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1. In the summer of 1992, while visiting a regular haunt on the Arbat, an old walking “mall” in downtown Moscow, I discovered a portrait that beguiled me from the first moment I saw it. It was evening and a bit dark in the back room of the antiques store where I unrolled a canvas to find something I'd never seen before: a heroic and Romantic depiction of a man of color. It didn't comport with what I'd seen in ten years of traveling through the USSR and living in Moscow, but neither had I ever seen anything like it growing up in America.
I took it out to the young women in the front room who only said, "Patterson, Patterson," as they told me he was in a famous movie that had a lot of famous songs. I had no idea what they were talking about but was completely smitten with the portrait. I took it home, had it properly conserved and framed, and hung it in our DC living room as a most unexpected trophy of my long travails in the Soviet Union.
Little did I know that in the course of 30 years I would uncover the amazing story and rich legacy behind the subject of the portrait, an American who lived a fascinating and largely unknown life in the Soviet Union.
2. Only a few months later, I was leafing through the October 1992 National Geographic that featured a story on Alexander Pushkin. As I flipped the pages, I came upon a photograph of James Patterson, "son of an African-American father and a Russian mother," and my jaw dropped. This was the name the women at the antiques shop had been repeating. I was sure I'd found the subject of my painting.
I contacted the National Geographic author who gave me important information. The subject of the portrait was Lloyd Patterson, father of James featured in the story, and husband of Vera Aralova. Vera was an artist and had long been a well known fashion and stage designer in Moscow.
3. Luckily, within a few months, I was on my way back to Moscow to meet Patterson's widow and, I hoped, find all the answers I had about this mysterious portrait. My secret hopes that Vera herself had painted the portrait were quickly dispelled when she told me she'd never seen the portrait in her life and had no idea who painted it. She did, however, show me a photograph that deepened the mystery of the portrait, a mystery only very recently solved.
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Vera in her beautiful apartment where I met her in 1993.
These three moments of chance set me on a decades-long journey. Whether it was kismet, bizarre coincidence, or plain luck, I was amazed at what I'd fallen into. Through years of research, more happenstance, and surprise, I have happily taken in all I could to rediscover Lloyd Patterson's unexpected life in Moscow -- and his amazing legacy.