“I don’t have time now, Gabriel. I have a ten-thirty appointment at the gallery.”

“Cancel your appointment, Julian. Tell me about that painting.”

ISHERWOOD CROSSED the footbridge over the lake and headed toward his gallery in St. James’s. Gabriel shoved his hands a little deeper into his coat pockets and followed after him.

“Ever cleaned him?” Isherwood asked.

“Vincent? Never.”

“How much do you know about his final days?”

“About what everyone knows, I suppose.”

“Bollocks, Gabriel. Don’t try to play the fool with me. Your brain is like the Grove Dictionary of Art.”

“It was the summer of 1890, wasn’t it?”

Isherwood gave a professorial nod of his head. “Please continue.”

“After Vincent left the asylum in Saint-Rémy, he came to Paris to see Theo and Johanna. He visited several galleries and exhibits, and stopped at Père Tanguy’s artists’ supply store to check on some canvases he had in storage there. After three days he began to get restless, so he boarded a train for Auvers-sur-Oise, about twenty miles outside Paris. He thought Auvers would be ideal, a quiet country setting for his work but still close to Theo, his financial and emotional lifeline. He took a room above Café Ravoux and placed himself in the care of Dr. Paul Gachet.”

Gabriel took Isherwood’s arm and together they darted through an opening in the traffic on the Mall and entered the Marlborough Road.

“He started painting immediately. His style, like his mood, was calmer and more subdued. The agitation and violence that characterized much of his work at Saint-Rémy and Arles was gone. He was also incredibly prolific. In the two months Vincent stayed in Auvers he produced more than eighty paintings. A painting a day. Some days two.”

They turned into King Street. Gabriel stopped suddenly. Ahead of them, waddling along the pavement toward the entrance of Christie’s auction house, was Oliver Dimbleby. Isherwood turned suddenly into Bury Street and picked up where Gabriel had left off.

“When Vincent wasn’t at his easel, he could usually be found in his room above Café Ravoux or at the home of Gachet. Gachet was a widower with two children, a boy of fifteen and a daughter who turned twenty-one during Vincent’s stay in Auvers.”

“Marguerite.”

Isherwood nodded. “She was a pretty girl and she was also deeply infatuated with Vincent. She agreed to pose for him—unfortunately with out her father’s permission. He painted her in the garden of the family home, dressed in a white gown.”

“Marguerite Gachet in the Garden,” Gabriel said.

“And when her father found out, he was furious.”

“But she posed for him again.”