Monday, August 04, 2008

The Great Profundo and other stories by Bernard MacLaverty (Penguin Books 1987)


After I had finished my first painting under his direction he went up to it and looked all over its surface from six inches. He nodded with approval.

'I'll call you my drapery man.'

'What?'

'An eighteenth-century caper. Portrait painters got a man in to do the time-consuming bits - the lace and the satin stuff. The best of them was Vanaken. Hogarth drew this man's funeral with all the best painters in London behind the coffin weeping and gnashing their teeth.' [From 'The Drapery Man']

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