Legal tidied the commas. The emails came through in the right order: the scope letter, the timetable, the confidentiality, the references promised “by week's end,” and the line that mattered — the National Gallery would sponsor Windsor. That would take time. I didn't have to wait to begin.
I asked for fresh images of the picture's back — verso, frame, stretcher — and opened them one by one. Old frames confess more than forewords. Three labels, none generous. The newest had a telephone number that put it in the twentieth century. The oldest was thin stock, a rectangle with a ghosted oval where a seal had once been; enough ink survived to suggest a workshop and a district, but not a name.
Labels lie by omission, not commission. I listed what could be known without guessing: paper weight, cut, the way the adhesive bled into the grain, the faint track of a knife where someone had lifted a corner and thought better of it. Then I built a map that began where such things usually begin — framers — and ran outward.
Daybooks next. One notice half a century later repeated the title with a date that didn't belong — “after 1838” — the sort of confident error that tells you where the picture once sat on a wall and how long it sat there.
One line felt warmer than the rest: an invoice book that had survived a move and a flood, the ink uneven but legible enough to carry a balance due. “Portrait — frame and glass.” No artist named. The payer described, not identified: “Equerry to Her Majesty.” The date put it in the back half of 1838.
I laid the facts in a memo — facts first, adjectives later — and sent it to the National Gallery. Their reply was quick and tidy: thank you, proceed — with the tone of a room that had other fires to put out.