Photograph of a Lost Painting

Today I paid homage, one last time, to an oil painting that has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. It's too long to be photographed well, and the lighting was wrong, but here it is, just the same, Buildings Designed by Schulze and Weaver Architects, 1921-1936. The artist was my great uncle, Lloyd Morgan, and the primary buildings, left to right, are the Hotel Pierre, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Sherry-Netherland; the Boca Ratan sits at the feet of the Astoria. My great uncle was the principal designer of them all.

My brother, sister, and I grew up visiting our great uncle's Tarryton, NY, home, and this was the painting that hung on the one, proud livingroom wall. It was his life work, a single cityscape risen against a red-brown sky, and after he passed away, the painting was sent to us, where it resided, first, in my father's corporate office, and, later, in our family basement. None of our walls were ever big enough to hold it.

Next week, following a massive restoration process, the painting gets shipped to the Wolfsonian—Florida International University, a museum that has long been collecting our great uncle's things and had (but we never knew it) been in search of this painting. In a retrospective issue, The American Hotel named it the Lost Painting. It isn't lost anymore.

Once, in a book called STILL LOVE IN STRANGE PLACES, I said that words are the weights that hold our histories in place.

Today, saying goodbye to this family heirloom, I thought of how paintings serve that function, too.