Off the wall

I made cups of tea this morning after we’d slept in rather longer than normal. I was rather bleary eyed having gone to bed late after binge watching an older crime series on tv, the prequel to ‘Prime Suspect.’

Helena then got up to make coffee in advance of our special breakfast of tasty Craster kippers which I’d bought a couple of days ago. She returned to bed with her coffee and asked if I’d noticed that ‘Effie’ had fallen off the wall. I hadn’t.

She was referring to this print of a portrait of a teenage girl, called ‘Her mother’s hat’. The subject is Effie, whom I met and became friends with when I was about 17 years old, whilst at a college in South Kensington in 1968 and we had lots of laughs over the next couple of years. I used to visit her at her parents’ very modern home in a back street of Chelsea, where her father, the artist Norman Hepple, had his studio. He was rather remote and I only met him once, but her mother had a vivacious personality which Effie had obviously inherited. Norman was already a renowned Royal Academician and regularly painted the Queen and her family members, as well as many portraits of his own family.

I went to Effie’s marriage early in the 1970s and sadly since then I’ve lost contact. In 2010 I spotted that this print was on sale online on Ebay, but had already been sold. For some reason I contacted the seller to find out more about it only to be told that the sale hadn’t completed. So of course I bought the print. I even drove to near Exeter to collect it! We’ve had it hanging in our back room ever since and I still like it very much. It captures Effie’s quite wild and spirited nature really well. I think she must have been about 13 at the time. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1965.

Being a superstitious sort I wondered this morning if she was alright after the picture fell down. It seems that the small screw fixing the hanging wire into the frame had pulled out, for whatever reason.

PS
This picture has some other Blipfoto resonance. Look carefully at the background image, and in the comments with Tanya,, one of Helena's sisters (TMLHereAndThere) in this old blip entry by MamaFi, where it is discussed.