Mrs. Black, Sirius a traitor, flint? (was Re: A Number of Questions)

[Sydney]

No: HPFGUIDX 81793

Kathy K wrote:

 Mrs. Black blasted Sirius 
> off the tree for leaving.  At first, the Blacks thought Voldemort 
> and his beliefs were just dandy.  Then they saw what Voldemort was 
> really about.  They even lost their loyal child, Regulus, to 
> Voldemort.  So even if Mrs. Black believed Sirius was the big bad 
> Death Eater the rest of the world thought he was, she may not have 
> put him back on the family tree because he supported a crazed mass 
> murderer who may hold the same sort of world views, but who took it 
> too far and even murdered the good Black son, Regulus. 
> 


You know, now that you lay out the chronology like that it makes me
think:  was Mrs. Black always as crazy as she is in her portrait, or
was she driven mad by all the contradictions manifested by the death
of Regulus and apparent fate of Sirius?  

The 'good' son goes bad, in a way that used to be 'good', but then
wasn't;  the 'bad' son finally goes 'good', but only after 'good'
actually turned out to be 'bad'.... in the end one ends up dead and
one in prison.  That would be a lot to take!  She might have just
wound up fixating endlessly on the one point around which all of it
revolved, and had always been an obsession, purity of blood.  

If she's always been as out of control as she is in her portrait, I
think she'd probably have been locked up in the attic.  After all, the
Malfoys would have wanted to marry into a lineage that wasn't only
pure, but also free of insanity.  Maybe it just a Mrs. Rochester thing!

Is there any canon for:

-- when, if ever, Mrs. Black went mad,
-- when she died, and,
-- would a portait 'update' a drastic change in personality, or does
it freeze the sitter at whatever point in life it was taken?

Sydney-- a purely academic point, but what the heck