FOUND: One of the Original 1969 Stretching Portraits

This may be the most amazing and unexpected discovery of an original Mansion prop since the Phineas Pock tombstone resurfaced in 2020. This is even better, really. Back in January of this year (2025), a guy who goes by the moniker "BlueCollardBastard" (BCB) put up a post at Reddit about successful restoration work on an old stretching gallery portrait of the Wicked Widow (aka Constance, and before that Abigail Patecleaver). As he tells it, his grandfather was an elevator mechanic with Amtech and did some servicing on the Haunted Mansion stretchrooms back in the day. He somehow got hold of an old Widow portrait, apparently from a Disney engineer who fished it out of the trash when they were swapping out the portraits for fresh ones. They wear out and have to be replaced regularly.

(You regular Forgottenistas will have to forgive the inclusion of a lot of stuff that you already know and has been discussed before. I'm expecting this post to attract the attention of a number of outside readers. Disney history buffs they perhaps may be, but sadly, many are still shockingly underMansionized. We must be patient with them.)

BCB chronicled the restoration with a nice series of photos. (They also did an Ally Gal portrait of more recent vintage.)

 

 

Photos: https://www.reddit.com/r/thehauntedmansion/comments/1il2owt/2_stretching_portraits/#lightbox

A sharp-eyed threadster brought the Reddit post to our attention (VicariousCorpse), and another

one noticed that this particular painting looks like a match to one of the originals (yensidtlaw1969).

 

Long story short: it is.

 

What we have here is one of the original 1969 stretching portraits,

a rare and valuable historical relic, risen from the dead.

 

 

From a historian's point of view, doing restoration work on an old relic beyond what is necessary for preservation is definitely a no-no, but from an aesthetic and possibly a collector's point of view, it's hard to argue with the results.

How do we know it's one of THE original portraits? First of all, it's the right style. As I've pointed out elsewhere, the Imagineers' first impulse was to preserve the design of Marc Davis's concepts but alter the coloration to something more realistic so they would look like typical 19th century oil portraits rather than watercolors using somewhat nonrealistic colors. You've seen it many times before, but these Daveland shots are among the most recent and most accurate photographs of Marc's concept art:

 

The portraits seen in the Mansion when it opened were not painted by Davis but by Ed Kohn, the same guy who translated Marc's changing portrait concept artwork into the finished designs still seen today. Ed did a pretty good job preserving Marc's designs while naturalizing the colors, but this approach did not last for many generations, perhaps not even two. It was apparently felt (correctly, I think) that the spirit of Marc's creations did not fit this approach, and if they were going to go with natural coloration they needed a more naturalistic design overall. That remains to this day the governing philosophy. Clem Hall is often credited for the new look, which is still in use, but Elmer Plummer may actually be the man to thank. Whoever is responsible, the difference between the newer style and Marc's is pretty obvious.

pic by Bassbone

My best information is that the paintings were done by hand until about 2005, although there were some unsuccessful attempts before that to come up with an effective printing technique. An "assembly line" approach can be seen in this photo of paintings being produced for the Tokyo Mansion in the 1980s. Of course, as long as paintings were still being produced by hand, the artists had some leeway. Notice that the foliage in the three Ally Gals is not leaf-for-leaf exactly the same from painting to painting. And why should it be?

Which brings us to the point first raised by yen69. There are photos from 1969 and 1970 showing the original paintings in situ, and it should therefore be possible to check whether or not the BCB relic is in fact the one in those photos. The painting can be seen in the Osmonds TV special from March 1970, but that one is a bit too distant to supply the sort of detail we want.

Better are these two from 1969/70, one acquired by Daveland a number of years ago, the other a shot by Gregg Ziak taken by himself back then.

With a little effort, it's possible to line these up with the BCB painting. Looks to me like an exact match. It's almost certainly the same painting.

Hey, what about the Widow portrait in the second stretching gallery? As it happens, Gregg has a photo of that one too (well, sort of):

This time the foliage is NOT an exact match, so this must be from the other stretching gallery.

A second photo exists (owned by Master Gracey and posted at Facebook).

Oh my.  Not the best quality, and not a very helpful angle for making comparisons, either. Nevertheless, with a few adjustments it's good enough to create an overlay with the Ziak photo. There's no doubt in my mind that we have another match. (You have to look not only at the outlines of the foliage but at things like the patterns of "sunlight holes" through the leaves.)

Worth the effort, because this gives us a DATE. The photo is stamped February, 1972. Assuming the paintings in both galleries were changed out at about the same time, this proves that the original paintings were in use for at least two and a half years, and BCB's grandfather couldn't have gotten his lucky hands on this relic until sometime in the spring of 1972 at the earliest. I've seen wildly different accounts of how long those hand-painted portraits lasted before needing to be replaced, from a couple of months to a couple of years. We now have solid evidence that they could indeed remain in use for at least two and a half years.

 

Orlando

What about WDW? Less mystery there. When they removed the original paintings from the WDW galleries, they cut one down, framed it, and put it in the chicken exit corridor:

 

 

Full-length photos also exist. It's fun to put one alongside the newly

recovered Disneyland example and see how similar they were:

Anyway, BlueCollardBastard, if you're reading this, know that you have an extremely rare piece of historic Disneyana on your hands. That's the very same painting people like me saw in the Mansion when it opened in August of 1969. I hope that whoever ends up owning it appreciates what they have.

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