By Savanah Anderson, Class of 2028
“There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own,” writes Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Grey.1 Consider, for instance, the Mona Lisa. What can you tell me about that woman and her famous smile? Probably very little. In this way, it seems, the creation of a portrait is both a birth and a death; the original model replaced by a reproduction of themselves. This is the dilemma at the center of portraiture. How can an artist pick through the contents of a life like junk at a garage sale and decide how the subject will be remembered? This question is likely one intimately familiar to Henk Pander.
Pander, a Portland-based painter from the Netherlands, was primarily known for his Pacific Northwest landscapes and poster art, but it is his portraits I am concerned with.
Pander produced several portraits in his career, the most notable of which are Portrait of Delores and Prayer Before the Night. These paintings show in Pander’s body of work a unique fascination with death, so much so it might as well have been holding the brush. Both paintings are of figures nearing the ends of their lives, and it is through them and with the help of written archival information that we can begin to understand this strange pattern and how an artist like Henk Pander chooses to memorialize those closest to him.
Spurned by the negative reaction to his exhibition at Portland State University, Pander retreated from the art world to work at the Storefront Theater in Portland. There, he would work closely with director and costume designer Ric Young. In his own words, the two “began a long and creative friendship, which lasted until he died in the winter of 1992.”2 Perhaps, they felt a certain kinship, each being highly criticized artists and Ric being described as “vehemently opposed to any form of censorship.3 An ironically Wilde-esque figure, Young was an eccentric, ostentatious, and avant-garde artist. By all (admittedly limited) accounts, Ric was loved and admired within the theater community and, although often disliked by critics, he was certainly a topic of discussion for many of them. All things considered, he seems a man worth writing about, and maybe for a time he was, yet little information about him remains online.
What remains, however, is Prayer Before the Night. This painting, now kept in the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, shows Ric Young as he lay dying due to complications of AIDS. Although perhaps not the same lively man he used to be, this portrait is an homage to the life and legacy of a man not to be forgotten. He lay surrounded by colorful, ornate fabrics, his frail figure swallowed by a large, draped kimono. A peacock, commonly used as a symbol for beauty and extravagance, sits on the bed beside him. He wears edgy black cowboy boots and a large, gold crown. As Henk would write in a piece on Ric, “he became famous for his great head pieces”4 which he designed for the Storefront Theater.
This painting immortalizes a man, not who he was soon to become, but how he was and is remembered by those who knew and loved him. It tells us little about his illness, his family, or his body of work, and instead creates an image of beauty and extravagance—of a richness of life.
Portrait of Delores tells a very similar story. Pander married his second wife, Delores Rooney in 1978. Generally, following a line of curiosity and conventional essay structures, now would be when I tell you about Delores, and I wish that I could. Yet, little about Delores is known to the public. One obituary claims she took an “extraordinary supporting role”6 in her career. A biography, (on Henk, of course), says her “support…allowed him to focus on his paintings”7 Her life before her marriage to the artist is seemingly lost to time. She was a shadow in the legacy of her husband’s work. Or, that would be the case, if not for her portrait.
Portrait of Delores is a portrait of strength. Her posture is relaxed, yet her expression is stern and unrelenting. She holds a large book on her lap, an homage to her work in the literary field, and a colorful ceramic vase sits on the table beside her. She wears bright red Wizard-of-Oz-esque shoes, matching the elegant red of the drapes behind her. She is dignified and unafraid. Delores would be diagnosed with cancer in 2010, which would take her life shortly after. Henk kept a journal documenting the process of her treatments until she passed, now kept in the Hatfield Archives, which details the agonizing experience of the decline of her health. She became thin and haggard, dwarfed by her hospital bed, her bones showing through her skin like the wings of a bat. This painting does not show this time in her life, but who she was in spite of it. As Henk would say in his journal, “she has been strong, fearless, independent, dignified, and sad throughout the ordeal,” and although she was hard to recognize, “she is very much the same person”.8
A painting will never be able to hold a life within its frame. We will never know Ric or Delores as Henk did and their portraits cannot laugh and speak as they did. And yet their portraits outlive them, and the talent of Henk Pander cements the image of these figures, not as they died but as they lived, in our minds and history, impervious to the weather of time. Each of these paintings hold fragments of what can be found in archives, after hours of concentrated digging—a love of fashion or literature, a sense of strength, their family’s talents—condensed into a singular representation. And whether in a museum or a collection online, they exist for all to see and remember.
1 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Sterling Publishing Company, Incorporated, 2020), p. 116.
2 “Ric Young, 1974, 1989–1992,” Series I, Box 5, Folder 12, Henk Pander Papers, WUA064, Willamette University Archives and Special Collections.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Henk Pander Catalogue of Artworks, 1991-2000, Willamette University Archives
6 Martha Ullman West, “Delores Pander, 1938–2010,” Art Scatter, June 25, 2010. Accessed October 22, 2025.
7 Roger Hull, “Henk Pander (1937–2023),” Oregon Encyclopedia, April 24, 2024. Accessed October 22, 2025.
8 The Delores Journal, January–June 2010, Series III, Box 12, Folder 11, Henk Pander Papers, WUA064, Willamette University Archives and Special Collections.
9 Henk Pander Catalogue of Artworks, 2001-2012, Willamette University Archives