Sunday, February 13, 2005

Memoir of a classic red


I can see how they loved you.

Why Dad, as he often told people, made that bet in the Lisdoonvarna Post Office that he'd take you out that day. Why he took you all the way home in three months, a short time, but long enough when petrol was only for Government business or funerals and even train journeys were rationed. Courtships over a distance in wartime tended to be short.

A classic red, the artist Sean O'Sullivan said later, and a classic red he painted. There was a lot of truth in Dad's joke that he only painted presidents afterwards. The presidents then were always men and he wouldn't have to deal with comparisons with as close to perfection as he was going to get. He was never going to get so close again and he probably knew it.

I never knew him, of course. I was there all right, just about, but when you're painting a classic red in a classic formal pose you don't show what's inside. Even if you know there's something, and you probably never told him. I knew the other bits in the picture. The chair was in the hall all the time I was growing up. It was later relegated to the nursery when that was made into a guest room. The fox stole thrown carelessly over its corner eventually made meals for moth. The brooch you wear again these days — what was fashionable then for the young now graces the old, after a long time when it suited nobody.

He knew the house. He came to you rather than you going to his studio — it was still somewhat difficult to travel to Dublin, even though the war was over. By coming down to Kilcullen he could stay as a guest on and off until the commission was completed. He could also more accurately size the painting to the room where it was to hang, when it was the room where you and he and Dad would relax with other friends in many an evening.

There was always a serenity in that room after the painting was finally hung. That's how I remember it growing up. You were so beautiful in that instant he took months to capture. Somewhere in the formal pose there was a sense of absolute contentment in which we all basked for a long time. Even when we had made homes of our own, we would come back and sit in the ease of the beginnings of your gentle smile which, like the Mona Lisa, hasn't quite reached your mouth. But its beginnings are in your eyes.

Then the young relation with pretensions to interior design made over the house and dismissed the O'Sullivan to entertain the customers in the restaurant. The room at home was never the same. Nobody could seem to sit quietly there for long. The matched pair of chalks portraits of you and Dad which the relation had commissioned from his friend, the coming artist, both glowered at anyone who dared to try to be comfortable.

The restaurant business, though, was never as good before or since the period when you gazed from its wall. You're not there any more, and you're not back at home either. For many years after the picture left the restaurant, it was carefully wrapped and stored. The National Gallery would have liked it for its O'Sullivan collection, but they didn't have room to hang it and wouldn't have for the foreseeable future. Which was just as well, as it turned out, because the painting now graces a room in my brother's home abroad. Though his is a lively family home, that particular room is restful.

Dad's gone now for years, and so are you, though much later. You'd stayed with him through the normal ups and downs of your matrimony, and you always loved him, I know. But possibly never more than in some moment that the artist managed to capture. Dad must have been standing at O'Sullivan's shoulder just then, and I've often wondered what he said that was to cause you to begin to smile, and so inadvertently give to so many people a sense of serenity for all those following years.

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