When Did You Last See Your Father By William Frederick Yeames. From The World's Greatest Paintings, Published By Odhams Press, London, 1934. Poster Print (20 x 10)

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Bullying, blustery, and boorish, Arthur blunders his way through fatherhood, regularly calling his son a fathead and intruding into the boy's private moments with a sense of entitlement. He has a penchant for exaggeration when he is not telling outright lies, and publicly humiliates his long-suffering wife Kim with his shameless flirting with various women and an affair with Beaty, a friend of the family. All Parliamentarian soldiers therefore wore yellow sashes during battle so that they could easily spot members of their own army. In the next room the phone goes; in here, by the bed, it's disconnected. I laugh with her about this - how we've not wanted the phone to ring and disturb his sleep, how no vacuuming has been done for the same reason, how we find ourselves whispering or low-voiced not out of grief and piety but because it would be such a pity to wake him. The GP has been fine about our holding on to the body - said that if we kept the room cold enough we could have him here right up to the funeral. We decided against that: he's going today; we don't want the house to be a morgue or chamber of rest, just to hang on to him a little longer, get used to him not being in his body.

The book is made up of numerous anecdotes of his father’s behavior and how he ofen took advantage of of his long-suffering wife and embarrassed children. Morrison writes: “ I know the contradictions are there: the unsnobbish protector and defender of ‘ordinary decent folk’ had his big house, his Merc, his live-in maid, and was acutely aware of his social status; the sentimental family man could be a bully and tyrant; the open-hearted extrovert had a trove of secrets and hang-ups. . . What would my father’s life have been without these little scams and victories? Not his life, anyway. What will my life be like without his stories of them? Not mine.” After a change in the fortunes of his family, Yeames moved to London in 1848, where he learnt anatomy and composition from George Scharf and took art lessons from F. A. Westmacott. In 1852 he journeyed to Florence where he studied with Enrico Pollastrini and Raphael Buonajuti. During his time there he painted at the Life School at the Grand Ducal Academy, drawing from frescoes by Andrea del Sarto, Ghirlandaio and Gozzoli. Continuing on to Rome, he painted landscape studies and copied Old Masters, including the frescoes of Raphael in the Vatican. Son.' I look at the map of Craven District on the wall, her patch of births, marriages and deaths. 'Are people fairly well in control of themselves by the time they come here?' I ask. This man is almost hidden by the shadows in the room. However, he is looking directly at the boy and seems assured that the family is guilty.And When Did You Last See Your Father? was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878, no. 329. In this work Yeames has again left the Tudors behind to select a subject from the Stuart period at the time of the English Civil War between the Royalist suppporters of King Charles I and the Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax. Yeames has painted an imaginary scene where a Roundhead officer and his Parliamentary associates are questioning the young son of a Royalist supporter about his father's current whereabouts. The boy's mother and another woman, perhaps his aunt, are shown to the far left anxiously awaiting his answers. The boy is obviously faced with the dilemma of telling the truth, thereby endangering the life of his father, or going against his conscience by telling a lie. This is Yeames's best-known painting and his undoubted masterpiece. As Yeames's niece Mary Stephen Smith wrote: He holds in his arms a number of books, probably literature that had been forbidden by the Puritans.

No, Arthur. It's just the numbers waiting to get in. And surely there must be doctors on the circuit.'

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But it's like the authorities fear for the corpse and won't let it out of their sight, as if it were going to get chopped up or boiled down or something.' I listen to his voice fading on the mobile phone, and remember my conversation with the consultant three days ago - 'Can he die at home?''I don't see why not: your mother's a doctor, and there's nothing more we can do for him in hospital' - and wonder if this is where we've got already. In the cars ahead and behind, people are laughing, eating sandwiches, drinking from beer bottles, enjoying the weather, settling into the familiar indignity of waiting-to-get-to-the-front. But my father is not like them. There are only two things on his mind: the invisible head of the queue and, not unrelated, the other half of the country lane, tantalisingly empty.

Morrison includes the intimate details of caring for his father, noting how his body changes with age and illness. He writes, "His pacemaker, once buried in the fat of his chest, now stands proud, like a parcel on a doormat."That is the first paragraph of the last chapter of this book and it really touched me. Blake Morrison has written a book about his father’s life and his death. That sounds like an old story that everyone has written, but it’s not. It’s not a memory of everything being wonderful or everything being horrid. It’s a story of a relationship between father and son, with all of its quirks, embarrassments, vulnerability, love, bonding, etc. It was a real story, one that most of us can easily relate to. When did you last see your father? Was it when they burnt the coffin? Put the lid on it? When he exhaled his last breath? When he last sat up and said something? When he last recognized me? When he last smiled? When he last did something for himself unaided? When he last felt healthy? When he last thought he might be healthy, before they brought the news? The weeks before he left us, or life left him, were a series of depletions; each day we thought ‘he can’t get less like himself than this,’ and each day he did. I keep trying to find the last moment when he was still unmistakably there, in the fullness of his being, ‘him’. If you select the stretched option, your reproduction of And When Did You Last See Your Father?, 1878 will be stretched over a timber frame and arrive ready to hang straight on the wall. The width of the bars will be about 0.5 inches / 1.5 cm. Stretching is usually done in preparation for framing the painting, that is, sliding the stretched painting into a wooden frame. If you wish to hang the painting without a frame, we recommend selecting the Gallery Wrap service. Morrison warns us: "don't underestimate filial grief, don't think because you no longer live with your parents, have had a difficult relationship with them, are grown up and perhaps a parent yourself, don't think that will make it any easier when they die." He is right. In 2000, a blue plaque commemorating Yeames was installed at his former home, 8 Campbell Road, Hanwell, London, where he lived from 1894 until 1912.