The Artist Colony Read online

  “Am I amusing you?” Champlin’s voice jolted her and she bumped against her easel, its wobbly legs buckled under and her canvas tumbled facedown onto the sand.

  The other students turned toward the commotion with various expressions of surprise and concern. Champlin reached down to pick up the canvas but Sarah was quicker.

  He turned to speak to his students, “When painting on the beach, you need to position your easel firmly in the sand or accidents like this can happen.”

  He lowered his voice and leaned closer to Sarah, “Why don’t you finish cleaning up and come meet me in my studio. Sirena can give you directions.” He climbed up the dune to the Bath House, put on his shoes, and rode off on his bicycle without looking back.

  Sarah left her sketch box, her red smock, and the ruined canvas with Sirena, who said she’d drop them off at the cottage. The canvas covered in a million grains of sand would have to be thrown out, but she would hold onto her ideas for the next picture.

  The long hot trek to Champlin’s house gave her time to remind herself that she only wanted to find out if he knew why Ada killed herself and not to act like a wounded art student being unfairly criticized by her teacher. She should be beyond such behavior by now.

  She followed Sirena’s directions and turned left on Santa Lucia Avenue. Several minutes later, she found herself on a scenic bluff overlooking another bay, wider than Carmel Bay but with fewer cottages. Down in the river valley on the other side of the beach were two large farmhouses. Farther inland she could see what she later learned was the ruins of the eighteenth-century Carmel Mission bell tower built by the Spanish for the missionary Father Junipero Serra.

  She stopped at the front gate of a weathered gray clapboard cottage with LAST CHANCE carved on a shingle nailed to a post.

  The flower garden and manicured lawn with grass soft enough to lie down on seemed incongruous; it was difficult to imagine the fastidious Henry Champlin down on his knees tending to such delicate floral beds.

  He opened the door and waved her inside with his unlit pipe. Overheated from her walk, she asked where the bathroom was. He pointed across the living room. “Down the hall on the left. I’ll be in the kitchen.”

  Midway across the living room, she was sidetracked by an A.B. Davenport landscape hanging above a riverstone fireplace. Four majestic eucalyptus trees were in the foreground of a golden pasture. The sunlit blue sky brushed lightly with billowing white puffs that seemed to move across the painting. In the background a range of mountains rose in purple splendor.

  Ada had captured the fleeting iridescent sunlight with her delicate brushstrokes, making the pastoral scene live and breathe. This iridescent quality was something Sarah had struggled to perfect when she studied plein air, but she’d never succeeded in capturing the sunlight’s subtle brilliance like her sister.

  In Champlin’s bathroom, she splashed water on her face and tried to calm down, but seeing Ada’s painting on his wall had shocked her. How did Eucalyptus Trees end up on Champlin’s wall, when back in January it was hanging over the fireplace in her and Ada’s apartment? The last time she saw Ada alive.

  I’d come rushing home after a meeting with the art dealer Peter Merkel, who had been very impressed by my prize-winning painting at the Whitney Studio Club exhibition. I couldn’t wait to tell you about his offer to represent me.

  “Calm down,” you said, immediately deflating my excitement. “How can you be so naive? Peter says that to all the pretty young artists. It’s just a come-on to get you into his bed. I thought you knew better by now, Sarah.”

  I countered with, “You just don’t believe anyone would take my work seriously.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Hurt? That’s a laugh. Since when did you care about me getting hurt?”

  “That’s not fair, Sarah. I care very much. That’s why I’m telling you not to trust art dealers. They aren’t your friends, particularly the likes of Peter Merkel.”

  “And here I thought you’d be so pleased. With an established art dealer in New York representing my work, I could come back home. We could live together again. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?”

  “Yes, I used to feel that way.” You paused and then said, “But now I’d prefer you join me in Carmel.”

  “Carmel? What are you talking about? Why would I want to live out there in the middle of nowhere when I was just offered representation in New York?”

  You sat down and asked me to do the same, but I remained standing.

  “It was foolish of me not to tell you at Keens the other night, but we were having such a lovely time. I just put it off.”

  “Put off what? What are you keeping from me?”

  “I do wish you’d sit down, Sarah, and stop glowering over me as if I was your worst enemy.”

  Reluctantly, I sat down next to you.

  “You see, I’ve bought land in Carmel and I’m planning to build a cottage on it. I can’t afford to keep both places, so I sold our apartment. The new owners are moving in next month. I’m keeping a few mementos of sentimental value, and my paintings, of course.” You looked up at Eucalyptus Trees hanging above the fireplace, “I’m saving this one for you.”

  “I don’t care about your damn painting. How could you sell our apartment without asking me?” My voice faltering. “This is my apartment too.”

  “Of course it is, darling, but I’m the one who’s been paying the mortgage. If I’d known how strongly you felt about keeping it, I would’ve asked you, but I thought Paris was your home now, like Carmel is for me.”

  “My home? A fourth-floor garret with rats scurrying over the leaky roof above my head? That’s temporary. I always planned to come back here once I finished my studies.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah, but you should’ve told me that.”

  You were right. I should’ve told you how lonely I was in Paris without you. I should’ve told you how difficult it was to have a famous artist for a sister. I should’ve told you how much I loved you. But my pride always got in the way

  When you put your hand on my shoulder, I brushed it off.

  “Please don’t be angry with me, Little Sis. We’ll figure something out. You still have the stipend from our parents’ trust and if you really want to come back to New York, I’ll help pay the rent on a studio apartment.”

  When I turned to face you, you looked so sincere, so truly sorry, but I couldn’t stop the pent-up resentment I’d felt for too many years.

  “My entire life I’ve catered to your selfish whims. You’ve always come first. Stuck while you traveled the world. Never offering to take me with you. Doling out a small allowance to me in Paris that hardly pays for my art supplies while you live in splendor. I even had to wear your hand-me-downs. So now you listen to me. I don’t want your painting. I don’t want your cottage. I don’t want your charity. I want nothing from you. Do you hear? Nothing!”

  I ran to my bedroom, stuffed clothes in my valise, gathered my coat awkwardly around me, and opened the front door to the apartment. Before I left, I looked back at you. You were still seated on the couch, as quiet and as regal as the statuesque eucalyptus trees framed in your painting behind you.

  From across the room, I yelled, “I’m going back to Paris and I never want to hear from you again. You can find someone else to be your Theo.”

  I slammed the door behind me, stood in the hallway a moment, and waited. You could’ve come out. Come out and beg me not to leave, tell me you were proud of the prize I’d earned, proud that I now had a New York art dealer, proud that I was your sister. But the door remained closed, the silence of the hallway deafening.

  She was still staring at Eucalyptus Trees when Champlin startled her from behind. “It’s magnificent, isn’t it? I was with Ada when she started painting it. We’d stopped on the side of the road in Carmel Valley to picnic, but she ate very little that afternoon once she had set up her sketch box and started to paint.” He
reached over to adjust the tilted gold frame and dust it with his handkerchief. “I couldn’t afford to buy this now. Her suicide has created an unheard-of demand for her paintings and a significant increase in their value.”

  “When did you buy it?” asked Sarah, disappointed Ada would’ve sold the painting she’d promised to her even though she’d said she didn’t want it.

  “Buy it?” he said, offended. “Ada gave it to me.”

  Sarah shifted her eyes back to the painting that rightfully belonged to her. But did she deserve to have it after the hateful things she had said to Ada?

  She brushed away a stray tear before turning to face Champlin. “I assume Mr. deVrais is the one who has most profited from my sister’s death.”

  “DeVrais is a charlatan.” He twisted the right end of his handlebar moustache. “I told her not to get involved with him. He never cared about her work. His only interest is in himself and filling his own coffers. Under what he called his ‘creative management skills,’ her work actually suffered. All her paintings started to look the same.”

  Sarah had also encouraged Ada to find a new direction in her work. But now she worried that by encouraging Ada to radically change her canvas was what unhinged her.

  He looked fondly at the landscape. “But not this one. This one was an original, pure Ada Davenport, back when she approached her plein air paintings with unadulterated passion.”

  Seeing how personally attached he was to Eucalyptus Trees, she decided not to ask for it back. Ada had wanted her teacher to have it. A farewell gift that he deserved and she didn’t.

  The living room had a kitchen at one end and an area with a sofa and high-back chairs that looked out on a panoramic view of a white beach below the blue, cloudless sky. As she drew closer to the window, she asked weakly, “Is that where—?”

  “Where Ada drowned? Yes it is.” He pointed to the other end of the bay. “Over there, where the Carmel River flows into the Pacific, is where Miss McCann found her.”

  Blood drained from her face and to stop from fainting she pressed her forehead against the cold glass. Champlin took her elbow and guided her over to the sofa where she sank down.

  “I’ll brew up some coffee. It’ll do us both good.” He busied himself at the kitchen counter while she took several deep breaths until her heart beat normally. She was composed when he put a mug in front of her and filled it with black coffee. “Cream? Sugar?”

  “No thanks.”

  When he sat down across from her, he held his eyes on her longer than she thought polite.

  Finally, he said, “Your eyes express a profound sorrow that wasn’t there when Ada painted you as a young woman full of life and hope. Your portrait is an inspiration to anyone who sees it. My favorite in the collection.”

  The coffee helped get her back on track as to why she was at Champlin’s house. She came to find out why he thought Ada killed herself. She told him about Ada’s telegram and asked him if he thought the portraits had anything to do with her suicide. He didn’t think so.

  She asked him when he had last seen the portraits in Ada’s studio.

  “Two weeks before Ada took her own life. That idiot DeVrais had told her she had no talent with portraits, that she would be ridiculed if she put them on display. It had depressed her and she’d fallen into one of her melancholic moods. Hoping my opinion would cheer her up, she hung all the portraits for my honest assessment.”

  “And what was your opinion?”

  “I told her the truth. The art world would acclaim the portraits as a brilliant new direction for an extraordinary talent. She’d found a way to express the same passion she’d felt when she painted Eucalyptus Trees.”

  “That must have been reassuring to hear that from you.”

  He shook his head. “She didn’t believe me. After deVrais derailed her, she had no confidence in her portraits and went on and on about how the critic Arthur Bye was out to get her and how she couldn’t bear to have another bad review. It would destroy her. You women artists shouldn’t listen to their chatter. They’re never going to give you a good review, however hard you try to please them.”

  “Easy for the great Henry Champlin to say. Critics are very powerful. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring them. Instead, we hide behind our initials when we sign our paintings, so our work gets reviewed and isn’t sold for a lot less because we’re women.”

  “My. My. You are cut from the same cloth as your sister. She was always getting up on her soapbox about the rights of women artists being abused.”

  Sarah looked down, surprised at her empty mug, and asked for a refill.

  “You gulp down coffee like your sister. She was seated across from me just like you are now when I warned her against drinking too much of it. Bad for her health. She laughed and told me she wasn’t planning to live that long. At the time, I thought she was joking.”

  “Why are you so sure she killed herself? Why couldn’t it have been an accident?”

  He shook his head. “Your sister could be wild and impulsive, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew the ocean’s power to kill. She knew she’d be sucked down into the deep underwater canyon twenty yards offshore at low tide.”

  “But why? I need to know why she would kill herself.”

  He met her eyes, unblinking. “You really don’t know, do you?” He put several spoonfuls of sugar in his coffee and stirred it. “I’d assumed being her sister that—”

  “Know what?”

  He reached for his pipe, filled it with tobacco, and tamped it down with his forefinger. He put a match to the tobacco and sucked on the pipe until it was red and smoking. “Look, I know it must be painful for you to accept your sister’s suicide, but she showed all the familiar signs of an artist with severe neuroses. Exuberant then melancholic. Calm then hysterical. Loving life then wanting it to end.”

  Here it comes, thought Sarah. Another analysis of female hysteria that men had been spouting ever since Freud published “Dora: The Analysis of an Hysteric.” But she let him continue.

  “Ada was a thrilling woman to be with, except when she got into one of her dark moods and thought all her years of hard work were meaningless. Her first attempt at suicide was from disgrace.”

  “You’re lying. My sister never tried to kill herself before. I would’ve known about it.”

  “I think you and Ada were having some troubles back then. You had moved to Paris and she hadn’t heard from you in several months.”

  There was some truth in what he was saying. Ada hadn’t wanted her to go to art school in Paris and it took her awhile to accept Sarah’s decision. Sarah asked him to tell her about Ada’s attempted suicide.

  “She’d had an exhibition of her landscapes at Anderson Galleries in New York. The critics, led by that misogynist Arthur Bye, had organized a campaign against women artists. Ada, the most successful of the group, was Bye’s main target. The other critics joined in like the chorus in a Greek tragedy.

  “I found her curled up on the floor of her apartment with torn up pieces of his New York Times review scattered around her. Bye had said her work was ‘Commonplace without redeeming artistic merit.’ His review was very effective. None of her paintings were sold.

  “When I pulled her off the floor, that lethal pendant she always wore was in her clenched hand. She fought me when I took it away from her. ‘Give it to me,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in going on after being humiliated like this. If my work is not appreciated . . . why paint? And if I don’t paint then why live?’”

  Sarah took her mug to the sink and rinsed it out. Ada had always told her she was very confident about her work, unaffected by the negative critics. But obviously she’d lied. And if she lied about that, what else had she lied about?

  Joining Champlin on the sofa, she said, “Is there anything else I should know?”

  He struck a match and leaned forward to light her cigarette and relight his pipe. He sucked until the tobacco turned into red hot coals. Its smoke wrapped
her in the familiar scent of Paris bistros where men sat smoking on the terraces watching women parading by in the latest fashions as if that was all women ever thought about.

  “The day she showed me her portraits she asked me to be a witness to her will. I scoffed at doing it. I told her she was too young to have a will. But she insisted.”

  “Did you read the will?”

  “No. I thought there might be something in it that she didn’t want me to know about, because she put a blank page above the signature line. After I signed it, she asked me take down Eucalyptus Trees from the wall in her living room.”

  So that was the painting missing from Ada’s cottage, thought Sarah.

  “She said I was the only one who had believed in her work from the beginning and to accept it as an expression of her gratitude. She had planned to bequest it to me in her will, but was worried something might happen to it.”

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “She said she was in a nasty legal battle with deVrais. He claimed to own all the copyrights to her artwork and that he had the final say on who bought her work and where it was exhibited, which included Eucalyptus Trees.”

  “Do you think that he was the reason she killed herself?”

  He sighed. “No. I lied to you when I said it wasn’t the portraits. The truth is I do feel somewhat responsible for what happened. I should never have encouraged her to make such a complete change of subject matter, style, and even color. She just wasn’t up to the challenge. I should have known that. Few of us are, including me.”

  Feeling her own responsibility for Ada’s suicide, she crushed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

  “Sarah, you might not understand right now, but I’m going to give you some fatherly advice. Ada’s death was self-inflicted. She knew what she was doing. Believe me there is nothing you could’ve done to stop her. Grieve for her and then get on with your own life.”

  She hurried pass Eucalyptus Trees and was already at the gate when Champlin stepped out on the porch and called out, “If there is anything I can do to help you, please let me know.”