Canadian Lawyer

Cross EXaMinEd Speed art Julian Porter has cased galleries in Europe so you don't have to 'waste your eyeballs.' by yaMri taDDeSe l ibel lawyer Julian Porter first went to Europe as an 18-year-old to admire paintings with a small group of peers. He liked the trip so much, and the role of tour guide, he still ushers folks through European galleries 58 years later. He travels with a bit more sophisticated company now (his fellow travellers include former Supreme Court justice Ian Binnie and former deputy prime minister John Manley), but he likes the experience all the same. His love of law and paintings was most likely inherited. Former Ontario Court chief justice Dana Porter — his "wonderful, wonderful father"— was also a painter. One of the senior Porter's paintings now sits on his son's office desk in downtown Toronto. The junior Porter is now 76 and 26 November/December 2013 runs a solo litigation practice. He is a tall, lean man with grey hair and a penchant for theatrical descriptions. It's that attitude he brings to his new book, 149 Paintings You Really Need to See in Europe (So You can Ignore the Others). It's a collection of cheeky quips on select paintings in galleries like the Louvre, the Tate Britain, the Uffizi, and the Hermitage Museum. The book "was long in the oven," he says. In fact, he's been scratching away at it for the last 30 years, renewing his thoughts after every trip to Europe — and he's taken many — before focusing on it for the last five or six years. He's looked at some of the paintings, he says, over a 50-year period. Dutch painter Rembrandt is one of his favourites. "One of my heroes is Rembrandt, and I most probably visited Rembrandt over 58 years. I must have www.CANADIAN L a w ye r m a g . c o m visited a portrait in the National Gallery of London of Rembrandt 80 or 90 times." Over the years, he's had to fit in trips to Europe between suing and defending many media outlets. His litigation experience includes cases like Reichmann family v. Toronto Life, Schreiber v. Lavoie, Yew v. The Globe and Mail, and the Dubin Inquiry into steroid use by Ben Johnson. For someone who has seen the paintings so many times, he says very little about each of them in the book. He wrote on average a 300-word critique of each piece, and it's clear he enjoyed doing it. "The model for this Virgin was most probably a prostitute," reads one of his commentaries on a Michelangelo oeuvre. "I try to make it irreverent, and saucy, and hopefully make you laugh," he says. The book, he says, is for people who want efficient visits to galleries without the sore sAndrA strAngemore Porter has been scratching away at his European art book for 30 years.

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