As a kid in Portsmouth, Virginia, the late portraitist Ralph Wolfe Cowan was discouraged from painting by his parents.

“My father kept saying, ‘artists are a dime a dozen.’ His whole line was ‘get a job.’” Cowan slipped away from his friends when they went to see Western movies, and chose to watch Betty Grable in Technicolor. Ever since he "paid that quarter to see Betty Grable," he "always wanted to paint beautiful, wonderful, exciting people," but by the time he finally met Grable, she couldn't afford his work. He attended Manhattan's Art Students League, served for a few years as a Stateside paratrooper in the military, and had a short marriage that resulted in two sons, who are now in their fifties.

Cowan painted at least sixteen monarchs, including Prince Rainier III and Princess Grace of Monaco, H.M. the Sultan of Brunei, H.M. King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, H.M. King Hassan II of Morocco, and H.H. President Shaikh Zayed of the Emirates. He painted Debbie Reynolds, Mikhail Gorbachev, Elizabeth Taylor, Johnny Mathis, Ava Gardner, Kenny Rogers, and five U.S. Presidents. He refused to paint Muammar Gaddafi or Fidel Castro, but had no ethical qualms about Augusto Pinochet or Ferdinand Marcos. Way back in the day, court painters couldn't paint so many different monarchs because travel was dangerous—Cowan credited airplanes for his long royal resume. It also helped that he was able to work from photographs. 

As Nicole Pasulka puts it, "In his paintings people are twenty pounds thinner and twenty years younger, often surrounded by heavenly light, riding exotic animals, or framed by mountain ranges." Cowan says that when he maintained a studio at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas, Elvis used to call him in the middle of the night, requesting that Cowan paint him nude. Apparently, The King changed his mind about that one, but he did commission a Cowan portrait. It was the only portrait Elvis ever commissioned and the only one that hung at his Graceland estate. Cowan's friends, the sovereigns of Monaco, chose his portrait of Grace Kelly for their official Christmas card. Pasulka's astute profile of the artist in his natural habitat hinges on one sentence: "Here, flattery is the local currency." 

But it wasn't all easy street for the painter of the rich and famous. "The rich are very lazy," he said, noting that royal families wouldn't pay without weeks of harassment and negotiation. Staying overnight at a client's house also had its hazards. Steve Mohler, Cowan's agent, biographer, and manager, said that Cowan would "have no idea who was going to be knocking on the bedroom door at 1 in the morning — the husband or the wife.”

In the last five years of his life, Cowan suffered a stroke and learned to paint all over again. "I hate old age,” he told an interviewer. “I hate everything about it. I’ve become a recluse. I’ve got Netflix and I revisit old friends.” He owned a "perfectly groomed Shih Tzu named 'Killer,'" listened to "meditation music," and once had a mystical vision of a crucified woman. He turned this vision into a painting, representing both the institution of marriage and the transformation from three dimensional atemporal reality to four dimensional heavenly reality. On his wall, he displayed a "large, naturalistic painting of a muscular, naked man sitting cross-legged on a red blanket." It was, of course, a self portrait from his youth. 

"People love a painting with a story,” he said. “The bigger the story gets, the more famous the painting becomes.” Thirty-one years ago, in his adopted hometown of Palm Beach, he wore an understated $1,000 gold chain to a Burger King, as you do, and someone ripped it off. The police asked if he could describe the personal appearance of the mugger. Cowan went the extra mile and delivered them an original oil portrait of the suspect, complete with a gold frame.