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My eldest daughter and her family are moving from a three-bedroom Art Deco semi with a garden and garage on the edge of a housing scheme to a top-floor tenement apartment in a trendy family orientated area of Glasgow. They’re having to increase their mortgage to do so but think that the benefits to their overall quality of life will be worth it, and if they move to my son-in-law’s native Como for a while, the apartment will be easy to rent out.
Surveying the contents of the garage, she messaged: “What shall I do with your big portrait, Mum?” When I was young I was painted quite often, mostly by my artist ex, because I was there and didn’t mind modeling for him. One of these, a back view of me glancing over my shoulder at the viewer, prompted a visiting national newspaper owner to say to my then husband: “Your wife is a very sexy woman…” When my midwife pal Hilary’s husband saw it he said: “Who’s getting the dirty look then?” “Probably you Gordon…” “Aye, right enough…”
But this wasn’t the portrait in question. The painting in the garage was the result of an arrangement in the early 2000s between a portrait-artist friend and my ex. She painted me and he modeled and cast a bust of her. For the painting I was seated in the corner of the dining room beside the fire, a picture of my father in the background, three roses on the mantel shelf representing my daughters and a book in my hands.
I would have preferred a smaller work but the artist worked on a large scale and, framed, it measured 4ft 4in x 3ft 2in. It was expertly painted: the background, seated figure, hair and hands were lovely but the face had an expression of trepidation which was unsettling. Life hadn’t been easy but I’d thought of myself as a resilient and cheerful person. The painting revealed a truth, as good portraiture should, but it was hard to live with. At first we hung the work in the dining room but after a while moved it into the hall, then on to the stairwell and eventually into the attic where it stayed until November 2018.
The painting revealed a truth, as good portraiture should, but it was hard to live with
After four-and-a-half years of devastating heartbreak, anger and despair for everyone, the divorce was in its final stages and a lawyer sent me a long list of items including furniture, paintings and sculptures to choose from. My Provençal cave house would almost fit in one room of the family home in Scotland, so I chose only fourteen things. These included photographs, a bust of my youngest daughter, a sculpture of a tortoise, my Aunt Carmen’s Japanese tea set, the children’s hymn book my dad inscribed for me the day I started school, two small paintings (copies by my ex of details from works by G.F. Watts and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes), a 1920s Art Deco peacock jardiniere and a full-length mirror. All of which could have fitted in the back of a car. I made it clear that I had no room for the big portrait or any other paintings, the enormous Fired Earth butcher’s block, the four-oven Aga, three carpets, two standard lamps, one tweed House of Bruar footstool — or anything else on the list.
I was working on the day of delivery and arranged for it to go to a friend’s house. “Huge truck’s arrived. Your stuff. There’s rather a lot,” said Ruth. “I’ll be over soonest,” I said, hoping to get half of it into the battered, twelve-year-old, three-door Seat Ibiza 1.9TDi Sport I was driving at the time. When I arrived, I couldn’t believe my ex’s generosity: everything I had asked for was there — as well as a lot I hadn’t. All the things I said I couldn’t accommodate — except the Aga, which would have been weird, and the hymn book, which couldn’t be found — were on Ruth’s lawn. In addition, there were six large paintings, five pieces of sculpture and forty big boxes. The boxes contained a twelve-piece Doulton dinner service, a carrier bag of old makeup, some almost empty bottles of shampoo, three boxes of tampons, a packet of Always Ultra (with wings), a chainsaw and just about everything else I’d touched during our twenty-eight-and-a-half-year marriage. I was, however, baffled by the fish kettle.
I kept what I could, sold the butcher’s block, binned a lot and took most of the rest of it, including a painting of me, nude from the waist up, to a charity shop, happy never to set eyes on any of it again. My daughters, like me, had no idea so much was being sent and wanted some of the things back. As soon as I could I arranged a van to return the items they wanted and the rest of the paintings — including the big portrait, which has been in my daughter’s garage ever since.
Last week I asked an old friend, Cooper Hay, an antiquarian bookseller in Glasgow and Edinburgh, if he had any idea where the painting, too big to be hung in a modest house, could be stored. He offered to help. I looked at a photo of the work for the first time in more than fifteen years. People tell me I look relaxed and well these days and I am mostly, but had the look of trepidation on my face in the portrait intensified?
