An old master who never existed

The family arms were formally registered this month, and the official emblazonments live on the Arms page, painted by real artists whose names are credited there. This picture is something else, and I should come clean about it at once.

I found myself wondering how the arms might have looked if some Georgian ancestor had commissioned them: toned paper, soft washes, acanthus mantling curling everywhere. So I designed the composition and set an artificial intelligence to paint it, round after round, until it looked the way I imagined. The design is mine; the brushwork belongs to nobody who ever lived.

For all that, it did its homework. The barry nebuly is drawn in the early interlocking manner, the way the pattern actually appears in the oldest rolls of arms, long before it softened into the modern wavy line. The talbot of the crest sits on a properly twisted wreath, blue with silver ears, just as the registration reads. And the silver of the lion, the escallop and the mullet is laid in as the old painters would have laid it: a warm ivory on aged paper, not a cold white.

Every proper antique painting needs a signature, so I had the artist sign it. The initials in the corner read A.G.P.T. Say them aloud and you have the whole confession.

It did not stop there. Given the taste for it, my invisible painter produced a second version with two talbots couchant flanking the shield as supporters, one blue, one white, looking very pleased with themselves. They are pure indulgence: supporters form no part of the registered arms, and in the British and Irish traditions they are a privilege granted well above a family like ours. So the two hounds below are strictly off duty, included here because they made me smile.

The real record, with the real artists, is on the Arms page. This one hangs in the Journal, where the family keeps its curiosities, alongside the picnics and the mysteries. The family has form for this sort of affectionate embellishment; the quartered arms on the book's cover are decoration too, and the site has always said so plainly.