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fired me, and ordered me to leave at once. An hour later, Sonny came in and asked him where I was. When the assistant informed Sonny that he had fired me for not saying “Good morning,” Sonny went out of his mind. He fired him on the spot and begged me to return. I was stubborn and refused. I had some savings and decided to say adieu.
    I now had more time to attend the exhibitions of old master paintings at Parke-Bernet. This helped me to expand into Dutch painting. I was attracted by the river and harbor scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael. Their tranquil scenes, painted in cool blues, greens, and grays, portray people going about their work on the rivers. Not only was I convinced that I could paint them, but there was the added advantage that many of the originals didn’t have cracks, thereby saving me the tedious job of engraving them into the panels. The wood panels they were painted on were, again, just like the ones commonly used as the bottoms of drawers from furniture of the period.
    I had installed a small drafting table in my studio, and I completed four pieces, three of them river scenes with the initials and dates of van Goyen and other artists in his circle. The terrace was ideal for putting the pictures out in the sun to dry and harden. Then I applied a varnish, which I tinted with pigments simulating an antique patina. As a finishing touch, I took something I’d seen Sonny fooling around with one day, a very fine powder he mysteriously referred to as “French earth.” I finally discovered that the substance was rotten stone , a superfine powder made out of volcanic rock. It’s commercially used as a polish when mixed with oil, but when applied as a dry powder it has an outstanding ability to create a hazy, dusty look in anything it’s rubbed onto. So after I applied the final patina on each picture, I rubbed the “dust” on and blew it off. The result was amazing.
    The fourth painting was a fine portrait of a Flemish gentleman, done on the Ephron panel I’d been saving. The sitter’s face was delicately creased with the lines of age; a band of gray hair framed the sides of his balding head. Dressed in the usual pleated tunic buttoned up to the neck, he gazed stoically out at the viewer. After I gave it a “dusting” and placed the panel back in the antique frame, I was astonished by how much visual credibility the frame had added to the final effect.
    When I’d worked at Sonny’s, I had become acquainted with Walter P. Chrysler Jr., scion of the automobile family. As a hobby, he had a gallery on upper Madison Avenue, and he invited me to drop in sometime. Chrysler was forever dragging in paintings—which he imagined were lost masterpieces—for restoration. He was in the habit of deluding himself with ludicrously optimistic attributions—believing, for example, that the painting he’d just found was in reality an unsigned Rembrandt, Titian, or Vermeer. In short, he was the ideal candidate to buy one of my “Flemish” paintings. This time, I took a photo of the painting with me and dropped in at his gallery with a story that I was disposing of the piece for a party who wanted to remain unnamed. Chrysler took the bait and asked me to bring the painting in. The next day, I returned with the painting and was soon collecting fifteen hundred bucks cash in the back room of his gallery.

    From that point on, I understood that a fine frame is to a masterpiece what a Saint Laurent original is to a beautiful girl. Without delay, I put the three “Dutch” paintings into my shoulder bag and headed up to Sixty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. Sometime back, I had noticed a dusty-looking second-floor shop that displayed a single antique picture frame in its window. The sign above the window read, in clear, elegant lettering, E. V. Jory, Picture Frames. When I entered, I