Writing Life

This past weekend, my wife and I visited an antiques mall in Carmichael, California. Early in our visit we came upon a cheap reproduction of Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting known as The Blue Boy. Right alongside The Blue Boy was a copy of a painting known as Pinkie, so called because its subject, a young girl, is wearing a pink bonnet on her head and a wide pink sash around her waist. Later on in our visit, we once again came upon Blue Boy and Pinkie, this time in the form of matching bas-relief wall-hangings. Kitschy copies of these two famous paintings, in a variety of media, are ubiquitous at garage sales, yard sales, flea markets, and antiques shops. Years ago, an antiques dealer told Julie and me that Pinkie and Blue Boy were both painted by Gainsborough and were portraits of a brother and his sister. For many years we assumed this to be true. Why else would they always be found together?

Actually, Blue Boy and Pinkie are not related to each other by blood – either their own blood or Gainsborough’s. The Blue Boy is believed to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a prominent English hardware merchant. It is a historical costume study. Though he posed for the painting around 1770, Buttall is pictured wearing clothing in the style of the previous century. Pinkie was painted nearly a quarter of a century after Blue Boy, in 1794, by Thomas Lawrence, another British painter. Gainsborough had been dead for twelve years by the time Pinkie came into existence. It is a portrait of Sarah Barrett Moulton, who was approximately eleven years old and wearing contemporary clothing when she posed for it. Thus, her clothing style and Blue Boy’s are separated from each other by more than a century and a half. Sarah was the daughter of a wealthy Jamaican plantation owner named Charles Barrett Moulton. She was born and raised in Jamaica but, shortly before posing for her portrait, traveled to England to further her education.

Tragedy befell the subjects of both paintings. Buttall inherited his portrait from his father, but was forced to surrender it when he filed for bankruptcy in 1796. Sarah Barrett Moulton’s fate was even sadder. She died, at approximately twelve years of age, in 1795, one year after Lawrence painted her. The cause of death is believed to have been whooping cough, possibly contracted from her brother Edward. Perhaps that is why Edward wound up acquiring her portrait for himself. Edward, who later changed his last name to Moulton-Barrett, eventually fathered one of the most famous poets in all of English literature, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Thus, Sarah Barrett Moulton, known as “Pinkie” to her family, was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s aunt. Alas, aunt and niece never knew each other. The poet was born roughly eleven years after the death of the famous portrait model.

It wasn’t consanguinity that linked Blue Boy and Pinkie for posterity. It was money. According to the Wikipedia, the two works had no association whatsoever until American railroad magnate Henry Edwards Huntington, acquired them both in 1921 and relocated them from England to the art gallery of his famous Huntington Library complex in Southern California. The British public was outraged by the sale of The Blue Boy, which was regarded as a national treasure. According to the Wikipedia 90,000 Britons came by to wish the painting a fond farewell when it was put on display in the National Gallery shortly before leaving Britain forever. Pinkie was not as well known nor as well loved as The Blue Boy at the time of its sale to Huntington, thus few tears were shed over her departure. It wasn’t until the two pictures were hanging together in the Huntington gallery that their obvious similarities caused them to become linked forever in the popular imagination. According to William Wilson, author of The Los Angeles Times Book of California Museums, Blue Boy and Pinkie are “the Romeo and Juliet of Rococo portraiture.” He further notes that “They have decorated cocktail coasters, appeared in advertisements, and stopped the show as the tableaux vivants at the Laguna Beach ‘Pageant of the Masters.’ For all that they remain intrinsically lovely…The subjects are certainly in the springtime of life, but their freshness is lent a certain poignancy by the rather grown-up garb that suggests both the transience of youth and the attempt to cling to it. Besides, both are extraordinarily fine pictures, easy and dramatic at once.”

When Julie and I first learned that Pinkie and Blue weren’t related, we were a bit shocked. We had thought of them as brother and sister for so long, that the discovery they were not related struck us as a cruel blow, sort of like discovering that the woman you thought was your grandmother was really just your grandfather’s longtime companion. But gradually we began to appreciate the fact that Pinkie and Blue’s actual relationship to each other is much more complex and fascinating than mere siblinghood. Pinkie and Blue found each other in adulthood, after they had each done quite a bit of living on their own. They were brought together not by blood but by love. Henry Huntington didn’t buy art as an investment. He was already fabulously wealthy when he began his career as a collector. Huntington bought art (and rare books, and other treasures) because he loved them and appreciated their intrinsic worth and beauty. And isn’t that a good description of marriage: a union of two people who love one another and appreciate each other’s intrinsic worth and beauty? Eventually, Julie and I began to see that Pinkie and Blue are really more like spouses than siblings. They were brought together as adults by love, and have remained with each other ever since.

After we learned to start thinking of Pinkie and Blue as husband and wife, it was only natural that Julie and I would occasionally begin to call each other by those nicknames, especially when out on the antiques trail, where we are constantly running into likenesses of Pinkie and Blue. If I should see copies of the famous paintings hanging side-by-side at some antiques shop, I am likely to tap Julie on the shoulder and say, “Look, Pinkie, there we are.” Sometimes, if we find only The Blue Boy hanging in a particular shop, I’ll turn to Julie and say, “Sorry, Pinkie, I guess they just didn’t like your portrait as much as mine.” To which Julie will respond, “You’re wrong, Blue. Whoever owned that particular set must not have liked your portrait as much as mine, or else yours wouldn’t be hanging all alone in an antiques store.”

Last week, my very own Pinkie was dealt a bit of a blow. Due to the harsh economic climate in this part of the country, she was laid off from her job as an escrow officer for a local title company. She was given a fairly generous severance package and is eligible for unemployment insurance, so our financial picture isn’t yet terribly bleak. What’s more, she already is mulling other job offers that have come her way in the last five days or so. The last week has been a sort of unplanned vacation for the two of us. We suddenly find ourselves in each other’s company twenty-four hours a day, every single day of the week. Normally, this would be an excuse to go hit the highway and do some antiquing up in the Sierra Nevada or go for a vacation on the coast. But given our current financial uncertainty, we are disinclined to spend a single penny right now on anything that isn’t essential. Thus we have pretty much confined ourselves to the house, with a few forays out and about to do some browsing (but no buying) at the local antiques malls.

As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, my productivity as a writer has dropped off drastically since Julie began hanging out at the house all day with me. I am used to having the house to myself every weekday between seven a.m. and six p.m. I am so accustomed to writing in an empty house, that I now find it difficult to get any writing done at all. I keep thinking I should be entertaining Julie somehow, even though she is perfectly capable of entertaining herself without any help from me. Right now she is engrossed in a mystery novel set in Egypt, circa 1922. I am sure she is perfectly happy, but I myself feel too unsettled to adhere to my usual writing routine. I don’t want to immerse myself in a writing project lest Julie suddenly announce a desire for the two of us to go off together on some errand or joyride. Frankly, it is a bit unnerving to have one’s spouse on hand every minute of every day. Julie and I are soul mates. We belong together like Pinky and Blue. But every now and then I find myself wishing she were hanging in another room.