The Girl in the Cemetery

I never intended to buy this painting!

I'd gone to a gallery preview of a retrospective exhibition of my brother's late father-in-law's work. En route we stopped off at another gallery where there was work from a postgrad degree show from Goldsmith's.

I wasn't impressed with the work I saw there, but went downstairs and found this painting on the wall and fell in love at once. It's a painting of a girl in a cemetery and it just clicked for me.

Now more than twenty years later, it still hangs in my house – actually now house number three – a key house-hunting requirement for me has been a room with a wall big enough to accommodate it.

The painting often attracts comments from guests, speculating about what it means. Many first believe it to be a photograph – or say it reminds them of a photorealist painting by Gerhard Richter.  

One person was convinced the setting was Brompton Cemetery, another declared that the young woman was dead – the image was of her spirit wandering among the graves. Some people have expressed horror at the idea of living with a picture of a burial ground – my own personal memento mori. Do people really believe death might be catching?

A few years after buying the work I tracked down the artist, Greg Rook – thanks to Google – and he invited me to visit him in his Whitechapel studio.  He confirmed that the setting was indeed Brompton Cemetery. In my football season-ticket days, I often used to walk through Brompton cemetery from Earl’s Court en route to matches at Stamford Bridge, and I would look along the overgrown pathways between the graves, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of the mysterious girl.

The artist said nothing about who she was, so I still have an excuse to speculate. What do you think is the story behind the painting?