The Provenance Series · Book One
Pentimento
The past doesn't stay buried. It shows through.
Dr Alec Muir authenticates paintings, and nobody in Scotland is better at seeing what lies beneath. When a conservation officer is found dead in her Glasgow flat, DI Ellen Docherty starts asking careful questions that lead back to Paisley, to a family house full of altered photographs, and to a man who has done this before.
The opening
The scaffolding on Fotheringay Road had been up for six weeks, and Mara Kerr had learned to read it the way other people read weather. This morning it told her nothing had moved since Friday.
Category B listed, 1887, a tenement that had survived two world wars and a botched harling job in the seventies and was now, apparently, going to be undone by a leaking gutter nobody had looked at since devolution.
She liked the argument of it. The building told you what was wrong with it if you looked properly, and then you told the owners, and the owners argued, and somewhere in the argument was the truth, usually.
Sometimes the surface is just the surface. Sometimes there's nothing hidden underneath it at all, and looking harder just means you're the one putting something there that was never actually part of the object.Pentimento
A pentimento is the trace of an earlier image beneath a painting's surface, where the artist changed their mind and painted over it. Time and thinning paint let the first version back out. The word comes from the Italian for repenting.
