The Picture
That Followed
Me Home

There is a picture hanging on my wall. An old stone house in a French village, pale in the sunshine, with a little arched doorway and a couple of people standing nearby. Nothing much is happening. That is part of its charm. It feels like the sort of place where you could turn a corner and find that the afternoon had all the time in the world.

The painting is The Square House, Vaugelas, by Sir William Russell Flint. Mine is a print, not the original watercolour, and I have never pretended otherwise. I bought it because I liked it. Or at least that is what I told myself for years.

Recently, I began thinking about why I liked it quite so much. It turns out that the answer goes back rather further than a closing-down sale in a little art gallery. It goes all the way back to a job I had when I left school.

My first job was with a company that kitted out showrooms and show houses for new private housing estates. These were the houses people walked through when they were thinking about buying a new home. Everything had to look right. Everything had to suggest a life that could be lived there.

The rooms were bright and carefully presented, and the pictures were part of that. A framed print might not seem terribly important beside a kitchen or a sitting-room suite, but a bare wall can make a house feel strangely empty. Put the right picture in the right place and the room begins to feel lived in.

I did not spend my days thinking lofty thoughts about interior design. I had work to do, and I was getting on with it. But looking back, I can see what we were really doing. We were helping strangers imagine somewhere as home.

There was a bit of training involved. I had to go down to Sunderland and do a course, though I would struggle now to tell you what the qualification was actually called. That detail has disappeared into the years. The journey, the course and the fact that I passed have somehow stayed put.

I came back home, qualified in whatever it was I needed to be qualified in, and got stuck in. I was young, learning, working and earning. As far as I was concerned, the important thing was knowing how to do the job properly.

I could not have guessed then that one of the less obvious things I was learning had nothing to do with qualifications. Without realising it, I was beginning a lifelong friendship with the work of a Scottish watercolour painter who had died years before I knew his name.

And it really was picture framing. I cut the mounts, cut the glass and put the frames together. We often used double mounts, one colour sitting neatly inside another, to give a little depth and make the artwork look properly finished.

I even remember mounting the prints themselves. There was a great heavy piece of equipment, something firm behind the picture and a wheel to turn. In my memory it was dry mounting, though after all this time I would not swear to the name of every tool or process. I do remember the feel of getting the thing done.

There is a satisfaction in work like that. Measuring carefully. Making the cut. Seeing the corners line up. It was repetitive, certainly, but there was skill in it. A badly cut mount is not something you can talk into looking straight.

One detail has stayed remarkably clear: NRG. Non-reflective glass. In those brightly lit showrooms it made all the difference. Ordinary glass would catch the overhead lights and give you a splendid view of the fittings instead of the picture you had spent time framing.

The double mount gave the picture presence. The non-reflective glass let people actually see it. Neither thing was particularly glamorous, but both mattered, especially when a house was being presented to look its very best.

I can still remember the practical decisions, decades later. It is odd what stays in the mind. I have forgotten the name of the course I passed in Sunderland, yet I can remember the sort of glass we put in front of a village scene and exactly why we chose it.

Most of the pictures I framed were of French and Spanish villages. And so many of them were Russell Flints. I handled them in such numbers that, if you were to put one in front of me today, I could probably recognise the style from across the room.

Old walls warmed by the sun. Narrow streets. A doorway in shadow. Roof tiles and shuttered windows. The occasional figure who seemed quite happy to let the afternoon take its time. Each scene was different, yet there was something unmistakable about the way Flint saw them.

I was not collecting his work. I was not studying art history. I was a young lad doing his job, and there was always another picture to frame. But somewhere between the mounts and the glass, those places settled into my imagination. I grew to like them without ever deciding to.

Of course, life moved on. I left that job for something that paid more money. At nineteen I moved to London, and picture framing became part of a chapter I had finished, or thought I had finished.

When you are that age, you are looking ahead, not back. There are jobs to take, decisions to make and a whole life still waiting to happen. You do not stop to catalogue the things you will carry with you. Most of the time you do not even know what those things are.

The tools were left behind. The showrooms belonged to somebody else's days. I had no particular reason to imagine that Russell Flint would mean anything to me years later. Yet the eye that had learned to know his paintings had come along to London with the rest of me.

Decades passed. Work changed, places changed and life filled itself with other concerns. Picture framing became one of those old jobs you mention when somebody asks what you did when you were younger.

Yet whenever I came across a Russell Flint, I knew. There was no need to read the name underneath. The picture simply looked familiar in a way that was difficult to explain. I had spent enough hours in the company of those villages to know them almost as old friends.

It is curious how a practical skill can leave behind something entirely different. I had learned to frame pictures, but the lasting thing was not the framing. It was an affection for what those pictures showed me. The trade had gone; the taste had stayed.

Many years later, I started noticing a picture in the window of a small art gallery. On display was a Russell Flint: a pale stone house in a French village, just the sort of scene I had handled so many times when I was young.

I did not need anyone to tell me who the artist was. I recognised it straight away. And I liked it straight away, too. But I did not buy it.

I walked past the shop again. And again. I must have passed that picture fifty times, perhaps more. There was always some other errand, somewhere else to be, no pressing reason to come home with a framed print. Still, every time I passed the window, I looked.

Then, one day, the gallery was closing down. There was a sale, and the picture I had admired so often was reduced. After all those walks past the window, all those moments of liking it and carrying on, I finally went in and bought it.

There was nothing grand about the occasion. I was not hunting for an investment. I did not know the history of the original watercolour or where it had been exhibited. I knew I liked this picture, and now I had the chance to take it home.

So I did. And the old French house, which had spent so long waiting in that little gallery, became part of my own home. I suppose that ought to have been the end of the story. Only much later did I understand that it was really the middle.

There is one thing about the picture that still makes me smile. The back of the frame is, to my old picture-framer's eye, a bit embarrassing. If I still had the tools, I would put it right in a heartbeat. Some habits refuse to retire, even when the equipment has long since gone.

On the back there is a little gold label from the gallery. It is nothing fancy, but I rather like that it is there. The front of the frame shows a village in France. The back holds a small reminder of the shop where I found it. Between them is the story of how this particular picture came to be mine.

I have left the frame alone for now. Not because the workmanship has suddenly improved, but because there is something rather fitting about it. The young framer is still there, quietly checking somebody else's work.

For years I thought of it as no more than a picture I had bought because I liked it. Now I see that it has been carrying part of my own history all along. A young lad leaving school. A trip to Sunderland. A workshop full of mounts and glass. Show houses waiting to welcome people who had not yet moved in.

And then, years and years later, one picture in a little gallery window.

All those years ago, I was putting Russell Flint pictures into other people's houses to make them feel like homes.

Decades later, I finally put one into my own.

I find that quietly wonderful. We never quite know which small parts of our early lives will stay with us. A job we took for the wages. A skill we learned because we had to. Something we saw so often that it became part of the way we look at the world.

Sometimes those things follow us for a lifetime. And sometimes they are waiting in a shop window, until at last we recognise them and take them home.