I have a mall right down the street from me that keeps me entertained on the weekends. No, its not Millennia Mall or the Outlet Mall. Its Halley’s Antiques Mall. The fact that this mall is my favorite supports my ongoing reputation as a total grandma. I guess I matured early; broke my hip by age 14 and started knitting around that time, too. Hence my nickname in high school, Mamaw (or Mams, for short).

Halley’s carries everything from old romantic postcards to kitschy mugs to really nice vintage jewelry to jars full of buttons.  And it seems like every time I go, they have rotated the merchandise so that theres something new (well, technically not new) that sparks my interest in history (although I never really cared for it in high school, sorry Mrs. Bell). A couple Saturdays ago I was at Halley’s, which has kind of become a weekly ritual, and was browsing through collections of other people’s stuff. I always walk in thinking I’m just going to run in and look… then an hour later I end up $40 in the hole with things I can’t live without but don’t have room for.

Anyways, I walked past these quirky portraits of old men hanging up on the wall and looked at the price tag, as many of us on a budget must do when shopping at malls, and kept walking. Then I remembered that it didn’t really matter what the price tag said (even though it was very reasonable), because I just had to have them. I did some circles around the portraits for a couple of minutes, having no idea who the portraits were of or who did them. So after giving myself a little pep talk about regret and happiness and all of those feelings, I decided that I just had to get them. I went home and unwrapped them and fell in love all over again. I decided to do some research to try and figure out who these people were. The name Spy was written like a signature in the bottom right corner of the portraits, so I started there. I called Halley’s to see if the woman working there could tell me who the people were in the paintings, because I noticed it was written on the tag she took off before she handed them over to me. So after googling all three names, I found that both portraits were created by Sir Leslie Ward, an accomplished British portrait artist and caricaturist for Vanity Fair magazine working under the pseudonym “Spy”. The man in the lefthand portrait is Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., an American physician, professor, lecturer, and author. Spy says of Holmes in his autobiography 40 Year of Spy,

I was introduced to him, amongst others, and was particularly impressed by his kindly features;  the first peculiarity my eye lit upon was the prominent eyebrows. Crowds of listening people surrounded him while he talked, and the opportunity of watching my subject unnoticed at such close quarters was a splendid one, and from my observations I made one of the best caricatures that I have ever done from my memory. [page 189]

The man in the righthand portrait is Sir William Crookes, a chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, in London, and worked on spectroscopy. He also discovered thallium, identified the first sample of helium, and invented the radiometer and vacuum tubes. Not bad, eh?

I love when I happen upon things like this…I have such a collection of happen-upons I could probably be considered a vintage binger. Or one of those crazy hoarders that satisfy their emotional appetite with, well, stuff. Any way you look at it, it brings me happiness to know that I now am the proud owner of two portraits that I think are peculiarly endearing and unique.

Tags: caricature, illustration, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sir William Crookes, Spy, Vanity Fair

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 10:53 am and is filed under Art, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.