It must have taken me twenty or thirty minutes to choose. I kept thinking and choosing and eliminating and making piles. Finally it came down to one and I actually saw the painting for it downstairs when I came in. It was the little shell called “The Visitor”. She seemed to be so much enjoying this methodology that I really didn’t have as I was trying to decide, in agony. She said “Alright dearie, now are you sure that’s the one you want?” and I said “Yes, yes, I’m very sure. I really can’t thank you enough”. And she said “Good. Now choose another.” And I did.
I think what I’ll miss most, well I can’t say what I’ll miss most, but I’ll miss Fanny’s voice and her gentle purring slightly gravelly way of talking on the telephone. And frankly, her frank advice about everything. And her stories, which always reminded me slightly of O. Henry stories, with their serendipitous twists of fate at the end and her very direct way of seeing the world and an ability to state things very, very succinctly. Her world seemed to me to be just perfectly edited. I mean perfectly edited, just like one of her paintings. And goodness knows, I have to say I wish she were here to edit me tonight. Because she might not mind a little embroidery, but as Dicky said to me when he called and asked if I might say a few words, “Fanny would really not want any of us to gas on.” I think I’ll just simply end by saying happy birthday, happy Valentine’s Day and God bless.

Amanda Vaill

Good evening. I’m Amanda Vaill. My mother met Fanny Brennan in the 1920’s on the beach at Cannes, in the south of France, when they were both little girls enrolled in a sort of ex-pat playgroup called the Sunshine Club. When the summer was over, they parted and they went their separate ways, but Fanny had made enough of an impression on my mother, not surprisingly, that when their paths crossed again in New York just after World War Two, she remembered her instantly. A deep friendship bloomed. They were by then young married women and they and their husbands, my father and Hank Brennan, spent a lot of time together the way young couples of that era did, drinking martinis and playing rumba records and laughing a lot. And when I came along, I was the first of the children of that group of friends. Fanny came to Presbyterian Hospital to see me. So I can say I’ve known her literally since I was born.
My childhood is threaded though with memories of Fanny, chiefly at the frequent dinner parties she and Hank came to at my parent’s house when I would be allowed to come out in my quilted bathrobe and shake hands with the grownups and curtsy to them and, if I was very, very good, to pass around the tray of hors d’oeuvres.

Fanny Brennan, Cutting Clouds, hand-crafted lithograph on Arches Cover. Paper size: 6 x 7 inches. Image size: 3.43 x 2.68 inches. Signed and numbered in pencil.