These islands

Dreams of wealth and art
July 19, 2001

when my father went senile, the Irish state put him in a home and told me to clear his Dalkey house.

One Saturday afternoon, I went to empty his garage. The interior was lit by a 20-watt light bulb. He put these horrible bulbs all over his house when he got Alzheimer's.

I opened the garage doors to let in the sunshine: that was when I noticed the picture frames, along the wall, containing reproductions of Manet and Van Gogh. There was also a hideous reproduction of the Mona Lisa I had never seen before. I would keep the frame, I decided, but the smiling one would have to be sent to the skip.

I took off the hardboard backing and discovered, to my surprise, there was a painting on the inside. It was of three sailing boats executed in a wonderful primitive style.

I took my seascape home and hung it on the wall. Visitors would often ask if I knew who had painted it.

"No idea," I would say truthfully.

For years this sufficed. Then I had a thought which was so stunningly obvious I couldn't see why it had taken me so long to have it. The artist, surely, was Alfred Wallis, the great English naive painter of seascapes who often worked on hardboard. Both my parents were Wallis fans. The first art exhibition I was ever taken to was the Wallis retrospective at the Hayward Gallery. When I was a child, we lived where Wallis worked. In those days, before the price of his work became stratospheric, you could pick one up cheap. My father, I presumed, had done exactly that.

"You know what," I said to my wife, "that's a Wallis." I summarised the preceding arguments.

"All right," she replied, "then how do you explain why your father used a priceless Wallis to back a reproduction of the Mona Lisa?"

The answer came effortlessly.

"He knew it was a Wallis when he bought it. But when the Alzheimer's came, he forgot it was and that's when he used it to back the Mona Lisa reproduction which, incidentally, because I don't remember from childhood, I know he must have got in later life."

The logic was perfect. How could it not be a Wallis? I found my dictionary of art. There were pages on the talented Cornishman. I greedily read the text. Paintings by Wallis were worth thousands. I spent the evening sipping whiskey and discussing with my wife the ways we could spend the money the auction of my painting would net us.

Obviously, with the painting unsigned, the next thing was to confirm it was a Wallis. I traced the curator of the exhibition I saw at the Hayward Gallery. Could he tell if mine was a Wallis? Of course, he said.

I hired a photographer who took a professional 10" x 8". I bought the world's most expensive Jiffy bag. Nothing but the best for my Wallis. I sent the photo off to the curator. Once he confirmed what I knew, I would be rich.

AS Byatt, someone told me, built a heated, open-air swimming pool with her Booker prize money and declared it was the best defence a writer could have against melancholy.

I decided that I too would build a pool and keep my blues away with the proceeds from my Wallis. I contacted contractors and solicited quotations. My five-year-old daughter, excited by the imminent arrival of what she called "the hot swimming pool," began planning a Barbie party at the pool side. Oh, those were happy days, chez G?bler.

A fortnight passed and the curator returned my photograph, enclosing a friendly letter. Yes, it was a seascape, he wrote, but there any resemblance to Alfred Wallis ended.

I gave my wife the letter.

"For once in my life I thought I'd be rich, and now it seems I won't," I said gloomily. "And how am I going to break the news there'll be no Barbie party?"

"But if it had been a Wallis," said my wife reasonably, "you'd have had to insure it, then decide when to sell, and where. This is better. We have a lovely picture and no worries."

But I was beyond consolation. I felt like the couple who lost their winning lottery ticket. I smarted with the injustice of it. My mood wouldn't lift for weeks after.

One evening, masochistically thumbing through my dictionary of art, I came on a reference to the writer, JP Donleavy, sometime close friend and neighbour of my father. Donleavy painted and the illustration accompanying the entry was uncannily similar to my seascape. My heart soared. I had a Donleavy. Granted it wasn't a Wallis but still, it was something.

"I think we have a Donleavy," I said, passing the book to my wife.

She scanned the entry and asked, "What are you going to do?"

"Nothing," I said.

I'd learnt my lesson. I'd get years of pleasure imagining it might be a Donleavy, even if wasn't. Why risk losing that happiness by doing something as ridiculous as looking for the truth?