What’s Her Story?
When I was a child, a portrait of my great grandmother hung in our living room. I sat on our velveteen blue sofa and stared up at soft blue eyes that looked back at me, eyes that followed me across the room. My blue eyes. Or so my father said.
When I was a teenager, my father gave me her Bible. A poem she wrote was glued to the inside cover, so I asked my father if she was a poet. He peered over his newspaper, raised a quizzical eyebrow, and grumbled an unintelligible response. My curiosity about her (and his lack of knowledge) sparked a hunger to know more about not just her, but also the time and the place she lived in.
If I had been smarter (and a better writer), I might have written a story about her, like so many others who have stood before a portrait and dreamed about the life of the sitter. Like Girl With a Pearl Earring, What the Ermine Saw, or My Last Duchess, the dramatic poem by Robert Browning that imagined the life and death of poor Lucrezia de’ Medici (who was probably poisoned by her husband). I wonder how long Browning stood in front of Bronzino’s portrait of Lucrezia before the lines of that famous poem began to form in his mind?
I mostly forgot about the portrait of my grandmother after I grew up and moved out of my parents house. And then suddenly, there it was again…
When my daughter was born, her gaze locked onto mine in those first moments after her arrival into the world and I saw those same blue eyes, staring back at me from across the generations. Same as it ever was.
I was surprised to learn that babies engage with faces immediately. If presented with anything that doesn’t resemble a face, newborns will lose interest quickly. By the age of 6 months, an infant can distinguish between different faces. Somewhere along the way we get so good at faces that it takes us 1/10th of a second to decide whether we trust a face, or not.
Faces MATTER to us, probably more than we realize. The next time you walk into an art gallery, note the time you spend in front of a portrait. Notice the story that begins to take shape in your mind when you stand before a face that has been immortalized in paint.
Portraits add value to our lives in so many ways. Of course they honor the past, those who came before us. But they also help us to understand ourselves, who we are, where we came from. They serve as inspiration. They can even spark a love of history, or portrait painting, in a great grandchild. Best of all, portraits tell a story that might otherwise be forgotten.
So…
What’s your story?