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| Baby, It's Cold Outside, Oil on Linen, 20 by 16 in., Private Collection |
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| Blue and White Lilacs, Oil on Canvas, 20 by 24 in., https://www.etsy.com/shop/RobertHoldenFineArt |
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| Childhood Friends, Oil on Linen, 20 by 24 in., Private Collection |
I think most people love teddy bears, having been introduced at an early age to one or more of these loyal and selfless companions, who can comfort you in a way no human can when you are feeling down and out and very much unloved. I’ve painted pictures of a couple of them over the years, including the one shown above. This teddy lives in the Long Island home of the retired supervisor of the phone room at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I worked on Thursdays during my 15 years of part-time enjoyment with the museum’s Visitor Services Department. The phone room is the Met’s first line of defense against the multitude of commoners who aren’t tuned in to the world of fine art and discover “undoubted Rembrandts” when cleaning out their attics or want to have a show of their paintings at the Museum and demand to speak with a curator.
The phone room supervisor, Peggy B., had a collection of teddy bears, and offered to loan me this favorite of hers so I could make a painting of it for my own pleasure. So one day, maybe a dozen or more years ago, she brought the teddy in with her on the LIRR and let me hang onto it for a few days. I decided this teddy girl would make a nice portrait study, so I gave her a good bit of attention for a couple of sittings while trying my best to replicate her essential fuzziness on canvas. She’s seated on a scrap of cardboard and the background is a paint-smeared, 24x30 in. piece of Masonite that I still use as a base for still lifes on occasion. I turned the board around a bit until I liked the paint shapes, which seemed to resemble a snowy woodland setting, at least in my mind’s eye. A little while later I sent the finished painting off to the Connecticut gallery that was handling my still life paintings at the time. To my surprise, I was told that a teddy bear collector bought her right away. I think it was the fastest sale of any painting I showed at the gallery.
Now the right thing to do would have been to split the proceeds with Peggy, I suppose. Isn’t that what all painters do when they borrow expensive collectibles from their friends or antique dealers and sell the resulting paintings for a fortune? I’m not in that class of art profiteers myself, however, and Peggy seemed to be satisfied with the teddy bear image on the Christmas card I sent out that year.
When I was getting started in this painting business some 30 years ago, I did several commissions for a collector who is a native of a small town in a mountainous region of northern Italy, where the family still maintains a commercial apple orchard. He is a lover of very traditional oil paintings, and a toy collector as well. He commissioned me to paint portraits of some family members and pictures of some of the toys he had collected. One time in the early 1980s he asked me to do a group portrait of four stuffed animals that had been crafted by his mother when he was a child. I don’t think I got the best composition for this group portrait, but it was a lot of fun to work on, and something of a privilege to paint this assemblage of quaintly amusing stuffed animals, which obviously had great sentimental value for the collector.
“Mr. Holden, you should paint toys,” he used to say to me. But alas, I had no toys of my own to paint and it was a lot easier to arrange an assemblage of fruits or vegetables from the grocery store across the street. You can’t spend a lot of time trying to put together things you know will sell when the morning daylight’s a-wasting. That’s a far more precious commodity in New York City than any Ming vase you might see in the window of a schmancy neighborhood antiques store.
