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November, 1823. Hawai‘i’s young king and queen, Kamehameha II and Kamämalu, set sail for England to seek the help of George IV in fending off Russian, American and British efforts to undermine the Islands’ independence. After a difficult six-month voyage, the royal couple finally arrive in London. There they meet with the foreign secretary, Lord Canning, and arrange an audience with King George. While they wait to see the king, Governor Boki of O‘ahu, who has accompanied the couple, arranges for their portraits to be done by the noted English painter John Hayter.
The Hawaiian king and queen never do meet their English counterpart; tragically, they both die of measles within six weeks of arriving in London. Boki waits for the audience with King George and is able to exact a promise of protection from the British monarch. “I will watch over your country,” the king proclaims. “I will not take possession of it for mine, but I will watch over it, lest evils should come from others to the kingdom.”
The king also arranges for official portraits of Kamehameha II and Kamämalu to be done by another prominent artist of the day, Eugenie Lebrun, who paints their images from the Hayter works. In February 1825, Boki and the rest of the party set sail for Hawai‘i to take home the bodies of their king and queen, along with the news that England will help safeguard the Hawaiian Kingdom. A year later, the paintings done by Lebrun arrive in Hawai‘i, sent out by King George. But what of the Hayter paintings? No one knows what has become of them.
Flash forward 160 years. The monarchy is no more, and Hawai‘i is now part of the United States. ‘lolani Palace, the former royal residence, has become a museum. Enter John Loring, design director of Tiffany & Co., who visits the palace to photograph a silver Tiffany punch ladle for his book Tiffany Taste. The ladle belonged to Hawai‘i’s last monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani; she is thought to have bought it in 1887, when she was in England at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebration—but that’s another story. Loring’s prior knowledge of Hawaiian history is scant; it comes primarily from a picture book he read as a child, which told the story of Kamehameha the Great. His knowledge of art, however, is extensive, and—no surprise for a Tiffany designer—he has a keen eye for detail. He is immediately struck by two portraits hanging in the palace—Lebrun’s paintings of Kamehameha II and Kamämalu—and recognizes that they must have been done by a serious European court painter. He asks local folklorist extraordinaire Jim Bartels (then the curator of ‘lolani Palace) for the story of the paintings, and Bartels tells him the whole tale—including the bit about the lost Hayter portraits.
A year later, Loring is in Ireland with his friend Sybil Connolly, a grand Irish dame who is Tiffany’s designer on the Emerald Isle. The two set out from Dublin with a picnic, off to visit a farmer “in the middle of nowhere” who sells Georgian-era woodwork; Sybil is hoping Loring may find some thing he likes for his new home. They drive for a couple of hours and find the farmhouse—and a lot of wood in dreadful condition. Loring isn’t interested. But he is hungry, and the two decide it’s time for their picnic.
By now, though, rain has started pouring down, and a meal outside is out of the question. Connolly and Loring ask the farmer if they might take their picnic in his kitchen, and he consents with an accommodating “aye.” They eat and then prepare to take their leave, but the farmer prevails on them to have one more sherry in the sitting room, where he has a few other wood pieces he wants to show them. They walk into the room, and Loring’s eye is instantly caught by something far more interesting—and improbable. There, propped up against a chair and staring at him, is the face of a man he last saw in ‘lolani Palace: Kamehameha II.
Loring asks the farmer what on earth he’s doing with a painting of a Hawaiian king. “No, no,” the farmer insists, a bit haughtily. “This is a painting of a Haitian officer in Napoleon’s army.” In fact, he tells Loring, he has a picture of the man’s wife, too, somewhere on a stack of books and magazines behind the sofa. Unable to restrain himself, Loring flings his body over the sofa and comes face to face with Kamämalu. Still unable to believe that he has actually found the paintings, he checks for identifying marks and finds, on the back of each painting, a small paper bearing the imprint of Lord Canning. He knows then what he has.
He asks the farmer if he’s interested in selling the portraits, and the answer comes back: Aye, if Loring will give him enough to buy two loads of bricks to restore a part of his farmhouse, about $1,400. On the ride back to Dublin, Loring tells Sybil that they have found the long-lost portraits. As soon as they get back to the city, he calls halfway around the world to Jim Bartels.
“Jim, I have found the John Hayter portraits of the king and queen!” he exclaims when he gets Bartels on the line.
Bartels, skeptical, replies, “You have not.”
“Well, I wouldn’t believe it either,” says Loring, “except for the fact that they have the book plates of Lord Canning glued to the backs of the canvases.”
Today, Loring marvels when he thinks of the tale. “If I’d gone to Ireland a year earlier, or if it hadn’t been raining, or if we hadn’t agreed to go into the sitting room, or if both paintings had been behind the sofa….” he trails off for a moment. Then he muses, “There is obviously a force in this world that makes these things happen, and it is probably as obvious as gravity was to Isaac Newton, but nobody has noticed it yet. I call it ‘horizontal gravity,’ and I think this story is a very good example of it. I imagine the king and queen must have wanted to get back to Hawai‘i very badly to have dragged us off to the middle of Ireland in a rainstorm to get them home again.”
Loring got the paintings back to Hawai‘i as quickly as possible and donated them to the palace on Tiffany’s behalf, an act that has sparked an ongoing relationship between the jewelry company and the museum.
Loring himself looks upon his deed of returning the paintings not as one of generosity, but as one of duty. “Everybody who hears the story seems to agree that I was sent there to get the paintings, and the only thing to do was get them home again. It was as simple as that. I feel very proud that they chose me as the messenger to bring them back.”
Currently, ‘lolani Palace is being restored to reflect the grand royal residence it once was, and earlier this year Tiffany helped sponsor a Royal Gala Ball as a key fundraising event for the effort. The company even donated an exquisite platinum-and-diamond butterfly pin for auction, designed after the style of a pin Queen Lili‘uokalani used to wear in her hair.
In the next phase of the palace’s restoration, new galleries will be created to display the treasures of Hawai‘i’s royalty, and the Hayter paintings will be hung there for all to see. Tiffany has agreed to underwrite the costs of framing the portraits in a style that reflects their early 19th-century origin. And on a recent trip to London, Loring just happened to find a matched pair of perfectly sized frames from the 1820s. “Horizontal gravity,” indeed.