Richard Pryor, an entertainment legend born in Peoria, has a new portrait immortalizing his image at the Riverfront Museum that held an official dedication Tuesday for the painting of the comedian and actor.
The museum commissioned artist Jonathon Romain to produce the large, oil-on-canvas portrait. It’s part of a concerted effort by the museum to collect more artifacts and present more information on Pryor and his legacy in Peoria.
The portrait shows Pryor older and contemplative. He sits on the porch of a home Romain said is meant to evoke the Washington Street brothel where Pryor spent his early years. Romain said the street where the building stood was cleared to make way for development. He didn’t know the exact house number, so he chose the area code “309” to represent the entirety of Peoria.
“You go start looking at different videos of Richard Pryor, reading whatever you can read on him and just trying to get a full context of who he was,” said Romain. “And how he was relevant to this institution and this city.”
Romain said it took him a few months to decide how the painting would look.
Pryor’s son, Richard Pryor, Jr., attended Tuesday's dedication ceremony.
“Seeing the light and the, you know, the darkness and all those things come together, how they made that person, I'm able to see him in a different light,” he said. “I don't just see the fact that it's just like, you know, Pops. I finally see what the world sees.”
There’s a good deal of darkness in the painting, its colors somber and muted. The location Romain chose references periods in Pryor’s life that would have been difficult, adding all of that is important to the portrayal.
“The sad reality is like, a lot of very creative people, they find creativity through pain and suffering,” said Romain. “And, you know, that was never more apparent than someone like Richard Pryor. And I wanted to make sure that I kept the integrity of that element intact.”
Pryor, Jr. agreed with Romain that the comedian’s personality could differ drastically from his onstage work.
“You think that's the actual person, not being able to know who they really are,” he said. “And being able to strip that down and learn about who people really are, that we're all human. We all go through things. But we also can come out of some things as well.”
The portrait is titled “Invictus,” a reference to a poem by William Ernest Henley, said Romain, adding the language, descriptions of trials and an “unconquerable soul” fits with Pryor's qualities he wanted to bring out in the painting.
“Richard is essentially a product of one of the hardest times that our city ever went through," said the museum's chief curator, Bill Conger. "He was born in 1940. And the years leading up to that were some very difficult years of Prohibition, which shut down our entire distilling and brewing industry. And so, there are a lot of things, a lot of wild things, that happened in our community that precipitated the situation that Richard found himself in.”
Besides the commissioned portrait, the museum also has acquired some of the earliest known photographs of Pryor performing. Museum officials said they were donated by Pekin residents.
Richard Pryor, Jr. said he finds this conscious effort encouraging.
“I think in the city of Peoria, I think they're going to embrace this,” he said. “And it's going to bring out more stories of people who have went through certain things and similar things as well in their lives.”
You can see "Invictus" on display in the Riverfront Museum lobby through this spring.
