I should say at the outset: I am a careful person. I do not collect things impulsively, and I am suspicious of anything that asks me to buy four of something. So I want to be precise about how this happened, because the precision is the point.
The hallway: Charlie
Charlie is my senior Lab mix, twelve, still here, still convinced the mail carrier is an ongoing threat. His portrait — a watercolor Gallery Canvas — hangs in the hallway where you see it the moment you come in. It was my first order, the one I wrote about. What convinced me, back then, was the free preview: I got to see the whole thing before I paid a dollar, and when I wanted his graying chin made a little more honest, a real person on their team adjusted it. No signup just to look. I only paid once it was truly Charlie.
That experience — seeing it first, being able to ask for a change — is the entire reason there are now four.
The living room: Henry
Henry is my orange cat, bossy and self-satisfied, and his portrait is the loud one. For him I chose an Art Print in a bolder, post-impressionist style — more color, more energy — because the living room gets hard afternoon sun and a soft watercolor would have washed out. This was my second order, and here is where I want to be honest about money.
The welcome discount only applies to your first order. By Henry, I was a returning customer, so I paid the member price — ten dollars off rather than thirty. And I want to tell you plainly: I paid it happily. I had already seen, with Charlie, exactly what I was getting. I didn't need a big discount to feel safe. I needed to know the thing was good, and I already knew.
The guest room: Millie
Millie was the tabby I had before Henry, gone now five years. Hers is the quietest portrait, a soft watercolor in the guest room, where I see her when I change the sheets for company and nowhere else. That suits her. She was a private cat. She would have hated being in the hallway. The guest room, where she can be visited rather than displayed, is exactly right.
That was my third order, also at member price, and again I paid it without a flicker of regret. The point I keep arriving at is this: the discount is a kindness on the first order, but it is not the reason to buy. The reason to buy is that what arrives is worth it.
The bedroom: Duke
And then there is Duke.
Duke was my Black Lab, and he has been gone three years, and his portrait hangs in the bedroom where I see it before anything else each morning. He is the reason I stop. Not because his is the most artful of the four — it isn't, particularly. It is the most him. The set of his shoulders. The way he held his head slightly down and his eyes slightly up, as though apologizing in advance for some joy he was about to inflict on you.
Three years. And every morning I look up at him and the day has a small, steadying anchor in it before it has anything else. People talk about portraits of pets who've passed as though they are sad objects. Duke's is not sad. Duke's is the opposite. It is the proof that he was here, that he was exactly this, that I did not make him up.
For Duke I had only ordinary photos — a black dog is famously hard to photograph, all shadow and no detail — and I was nervous. But I used the free preview, saw that they'd found the light in his coat and the warmth in his eyes, asked for one small change to the white at his muzzle, and only then paid. He arrived in about a week, with the same 30-day guarantee that came with every one of them — not that I've ever needed it. He has not left the wall since.
What four portraits taught me
I did not plan a collection. I ordered Charlie, and the wall taught me something, and then I kept teaching myself the same lesson in different rooms. The animals who shape a life deserve to be in the house — not in a phone, not in a drawer of prints, but on the wall, at eye level, where you live.
If you are considering your first, my advice is unglamorous and practical, which is the only kind I trust: use the free preview, see it before you pay, ask for the change if you need it. That first one will tell you everything. And if you end up, three years on, with four of them and a particular spot on the bedroom wall you cannot walk past without stopping — well. There are worse things to become than the woman with a houseful of the faces she loved.
Duke would have found the whole project deeply silly, and then sat directly underneath his own portrait, blocking it entirely, until I gave him the attention he was actually after. I miss him every morning. I am glad, every morning, to have his face to miss him by.
