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  I carefully get out of bed, and feel in the darkness for a sweater to pull over my pyjamas. I hear Kate’s head turn enquiringly towards me on the pillow.

  ‘Just looking something up,’ I whisper.

  In the cold kitchen I turn on the fan heater and slide my pile of books back towards me.

  Where are we? Yes, De Twelff maenden in the list of Jongelinck’s sixteen Bruegels. The list was compiled because in 1566 Jongelinck offered them as part of the security for a debt. The money was owed not by Jongelinck himself, but by someone called Daniel de Bruyne – 16,000 guilders to the City of Antwerp for unpaid tax on wine. Did de Bruyne ever repay the money? Was the security recovered? There’s no record. But now I begin to move on in history. In 1594, twenty-eight years later, long after Bruegel had died, the City made a dutiful presentation to the Governor of the Netherlands, Archduke Ernst von Habsburg, which included 6 Taffeln von den 12 monats Zeiten. Could these six pictures of the twelve months be part of Jongelinck’s security? It seems they could, because the inventory made of the Archduke’s estate after his death the following year lists what must be the same six pictures, now described as Sechs Taffell, von 12 Monathenn des Jars von Bruegel.

  So at this point, a quarter of a century after Bruegel’s death, there were six pictures of the twelve months extant. Six remaining out of twelve, with half of the total already lost? Or could it be six remaining out of six, because there never were twelve?

  I’m not the first person to have had this idea. Tolnay hit upon it in 1935. ‘Everything becomes plain’, he says, ‘if one sets them beside the miniatures that inspired them, when one notices that Bruegel has put together in each picture scenes which illustrate two successive months.’

  Six pictures, each representing not one month but two – this is what all the apparent ambiguities of his iconography demonstrate, according to Tolnay. I allow myself to dwell on this idea for a moment. Six pictures: three in Vienna, one in Prague, one in New York and one shortly to be occupying most of the end wall of this very room for a precious day or two, before moving on to take its rightful place in the National Gallery in London. To have found one of seven missing links in Bruegel’s great chain would be a glorious discovery, that would light up the rest of my days on this earth. But to have found the one single one that completes it …!

  This is what I’ve had at the back of my mind all through my struggles with the iconography. It’s the conclusion I leapt to, in my simplicity, I have to confess, in the Churts’ breakfast-room. It’s what I thought I remembered from Vienna: that there was only one picture missing. The trouble is that none of the others, except Bianconi, agrees with Tolnay. I hunt through the remaining volumes, the pages clumsy beneath my impatient fingers. Glück, writing two years after Tolnay, with all the majesty implied by the royal plural, insists that ‘we share the opinion of most scholars’ in staying with twelve. Stechow, in 1970, believes that ‘it is becoming more and more probable’ that there were twelve. Grossmann, on whom Stechow based himself, is still agreeing with Glück in 1973. Friedländer, my beloved Max, even in the 1976 edition of Early Netherlandish Painting, still accepts twelve without question or discussion. But then Bruegel is right at the end of his period, tacked on in Volume 14, already out of the range suggested by the title.

  Genaille goes in the opposite direction. He’s troubled by the fact that only five were being listed in a Vienna inventory by 1653, which for some reason seems to suggest to him that there may never have been more than five in the first place. Glück, disturbingly, appears to agree that the series of twelve was ‘probably never completed’, though how many Bruegel actually did paint he doesn’t suggest. Grossmann, even more disturbingly, reports the discovery of a later inventory of pictures in Brussels, which suggests that even a century after the event, when there were at least five and possibly six of the paintings known to be in Vienna, there were still six in Brussels.

  Twelve, or six? Seven missing, or one? One-seventh of the deficit about to be brought to light? Or all of it? I sit at the kitchen table, consumed by this terrible new anguish that seems to have taken root in my life.

  When my eye first fell on that picture at the Churts, I have to confess, everything seemed so simple because I thought I knew for certain exactly how many pictures in the series were missing. It was absolutely clear and simple, and the figure wasn’t seven. Or nine, or six, or five, or four. It was one.

  Why was I so sure? What did I see on that bright summer’s day in Vienna seven years ago that put this idea so firmly in my head? The museum catalogue, presumably. Or perhaps one of those brief explanatory panels that galleries put up on the wall. This was, after all, before my serious interest in art began. Indeed, that hour in the Bruegel room, now I look back, may have been the very beginning of it, and the future course of my life turns out to depend upon reconstructing its details. But, as with so many things at the back of your mind that seem clear and simple until you turn to look at them directly, all the clarity and simplicity are vanishing moment by moment as I read.

  I need to fly to Vienna and take another look at the panel. Or else find a copy of the catalogue. Where will they have one in this country? Not in the organic farm-produce shop at Castle Quendon, that’s for sure. Not in the mini-market by the petrol station at Cold Kinver.

  The door opens. Kate stands in the doorway, blinking in the light, watching me more uneasily than ever, waiting for me to explain.

  But all I say is: ‘Will you drive me to the station again in the morning?’

  By quarter past eleven I have it in front of me. I’m in the National Art Library, inside the V & A, sitting at a serious and scholarly leather-topped desk surrounded by PhD candidates doing their theses on Escher and Cimabue and railway advertising, by art dealers trying to track down provenances and attributions for their purchases.

  It takes me most of the day to puzzle it out, because my halting German is such an inadequate guide to the amazing convolutions of Austrian academic style. The case made out by Demus, Klauner and Schütz, the editors of the Kunsthistorisches catalogue, is complex, and depends heavily upon a word by word re-examination of the text of the documents, mostly in an archaic German which is even further out of my reach. One of Grossmann’s arguments they counter by replacing a missing ‘and’; one of Glück’s by putting an ‘of’ in place of an erroneous ‘with’. They demonstrate that the French version of a letter written from Vienna in 1660, nearly a century after the paintings were done, which gives an account of seeing six pièces de l’ancien Bruegel, qui représentent la diversité des douze Mois de l’ Année, and a Spanish version of it which also mentions twelve months, must be anterior to, and more reliable than, the Latin and Flemish texts, which refer to six pictures representing only six months, with the implication that the other six months (and six pictures) are missing. The inventory cited by Grossmann showing six still in Brussels at the same period they dismiss as a mistake. After this ‘as we believe permanent repair of the weak points of the record,’ they consider that the identity of Jongelinck’s twelff maenden with the six pictures in Vienna described as showing the twelve months of the year is definitely established.

  By the end of the afternoon I’ve also found a no less magisterial survey of the problem by Buchanan, in the Burlington Magazine, who concurs. Grossmann and Stechow seem to be holding out for twelve, but by 1953, I discover, even Glück, in a later book on Bruegel, has come round to six, because he thinks it impossible that the City of Antwerp would have presented the Archduke with an incomplete set.

  The tide’s turned, no doubt about it, though the iconography still won’t work out smoothly. Tolnay makes his six pairs possible by beginning the year with December/January. But Demus, Klauner and Schütz, in the catalogue, point out that the traditional beginning of the year was in March. Glück agrees that the Netherlandish year began at Easter, but this leads him now to identify The Gloomy Day as March/April, and Haymaking as May/June – so in his view there’s no gap in April
and May, and he expects the missing picture to show November /December. Buchanan, however, cites a drawing by Pieter Stevens, freely based on The Gloomy Day, which is inscribed by the artist with the words Februarius and Mert. Demus, Klauner and Schütz believe that the difficulties can be resolved by accepting that the cycle breaks the year up in a less formal way than is permitted by the schema of months or pairs of months. They cite an old tradition according to which the year was divided into six parts, and they believe that Genaille is right in thinking that each picture catches ‘the characteristic moment’ of what Novotny suggests is Early Spring, Early Summer, High Summer, Autumn and Midwinter.

  Which once again leaves Spring. High Spring. And this is what I have; there’s no doubt whatever left in my mind, if ever there seriously was. It’s something else, too. The old Julian year, which was still the basis of the calendar until Pope Gregory reformed it in 1582, seventeen years after the series was painted, began just after the vernal equinox, on 25 March. So my two months, if one had to be precise, are 25 March to 25 May. In other words, the missing picture, the picture I’ve found, is not just one of the series. It’s the first. It’s the point of departure for the whole enterprise.

  Before I leave the library I stop at the shelves where the various records of sale-room prices are ranged. Not that I’m thinking about money, but it’s impossible not to be curious. Difficult to find any point of reference, of course. No major painting by Bruegel has come on to the market since The Corn Harvest was acquired in Paris by the Metropolitan in 1919. In 1955 a small, very early work, Landscape with Christ appearing to His Disciples at the Sea of Galilee, emerged from the castle of the unnamed family that had owned it for the previous century and a half, was identified by Tolnay, and in 1989 was sold at Sotheby’s for £780,000. In New York in 1990 a copy by Pieter Brueghel the Younger of one of his father’s major works, The Census at Bethlehem, fetched £1,200,000.

  Over a million pounds for a copy. So for an original … An original that opens and completes the great cycle of the year …

  But I’m not thinking about the money. I’m truly not.

  The Business Plan

  ‘Am I driving you to the station again?’ asks Kate neutrally over breakfast next morning, not looking at me.

  ‘No, no,’ I reassure her. Not that she gives any sign of being reassured, which is perhaps just as well, because my plans for today still don’t involve doing what she thinks I should be doing. ‘I thought I might go out for a walk. If that’s all right?’

  She doesn’t comment. Doesn’t ask where I’m going, or offer to come with me. Never mind – all will be made clear soon enough. When I get back from my walk, even, if all goes well.

  In any case, she probably knows where I’m going. I thought I’d walk there over the fields, rather than drive, to make it seem more offhand. It’s like the difficulty of contriving an accidental meeting with the woman one’s pursuing. In so far as I remember that phase of my life. Rushing over to the Churts in the car and crashing all the way up their drive to announce that I’ve found someone who’s interested in their Helen might suggest a suspiciously eager interest. Everything in this business, I imagine, depends upon all those little details of behaviour and manner that suggest dull, unsurprising normality. Everything in what business? Confidence trickery, I suppose, if one has to name it. No, that’s ridiculous. What I’m doing is what a painter does – what Bruegel’s doing in the cycle of the year; I’m constructing a plausible scenario. The scene will simply look easier and more natural if I start it by happening to drop in when I’m passing on one of my walks. I’ll appear out of the woods round the back somewhere. There’ll be mud on my boots – a sympathetic touch. And that means I’ll have to take them off at the door, and talk to him in my socks. An amusing little genre scene. I might even bump into him, countryman to countryman, as I wander absent-mindedly along brooding on nominalism, and he strolls about his estate with a gun in the crook of his arm, cogitating upon the life expectancy of pheasants and how to lower it.

  I trudge up from the valley bottom, through the great field where Laura wants to put her New Age festival. Where have we got to in the cycle of the present year? The first raw, blustering advances of Early Spring have exhausted themselves in a rather spectacular sequence of rainstorms, cold snaps, thunder and sudden snow showers, and we’ve not yet reached the great transformation scene in the next picture. We’re in an unillustrated no man’s land between the two, a raggedy come-and-go weather of patchy blue and white over patchy green and brown. The iconography’s not much help, either – it’s even more difficult to make sense of than Bruegel’s. In fact, I find it difficult to locate any iconography at all. There are no peasants to be seen at their labours, no gentry at their pleasures. The only visible creatures of any sort are cows, who lift their heads mournfully as I pass, mumbling dull, soundless monologues about the bovine condition, then carry on with the one traditional labour that characterizes this and every other month of the year – the production of cowpat.

  It’s real country all right, our valley, and I’ve grown rather fond of it in the two years we’ve been coming down here. But it’s a dull place compared with the kind of valleys they have in the Netherlands. Almost every valley there, if Bruegel’s to be believed, is overlooked by soaring crags, and has a river that winds past a village and a high-perched castle, with a distant view of the sea. Their springs are more springlike than ours. But of course Bruegel isn’t to be believed, not literally. He’s doing what I’m doing in my dealings with Tony Churt: constructing a fiction. Grossmann agrees with Novotny that the pictures in the cycle of the year are what he calls Mischlandschaften, composite landscapes, built up from elements either invented or observed separately in different places. All those crags are the souvenirs of Bruegel’s great trip to Italy. ‘When he travelled through the Alps,’ says van Mander, ‘he swallowed all the mountains and rocks, and spat them out again, after his return, on to his canvases and panels …’

  I stop as I reach the high ground at the edge of the woods, and turn back to look at the undramatic landscape I’m living in. No castles, no crags. Just gently sloping woods and fields. All the same, a landscape is what I see it as. It’s given form and identity by all the painted landscapes I’ve seen over the years. Which painter first saw landscape as landscape, and painted it for its own sake? Bruegel, according to Novotny, in the great cycle of the year, where for the first time in Western art landscape is given the rank of an independent subject.

  It had begun as the background to religious events. You can see two distant valleys, with crags and castles, and a river winding towards the sea, framing the Scenes from the Life of the Virgin and of Christ that Hans Memling painted in 1480. In the early part of the sixteenth century Joachim Patinir brought the landscape closer, and shrank the saints he showed living in it. It was Patinir who first established the characteristics of this wonderful land, with its dreamlike combination of Alpine crags and Flemish settlement, its valleys seen from the high ground, winding up through receding planes of blue to the sea and a horizon near the top of the canvas. What Bruegel did was to leave out the saints.

  Before Patinir and Bruegel this valley I’m standing in would have had no artistic use, even less than it now has economic use. Rough pasturage for a few cows now, it would then have been merely the low-rent location for a miracle or martyrdom, perhaps with Tony Churt as proprietor kneeling importantly in the foreground.

  I Patinirize it as I look at it, I Bruegelize it. A little practice for my project. I ennoble it with a line of crags. A river, a village, a castle. I paint in figures engaged in the appropriate labours. In the middle distance two boys got cheap from the local comprehensive on work experience are filling hoppers with pheasant feed. In the foreground a couple of investment bankers and the chairman of the local planning committee are shooting the pheasants the boys have raised. Through the window of the castle you can just see Tony Churt, putting in his application to the planning committee f
or a scramble track.

  But those six pictures of Bruegel’s aren’t simply an image of the revolving wheel of the here and now to which we’re bound; they’re offers of an escape from it. They’re travelogues, invitations au voyage, that lead us out of the flat lands of the north, out of the cold and wet, out of the mud, out of the dull daily round, to distant shores where the sun shines and things are different. So is the picture that I’m painting. I arrange the great diagonals that lead the eye out and up into the distance. I indicate the last bare branches of winter with the bitumen and carbonized walrus ivory that Netherlandish painters used for browns and blacks, then clothe them in the distilled verdigris and malachite with which they captured the elusive green tones, and touch in the sunstruck highlights with whitelead. I set the spring flowers blossoming with complex combinations of red mercuric sulphide and Zealand red madder, of poisonous yellow arsenic sulphide and the sweet yellow juices of broom, saffron, weld, aloes and dyer’s oak. I grind the crystals of copper carbonate, the azurite or verditer, the famous mountain blue for the receding planes of aerial perspective, and paint my way, blue by blue, up to the distant sea, where my ship lies waiting.

  I follow my own leisurely progress plane by plane up into the sunlit lands that lie before me, as I carry my picture off to hand over to the fictitious collector I’ve found to buy it, then, as I artlessly explain to Tony Churt, hang it on my own wall to enjoy it myself for a few days in transit; find myself falling in love with it; humbly raise several thousand pounds I can’t afford to buy my purchaser out and keep it for myself; become curious enough about it to take it to be examined by experts; am stunned to find that I’ve made one of the most important artistic discoveries of the century; behave with characteristic modesty as I receive public and professional recognition in equal measure; look with innocent amazement and heroic equanimity at the huge sums of money dangled in front of me; regretfully decide that I must let the picture go out of my possession to some institution where it can be properly looked after and seen by a wider public; nobly insist that it must remain in the country, even though this means accepting a considerable financial sacrifice; contribute a remarkably generous proportion of the proceeds to help good causes in the arts; perhaps even make a small but entirely uncalled-for donation to Tony Churt himself …