Chris: "Julia, you and I have to discover whose portrait is under that landscape."
Julia: "There's only one man to ask."
Oh my god!!! Professor Stokes is an expert consultant on handwriting, paranormal activity, the I-Ching... and now art? The man is practically a super hero!
Except for the addition of an open doorway next to the fireplace, Stokes' living room set is identical to the room we saw in Mrs. Fillmore's home in Collinsport. It has the same front door, the same half-paneled back wall with shuttered windows (already used multiple times, including Seaview house, the 2nd Worthington Hall, and Frank Garner's office) and the same brick fireplace (once part of Rev. Trask's room). But of course his home is in Rockport, so Stokes can't be living in the same house occupied by Mrs. Fillmore in 1897, and didn't Megan recently mention something about a Fillmore
farm?
While Stokes is handling the so-called x-ray of the painting, you can get just enough of a very brief glimpse of it to make out a spine and a heart.
Professor Osmund was played by Ronald Dawson, who will later play the nervous records clerk in 1995.
The last time we saw a Tate portrait of Amanda, it was bricked up with Trask in Quentin's room. I do not see how the portrait we saw today could be the same one, because even if Tim Shaw extracted the portrait of Amanda from Quentin's room when he was replacing bricks with panels, by that time Tate had left Collinsport and there would be no reason for him to come back again. So maybe Tate painted multiple pictures of his ideal woman, and today's picture was originally painted before his stay in Collinsport, and put in storage.
Lydia, I know you got your answer after seeing a couple more eps, but it's information we did get before; this is from #820:
Oh, her, says Petofi, looking over Charles' shoulder at the sketch he's working on--I never understood why you persist in painting that same portrait over and over again. I told you, says Tate, annoyed. You're a grown man, says Petofi, only little boys invent "ideal women." I don't want to go over this again, says Tate--I like to paint her because she's the only thing in this world that really belongs to me.
Amanda's portrait is revealed, sans any Dorian Gray surrogate aging, but then no one on DS ever seemed to think that Amanda's Tate portrait should keep her young too. Maybe it was silently assumed by some characters, but the writers seem to have overlooked this idea.
The reason that Amanda didn't age has nothing to do with her portrait.
But I suppose that at this point, one could assume that she doesn't age because she was never born.
Anyway, moments after the portrait is revealed, we cut immediately to the room where it really ought to be, where we saw it last time, in Q's room and Greg Trask's getaway place!
Didn't Gregory destroy that one?