Untouchable: daughter fights for painting of young Connery
WHEN a painting of a youthful Sean Connery posing in a pair of trunks was displayed for the first time in decades it gave fans of the actor a fascinating insight into his early years.
But that portrait of Connery, in the days before playing James Bond made him a household name, is now the subject of a bitter dispute between the artist’s daughter and the Scottish college where her father painted it as a student in 1952.
After Alison Kendall asked Edinburgh College of Art to return Al Fairweather’s portrait of Connery to his family she was promptly rebuffed, with the college saying it was its policy to retain students’ coursework as a permanent part of its collection.
Now, Mrs Kendall has urged the college to “do the right thing”, saying: “I want it back with my family so that we can enjoy it and pass it on.”
She added: “My parents divorced when I was only two years old.
“It wasn’t amicable and I didn’t have much contact with my father. As a result I didn’t have much of my father’s work growing up, only one or two paintings he gave me on my birthdays.” Mrs Kendall, a retired bilingual secretary and exhibition organiser, is now planning to mount a legal challenge against the college.
She says her father bequeathed her all his works of art when he died in 1993 and the Connery portrait is rightfully hers.
However, when she asked for the portrait to be returned, along with other paintings and drawings, the college – part of the University of Edinburgh – instructed a solicitor, who told her she had not provided enough evidence to prove the painting did not belong to them.
Fairweather’s oil-on-canvas portrait of Connery as a life model was part of a collection of paintings and drawings he left behind when he graduated and moved to London.
The portrait came to public attention when it was displayed at a major exhibition celebrating Edinburgh College of Art’s centenary in 2007. Mrs Kendall, 61, saw a photograph of the painting in The Telegraph and tried to reclaim it on behalf of her family.
“I feel it’s only right. The college’s position seems to be that since they ended up with the painting it’s theirs, but my father would have remembered if he had sold it to them or even gifted it. But he didn’t.”
A spokesman for the University of Edinburgh said: “If the university [receives] a formal letter of claim for any works in our collections an investigation will of course be undertaken.”