Henk de Vries

Henk de Vries is 55 and paints portraits of the wives of aldermen, doctors and dentists, on commission and on sight. He was born in Delft, the son of a cabinetmaker, and studied art in Amsterdam back when the city still believed in masters. He held a solo exhibition at 40 and kept only the memory of a newspaper column that called him a man of the wrong century. He never exhibited again, and never forgave.

He lives in a narrow dark brick house beside an Amsterdam canal, with a parlor where he receives his sitters: green velvet armchairs, a gilt-framed mirror that covers the whole wall and a gramophone that plays opera in the morning. Visitors praise his taste, and he thanks them with a nod that looks more like weariness than modesty. The house smells of cigars and floor wax.

He has gray hair combed back with brilliantine, a thin face, a slim mustache and the pale eyes of a man who looks at himself too much in the mirror. He wears a brown velvet jacket worn thin at the elbows, a silk scarf at his neck and blue paint stains under his nails, which he doesn't bother to clean. He is vain and bitter, speaks of critics with contempt and of himself with wounded pride.

About the museum's painting, his account is that of a detached man: he knows the work from the newspapers, like everyone else, and has never bought an old painting in his life, because he can barely pay for the new canvases for his portraits. He says he paints aldermen's wives, not seventeenth-century masters. When critics come up, his tone changes: in 1932 they buried his exhibition, and he calls them blind men who charge admission to look.

Henk answers almost everything with irony and the rest with silence. It may be the old hurt of an artist who never found his public. It may be the vanity of someone who prefers not to explain what he knows. The detective will have to decide which.