Charmed Lives by Michael Korda

Author:Michael Korda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

MY FATHER’S new house did very little to cheer me up. It is hard to call a place home when you’ve never seen it before, and though there was certainly a room for me, as promised, I felt a stranger here. The chief feature of the house (and no doubt the one that had attracted Vincent) was a huge glassed-in studio, fifty by fifty feet and almost three stories high, around which the house had been designed by its first owner, a Victorian portrait painter. Some of his belongings still sat in the studio, gradually being submerged by the vast tide of my father’s possessions. The most remarkable survivor of the house’s former occupant was a life-size articulated wooden horse, complete with a saddle and stirrups, and designed so that the horse could be adjusted in any position—standing, trotting, even rearing up on its hind legs. A comfortable set of steps was attached to it so that the subject of a painting could climb into the saddle without effort, and the saddle itself was specially padded for long sittings. In this way Victorian military figures had their portraits painted on horseback, in the position of their choice. A specialist would later paint in the horse itself. A set of tailor’s dummies stood against the far wall, on which the subject’s uniform could be fitted, complete with all his decorations, so that the painter’s students could add these laborious but essential details to the painting as finishing touches. The studio, in fact, constituted a kind of production line for Victorian official portraiture, in which the painter himself merely dictated the pose, drew the general outlines on the canvas, and painted in the face and hands. Two sittings were sufficient for a life-size portrait, in these circumstances, provided the subject gave all the necessary information about the type, color and general configuration of his horse, and left behind his uniform and his medals for a few days. This approach to painting fascinated my father, partly because it very closely resembled a primitive version of moviemaking. He carefully preserved these relics of the past.

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