Notes — Rina Repina

(Archive of Lady Catherine de Turnips, entry 4663-1-bis; discovered by Ekaterina Repina, BA, MA – Kazakhstan, St Petersburg, London)

My dear friend,

You are asking me how my life is.

As you know, in the world that plays checkers, I play Heroes of Might and Magic. It is not that the latter is somehow more intellectually advanced: it is a rather straightforward computer strategy where one is supposed to build their own castles, sometimes with dragons, sometimes with skeletons, and use them in further adventures. Most importantly, while a certain basic awareness of checkers is normally universally implied, with my life, just like in the case of Heroes, a solid majority of people I encounter have not the faintest idea of what I am doing (I bet you don’t know this game either, so my metaphor still holds).

So, to condense my most recent proceedings to a single phrase, where all parts are neatly glued together in their equi-greatness: while I walked from my talk at the National Portrait Gallery, I saw an alligator joyfully cruising the lake overlooking Buckingham Palace.

Every single part is an absolute truth.

(If you are curious why I am so sure: alligators are dark coloured with a broad, rounded snout and are usually found in fresh water; crocodiles are greyish-green and prefer coastal, brackish and salt-water habitats.)

It’s not so important that the alligator was, in fact, a remote-controlled boat: life-sized, snout-shaped, it was realistic enough for me to be worried about the next generation.

Have you heard it, by the way? There is the next generation in the park (not only the screamy brats you are normally so fond of – and I am talking of the parakeets, obviously). Tiny fluffy ducklings. Teenage swans who make me question Danish beauty standards of the 19th century. And, most importantly, the pelicans! Isn’t it fascinating? For the first time in over 360 years, there are four pelican chicks in St James’s Park! They say those magnificent birds were so bored during their most recent quarantine that they decided to bring extra company into the world.

(To the best of my knowledge, the chicks are yet unnamed. The adults are Isla, Tiffany, Gargi, Sun, Moon and Star.)

I didn’t manage to have a glimpse of the freshly arrived ones yet. The Astrologers proclaimed the month of the people with some huge camera lenses (another Heroes reference, by the way) – for some reason, pointing somewhere across the pond (not as in the Atlantic Ocean, but I should not underestimate the strength of modern optics). Back in the 17th century, the first generation of pelicans was a gift from a Russian ambassador, brought from the area of Astrakhan. Some time after that, I spent a week there. Was it a synagogue, was it a former orphanage that gave me shelter at night that time (or both of them) – I don’t remember. I didn’t see any pelicans either.

Revenons à nos moutons, even though, unfortunately, zero sheep are involved in my current enterprises – yet again.

The talk.

(Did I tell you that once, I was interviewed by an Austrian radio during my lunch? A week later, I was able to hear my own dulcet, slightly chewing tones under a more structured – and, I need to admit it, more pleasant to listen to – German voice. For that lunch, I had some buckwheat with chicken. Chicken, in that interview, did not participate.)

The talk was so intimate that the audience was only slightly bigger than my own humble self.

(The latter is my favourite – and the most unforgiving – kind of audience.)

You have a certain partiality towards the Tudors, even though these feelings are not necessarily mutual. You would be delighted to know that my talk was dedicated to their representative, Elizabeth. Rings some bells, I assume?

We have already spent some time in front of her "Coronation Portrait": you were saying that a frame like this, in all its heavy gilded grandeur, would never be used today. "The frame should allow the picture to speak for itself." This time, it was my turn.

The painting was made around 1600 – roughly forty years after the coronation it depicts.

We know that because researchers dated the panel by analysing the tree rings in the wood. The discipline is called "dendrochronology": the growth rings can point to the exact year they were formed by a tree. Some would call it "tree-ring dating", but for me, it sounds distractingly romantic, almost matrimonial. I was thinking of making a joke that "we can ask a tree what time it was": please, please, please, tell me if you come up with a better one.

English oak would have had an irregular, twisted grain due to greater changes in weather throughout the year (or an hour, as you are perfectly aware). Imported timber was standard: colder climates mean trees grow slowly and evenly, hence they are easier to cut down into a relatively thin panel (the flatter the better). We know that the oak, now bearing the likeness of the eternally 25-year-old Elizabeth, not only continued to grow years and years after her coronation but also did so hundreds of miles away from her, somewhere in the eastern Baltic region. Put into this perspective, we can imagine that somewhere, maybe in Poland, maybe in Estonia, there is a tree that is a descendant of the one that is nowadays bearing one of the symbols of English queenhood.

As for the frame… You were right, it was Victorian, made after a fire at Warwick Castle in 1871. However, its style, with all those scrolls and festoons of fruit, is even more interesting than a pure Victorian Elizabethan fantasy. The "Sansovino" style is named after a Venetian architect and sculptor, Jacopo Sansovino, who died in 1570. Hypothetically, he could have met the aforementioned queen – maybe even under the aforementioned oak tree. Still, three hundred years later, in England, his name was being used to describe elaborate frames associated with Venice and the Renaissance. Scrolls, garlands, masks, broken pediments, and even cherubs: if you close your eyes and imagine what normally surrounds an artwork from olden times, I bet you will instantly have a certain image.

In any case, the Elizabethan portrait now lives inside something that would have looked excessive even by sixteenth-century Venetian standards. Elizabeth herself would have satisfied those standards perfectly: after all, she was redheaded.

I will keep you updated on any further avian friendships I may develop. One coffee shop in Hackney has even suggested that I give a talk on the subject – so, most likely, I will bring you more stories in my beak.

Yours sincerely,
Lady Catherine de Turnips