The Singing Butler

A woman in a man's arms by the beach. He in a dinner jacket and evening pumps, she in a red cocktail dress, matching long gloves, bare feet. Just like The Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Edward Lear — "And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, / They danced by the light of the moon." Sunset, golden hour, a before-rain darkness eating up the white clouds, while the sky is quietly getting ready, in its own time, for the fancy, cozy dinner to come.

She has her gloves on, he has his shoes on. There is a strong contrast between them which they embrace. One slow, the other excited. One quiet, the other loud. One in order, the other like they are in a rave.

But The Singing Butler isn't really about them. It's named for the butler and the maid, both fighting the wind with umbrellas, holding the elements back so the couple never has to feel them. He is said to be singing Fly Me to the Moon — a song about wanting to escape, to be somewhere else, with someone — sung by a man standing exactly where he is, for people who are already exactly where they want to be.

The couple has forgotten the 'right' hand placements. They've forgotten propriety, the wind, the weather, everything but each other. And I keep asking — why is the title not theirs? Why is it the butler's, a man whose face we never even see?

Because not everyone can afford to run from their mansion or hotel to the beach, to the perfect sunset, to dance before a fancy dinner. But everyone can give space for the ones who do.
Everyone can stand in the wind, holding an umbrella they don't need for themselves, and still find a kind of happiness in it — not in having the moment, but in guarding it. The butler may be missing his own wife, his own mistress, his own first love. But he stays. Not only by holding the umbrella, but by singing. He cherishes what they have — maybe out of loyalty, maybe simply because he loves love, even from the outside of it.

A note on the painting: Vettriano submitted this piece to the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition in 1992, where it was rejected (JackVettrianoStudio) — considered, by the establishment's own account, too sentimental, too populist to take seriously. It sold that year for a modest sum. Twelve years later, in 2004, it sold at auction for £744,800 — at the time, a record for any Scottish painting, and for any painting ever sold in Scotland. (Alchetron) The public, it turned out, saw something the critics had missed — perhaps the same thing this essay has been circling: that the butler's devotion, unglamorous and unpaid attention to, is not a lesser story than the couple's. It just took the art world longer to notice.