Portrait Painting of Renata

The Portrait Painting of Renata is more than a likeness kept in Richard Cantwell’s hotel room: during his separation from Renata, it becomes a focus for his longing, his self-reproach, and his effort to address her as if she were near. Its silence makes the difference between painted image and living person unmistakable, but Cantwell continues to speak to it. Later he carries it away, and his final written instructions ensure that it is to be returned to the Gritti Palace Hotel, where its rightful owner can claim it.

Identity and Physical Presence

In the hotel room, the portrait is arranged so Cantwell can see it from bed. It has been removed from its frame and placed across two chairs; the mirrored doors of the armoire are open so that he can see the image from the side as well. The careful positioning makes the painting part of the room’s intimate arrangement rather than a picture stored out of sight. The room feels like home to him, and the visible portrait is among the details that give it that character.

Other objects help establish the setting: his pyjamas are laid out, his scuffed slippers stand by the bed, and a bottle of Valpolicella and his extra medicine are near the reading light. The painting is not simply one possession among these practical comforts. Cantwell directs his attention and speech toward it, while the familiar objects around him mark the private routines of a man spending the night alone. He uncorks the wine and pours himself a glass, then addresses the image as Daughter, praising Renata’s beauty and recalling her scent. The remembered intimacy belongs to the living woman, but the portrait provides the visible point of contact for it.

A Silent Addressee

Cantwell’s talk moves repeatedly between recognizing the painting’s limits and treating it as a companion. He abruptly tells himself that he will not talk to a picture, yet soon asks Renata to know that he loves her and wishes to be delicate and good. He asks her to stay with him, although nothing in the painted image changes. The portrait cannot answer or reassure him; its stillness makes the absence it represents plain even as he uses it to speak his affection aloud.

At first light, he sees the picture clearly and asks why it cannot get into bed with him, measuring their separation as a physical distance of eighteen solid stone blocks, perhaps more. He addresses both the portrait and the girl, but the scene explicitly holds the two apart: there is no girl in the room, only the image as it was painted. His teasing complaint that the portrait should keep its chin up so it can break his heart more easily turns its fixed pose into a reminder of the pain he is trying to manage through humor.

The painting remains silent after it has been brought into the room. Cantwell recognizes that he has said foolish and potentially brutal things, apologizes to the image, and asks whether Renata might call. In daylight he acknowledges that the portrait is the likeness of his true love, but likeness does not make it a substitute for her presence. Its value lies partly in sustaining that distinction: it lets him address Renata while confronting the fact that she is not there to hear him.

From Private Consolation to Shared Joke

The portrait’s role changes when Cantwell and Renata are together. After breakfast, they discuss going upstairs to look at the picture in daylight and decide whether it is any good. Renata wears the portrait’s black sweater, bringing the painted appearance into their shared scene without collapsing the difference between image and person. Cantwell explains that the previous night and at first light he had spoken to the portrait as though it were Renata. She treats this as a kindness and says that the picture has served a useful purpose.

Her response turns his solitary ritual into something they can acknowledge together. The portrait is no longer only the object of a one-sided conversation: Renata knows how Cantwell used it, and the two can speak about that use without mistaking the image for her. The scene also gives the painting a modest practical question of its own. They are not only asking what it has meant to him; they are going to examine its quality and value in daylight. Intimacy and appraisal coexist, as the picture remains both an emotionally charged likeness and a material object.

Later, Cantwell thinks of the sleeping Renata and the portrait as two positions in which he has her: one lying on her side, the other looking straight at him. The thought gathers the object’s two functions into a single image. It cannot replace Renata, yet it makes her likeness available alongside her actual sleeping presence. Cantwell calls himself lucky and tells himself not to be sad about anything, a response that makes the painting part of a moment of gratitude as well as absence.

Carrying and Returning the Painting

The portrait’s significance outlasts the hotel-room scenes because Cantwell keeps it. Before leaving, he insists that he will not turn it in and that he will keep it. Near the end of the journey, it is wrapped in the back of the car. When Ronald Jackson asks whether it is Renata’s portrait, Cantwell confirms that it is; Jackson says he will tell her that the portrait was in good condition.

Cantwell’s written order makes the painting part of a practical arrangement for what is to happen if he dies. It specifies that the wrapped painting and two shotguns in the car are to be returned to the Gritti Palace Hotel for their rightful owner to claim. After Cantwell’s final words, Jackson stops to turn the car toward the highway leading to Trieste, reads the order blank by the map light, and expects the items to be returned through channels. The narrative does not show the portrait being delivered, but the instruction establishes its intended destination and owner. The image that once allowed Cantwell to speak to Renata in private thus becomes a possession entrusted to a formal chain of return, carrying his care for it—and his connection to her—beyond his own life.