The Story of the Lost Portrait of Roy

A 1920s portrait of my grandfather, Joseph Roy Chapman. He was always called Roy.

My grandfather, Roy Chapman, of Goodwater, Alabama, was the executive for Alabama Outdoor Advertising, a job he held his entire life. He was also president of the Homewood, Alabama, City Council. I never met him. He died before I was born.

But my Aunt Helen said he was a wonderful man and his death affected her in such a way that she was unable to talk about him--at least to me--for the rest of her life. In the letters I have read of his, and in the love he gave my father, I know he must have been a good and kind man.

We used to have a portrait of him, and therein hangs the tale.

A photo of Roy in the 1930s.

When Roy died, World War II had just ended, and my parents had been married only few years. They were on the other side of the continent from Alabama, in California, building and decorating their first home. My grandmother sold her home and sent my father some of the family things she thought he might want.

One thing was a baby grand piano. Another: an oil portrait of my grandfather.

My grandfather knew a lot of sign painters in his business, and during the Depression, the story goes, one of them borrowed some money from Roy Chapman that he could not find the means to repay.

So, he offered to paint a portrait of Roy, and, in further evidence of Roy's kindness, he agreed to the barter.

My mother didn't like the painting, though none of us knows exactly why. In any case, it was never given a place of honor in our home. It was in a closet for a while, and then it was in the garage.

My Aunt Helen was visiting one year and found it in the garage and told her brother that this was not a nice thing to do with a portrait of their father. She told him she would take it back home to the South with her. My mother didn't mind--obviously--and my father wanted whatever my mother wanted. Thus the portrait vanished from our lives.

After the death of my father's sister--my Aunt Helen--I knew my cousin had the portrait. And, with my interest both in family and art, I called her last year and asked if she was interested in our grandmother's baby grand piano. She was. If I sent her the baby grand piano, I asked, would she send me the old portrait of Roy Chapman? No, thank you, she said. Roy was very happy where he was. But she volunteered to have it copied--which was a nice thing to offer, though it was not what I wanted.

Well, I tried! We had lots of nice photos of Roy in any case.

My grandfather in his World War I uniform.

Yesterday, my sister and her husband were rummaging through the boxes in the space above the garage, and my sister came in and said there was a box labeled "Dad's portrait." It must be mislabeled, I said, as that portrait is no longer on this coast.

But, in a way, I was wrong.

A few minutes later, in came the portrait of Roy Chapman as a young man.


My Aunt Helen was as thoughtful as her father and, though she had taken the original, and knew my mother didn't like the painting, with an eye to the future, she had made a copy of it for her brother. The copy was hidden away, as had been the original: but Aunt Helen may have thought that one of us would eventually come across it, as we did, and it would re-emerge into the daylight.

I always liked my Aunt Helen.

The copy isn't as much fun as having the real thing: but it does appear that the original was indeed a good painting--as I had long suspected. The shadows on Roy face and the other details are wonderful, and it has the American primitive style of a self-taught itinerate sign painter that now marks the era.

I like it very much, even though it is a copy: for the funny story behind it and for the charm of the portrait itself. I can see my father in that face and something of my cousin in it too.

And I love the 1920s collar he is wearing.

I now have another reminder of family in this beautiful home my father left me. Roy's portrait took a long and circuitous route to get to this place, but that isn't unusual. We all do that, in life, to get where we are going. And we never know where that is going to be.

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The Beauty of the Tangible

My father as a toddler, in a photo taken by the Boyett Studio, 2008 Second Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama, about 1920.

While my sister was here, she swept our mother off to run some errands and I had time to sift through a box of old family photos as my father sat nearby and talked and dozed. In his mind that day, he was back in Alabama, where he was raised, and the stash of photos I found confirmed to him that his old home on Palmetto Drive, in Homewood, Alabama, was near enough for us to visit.

He talked about sneaking under his new house, when he was eight years old and the house was being built, and finding a neighbor girl had sneaked in behind him. He kissed Loula May that day, he said, though he knew he wasn't supposed to. He held up an old photo, and told me about the funny shoes he had to wear the day the photo was taken. The present is fading for Dad, but the past is very clear.

The short pants and the not-so-favorite shoes.

I wonder if generations to come will have the pleasure of holding old photos in their hands? So many of them now are saved as digital files, which is very convenient. But you can't hold a digital file between your fingers nor enjoy the tangible clues that a photo on paper provides.

Details from paper photo frames, surrounding circa 1920s photos of my father.

The old photos of Dad as a child are beautifully set in old graphic paper frames, and there are a number of them that catalogue his youth. Baby pictures, pictures of him at about age five, and then the pictures that show the growing maturity of a lively young boy and then a gangly young man.

One of them was in a frame behind glass and touching it reminded me that my grandfather Chapman was a very heavy smoker. The picture seemed obscured behind a haze and when I took the photo out to clean the glass I found it coated in a sticky layer of nicotine. My grandfather died of heart disease at the age of 57, just a few years before I was born. My father never spoke of him, until recently. Now his father's death brings tears, as if he is mourning a death that just happened.

We don't have any of these studio portraits of my mother. Her family was having a tougher time in Spokane, Washington, surviving the Great Depression and there was no extra money to spend on studio portraits of the the four Latta children. Dad's father, on the other hand, was more prosperous. Though he himself had achieved only a high school graduation certificate, he was already planning to send both his son and daughter to Auburn University, from which they both graduated.

Another photo, is one my father had taken during World War II when he was on leave from Ascension Island, at an "R and R" station in Recife, Brazil. It is a photo that was printed, as they sometimes where in those days, on a postcard. It wasn't sent that way, though, because it was not written on or postmarked. Holding it, you see the stamp of the processor, written in Portuguese on the back: "Foto Lux."

My father, on leave during World War II, in a photo taken in Brazil.

Here you see a dutiful son, away from home in a terrible war, having his picture taken on leave to send to his parents. His letter arrived and they took the photo from its envelope, and held it like a treasure. They had not seen him in two years. Carefully, they put it behind glass in a frame, where his father could see it as he paced, and smoked, and worried, and prayed that his son would come home from war safe and well.

My father dozed. I held the photo. Taken sixty-five years ago, it was now a treasure to me; for, though I will one day go to him, he will not come back to me again.

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