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Myatt too had copied a variety of masters for his art studies, sitting for hours in museums, sketching in front of a Rembrandt or a Reynolds. Now he was simply trying to turn a profit from his copyist’s gifts. As long as his clients were willing to pay £150 or more (the price depended on the size and complexity of the commission), he did his best to accommodate. Rarely did he hear from clients a second time, but he didn’t take this as a measure of his talent. After all, they were not serious collectors. There was the occasional art lover who couldn’t afford the real thing, but his clients for the most part were cultural tourists, mall safarians who weren’t ashamed to buy a painting that would go nicely with the curtains. In the same vein, hundreds of reproductions of famous paintings were routinely made for high-end hotels, interior decorators, and château owners.

After Myatt’s ad had run a few times, he picked up the phone one day to hear a polished voice speaking with perfect diction and a Cambridge accent that telegraphed the privilege of the English upper classes. The caller introduced himself as Dr. John Drewe, a London-based physicist who wanted to commission a piece.

“I want a nice Matisse,” he said, without being too specific. “Something colorful, memorable, not too large.”

Myatt said he could have one ready within a couple of weeks.

“Perfect,” said Drewe. “Would you mind bringing it into the city for me?”

Myatt agreed to meet the professor at the Euston train station, one of London’s main terminals, in a fortnight or so.

He finished the painting one day in late summer, a vivid little canvas with two colorful figures in the center. During the two-hour journey past farmlands and ruins and tidy backyards with minuscule gardens, through the outskirts of London and row upon row of cramped two-story brick houses, he could smell the varnish under the black plastic wrapper.

Soon after he sat down at the station pub with the Matisse, Myatt felt a tap on the shoulder. It was Drewe, a tall man wearing a good mohair coat and handmade leather shoes, and sporting a rather dated Dirk Bogarde haircut from the 1950s. Myatt thought it was peculiar and a bit showy.

“Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Drewe,” he said.

“Call me John,” said the professor.

Drewe ordered beers as Myatt pulled down the plastic wrapper and showed him the top half of the Matisse.

“Very nice,” said Drewe. “Exactly what I was looking for.” He handed Myatt an envelope containing his payment in cash and proposed a toast to Matisse.

Drewe said he was a university lecturer in nuclear physics and worked as a consultant for the Ministry of Defence. He was developing two new technologies for the military: One was a compressed-gas propulsion system for use on nuclear submarines, the other a landmineproof, battle-ready fire-suppression packet that could be installed beneath military vehicles.

Despite his breathtaking set of academic credentials, Drewe was a skilled and amusing raconteur with none of the haughtiness Myatt had expected from such an upmarket city gent. Drewe joked about the government ministers he met in the course of his job and spoke breezily about his work as a scientist and inventor. Myatt’s life had been reduced to a run-down farmhouse and two young children, so chatting with Drewe was like a shot of adrenaline. Myatt found him hypnotic, a combination of charm and challenge, able to process and expand upon any topic of conversation. The professor spoke so quickly and with such authority on such a wide variety of subjects that Myatt could hardly keep up. “It was like going to the pictures,” he later recalled. “He just took me out of my world.”

Drewe ordered a second round and asked Myatt whether he would paint him another early-twentieth-century work, this one in the style of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Myatt agreed, and they shook on it.

On his way home on the train, Myatt reflected on what had been a very good first meeting. It dawned on him that he