The true form of Daphne

Amongst statues and vases, great gold gilded frames, fine masterpieces of the renaissance and some worthy modern art I found a portrait of my mother.
The painting was entitled: ‘The true form of Daphne’ and came from the hand of an artist named Reinhart Shultz. A large white sign on the wall told me this.
The information on this sign told me almost nothing else about the work. Perhaps the card’s text was yet to be finalised, or maybe the museum officials knew little more about the work, than its title and painter?
Later I wondered why they had bothered to hang a piece they had so scant a knowledge of. But my initial thoughts were concerned with how an image of my mother came to be on display here, in York Art Gallery.
There was an interesting blend of styles to enjoy, throughout the various rooms. I came for the Turner, enshrouded in a curtain-covered cabinet to protect the oils from the light, but I never made it to that fabled corner. I never made it past my mother.
Her image is indelible now. Indeed, it seemed seared onto my retinas for a time. Not that it was an image of horror, far from it. But to see your own mother presented as an object of great, if not divine, beauty - hanging there, a portal of sexuality - well, it uneases one’s mind.
He had her, Reinhart, posed in the middle of a sparse room, bathed in a single beam of light coming down from the top left of the image, as if through a skylight. The room itself seemed completely wooden: brown, rough and unpainted. And there, in the centre, he had perched Daphne.
Naked, of course, the light tricked over her wet lips and danced across her pert bosoms. And the artist painted her entirely, leaving little to the imagination.
She stood, placidly, posed as the tree. Her legs firmly together, her body leaning back a little towards the fullness of the light, her arms reaching out and upwards in a strange crooked fashion. And there, upon those slender limbs that passed for branches, Shultz had draped her more personal items of clothing.
An amazing and dreadful thing. I stood, agape, for perhaps 20 minutes while other patrons filed past in moments.
But I’m forgetting things, there was a date too. Well, a year, at least. 1957 - three years before my birth. I asked a passing member of staff if they could tell me more about this painting; I said I thought it was a portrait of my mother.
The woman I was unlucky enough to have halted looked at me with suspicious eyes, which seemed to doubt that a man such as myself could be related to the goddess, so depicted.
Eventually, I received the answer that ‘research was ongoing into this piece, which had been recently discovered in a personal collection and subsequently praised for its “eager sexuality and firm empowerment of woman”.’
I nodded and handed her my business card. She assured me the museum would be in touch, should any more information come to light.
Upon escaping the gallery, I was inclined to take four large gulps of air and sat for a minute on a bench beneath the Roman Wall while the cooling rain poured down about me. I then took refreshment in the refectory of nearby York Minster and pondered the various leaflets about the cathedral’s great history and how even this great edifice was once struck and burnt by a bolt of lightning.
I pondered cleanliness and godliness.
Once I had finished my refreshing tea and two shortbread biscuits, I visited the crypt where there was a small display of medieval Christian art. I spent an hour among the Icons and Madonnas and, when I was quite ready, I stepped back out into the air and the incessant rain, hugging the cathedral wall until a break in the deluge.