Christoph Waltz’s Old Art Teacher Kept the Drawing

In January 2015 a James Bond film was shooting in the Tyrolean Alps, and its villain was played by Christoph Waltz. The Tiroler Tageszeitung found a retired art teacher in Tyrol who had taught Waltz as a boy at the Theresianum in Vienna. And he had kept a drawing.

The assignment had been “I look out of the window”.

Every art teacher sets the window exercise eventually, and every art teacher learns from it who looks out of windows and who draws rectangles.

Most of a class draws what is outside: rooftops, a chimney, perhaps a pigeon. A few pupils read the title more carefully. If I am looking out of the window, they reason, then the subject is me, looking. The young Waltz drew himself at the window.

The teacher kept it. Decades later, with Hollywood filming an hour away, he still had it.

This is the part that is unbearably touching and slightly alarming, as a parent who has thrown away nearly every drawing her children ever made. I did keep things, in theory. In practice we have moved house four times, and each move is a cull, and each cull is conducted late at night by me, with a bin bag, while the children are asleep.

Somewhere in a Madrid landfill is a portrait of me by the middle one, aged six, with a caption that read “MUMMY IS ANGRY”. I am told it was a very good likeness. The middle one has never let me forget it was thrown away. Nobody can now check the likeness.

Somewhere out there, then, there may be an art teacher who kept something of my children’s that I did not. The possibility is both comforting and humiliating. That a stranger valued what I binned. That my children’s first masterpieces may sit in a folder in a retired teacher’s house, waiting for someone to become famous.

I asked the middle one whether she thought any of her teachers had kept her work. She thought about it and said her Year 2 teacher in Copenhagen had kept her drawing of a whale, because she had asked for it back and been told it was “on the wall for now”.

That was four years ago. It may still be on the wall.

I have written to the school to ask. If it is, I will not ask for it back. I will only ask whether, by any chance, they also kept a portrait of a mother, looking angry.