Talking to a Portrait by Rosalind M. Pepall
This is a collection of stories about art works—whether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer’s sketchbook or a Tiffany lamp—and how the author fell under their spell. Few people are aware of the work, the emotion, and the obsessions of a curator’s job. Exhibitions come and go; they are forgotten after a few years, but they live on in the curator’s memory.
In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger.
Pepall’s stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity.
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