Old Master Follies
January 6, 2010
‘Dad should have stuck to photography, but he didn’t. Art struck, old master art. By this time [the 1940s] Mum had become a dab hand at colouring in: brushes as fine as a baby’s eyelash, pastel hues skilfully blended with cotton pads, no detail too difficult for the natural glow of Winsor & Newton oil paint. The firm had started up a flourishing line in hand-coloured miniatures. Then Dad had the bright idea of having Mum colour in tiny photographs of old master paintings: The Blue Boy, Mrs Siddens as the Tragic Muse, Bubbles – the whole pantheon of popular British old masters with Frans Hals’ Laughing Cavalier thrown in for good measure. . . . These would be trimmed, glazed and set into tiny gold frames as earrings, rings, lockets and brooches. Dermot Holland was roped in as a business partner; money was borrowed from a gullible bank; Colin McCahon was employed to make the jewellery. They were all off to the judgment summons columns of the Mercantile Gazette in a handbasket and Art, of a sort, had now installed itself in the family’s driving seat.
At first things went well. Dad acquired a black Morris 25 and a black homburg hat. He travelled both islands his with shiny black sample case unloading hundreds of tiny hand-painted old masters on a public hungry for luxuries. They could hardly get enough of them. My mother struggled at her desk long into the night to keep up. Then disaster struck. The invisible hand of the market delivered the whole enterprise a fatal blow. The newly elected National government dismantled import restrictions on jewellery (but not, for some reason, on art) and almost overnight the moderately priced kitsch Dad was peddling found itself competing with similar kitsch from Europe at half the price. The punters lost their taste for the local product. Dad and Dermot Holland struggled on far too long and eventually went to the wall. Colin McCahon and my brother went into partnership making even more outrageous kitsch from silver and melted Marmite jars but nobody much wanted that either.’
