From the day I was born it stood on the wall at the head of our of our kitchen table at 580 Grosvenor, covering up the electrical panel.
So this mysterious woman overlooked our family meals with a secret message, as impossible to decipher as the Mona Lisa smile.
Who is she? What is the idea behind the painting? Why did Tidemanis choose this theme? We frequently asked this around the table during meals either in our thoughts or out loud.
I had always assumed that Janis Tidemanis, the Lithuanian painter who did this work, simply chose some sort of African theme.But good things come to those who search through old newspapers and after a lifetime of speculation, I've finally stumbled across the stunning and surprise answer to what this painting is about:
The answer is that the woman in the picture was a famous American singing starlet from the early '50s named Joyce Bryant, who actually posed for the image right here in the Montreals.
Bryant was a lovely brown-skinned singer who increased her notoriety by colouring her hair silver but it is said that her songs were a bit too risque for the radio stations, so she became a major nightclub act when not going back and forth between her strict adherence to the Seventh Day Adventist church.
Bryant posed for portraits in Montreal three times between 1951 and 1953, according to that article, including at least once for Tidemanis.The mystery does not end there, however.
Bryant claimed never to have met whoever it was that paid for the portraits and Tidemanis would not reveal who it was either.
So it's not impossible that it was my father who commissioned the portrait, although I never heard him express any notably profound expression of appreciation for brown-skinned women which I have no hesitation in expressing myself.
It might also be noted that Joyce Bryant was the subject of Gabriel "Gaby of Montreal" Desmarais' most famous portrait, a sorta gimmick pic of her standing inside a bottle, done in 1952. This could possibly have been one of the three portraits that Bryant posed for.