Portrait comes alive

Her name is Champa Manooa, and when she was 17 years old she met renowned artist Vladimir Tretchikoff at one of his exhibitions at the Stuttafords department store in Durban.

Manooa wanted to know why he had not ever painted an Indian woman.

"He told her: 'I would love to paint you. You are beautiful and have the most amazing eyes'," Manooa's daughter, Chameli Jain, said yesterday.

That was 63 years ago.

At the time, Manooa was a well- known dancer in the Indian community but was more widely known by her stage name, Champa Chameli.

One of Tretchikoff's portraits of Manooa,Hindu Dancer, fetched R1.3-million at an auction in Cape Town this week.

In the run-up to the sale, it emerged that Boris Gorelik, who wrote a biography of Tretchikoff, had been trying in vain to trace Manooa - only for her daughter to appear at the auction, having moved to Cape Town a few years ago.

The winning bid came from an Indian man from Durban .

Manooa now lives in Palm Beach, in Florida, in the US. She celebrates her 80th birthday next month. When asked about the attention her portrait had garnered, she said: "I am so excited. I didn't expect it, so many years later."

The mother of four and grandmother of seven said she posed in Tretchikoff's Cape Town studio in 1950.

She remembered fondly how melon and ice cream was served during breaks.

From his studio, she could see Lion's Head.

About Tretchikoff, she said: "He was a gracious man and a very talented artist."

He worked on three paintings in just a few sittings and took several photographs of her.

She met Tretchikoff again at the age of 26 in Johannesburg. He signed a print of her portrait.

Jain said the print always had a special place in the family home.

After her husband died, it went with Manooa when she moved to the US with her four daughters in 1980.

Today she paints, does pottery, makes jewellery and gardens.

She is, according to Jain, as beautiful as ever.