We followed one commission from the moment the enquiry arrived to the afternoon the piece was delivered — every conversation, every decision, every rework, and the phone call at the end.
We are asked, fairly often, what a commission actually involves. The question usually comes from someone who is thinking about enquiring but is not quite sure what they are signing up for — how long it takes, how many decisions they will need to make, how much of themselves they will need to bring to the process. This piece is an attempt to answer that question honestly, by following one commission from beginning to end.
The commission is real. The client — we will call her Nina — has given us permission to write about it. The details are accurate. We have changed only her name and the name of the person in the portrait.
The Enquiry: A Tuesday in November
Nina\'s email arrived on a Tuesday morning in early November. It was three paragraphs long — longer than most first enquiries, which tend to be brief and slightly tentative, as if the person is not quite sure they are allowed to ask. Nina\'s was different. She had clearly been thinking about this for some time.
She wrote that her father, Thomas, had died in August after a short illness. He was 71. She described him in a way that told us immediately what kind of portrait this would need to be: \'He was the kind of person who took up space in a room without trying to. Not loud — just present. You always knew when he was there and you always knew when he wasn\'t.\' She wanted something she could wear. Something that would let her carry that presence with her.
She ended the email with a question we hear often, and which we always answer the same way: \'I\'m not sure I have good enough photographs. Is that going to be a problem?\' We replied the same afternoon: send us everything you have, and we\'ll tell you honestly what we can do.
The Photographs: What We Had to Work With
Nina sent eleven photographs. We looked at them carefully before calling her.
Eight were recent — phone snapshots from the last few years, mostly taken at family gatherings. Thomas in a garden, squinting slightly into afternoon sun. Thomas at a table, mid-laugh, slightly blurred. Thomas standing with Nina at what looked like a graduation, his arm around her shoulders, his face turned slightly toward her rather than the camera. These were the photographs of a man who was not particularly interested in being photographed — candid, unposed, alive.
Two were older: a colour print from the early 1990s, Thomas in his forties, and a black-and-white image that Nina thought had been taken in the late 1970s, when he would have been in his mid-twenties. The black-and-white was the best photograph technically — sharp, well-lit from one side, a three-quarter profile that showed the structure of his face with unusual clarity. But it was of a young man, and Nina had lost her father at 71.
The eleventh photograph was the one that decided everything. It was a slightly blurry phone image, taken at a kitchen table, Thomas looking down at something just out of frame. The light was coming from a window to his left. He was not performing for the camera. He was simply there — present, in exactly the way Nina had described. The quality was imperfect. The information it contained about his face was extraordinary.
“The best photographs are almost never the posed ones. They are the ones where the person forgot the camera was there.”
The Conversation: Choosing the Version
We called Nina on a Thursday. The conversation lasted forty minutes.
The central question — which version of her father did she want to keep — took most of that time to work through. The black-and-white photograph of the young man was technically superior. But Nina had not known that young man. She had known the 71-year-old, the one with the lines around his eyes and the grey at his temples and the particular quality of stillness that comes to some people in later life. \'If I look at the young photograph,\' she said, \'it\'s like looking at a stranger who happens to have his face.\'
We agreed to work primarily from the kitchen-table photograph, supplemented by the 1990s colour print for structural reference. We would use the black-and-white image only for the underlying bone structure — the proportions that do not change with age. Nina asked whether the blurriness of the main photograph would be a problem. We told her honestly: it would make certain details harder to resolve, and we might need to make some interpretive decisions about the surface of the face. We would share progress photographs at every stage and she could tell us if we got anything wrong.
She chose 18k yellow gold. Her father had worn a gold watch every day of his adult life. It felt right.
The Wax: Three Weeks and a Rework
Eleanor began the wax the following Monday. She spent the first three days simply studying the photographs — not touching the wax, just looking. This is her standard practice, and it is not wasted time. The looking is the work. By the time she picks up a tool, she has already made most of the important decisions.
The first progress photograph went to Nina at the end of week two. The underlying structure was established: the proportions of the face, the depth of the eye sockets, the projection of the nose, the relationship between the jaw and the chin. At this stage the portrait looks rough — more geological than human, a landscape of planes and ridges that will only resolve into a face in the final stages. We always warn clients about this. Nina replied within the hour: \'It\'s strange — I can already see him in there.\'
The second progress photograph went out at the end of week three. The surface detail was in: the lines around the eyes, the particular set of the mouth, the texture of the hair. Eleanor had resolved the blurriness problem in the source photograph by cross-referencing the structural information from the 1990s print — the result was a face that felt, to us, like a confident interpretation rather than a guess.
Nina\'s response came the next morning. She was kind about it — she always was — but she was also precise: \'The mouth is slightly wrong. Dad had a way of holding his lips that was almost like he was about to say something. This looks more settled than he ever was.\'
This is exactly the kind of feedback we need, and exactly the kind that only a person who knew the subject can give. Eleanor reworked the area around the mouth over two days. The third progress photograph went to Nina on a Friday afternoon.
Her reply arrived within twenty minutes: \'That\'s him.\'
“The rework is not a failure. It is the process working exactly as it should — the client\'s knowledge of the person correcting what no photograph can tell us.”
The Casting: The Irreversible Moment
We cast on a Wednesday. The wax — approved, signed off, the only existing form of the portrait — went into the investment flask. This is the moment in every commission that carries the most weight. The wax is about to be destroyed. What comes out of the flask will either be the portrait, or it will be a problem.
The pour was clean. We knew within the first minute of quenching that it had worked — the sprue came away without resistance, and the surface of the raw casting had the crisp, slightly granular quality that tells you the metal filled every part of the cavity. The portrait was there.
Finishing took four and a half hours. The raised areas of the face were brought to a high polish; the recessed areas — the eye sockets, the shadow beneath the cheekbones, the space between the lips — were left deliberately matt to increase the contrast that gives the portrait its three-dimensionality. The piece was set in a plain oval bezel, 44 millimetres across, on a fine curb chain in matching 18k yellow gold.
The Delivery: A Thursday in January
The piece shipped on a Monday in the second week of January — eight weeks after Nina\'s first email. It travelled in our standard presentation: a blackened cedar box, tissue-lined, with a handwritten note on Ashbourne & Vale correspondence card. We use a tracked courier for all deliveries and follow every shipment personally.
The tracking showed delivery at 11.47 on a Thursday morning. Nina called us at 12.15.
She was quiet for a moment before she spoke. We have learned, over many commissions, that this silence is the best possible sign. \'I\'ve been sitting here for half an hour,\' she said. \'I keep picking it up and putting it down. It\'s — I don\'t know how to explain it. It\'s not like looking at a photograph. It\'s more like — he\'s just here. He\'s just sitting here on the table.\'
She paused. \'The mouth is exactly right.\'
“It\'s not like looking at a photograph. It\'s more like he\'s just here. He\'s just sitting here on the table.”
What the Process Actually Involves
For anyone reading this who is considering a commission: this is what it looks like. An initial email. A phone call. A set of photographs and a conversation about which one to work from. Three progress photographs over three to four weeks of sculpting. One rework — sometimes more, sometimes none. A casting. A finishing stage. A delivery.
The total elapsed time from Nina\'s first email to delivery was eight weeks. The number of decisions she had to make was small: which photographs to send, which version of her father to capture, which metal, whether the progress photographs looked right. The emotional weight of those decisions was, of course, something else entirely.
We do not take that weight lightly. Every commission that comes to us arrives with a story attached — a person, a loss, a love, a reason. Our job is to receive that story carefully and to give it back in a form that lasts. Nina\'s father is now in gold. He will be there, in exactly that form, for a very long time.