Man With a Squirrel Read Online Free PDF Page A

him.
    â€œOona’s?”
    Clayton had never heard of the place. It was six blocks from his house.

5
    â€œYou say Copley on account of the squirrel,” Clayton Reed said, turning his full attention to the fragment of the painting. Clay’s lean face was eager, inquisitive. Fred’s office space, as always, was crowded: with books, periodicals, paintings they were thinking about buying, and the racks in which paintings were kept while they were not hanging upstairs.
    Fred had a good look at the fragment himself, now that he could do it without Oona around. The manner was right; the age, the subject, the feel of it was right for Copley. If it was Copley, even just a fragment, it was a major find. This was a gray squirrel. Sometimes you’d get a flying squirrel instead, with that scalloped frill down the side.
    â€œBecause of the squirrel,” Clay repeated, flipping the fragment over carefully and looking at the back, his excellent eyes needing no glasses. “But as far as squirrels are concerned—and clearly, Fred, you have in mind Copley’s 1765 Henry Pelham (Boy with a Squirrel) in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts—the squirrel wasn’t an unusual subject in the mid-eighteenth century. As you know, there are other Copleys with squirrels in them. The portrait of Daniel Verplanck in the Metropolitan’s collection; the portrait of Mrs. Theodore Atkinson from 1765, I forget where it is, but the husband is at the Rhode Island School of Design. No doubt there are others.
    â€œMy point, Fred, is that there was plenty of contemporaneous precedent. Copley’s sitters were not the only portrait subjects who wanted to be immortalized in the intimate company of squirrels. Why should this fragment not be by William Williams? You recall Williams’s portrait of Deborah Hall, or Hill, with a squirrel and roses, at the Brooklyn Museum? Williams was English, but he was active in these colonies between 1746 and 1776 when he, like Copley, inferred that there was personal and professional risk to remaining here.”
    Clayton Reed turned the painting over so as to look at its face again.
    â€œI see no immediate reason to think this is either American or even done over here. I could show you a Joseph Highmore from the same period, as English as Westminster Bridge: Portrait of a Boy with a Pet Squirrel, which was sold out of New York within the past few years. That picture, which was entire, incidentally, brought about five thousand dollars.”
    Clay was on a roll, as if he’d had a premonition Fred would give him the chance, and he’d been studying the subject of the arboreal rodent in eighteenth-century portraiture in England and her colonies—and Fred had walked into his trap.
    The squirrel as subject caught his interest, not the money expended. In fact, a cavalier disregard for the reputed financial value of paintings they cared about was one of the things Fred and Clayton held in common. Fred cared about the thing: the wrenching violence, held in suspension, that makes up a work of art. And Clayton—well, Clayton cared about whatever it was he cared about, which Fred respected though he could not divine it. But both of them liked a puzzle.
    Fred took the cut fragment and pinned it by its original tacking edges to an empty place on the wall where he could see it from his desk. It felt like Copley. It had that naive juice and bounce and hope of the young Copley when he was striving to educate himself. “I’m going to work on it,” Fred said. “It takes my fancy. It may never be more than what we’re looking at.” If Clayton did not want to associate himself with this project, he had only to say so. That wouldn’t stop Fred.
    â€œIt does have a certain Colonial charm,” Clay admitted. He went upstairs and Fred got started.
    *   *   *
    By noon Fred was surrounded by books from Clayton’s library. He called Molly at