TRUE-LIFE
There was something familiar about this stranger’s painting
Jenny Smith, 43
Staring at my phone, my eyes widened.
It can’t be… I thought, leaning closer to examine the woman on my screen. Deep red curly hair, arched eyebrows, bright blue eyes.
Even the same-shaped nose and high forehead. It was me!
Only, this wasn’t a photo but an old painting in an ornate golden frame.
It was June 2023, and the portrait was being sold in an antique shop hundreds of miles away.
My sister, Melissa, then 35, had randomly spotted it on Facebook and sent me a screenshot.
She’s my doppelganger, I texted back.
It’s uncanny, she agreed. Later, I showed my four kids, aged 14 to 26.
‘Mum, are you sure you didn’t pose for that?’ my eldest daughter asked me.
I shook my head.
I’d always thought it’d be lovely to commission a painting, like I was royalty, but imagined it’d be pricey.
Now, it looked like a complete stranger had already painted me, or my double.
‘It is you,’ my husband, Rodney, now 49, frowned when he got home from work.
There was only one thing for it. I simply had to buy the painting.
The antiques shop was in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, 650 miles from my home in Mississippi.
I telephoned them for days on end. Voicemail.
My double in the painting could still be out there!
I started considering the long 12-hour drive there.
But what if I got there and she’d been snapped up?
So I recorded a video and posted it on TikTok, where I had 70,000 followers.
‘If anyone lives near this shop, please can they get this painting for me?’ I pleaded into my phone.
Though people were shocked by the likeness, no one lived nearby.
By September, I’d almost admitted defeat, when a woman called Carey messaged me.
I live around the
