Charlotte is seated on a stool, she is wearing a nice, off-gold top with a similar color of slacks. Her makeup is tasteful and her jewelry the same. She has one leg up on a rung of the stool and her hands rest on that knee. She is sitting near a decent sized painting which is perched on a stand, it is only about two feet long and shows a wonderfully colorful image of a tree and a house and some small hills. Standing beside it is a thin, middle aged man, his light colored hair absent on the top of his head but long on the sides. He pushes glasses up his nose and is very aware of the camera. Behind them, a vast crowd of people fill a large room, and although they are cleared away from the painting, there are still plenty of people standing and watching. Charlotte begins speaking.
“Now this is a very lovely piece. Why don’t you start off and tell me how you came about it?”
The man by the painting wrings his hand in front of him for a moment. “Well, my father passed away recently, and my brothers and sisters and I were going through his things and up in the attic, amongst all the rubbish and things, we found this. And we thought it was quite nice.”
“Did you do any research on it?”
“Well we tried. There is a signature on it.” The man leans across the painting to point at a signature near the left corner. The camera shows a close up of it for the audience. “But none of us could quite read it properly. I think it says S. Bergnec.”
Charlotte smiles politely, because the man is obviously wrong. “Well, now it doesn’t say S. Bergnec. It actually says G. Braque, for Georges Braque.” Her pronunciation of the name is perfect. “Braque was an artist, a French artist in the first half of the 20th century, and was actually one of the founders of cubism.”
The man smiles, and his eyebrows raise excitedly. “You don’t say.”
“Yes! In fact I can tell you a lot of about this piece. This is one of his earlier works, and I would actually date it around 1906 or 1907, because that was when Braque was staying at a small village in France call L’Estaque, and he painted many things there and I think this is one of them.” Charlotte takes a moment to admire the painting. “It really is lovely, such wonderful use of color and light, it’s just so very happy and peaceful looking. You can almost smell this olive tree here, for indeed it is an olive tree… It feels like sunset or sunrise, doesn’t it?” She looks from the painting to the man. “Now tell me about your father. He must have been a very interesting man to have this up in his attic all that time.”
“He was an all right sort. A hard worker. Moved around from job to job but always managed to feed his family.”
“And how do you suppose he came by this?”
The man shrugs. “Something he picked up somewhere, junk shop or something. None of us had ever seen it before.”
Charlotte is silent in thought for a moment, because that sort of answer is not rare. “Now about its value…” She clears her throat and then looks at the man, giving him a slightly mischievous look. “What would you say if I told you that, just around the time of the new millennium, a painting by this artist, from around this time in his life, sold at Christy’s for about…” She pauses for drama. “…four million dollars?”
The man stumbles back a step and places his hands on his head in disbelief. Some people behind them gasp and chatter to themselves. Charlotte just smiles and turns back to the painting.
“Now I can’t promise you’d get the same today, given the American market, but…” She smirks. “You should really get this insured, if I remember correctly, the one that sold at Christy’s was stolen from a museum in Paris about twenty years ago. But that was L'Olivier Près de l'Estaque, and not…” Charlotte’s eyes narrow as she looks at the painting and remembers. The sides of her mouth fall into an unpleasant look and she slowly turns her head to look at the man. “The stolen one was called Olive Tree Near Estaque… and it hasn’t been seen since, not for twenty years…”
The man falls silent, and together they look at the painting of a very lovely olive tree. The crowd begins to chatter more. Someone off camera can be heard calling for security and the camera turns off.