Talking to a Portrait

This is a collection of stories about art workswhether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer's sketchbook, or a Tiffany lampand 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. Archival black and white photographs and colour platesincluding Edwin Holgates Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever paintedmake this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers, and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.