One of the many cool things about Patrick's copyright/trademark work is that sometimes clients show him their appreciation by giving him pieces of art. So we have some great original stuff that we could never afford hanging or sitting around the house. But as terrific as they are, my favorite piece of art in our house is not one of these; instead it is one that has immense sentimental value to me.
When I was four years old, I would stare at a certain picture hanging on the wall of our living room for what seemed like hours at a time. It was in black and white, but it was not a photograph. It featured a girl lying face up in a body of water, apparently asleep, with a halo over her head. Who could she be? Why was she in the water? Who were the shadowy figures on the shore? I wondered about this picture endlessly.
When I was five, my parents split up. My dad kept the fascinating picture, and I never saw it again except on a brief visit when I was 21. By then, I knew enough to see that it was an engraving, and that the caption underneath read 'Martyre Chrétienne,' or 'Christian Martyr.' I also got the story on where the piece came from. In 1968, my grandmother found it in a Deseret Industries (a Goodwill-type thrift shop) in the Los Angeles area and bought it for about three dollars. She gave it to my father when he expressed intense interest in it.
When I was 27, Patrick and I went on our post-law school 'honeymoon' (we'd had neither the time nor the money for a real honeymoon when we got married three-and-a-half years earlier). It was a three-week trip to Paris, the Loire Valley, and French-speaking Switzerland, and it was heaven: 21 days of perfection (except for the horrendous perm I got at the Galeries Lafayette).
One day in the Louvre, as I was walking around goggling at beautiful things I'd seen in books my whole life, I turned a corner and stopped in my tracks. There on the wall was the picture from my childhood.
"The Young Martyr (A Christian Martyr Drowned in the Tiber at the Time of Diocletian)"
by Paul Delaroche, French 1797-1856
I was thrilled that the Museum Shop had a postcard of the painting; I bought two and sent one off to my father telling him how exciting it was to find it. Later that day, Patrick and I spend a fascinating few hours in the Louvre's Department of Chalcography. Here's what we learned. These days, if you love a great painting, but your budget is limited, you buy a print or a poster. In the centuries before this was possible, engravers made their living making copies of paintings, then selling them for display in people's houses. The next time you are at the Louvre, visit this department. They have thousands of original engraving plates of all sorts of fascinating images, and will make a print for you for a fairly modest fee. They didn't have a plate of "The Young Martyr," but we did get a cool engraving of the fountains at Saint-Cloud.
About four years ago, my father sent me a huge package in the mail; it contained treats for the kids and the engraving that had hung on his wall for so many years. At some point, it had gotten damaged by a swamp cooler, and the picture glass had broken in transit, so Patrick and I took it to our local framing expert to see whether we could get the piece repaired and reframed. The restorer did fantastic work on it and liked it so much that he offered to buy it from us; apparently it's worth quite a bit of money. It's an original print of an engraving by Hermann Eichens after the Delaroche painting, and it now hangs above our living room mantel:
Apologies for the poor photo; it really is a finely detailed engraving. You'll just have to come over and see it in person. I did some research a while ago to determine whether this was one martyr in particular, but apparently Delaroche had no one specific in mind.
I do know that some people walk into our house, see it, and question my taste in art, but I find this piece just as captivating now as I did 37 years ago. Thanks again for the gift, Dad. I treasure it.