Saying goodbye to Phyllis

For all my life a couple of portraits of my father's first wife have hung on the wall,  and another kept company with The Old Man, her son, until his death earlier this year.
 Today I handed all three over to her nephew, her only remaining blood relative, in order for him to donate them to galleries that will, we hope, look after them in future. The two by Laura Knight will go to the Penlee House Gallery in her native Cornwall and this one, by A.J.Munnings, should find a home at the museum dedicated to his work in East Anglia. Both artists used her as a model when she was a teenager in Cornwall during WW1.
Phyllis was also exceptionally creative in her own right. She sketched and painted,  designed her own clothes, shoes and furnishings,  and crafted beaten silver motifs which she attached to small wooden boxes, an example of which is shown on the right. Apart from a small number of these artifacts her own work has vanished and, as the passage of time smooths over her troubled life story, I can but hope her memory will live on through her image as rendered by others..

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