By Emily Bissland

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In the Hamilton Gallery in regional Victoria, every room and wall is covered in portraits of the same man.

In some paintings he is wearing regular clothes, but in many he is dressed in costume: as a religious brother, a gentleman from the American Deep South, a near-naked beggar and even the pope.

The portraits are all of gregarious 86-year-old Victor Caulfield, a Warrnambool man who moved to the Italian city of Florence in his 70s and became an artists’ model.

Walking the gallery floor, Victor reflects on the artworks on display.

“To see them hanging here now has been something that I’ve been thinking about for many years.”

Warrnambool to Florence at 70

The exhibition, Seeking Victor, brings together 100 paintings of him by 100 artists.

None of the artworks were commissioned. He collected them during his 10 or so years as an artists’ model in Florence.

It captures an adventurous, social and creative decade that began for Victor in his 70s.

After a divorce, he packed up his life in Warrnambool to follow his dream of living in Florence, a city renowned for its art schools and artistic history.

“I was an old man when I went there,” Victor said.

Almost upon arrival, he stumbled into a new vocation.

“It was by accident,” Victor said.

“I met a wonderful, well-known art teacher, Charles Cecil, and he said: ‘Why don’t you come and have some portraits painted?’

In the years that followed, Victor sat for hours, sometimes days, for dozens of artists.

“I was a senior person and an honorary member of the whole art scene and I’d have lunch with all the students and the masters,” he said.

“My flat was beautiful and spacious, so we had Friday night drinks where people would come from all over Florence, and once a month we’d have a soiree.”

His life became like something out of a Fellini film.

Victor tells of of joining a women’s club with “about 500 ladies and me”, living with an Italian opera singer and of seemingly endless parties where the guests end up splashing about in fountains.

The gift of the gab

In Florence, Victor stood out as a model.

“I was never out of work,” he said.

“The artists get lots of lovely young men and women who haven’t got a blemish, who want to earn some extra money.

“Plus, I could talk – where the other artists’ models sit there mute and do what they’re told, the only time I couldn’t talk was when they were doing my face.

“So I talked the whole time.”

Victor would talk about the Gatsby-like adventures from his lifetime, including his travels as a textiles merchant and running an equestrian school in Victoria in the 1980s.

He told stories of hobnobbing with famous Italian clothing designers in the 60s, collecting vintage Rolls Royces, leading fox hunts on horseback through the rolling paddocks and stone walls of Victoria’s Western district, and hosting endless guests in a medieval castle.

To this day, Victor’s modus operandi is to greet strangers with a smile and engage them in entertaining conversation, a characteristic he formed early in life while secretly grappling with a learning difficulty.

“So I decided, this is the time to get on very well with teachers and with the bullies.

“I learnt then how to get on with people and I travelled right through life with that, like I do now.”

Life is a stage

Over the years Victor kept as many portraits of himself as he could.

“All professional models have lots of paintings done of them, but they go all over the world and they never see them again,” he said.

“[So I] have an amazing collection.”

Victor brought his own creativity to the painting sessions, buying clothes at vintage markets and creating different characters for the artists to paint.

“I started dressing as the Pope and a businessman in a smoking jacket,” he said.

Though never an actor, Victor said dressing up came naturally to him thanks to his former careers.

“I ran a large equestrian school in Beveridge, teaching riding, breeding horses and hunting,” he said.

“Before that, I was was a travelling textiles merchant and the company supplied all my clothes.”

Despite his love of dress-up, occasionally Victor wore very little for the painting sessions in Florence.

“I just had one stipulation — that they didn’t show the bits, because my daughters would have been embarrassed,” he said.

“So never fully naked.

“There’s one, actually, a bronze, where my backside is showing, but that’s not so bad.

“It’s a beautiful sculpture. I’m fighting a dragon.”

A life of pleasure

Eventually, Victor returned home to Warrnambool for a series of major surgeries and then moved into Lyndoch Living aged care residence.

In collaboration with co-curators Elizabeth Arthur and Sam Happe, he has been helping to orchestrate the exhibition at Hamilton Gallery from his small room.

A self-proclaimed eccentric and socialite, he still has parties when he can, and has a girlfriend back in Florence, who he is due to visit next June.

Meanwhile, Victor is looking forward to the exhibition as another opportunity to socialise with new and old friends.

“Seeing the paintings in a gallery gives me so much pleasure. It made my time in Florence,” Victor said.