Social Distancing in Sterner Times

These are my paternal grandparents, Alice Venable and Roy Eastman. He was pastor of the first Presbyterian  Church in Red Bluff California. They certainly do look the rock-ribbed straitlaced pair. Grandma sits on the rosewood loveseat which passed from grandparents to parents to me. My brother Rick ran across this picture as he and Meg prepare to move next week. They have sold their resort-like home in Fallbrook, CA and are moving to downtown San Diego. We have been having many discussions over what to do with a number of family heirlooms which no longer fit into our homes or our lifestyles, so it was quite fascinating to see many of those pieces in this photo which was probably taken in 'The Manse' around 1920.

The loveseat Grandma is sitting on, with her knitting in her lap is now in Tim's basement. I felt quite attached to it even though there was no place for it in this house. Rick has the large rosewood chair across from Grandpa, now recovered in blue velvet, but will have no room for it in his new place. A glimpse of the round pedestal table to the left of Grandma's loveseat is now John's puzzle table along with two smaller rosewood chairs, one of which is tucked into the corner between two bookshelves in the photograph. I remember worrying about how I could possibly find a place for Grandma's table and chairs here, but the solution came to me in the middle of one of a number of anxious nights right before we moved. You can see it here if you're interested. I don't, however have room for the big blue chair.

The most interesting item of all is the portrait of 'Uncle Richard' Venable Grandma's uncle. They were from a fairly patrician family of landed gentry in Virginia. Grandma's father was a judge and Richard here was a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. His portrait has hung on the family  wall for as long as I can remember, even though nobody really liked it very much. 

'Uncle Richard', as the painting was always referred to, fell off the wall of our family home in Pasadena during an earthquake and was damaged. I think my mother would have taken it as an omen to get rid of it ,but somehow he was repaired and continued to hang on the wall until Rick and I were going through our mother's effects and deciding what to do with them. Rick inherited him because he (and our father, Rick being the second) both recieved the family name, Richard Venable.

And there he hangs, gazing benignly down from his place on the wall above Grandma's head. Adding to the dilemma of what to do with a family heirloom nobody really wants, is the fact that being a well to do landowner in Virginia in in 1850, he was almost certainly a slaveholder. That is enough for me to say to Rick, 'I don't think he belongs on the family walls...' But what to do with him? It may be revisionist history, so perhaps he should be stored in some archive somewhere....

I wonder when it stopped being obligatory to look downright dour in a photograph? And I wonder if it was suggested that they pose with a favorite pastime, she with her knitting and he with an open book in his hands. Grandma taught me to knit and Grandpa must have passed down his love of reading to my father and to me. It is quite fascinating to see this picture just as we have been discussing the fate of so many things in it.