Most of the children I saw were not obviously troubled; they were sweet and generous, well-mannered and mature. Groomed. They would follow the same path as Arch and Vanessa: private elementary; Yeatman or Steptoe or one of the other pricey day schools in Nashville, or maybe a boarding school in Virginia or New England; respectable university; graduate school in business or law or medicine. They would play golf and tennis, become skilled swimmers, go to summer camp in the Carolinas, spend a semester abroad in Europe, and maybe work for a while on a dude ranch in Wyoming, learning to love the arts and the wonders of history and the great outdoors. They would go on church mission trips to poor countries and come home swollen with pride for having touched the lives of the less fortunate. They would volunteer at soup kitchens and homeless shelters, tutor at public elementary schools, make a black friend and form a genuine respect for the challenges he faced. They would “give back,” as the saying goes, in the form of generous contributions of both money and time to church and charity.

And they would marry others of their ilk, with the occasional interloper—a Yankee or an Italian or a Jew. Their fortunes would grow. They would build homes of their own or move into the ones in which they were raised. Their lives would not be untouched by hardship; there would be the same spillage of infidelity and divorce, disease leading to prolonged illness and sometimes death, business failures and other reversals of fortune, struggles with addiction and mental illness. But most of them would land on their feet, as would their children, who would be just as beautiful and charming as they had once been, and who might one day sit for an hour or so with me while I sketched and took photos as studies for their portraits.

I did most of the portraits outside, and I generally finished them ahead of schedule. I never lost my love of art, nor my obsession with getting every detail right. But I’d been at it for so long and with such steadiness of practice that I could blow through a house-and-garden painting in a few weeks. There were commissions enough to keep me working for two more years.

“If only we’d known,” Pancho said. “You might have tapped this well a long time ago.”