Portraits On The Wall...

These portraits currently hang in my home, totally out of place. They are two of my 5th Great Grandparents, Jessie Pittman Lewis and his wife, Sarah. They were painted by a prominent Virginia portrait artist, John Toole, in 1842.

Even though they call for the backdrop of a stately mansion, all they get here is my little modular plunked down in an older subdivision composed of:

“Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.”

Hey, my ancestors should have had the foresight to pick a more impressive caretaker, 5 generations down the line.

The first picture here is of those same portraits hanging over the stairway wall of Lewis ancestors in the late 1800’s or very early 1900’s. That house still stands in Charlottesville, Va. Owned by The University of Virginia. It is used by their School of Architecture.

   

A family story has Confederate soldiers putting that particular Lewis ancestor, who built the house, up against a tree in the front yard with the intention of executing him for being a Northern sympathizer. Apparently, that didn’t happen though, so the bad seed continued to flourish for another 170 years, until today, when those portraits could wind up being rejected by both of my dear daughters.

Ruth wants modern stuff; Hannah doesn’t want any stuff at all. “I don’t want them, you take them.” “No, I can’t, you take them.”

Honestly, I’ve never been too delighted with these paintings either. Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Grandma Lewis looks like she would be about as much fun as an unseasoned boiled potato. I believe someone may have pooped in her cereal bowl just before she sat for these portraits.

 I’ll probably wind up donating them to UVA “on loan”. They would love to have them. Jessie was a prominent Revolutionary War soldier who is buried in what once was a family plot, now on UVA property. I helped clean up and restore those graves with my Grandpa Maverick in the late 1960’s.  There is currently a road marker down the hill, dedicated to the historic site.