that in the past, Kitomi had sold through Christie’s. But for this painting, she had invited other auction houses to make their pitches. “It’s breathtaking,” Eva said, and when she did, I didn’t look at the artwork but at Kitomi Ito’s face. She looked like a mother who had made the decision to give a baby up for adoption, only to realize that it was harder than she thought to let him go.
“Sam used to say,” she said, “that when he turned eighty, he’d never do another interview. Never sit in front of another camera. He wanted to go to Montana and raise sheep.”
“Really?” Eva asked.
Kitomi shrugged. “We’ll never know, I suppose.”
Because thirty-five years ago, her husband had been murdered. She turned, leading us down the hallway again to the table for tea.
“Is there a particular reason you decided to sell the painting?” Eva asked.
Kitomi looked up at her. “I’m moving.”
I could see Eva doing calculations. If Kitomi was going to leave New York City, there would be other things in the apartment she might want to sell.
The tea steamed in front of me. It smelled like green grass. “It’s sencha,” Kitomi said. “And there’s Scottish shortbread, too. Sam was the one who got me addicted to that.”
I sat with my hands folded in my lap, listening with half an ear to Eva’s pointed questioning: Have you had the painting appraised? Has the piece been moved? Has there been any restoration done on it? What other players do you work with in the art field—does someone manage your collection? What do you hope to achieve through auction?
“What I want,” Kitomi said, “is for this painting to close one chapter, so I can open the next one.”
Her words sounded like the break of a bone, sharp and irrevocable.
Eva began to pitch the marketing campaign she and other senior associates had been fine-tuning since the first call from Kitomi. The plan was to wrap Sam Pride’s name all over the auction, because value is added for a celebrity—part of the reason the Vanderbilt estate had sold as well as it did years ago was simply the name Vanderbilt in the descriptions. “At Sotheby’s, we know art. So naturally, we would write up the history of the time of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life and pitch it to the top five Imp Mod collectors in the world, and we would give the painting the cover of the catalog. But we also know this is special. This piece is like nothing we have ever auctioned, because it is a link between two icons of their times. It’s not just Toulouse-Lautrec who should be spotlighted, but Sam Pride. At the auction, we would lean into the moment at which this painting intersected with Sam’s life.”
Kitomi’s face was unreadable.
“Nineteen eighty-two,” Eva continued, “when the album came out with this visible in the cover photo. We would also reunite the surviving Nightjars as a precursor to the auction—art begetting art.”