"He was handsome, very elegant," the painter Albert Kresch told reporter Christopher Turner. "Better looking than his son, a couple of inches taller and his hair was fairer. He was poetic in the Byronic sense." The good-looking booger in question was Kresch's fellow painter, Robert De Niro, Sr. De Niro died of cancer in 1993, the same year that his homelier son, Robert De Niro the actor, made his directorial debut with A Bronx Tale. Since then, De Niro has carefully maintained his father's studio, described by Turner as "a time capsule of Fifties bohemia, a loft space presided over by an ornate birdcage and antique ski machine, every inch of wall covered in rugs, African masks, ex-votos, charcoal drawings and vibrant watercolours. A corridor flanked by storage racks crammed with richly coloured canvases leads into the studio itself (the space is two apartments knocked into one), a huge, bright room with three easels, on one of which is a fauvist landscape dated 1977. Tubes of coloured oil have exploded with age and ooze over a painting table where an army of brushes stands neatly to attention." "I try to keep it as much as possible as it was when he passed away,' De Niro says. "I wanted to keep it for his grandchildren, my kids. I wanted them to know what their grandfather did. I've taken pictures, documented everything, but I just try and hold on to it, to preserve everything as it was, as long as I can." He added, "Sometimes I just go there and sit."

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