Harvey Edwards Legging Warmers, was the first poster I ever bought, and then a framed print of Robert Doisneau The Kiss, Spring 1950.
Later I was captivated by Jack Vettriano’s most famous painting, The Singing Butler 1992 which hung in my home for quite a few years, before being replaced by an art print of Paul Gauguin The Siesta which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. The Butler’s in Love painted by Mark Stock which hangs in Bix a two story dining room in San Francisco and then the copy of Rene Magritte’s painting Le Maître d'École (The School Master) which hangs in the bar at The Beaumont Hotel in London.
What could a pair of woolly leg warmers, a Parisian kiss, a tropical siesta, a lecturing crescent moon, and two punctilious butlers possibly have in common? For me, the thread is choreography: each image arranges bodies and attention, service and desire, rest and readiness. Seen together, these six favourites sketch a quiet map of how we move through the world and how the world, in turn, composes us. I wanted to explore how these works of art have become not necessarily my favourites but the most resonant and easy to recall and why.
Harvey Edwards’ Leg Warmers begins with near-silence. We’re offered not a face but a fragment: calves pressed to a barre, shoes scuffed, cloth bunched. The drama is in the grind, not the performance. This is the backstage of grace, a study of preparation where heat is borrowed, muscles coaxed, and the self is literally held together by elastic and discipline. As an observer, I feel conspiratorial—let in on a secret pact between body and craft. And not just a secret, for anyone who has trained in this art form understands tatty shoes and holey leg warmers are all part of work. The photograph expresses the beauty of the work in contradiction to the wear from repeated practise. The frame edits away the theatre’s glamour to elevate the ordinary labour that enables it.
That editorial instinct carries into Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss (Le baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville), a photograph that feels candid but is famously staged. It doesn’t matter. The lovers are centred, precise as dancers hitting their mark, while the city eddies around them—caps, cars, coats, a café chair askew.
Paris is the grandest of stages and we, like passers-by caught in the tableau, must decide whether to look away or to watch.
When I saw these two young Italians kiss outside Liberty, I was compelled to capture them. My image was not staged. I confessed to snapping the image after seeing them embrace, and told them why.
The image and mine too rehearses a public intimacy that still startles because it exposes how often life’s most private beats rely on the world’s indifferent hum to appear so intensely alive. I wasn’t indifferent when I saw the image recreated in real life 70 or so years later.
Paul Gauguin’s The Siesta turns that hum down to a murmur. Heat thickens the air; figures fold into the shade, bodies arranged not for spectacle but for survival. Time slackens. If Doisneau’s kiss is a held breath, Gauguin’s noon is the long exhale. The geometry of rest here is as deliberate as any choreography: limbs draped, glances averted, the room’s angles doing as much work as the figures themselves. Looking, I’m confronted by the ethics of my gaze—this is a colonial eye imagining ease in a place it exoticised. Yet the painting still teaches the dignity of pause. Rest, it insists, is an art of its own.
Rene Magritte’s The Schoolmaster is the trickster in this company, and perhaps its most literal teacher. He presents an object that is and isn’t itself—nature dressing up as instruction. The scene is stripped down, almost diagrammatic, as if the world has paused to let the lesson land: seeing is learned. After Edwards’ cropped body, Doisneau’s staged spontaneity, and Gauguin’s languid theatre, Magritte makes explicit the pact that underwrites them all. Images do not simply reflect; they propose. They show us how to notice by first unsettling what we think we already know.
That lesson proves useful when we come to Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler. It is kitsch to some, beloved to many—a couple in evening dress dancing on a windswept beach while a maid and butler stabilise the scene with umbrellas. The composition is unapologetically cinematic. But look at the servants: their labour is the weatherproof frame within which romance can take place. The butler, like Edwards’ barre, is a support hidden in plain sight. The couple’s poise is a duet with the wind, yes, but also with the hands that keep their world from blowing away. The painting is about love, certainly, but it is also about the infrastructure of love. The first time I saw it it conjured a desire to connect completely with another person for me. I was looking inside the painting for something sadly lacking in my own life at the time. I saw myself dancing in that red gown with the wealth and status of the women in the painting.
Mark Stock’s The Butler in Love narrows that theme to a single, aching figure. Here the servant is centre stage at last—gloved, immaculate, immobilised between duty and desire. The room’s glow is all red velvet and glass, but the most brilliant surface is his restraint. We read the scene like detectives: a lipsticked rim, a fire that burns for someone else, a gaze kept just off target. If Vettriano shows service as choreography, Stock shows it as suspense. The butler tends the moment that excludes him, an artist of unspent feeling.
Across these works, certain motifs keep returning. The partial body versus the full scene; the tension between spontaneity and staging; the quiet heroism of preparation and support. Objects act like characters—leg warmers grip a destiny, umbrellas argue with weather, a leaf pretends to be a blackboard, a champagne glass blushes with someone else’s mouth. And time behaves oddly. It stops for a kiss, stretches for a nap, splinters into rehearsal beats, loops back in a surreal lesson, elongates in longing, is snatched from the gale for a dance.
Most of all, these images recalibrate where we place importance. They make peripheral actors central: the apparatus that holds an arabesque; the city that dignifies a gesture; the heat that compels repose; the idea that rearranges perception; the invisible labour that makes romance look effortless; the person whose love is a masterpiece precisely because it remains unsaid. As an observer, I’m reminded that looking well is its own form of service—an attention that steadies, that shelters, that allows a scene to become itself.
So, six very different works, one quiet kinship. Each one sets a stage, declares a weather, appoints its supports, and then asks us to notice not just the obvious subject, but the system that bears it. The miracle is not simply the kiss or the dance or the dreamlike leaf. It is the care—practical, ethical, imaginative—that makes such moments possible and, just as often, keeps them from spilling into loss. In that sense, every viewer is a kind of butler too: holding the umbrella of attention steady while art does what it does best—teach us how to see.
All these pictures have had a memorable impact. I love art and of course if I were to write comprehensive list of all the paintings artists and photographs photographers I admire there would be so many to add. For now I just wanted to think about these six and connect them with an imaginary thread.
Art is subjective, why we love what we love is unique to us. What we take from a work of art is different for everyone and yet without the creative process I think life would be profoundly lacking.
Art lovers think back to the paintings, sculptures, photographs you have sunk into. The works you have lived with, lived in, in posters and postcards and prints, few of us can afford originals by great artists. These are the paintings or photographs that have changed us and linking them together is an exercise in defining who we are.