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Boss was a peculiar man—as an art dealer, he was ruthless with his suppliers, customers and help, but as gentle as St. Francis with the birds, and a most conscientious catch-and-release fisherman. He had a few wild tales to tell from the latter hobby. One of them should give the flavor of his exploits. It seems that a buddy and he had rented an exceedingly old, small, wooden outboard-powered runabout to do some lake fishing in a very isolated area up north. They had gotten ready early, loaded the boat and motored well out across the water, when a strong tug on the tiller took the entire transom (the rear end of the boat, to which the engine is clamped) away from the hull in a single movement. After saving the motor, they immediately turned it off and dove forward to keep the boat afloat, but then they were reduced to paddling a severely nose-down hull back where they came from, against a rising wind. They made it, but just barely, and had some very strong words for the old fart who owned that death-trap. His formal education was limited, and I know he has regretted its narrowness all his life. Certainly, there is no doubting his intelligence. Fishing is his one area of intensive expertise, his only hobby, about which he knows more than anyone I am ever likely to meet, and of which he can speak at greater length, with deeper feeling, than he could ever devote to his actual business. I’ve seen this in others, of course, but in him the gulf was of such a magnitude as to make him appear to be two wholly separate people. He was, at the time, and no doubt still is, a divided soul, but his vanity cannot bring him to openly confront the shortfall. When he was in the right mood, he could deliver the smoothest sales pitch I’ve ever heard. I will never be able to equal the unctuous tone of reassurance that he could adopt, when he could see a customer who needed only a little nudge to pay for something that they obviously craved. Watching him, and listening carefully to the way he modulated his voice, was an education in the power of gentle, but calculated, persuasion. As part of my job, we went to many auctions, even as far from home as Sudbury, but one afternoon, just for a break in the monotony, I accompanied him downtown to what was billed as a “major” art auction. By his judgement, it turned out to be as phony as any of the others, where high-priced works are often “sold” to mythical “buyers” in order to boost, or at least maintain, the value of the artist’s oeuvre, regardless of whether the poor soul is dead or alive. The object of concern here is the net worth of the current owners, of course, not the reputation of the artist.
Boss doubted severely that this is what actually happened. I’m not qualified to judge this particular instance; I now know that faking a sale at an auction is a lot easier than making a sale, and it happens when the bidding is too slack to satisfy the seller or the auctioneer. Despite the fakery, it was amusing to sit at a distance (by prior instruction) and watch Boss gladhanding his cronies, most of whom seemed to be doing little bidding. He did none at all, which I’m sure was his intention from the start; it was purely a social event for him—to see and be seen.
One of Boss’s older daughters helped me with an assignment that required me to spend a few days at the zoo, getting close shots of the more interesting animals. It was a short drive away, but would have been a killer walk, especially with the equipment. |
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That night it was the turn of A. J. Casson, the last survivor of the Group of Seven at his death several years earlier, still justly beloved for his exacting depictions of small-town Ontario. Two or three of those townscapes went on the block that night, two of which were shown to fetch something in the neighborhood of $30,000 each.
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