Sometime in the last year I realized we had two poppy pictures in
the dining room: a poster from the 1992 Matisse exhibit that Dianne, Joie, and I
went to on one of our jaunts (New York City, oh, yeah), and a still life in an
antique frame that Tom brought with him when we got married (he doesn’t’ know
where it came from . . .).
What with poppies being my favorite flower (recently passing the
iris), I thought it would be great to have a whole wall of poppy pictures. I
hadn’t started this project, though, when I came across an item in one of the
2,348 Christmas catalogs delivered last year. It was a tapestry of a Van Gogh
painting, Vase with Red Poppies. I had never seen that
Van Gogh painting (the original is in the Wadsworth Atheneum in I didn’t want a tapestry, so I searched online for a print and ended up ordering a handpainted reproduction from
And yes, I did wonder if using Pay Pal on a Chinese website was a
good idea.
But I was totally reassured the next day when I got a personal
email from one Mr. Yu Lin. This was the email subject line: Re:
I am not making this up. How cool is that? The email was in
English, ending with “Wish you have good days.” Yu Lin and I were pretty tight
after that.
The painting arrived on a rolled-up canvas. One of our friends
who knew it had been handpainted in China
There is a footnote to the whole “poppies in the dining room”
story, though. When I was reporting all of this to Dianne on the phone, she
said, “But those aren’t poppies in the Matisse poster—they’re anemones.” Oh, no, I argued. They are poppies.
As I spoke, though, it dawned on me that I had never seen pink
and white and purple poppies. Matisse—such a colorist. So while we talked I
wandered over to the Matisse poster and read the caption. In very fine print
under the picture it reads Anemones in an Earthenware Vase.
Whoops. That Dianne. She knows these things.
