My great-great-grandfather was the son of the first of his Tunisian court dignitary father’s three simultaneous wives. He himself was very monogamous. The story goes that he and his wife, who had a heart condition, were inseparable like the lovebirds they kept, and that when she died, he said he would die a year later, and that’s what happened.

This painting is their eternal summer, the season of Tunisia’s small jasmine bouquets known as machmoum that our men wear behind the ear in a grand show of what is feminine about their patriarchal society.