In honor of Casper’s “glop paintings” as Rosalie called them, we invented a painter named Gunzel van Glop. If we didn’t try to pass off my work as a real Dutch master, we figured none of us could go to jail.
We went after Casper with a multi-pronged attack. Aunt Lauren had delved into the exploits of a failed artist named Hans van Meegeren for a novel. He’d spent years creating a process to forge Vermeer paintings. Aunt Lauren sent for a near worthless seventeenth-century canvas. It was a pastoral view of a cow which would be nice except the perspective was such that the cow’s head took up three-fourths of the painting leaving the body the proper proportion for a dachshund. I had expected to feel guilty painting over something so old, but it was obvious I wouldn’t be cheating the art worl
