Coolness // Portraits

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

No: HPFGUIDX 182808

Carol wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/182695>:

<< Harry learns that Luna and Neville are much "cooler" than they
appear to be, brave and loyal and valuable in themselves, however
"dotty" and eccentric or forgetful and chubby they may be." 
big big snip
Harry, I think, comes to realize that "coolness," in the sense that
the Marauders were "cool," isn't nearly as important as loyalty,
friendship, and dedication to a cause. >>

I didn't comment on this before because what is there to say? I'm sure
JKR intentionally put the scene where Harry wants to stay with his
friends Neville and Luna rather than go with Romilda as a parallel to
the stinksap scene, and that she intended it as a little sermonette on
not judging people by their appearance ('don't judge a book by its
cover'), and 'character' being more important than 'coolness'. Sure,
she needed to introduce Romilda before Romilda plays her role in the
plot, but she could have introduced her some other way.

Steve bboyminn wrote in
<http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/message/182731>:

<< Let's take a hypothetical person and say they have their first
historic living portrait painted when they are age 30, say after some
big historic discovery. Next, once they have established a long and
lustrious career, they have another living portrait painted at age 70. >>

It is not at all clear to me whether the portraits are painted at all,
let alone at different ages of the person. Maybe they just magically
appear at the moment of the person's death, Completed paintings, with
frames, hanging on the walls of important magical institutions to
which the person was important. 

For the portraits of dead Headmasters to appear in the Headmaster's
Office at Hogwarts, it could be a spell on the Headmaster's Office to
cause it to generate the portrait (in which case, somehow it must know
when each past or current Headmaster dies) or it could be a spell that
was cast on the person when he or she became Headmaster. Does Hogwarts
have, presumably not in the Headmaster's Office, portraits of all its
dead teachers? With Binns as the latest portrait in the History of
Magic office, and Quirrell in the crowded DADA corridor?

Are all the paintings who speak and interact portraits? Sir Cadogan
and the drunken monks were people, not genre pieces? It's easy enough
to imagine that that old family homes of old wizarding families are
among the institutions on whose walls portraits magically appear (but
why did Mrs Black appear as a senile loony rather than as the elegant
grande dame she surely had been at one time, or the beautiful young
woman strongly resembling Bellatrix?), and families who find a certain
portrait exceptionally tiresome might donate it to Hogwarts. But what
about group scenes, such as the drunken monks? Does being in one
picture mean they were all killed at the same time?