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juneteenth-photographs

Early Photographs of Juneteenth Celebrations Text by Adam Green Jun 18, 2020 Although Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Civil War then raging prevented it being enacted in much of the American South until months or even years later. Emancipation Day, or Juneteenth, is a celebration to mark the eventual country-wide realization of the decree — on June 19, 1865, when around 250,000 enslaved people were finally declared free in Texas — the last state in the US to be reached by the Union Army, commanded by General Gordon Granger, meaningfully accompanied, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner notes, by “two transports of colored troops”. Although Granger did not read out the Emancipation Proclamation itself on that day in Galveston, he did read out “General Order No. 3”, which began: The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection therefore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer. One year later, the first anniversary of Juneteenth — or “Jubilee Day” as it was then called — was celebrated in several places in Texas. The tradition soon took hold throughout the state. Communal barbecues, concerts, prayer services, parades, as well as baseball games, fishing, and rodeos, all featured in the festivities. Some former enslaved people and their descendants living in far-flung parts of Texas made a pilgrimage to Galveston, and many dressed in their finest clothes — partly in response to the pre–1865 statewide laws that had prevented enslaved people from dressing in any clothing not given to them by those who held them in slavery. Many of the photographs that survive from these early decades of the celebration — including sets from Houston and Corpus Christi — depict elegantly dressed groups in horse-drawn carriages elaborately decorated with flowers down to the wheels. Another set from Austin — taken in 1900 by Grace Murray Stephenson — shows a group of older people, many or all of whom would have been born into slavery, dressed up for the day, as well as a very well-posed six-piece band, and a group of men decked out in Civil War uniforms (perhaps reenacting the Union’s entry into Galveston). Of course, violence toward Black Americans did not magically evaporate with emancipation, and racial segregation and prejudice in some places made Juneteenth celebrations very difficult. Often forbidden from celebrating on public land, many gatherings had to be disparately held in remote rural areas or small church grounds, leading some Black Texan communities to band together and buy land specifically for celebrating Juneteenth (and other community occasions). The first such communally-bought land was Houston's Emancipation Park, a ten-acre lot purchased in 1872 by the Colored People’s Festival and Emancipation Park Association led by the Baptist minister and formerly enslaved Jack Yates. You can see Reverend Yates pictured (far left) in the Juneteenth group shot below (and in the featured image above, two of his daughters in a decorated carriage). Following Houston's example, in 1898, Mexia's Nineteenth of June Organization bought an area of land on the banks of the Navasota River, now known as Booker T. Washington Park, which was said to draw up to 30,000 for the celebration. Another dedicated community-bought land was in Austin. The photographs we've featured of the city's Juneteenth celebrations of 1900 took place in what was then called Wheeler's Grove (now Eastwoods Park) but a few years later an association, led by the formerly enslaved Thomas J. White, purchased a plot for the purpose, also named Emancipation Park (although 30 years later the city of Austin seized it to build housing). Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Juneteenth festivities became increasingly common outside of Texas — often brought to new places throughout the country by Black Americans who’d moved away from the state. In the 1950s, the holiday temporarily faded in popularity. This was to some extent due to the Great Migration, when many Black Americans found themselves in northern cities, working for bosses who did not recognize Juneteenth. (The US Congress has still not recognized it as a national holiday, although forty-seven states do at least acknowledge its existence.) It was also to some extent due to the changing political attitudes of the mid–twentieth century, when celebration of difference was sometimes seen as antithetical to integration. During the last half century, however, Juneteenth has grown more and more popular again. In addition to the old traditions of parades, cookouts, and music, new traditions have sprung up — including readings of work by Black American writers such as Maya Angelou and Ralph Ellison (whose second, long, and long-unfinished novel was titled Juneteenth). The celebration of difference and the commemoration of the ongoing struggle for freedom, equality, and respect have become central to this second American independence day. You can read more about Juneteenth —past, present, and future — here and browse our selection of historical photographs of Juneteenth celebrations from across the US below.

public-domain-review

Jun 18, 2020

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:31.864016

theatrum-chemicum

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652) Aug 26, 2020 Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum — compiled and edited by antiquary extraordinaire Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) — is perhaps the seminal volume of English alchemical literature. Most significantly, it brings together a number of hermetic works previously only available in privately held manuscripts, including, as the subtitle has it, “severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the hermetique mysteries in their owne ancient language”. Among these famous English philosophers were John Gower, George Ripley, Thomas Norton, and Geoffrey Chaucer — whose alchemically themed “Tale of the Canans Yeoman” is excerpted from The Canterbury Tales. By collecting these hard-to-find texts between covers, Ashmole first of all wanted to give a greater number of English readers a glimpse into the “Profound and Misterious” learning of the alchemists — who were not all, it should be said, completely benighted pseudoscientists. Some of them accidentally made discoveries about interactions between chemical compounds in their quest to transmute base metals into precious ones. And many, like Chaucer (whose alchemist ended up with lead poisoning), were more interested in transmutation as a metaphor for the elevation of the human soul than in striking it rich by means of hocus pocus. It was also Ashmole’s intention, in publishing Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, to repair some of the damage done by the Dissolution of Monasteries during the 1530s — when many books were destroyed simply because they contained red letters or a mathematical diagram. These things alone were then considered “sufficient”, as Ashmole writes in his preface, “to intitle the Booke to be Popish or Diabolicall”. Even at the time it was published — the year after Charles II had been dethroned by Cromwell — Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum was not only arcane but antique. Ashmole anticipated mockery and skepticism on the part of many of his contemporaries, saying he did not expect that all my Readers should come with an Engagement, to believe what I here write, or that there was ever any such thing in rerum natura as what we call A Philosophers Stone, nor will I perswade them to it, (though I must tell them I have not the vanity to publish these Sacred and Serious Mysteries and Arcana, as Romances) As for Ashmole’s own belief or disbelief in alchemy? He said only: “I must professe I know enough to hold my Tongue, but not enough to Speake.” With all their talk of Elixirs of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone and magic mirrors, the texts of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum remain fascinating. But it’s the illustrations that really steal the show. The circular diagram “conveying all the secrets of” George Ripley’s “The Compound of Alchimie”, the images of monks and dragons, butterflies and dogs, ibises and angels — all of these testify to the rich imagery of the late medieval and early modern eras even as they point to the hunger for transformative knowledge that would lead (following many twists and turns) to the discoveries of such thinkers as Isaac Newton and the experimental methods of modern science. (In fact, a typed note inserted in the scanned copy above tells us that Newton's copy of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, bought in 1669 for £1.80 and subsequently covered with annotations, was one of his "favorite books".) You can page through Ashmole’s book above — and browse some of its most memorable images below. For more illustrations from the history of the alchemical tradition see our dedicated post here.

public-domain-review

Aug 26, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:32.352945

joseph-ducreux-self-portraits

Joseph Ducreux’s Self-Portraits (ca. 1790) Aug 27, 2020 The painter Joseph Ducreux, born in Nancy, France, in 1735, was a minor aristocrat who began to paint during the final decades of the Ancien Régime. (In fact, he drew the last portrait of Louis XVI before the king was guillotined.) In 1789 or ’90, he emigrated to London with many other aristocrats, before returning to Paris in 1793. For the last ten years of his life, he continued his career with the assistance of Jacques-Louis David (a friend and younger painter in favor with the revolutionaries) and became the host of an informal salon for artists and musicians. Ducreux specialized in portraits, including those of Choderlos de Laclos (author of Liaisons dangeureuses) and Maria Theresa of Austria, but he is perhaps best remembered today for his strikingly modern self-portraits, which depict him in exaggerated, mime-like postures not at all common in either portraits or self-portraits at the time. These postures included “surprise in terror”, in which Ducreux raises his hand up defensively with mouth agape, and “the silence”, in which he puts a finger to his pursed lips (in the suspected later version his shoulder's covered in a white dusting from powdered wig). Other self-portraits show him yawning in decidedly unsexy dishabille, with a white nightcap crowning his head, or pointing directly at the viewer and grinning. The latter, so the title tells us, is meant to depict an expression of mocking, but, at least nowadays, more readily presents itself as depicting a friendlier encounter with the viewer (though retaining the smugness), like a man catching sight of an old friend across a crowded room, or a politician trying to charm a voter. ※※Indexed under…Quietas expressed in portraiture These unorthodox self-portraits were remarkable artworks for their time — evidence of Ducreux’s disregard for the classical styles of portraiture dominant in his day and enthusiasm for the study of physiognomy and the expressive capacities of the human body and face. With their unusual combination of directness. ambiguity, and exaggerated expression they earned Ducreux a mixed reception in his lifetime but a strong and curious rebirth in the age of social media and the all-powerful "meme". Indeed, they seem to have been virtually waiting, through the centuries, to be adorned with witty captions. Since, 2009, "Self-portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mocker", in particular, has appealed to meme-makers — its anachronistic aspect, of such a modern-seeming expression from so many centuries ago, providing the perfect impetus to get playful with rap lyrics, translating them into what Know Your Meme calls "archaic rap". In 2011, Steve Buscemi's face got involved, the now-photoshopped figure spouting similar faux-old translations of lines from Buscemi's films such as The Big Lebowski. For more on old art and memes check out our essay "Early Modern Memes: The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print" by Katie Sisneros; and for more on the expression of emotions and painted portraits see our essay "The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture" by Nicholas Jeeves.

public-domain-review

Aug 27, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:32.683950

dr-syntax

The Tours of Dr Syntax (1809–1821) Oct 20, 2020 The word “picturesque” has long been a rather vague way of describing a certain ramshackle beauty — in particular the beauty of a rural landscape, or a country house, or some other old structure gone to attractive ruin. But the word has its origins in late eighteenth-century Britain, where the artist, Anglican cleric, and schoolmaster William Gilpin (1724–1804) was its foremost promoter. While Gilpin was very skilled at describing a post-Enlightenment preference for “the rough, varied and irregular forms of nature” instead of the strict lines and right angles of the earlier eighteenth century, he was also very often ridiculous. In his Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales... Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1770), Gilpin famously suggested that some of the straighter and more regular “gabel-ends” of Tintern Abbey could benefit from some aesthetic alteration: “A mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it?) might be of service in fracturing some of them”. By 1809, when the artist Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) and the writer William Combe (1742–1823) co-created the character of Doctor Syntax, the concept of the picturesque was ripe for satire. Syntax, like Gilpin, is an artist, cleric, and schoolmaster who decides to make his fortune by traveling to quaint locales and then drawing and describing them for publication — a sort of aesthete Quixote who rides around on an old mare called Grizzle. The first of the books, The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1809–1812), follows the good doctor’s adventures about the countryside in search of the perfect scenery. Like many a traveler before and after him, he suffers his fair share of mishaps — falls in a lake, is pursued by a bull, loses all his money at the racetrack in York. The comic nature of these mishaps is clear enough in Rowlandson’s pictures, reinforced by Combe’s satirical verse: Nature, dear Nature, is my goddess,Whether arrayed in rustic bodice,Or when the nicest touch of ArtDoth to her charms new charms impart:But still I, somehow, love her best,When she’s in ruder mantle drest:I do not mean in shape grotesque,But when she’s truly picturesque. Two more books followed — The Second Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of Consolation (1820) and The Third Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of a Wife (1821). They were all hugely popular, above all in Britain (where figurines, prints, and fabric patterns of Dr Syntax can still be found in museums and antiques shops) but also in France, Germany, and Denmark, where translations of the books appeared. Combe’s verse is certainly entertaining, but Rowlandson’s art comes first in every sense: Combe wrote his poems to illustrate Rowlandson’s pictures, which are often cited as forerunners to the comic strips of later years such as Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837). You can read all three Dr Syntax books above, in 1903 reprints of the seventh edition (originally published 1820–21), and included below a selection of Rowlandson's images from an 1813 edition of the first Tour (digitised by The British Library). And we've also one of the images (though in the form of a higher quality stand-alone print from 1812) available in our online shop.

public-domain-review

Oct 20, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:33.192561

jacob-van-maerlant-der-naturen-bloeme

Der Naturen Bloeme: The Flower of Nature (ca. 1350) Sep 10, 2020 Nowadays, when we seek a holistic picture of our world, many of us might look to the internet. It’s debatable whether this crowd-sourced glut of information provides us a more extensive or more accurate version of things than the encyclopedias and natural histories of old provided their readers. A great deal, after all, depends on the interpreter. But one thing is clear: everyone, no matter when or where they have lived on this earth, has always loved drawing and looking at pictures of animals. The wonderful illuminated manuscript featured here, produced in Utrecht or Flanders sometime in the mid-fourteenth-century, contains quite a number of memorably rendered creatures, some real and some imaginary, and would have acted, in its day, like a kind of Wikipedia of the natural world. There is an elephant with a funnel-like trunk in a landscape of mushroomesque trees. There are several bipedal, winged, or horned fish. And a rather mean looking oyster. Indeed, a compendium of cute animals this is not — most of the beasts are found sporting the same grisly grin, though often to the point of comedy (and one might argue, cuteness). The manuscript is an illustrated version of the poet Jacob van Maerlant's Der naturen bloeme (ca. 1270), which is itself a shortened adaptation (and translation into Dutch) of De natura rerum (ca. 1230–45) by the philosopher and theologian Thomas of Cantimpré. The tradition of such encyclopaedic studies of natural things stretches back nearly two millennia, to the publication of Pliny the Elder’s Latin Naturalis historia (c. 77–79 CE), which purported to include all knowledge of life on earth, and the anonymous second century Greek Physiologus, which more modestly limited itself to flora and fauna. The thirteen books of van Maerlant’s Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature) focus on man, quadrupeds, birds, fish and other sea creatures, reptiles and insects, trees, medicinal herbs, springs, and gems and metals, proceeding in roughly alphabetical order according to the Latin names. To historians, Der naturen bloeme is especially remarkable because it is a scholarly text written in Dutch, not the expected Latin. To all of us, it’s remarkable for the indelible illuminations it spawned, including not only animals but homines monstruosi (monster humans) rumored to live outside the bounds of Europe. These comprise cannibals, Cyclopes, and — in the words of the National Library of the Netherlands where the manuscript is housed — “people with only one leg and feet so large that they could be used as a parasol”. Find below some of our favourites from the 460 or so miniatures featured in the manuscript.

public-domain-review

Sep 10, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:33.654545

execution-by-guillotine-of-louis-xvi

“A Slight Freshness on the Neck”: Prints Depicting the Execution of Louis XVI (ca. 1793) Jul 14, 2020 It was an execution that defined an era. On January 21, 1793, four days after he had been convicted of high treason and crimes against the state by 693 of the 721 deputies of the National Convention, King Louis XVI was guillotined. The gruesome event took place on the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV, soon to be the Place de la Concorde) and came to represent, both in France and abroad, the changing nature of the French Revolution. Of course, the way artists at the time depicted Louis XVI’s execution depended on their own political convictions — or, lacking those, the political convictions of their patrons or audience. The primary sentiment many throughout Europe felt was fear that this act of violence was a prelude to others. This is clearly evident in the English print Hell Broke Loose, where a swarm of devils beat drums and blow trumpets among the free-floating words Ça ira (“It’ll be fine”, an emblematic song of the French Revolution) and Vive la Nation (“Long live the nation”). The English cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank emphasized the brutality of the execution by first portraying it inaccurately but symbolically, in a picture that has the Duke of Orleans (who, though he supported the Revolution, would be guillotined ten months later) holding an axe over Louis’ head while Marie Antoinette (who would be guillotined nine months later) pleads for mercy. Within a few days, another Cruikshank cartoon was published in which Louis is depicted as a martyr standing beside the guillotine, whose newfangled workings (the beheading machine had only been invented the year before, in 1792) are explained. Horror at Louis’ execution was in fact frequently mixed with horror at the efficient modern machine by which the execution was carried out. This double horror often took straightforward form, especially in English prints of the 1790s: Certain French artists took a more sardonic view — for example, in this cartoon where below the crown it says “I am losing a head” and below the guillotine “I am getting one”: The view of Louis as a martyr was shored up by many French engravings — and by the English painter Charles Bezanech, whose images of Louis on his way to the scaffold quickly became iconic for the royalist cause. While Louis is portrayed as a Christian family man bathed in celestial light, his executioners are shown in rigid poses with eyes averted from the viewer. The even more rigid guillotine looms large — albeit discreetly, so as not to distract the viewer from the king — in the background. Pro-revolutionary depictures of Louis’ execution were, if anything, more gruesome than anti-revolutionary ones. Only the rhetoric of the captions distinguished them, as in this image from a Montagnard pamphlet, which is labeled “Food for thought for crowned mountebanks: may an impure blood water our soil. Monday, January 21, 1793, at a quarter past ten in the morning, on the Place de la Révolution, the tyrant who used to be called Louis XVI fell beneath the sword of Law”: There was no “sword” involved, of course — only the guillotine, which, ironically enough, Louis XVI had helped design. An amateur locksmith generally fascinated by mechanical things, Louis had suggested that the device use an oblique blade rather than a crescent one to make certain that the head would come off at the first blow, no matter the shape of the neck. At any rate, Louis’ own head was apparently severed without any (mechanical) trouble at all. You can browse a selection of other images of Louis XVI’s beheading below. These range from the wholly imagined rendering by the German Georg Heinrich Sieveking — who had been in sympathy with the Revolution until the king was killed — to some of the many anonymous popular engravings that circulated widely in 1793. In these, the same details are repeated again and again (not least of all the towering symbol of the guillotine), as though artists and audience alike were trying to find a place for this shocking event, which shaped history and reshaped reality.

public-domain-review

Jul 14, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:34.271113

elements-and-temperaments-maerten-de-vos

The Four Elements and Temperaments from an Album of Prints after Maerten de Vos (ca. 1583) Jun 30, 2020 In the collection of the Rijksmuseum is an early-modern album of prints from the library of (and likely compiled by) a man named Jean de Poligny, whose stony-faced portrait is pasted toward the end of the volume, but about whom nothing else appears to be known. Among the highlights of the album — a mixed bag of Ortelius maps, an infographic-esque history of the world, and various allegorical and biblical scenes — is a pair of beautiful sets engraved by the Flemish artists Adriaen Collaert (1560–1619) and Raphaël Sadeler (1560–1632), both modeled on paintings by their fellow Fleming Maerten de Vos (1532–1603). The Collaert series depicts personifications of the four classical elements — Earth, Water, Air, and Fire — which since Empeclodes and Aristotle had been key to how Western traditions, prior to modern atomic theory, conceptualised the material make up of our world. Earth is personified by the goddess Cybele, holding flowers in one hand and a city in the other; a skeleton and a newborn symbolize life and death, as a bestiary frolics on the hills and dales behind her. Water, embodied by Venus, sits in an almost drapery-like swirl and welter of aquatic creatures, in one hand a compass and in the other a ship. Air, a well-muscled man in the clouds, is surrounded by birds and flying insects and holds aloft a chameleon — the mascot of all that's ethereal. Fire, Helios, is seen encircled by flames, a Phoenix rising towards him and in his hand a salamander. Although the latter is amphibious, it has long been associated with fire in legend, most likely due to its habit of hibernating in logs, which when used as fuel would result in salamanders mysteriously escaping from the flames. The set engraved by Raphaël Sadeler depicts the four temperaments — Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic — a spin-off theory from humourism which relates to essential personality types (often considered in parallel to the four elements). The picture for the Sanguine temperament (associated with the Air element) depicts Flora sitting next to a young man in a beautiful arbor-like structure, behind which plays out bucolic scenes of lovers, music-making, and general frivolity. The Choleric temperament (associated with Fire) is represented by the war god Mars and the wheat goddess Ceres, with soldiers marauding in the background. The Melancholic (associated with Earth) shows a troubled woman sitting over a man lying on the ground before her: around them, all is broken, abandoned, or otherwise depressing. (The performance going on in the background is apparently a charlatan exhibiting false cures and miracles.) Finally, in the image for the Phlegmatic temperament (associated with Water) we are treated to a somewhat simpler scene wholly dominated by fish and fish-based activities (including the act of gazing peacefully into a fish's face).

public-domain-review

Jun 30, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:34.720611

korean-fairy-tales

William Elliot Griffis’ Korean Fairy Tales (1922) Sep 22, 2020 Many of the Korean fairy tales told by William Elliot Griffis begin rather pedagogically. “Korea is the land of beautiful scenery and lovely flowers”, begins “The King of Flowers”. “No bird is more common in Korea than the magpie”, we are told at the outset of “The Sky Bridge of Birds”. Yet Griffis has a talent for transitioning quickly from these educational openings to quite striking narratives shot through with images that are hard to forget. Here, for example, is how “The Sky Bridge of Birds” continues: They [the magpies] are numbered by millions. Every day in the year, except the seventh day of the seventh month, the air is full of them. On that date, however, they have a standing engagement every year. They are all expected to be away from streets and houses, for every well-bred magpie is then far up in the sky building a bridge across the River of Stars, called the Milky Way. With their wings for the cables, and their heads to form the floor of the bridge, they make a pathway for lovers on either side of the silver stream. The two lovers, separated from each other by an edict of the King of Stars, cross over the magpies’ heads and wear away the poor birds’ feathers. This is an explanation for magpies’ partial baldness during their late summer molting, but it also lends an aura of romance to the birds — and to the seventh day of the seven month — that is genuinely enchanting. The author (or rather adapter) of Korean Fairy Tales, Griffis, was born in Philadelphia in 1843. After fighting in the Civil War, attending Rutgers University, and briefly studying at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, he was invited to Fukui, Japan, in 1870 — partly to help develop a modern school curriculum. The next year, he moved to Tokyo and began teaching at the institution that would later become Tokyo University. Although Griffis returned to the United States in 1874, he continued to take an interest in East Asian culture for the rest of his life. Throughout the final quarter of the nineteenth century, he kept busy as a minister in New York State and Boston, but also as the author of more than fifty books — including The Mikado’s Empire (1876), considered for many years the authoritative text in English on Japanese culture, and several books of folklore and fairy tales from Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea. He also wrote two volumes on Korean history, Korea: Within and Without (1885) and Korea: The Hermit Nation (1882). Perhaps the pedagogical tone that sneaks into Griffis’ versions of these traditional Korean stories can be attributed to his career in the ministry. He shows a tendency to moralize, and to romanticize, which mark his productions as true “fairy tales”, as opposed to the more authentic transcriptions of the stories told by cultural insiders and typically called “folktales”. This is not to say all is light and beautiful in Griffis’ tales. In “The Unmannerly Tiger”, the unfortunate animal of the title is outwitted by a priest and a toad before ending up so hungry and frustrated he dashes his own brains out on a rock — to the profit of a wandering hunter who happens on the corpse. A number of other stories introduce readers unfamiliar with Korean folklore to the sprite Tokgabi, a mischievous trickster. In “Tokgabi’s Menagerie”, we are told why there are so few housecats in Korea — and more particularly why they end up classed among the “bad” animals in Tokgabi’s menagerie. The blame falls on a tabby named Mee Yow, whose conceited nature, after an adventure involving a bargain with rats, causes her to lose her master's magic stone (much prized as it had caused the wine-merchant's bottles to forever be renewed). The text of Korean Fairy Tales is accompanied by some delightful illustrations (artist unknown), which you can browse below.

public-domain-review

Sep 22, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:35.163188

night-parade-of-one-hundred-demons

Kawanable Kyōsai’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (1890) Jun 16, 2020 Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), aka “The Demon of Painting”, composed this book of woodblock illustrations toward the end of a life that had begun during the Edo period, when Japan was still a feudal country, and ended in the midst of the Meiji period, when the country was transforming into a modern state. Kyōsai was by all accounts the bad boy artist of his era. Considered both Japan’s first political caricaturist and one of the first authors of a manga magazine (Eshunbun Nipponchi), Kyōsai was arrested by the shogunate three times for his commitment to free expression. Also, he made no secret of his love for sake. The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Hyakki Yagyō) is a thousand-plus-year-old Japanese folkloric tradition, in which a series of demons parades — or explodes — into the ordinary human world. Kyōsai’s version was, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which houses the book, one of the artist’s most popular volumes, offering “a spectacular visual encyclopedia of supernatural creatures of premodern Japanese folklore”. (To see more examples of such supernatural creatures, also see our post on this Edo-era scroll.) One can see why it was so popular. Narratively, it paves the way for the fantastic parade with two woodblocks: the first depicts a group of adults and children gathered around a coal fire to hear ghosts stories, the second a man (probably Kyōsai) setting down his calligraphy brush and extinguishing the lamp in preparation for the night in which the demons will appear. The illustrations of the demons themselves are appropriately terrifying. Skeletal soldiers riding a human-headed horse; a frog-like demon dominating a badger; furry-headed demons and naked demons that look like the stuff of Jim Henson’s darkest nightmares — all parade across Kyōsai’s pages. Each double-page of the book is arranged in such a way as to join up with the next, as though a continuous scroll is divided over the pages of a book. Though be aware that, of course, the book is bound on the right and so runs counter to the usual left-to-right of English-language books, and so also counter to how our gallery below is set up to display!

public-domain-review

Jun 16, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:35.715131

scott-joplin

Scott Joplin May 25, 2012 Scott Joplin (1867? – 1917), "The King of Ragtime", wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. He was born into a musical African American family of laborers in Northeast Texas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers, most notably Julius Weiss. While growing up in Texarkana he formed a vocal quartet, and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s he left his job as a laborer with the railroad, and travelled around the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. In 1894 he moved to Sedalia, Missouri, and earned a living teaching piano and going on tour across the Southern US. During this period he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. Joplin began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 brought him fame and had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life. During his lifetime, Joplin did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems. In 1901 he moved to St. Louis where he continued to compose and publish music, and regularly performed in brothels and bars in the city's red-light district. By the time he had moved to St. Louis, Joplin may have been experiencing discoordination of the fingers, tremors, and an inability to speak clearly, as a result of having contracted syphilis. The score to his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings due to his non-payment of bills, and is considered lost. He continued to compose and publish music, and in 1907 moved to New York City, seeking to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form which made him famous, without much monetary success. His second opera, Treemonisha, was not received well at its partially staged performance in 1915. In 1916, suffering from tertiary syphilis and by consequence rapidly deteriorating health, Joplin descended into dementia. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917, and died there three months later at the age of 49. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 25, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:36.713214

william-cheselden-s-osteographia-1733

William Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733) Jun 11, 2012 With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s lavishly illustrated Osteographia or the Anatomy of the Bones, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration.

public-domain-review

Jun 11, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:37.139383

transit-of-venus-1882

Transit of Venus (1882) Jun 5, 2012 The etching above shows William Crabtree in 1639 making what is thought to be one of the very first observations of the 'Transit of Venus', when the planet Venus crosses the face of the Sun. There would be three more such occurrences before the event of 1882 shown in the images below. Rather than using wet bromo-iodide plates to capture the image as was done for the Transit of Venus in 1874 only 14 years earlier, these images from 1882 were made on dry collodion emulsion plates - a much more practical method. The Naval Observatory and Transit of Venus Commission sent 8 parties around the world to observe each of the transits; the results of which were important for determining the scale of the solar system. Of the hundreds of images created during the 1882 American expeditions only 11 plates still survive.

public-domain-review

Jun 5, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:37.601871

sir-arthur-conan-doyle-interview-1927

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Interview (1927) Jun 29, 2012 A 1927 Fox newsreel interview with the author and spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He speaks about his greatest literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, and his work in spiritualism.

public-domain-review

Jun 29, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:38.089317

james-joyce-reading-his-work-1924-1929

James Joyce reading his work (1924/1929) Jun 15, 2012 FROM THE “AEOLUS” EPISODE OF ULYSSES (1924) MP3 Download / Internet Archive Link Joyce made this recording in Paris at the HMV studios at the insistence of Sylvia Beach (the woman behind Shakespeare and Company, the publisher's of Ulysses), although HMV would only loan out their equipment at a cost and would have as little to do with the recording as possible. Beach recounts: Joyce himself was anxious to have this record made, but the day I took him in a taxi to the factory in Billancourt, quite a distance from town, he was suffering with his eyes and very nervous. Luckily, he and Coppola were soon quite at home with each other, bursting into Italian to discuss music. But the recording was an ordeal for Joyce, and the first attempt was a failure. We went back and began again, and I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved. Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was "declamatory" and therefore suitable for recital. I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out - 'he lifted his voice above it boldly' - it is more, one feels, than mere oratory. THE "ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE" SECTION FROM FINNEGANS WAKE (1929) MP3 Download / Internet Archive Link This recording of Joyce reading was made in 1929 by C.K. Ogden (the linguist, philosopher, and inventor of Basic English) in the studio of the Orthological Society in Cambridge. Ogden boasted of the two biggest recording machines in the world and wanted to do a better recording of Joyce than the Ulysses recording of 5 years earlier which he regarded as being of very poor quality. Sylvia Beach again: How beautiful the "Anna Livia" recording is, and how amusing Joyce's rendering of an Irish washerwoman's brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known "Anna Livia" by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again. Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had "Anna Livia" printed in huge type so that the author-his sight was growing dimmer-could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged. Below are the texts themselves: FROM THE “AEOLUS” EPISODE OF ULYSSES (1924) He began: —Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses. His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself? —And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me. FROM THE FATHERS It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine. —Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity. Nile. Child, man, effigy. By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone. —You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name. A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly: —But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw. THE "ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE" SECTION FROM FINNEGANS WAKE (1929) Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a tailing and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking root. And my cold cher’s gone ashley. Fielhur? Filou! What age is at? Its saon is late. ‘Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh. When will they reassemble it? O, my back, my back, my bach! I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains. Pingpong! There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez! And Concepta de Send-us-pray! Pang! Wring out the clothes! Wring in the dew! Godavari, vert the showers! And grant thaya grace! Aman. Will we spread them here now? Ay, we will. Flip! Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine. Flep! It’s what I’m doing. Spread! It’s churning chill. Der went is rising. I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets. A man and his bride embraced between them. Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only. And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here. It’s suety yet. The strollers will pass it by. Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins twelve, one baby’s shawl. Good mother Jossiph knows, she said. Whose had? Mutter snores? Deataceas! Wharnow are alle her childer, say? In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther? Allalivial, allalluvial! Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain. And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats. And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbling till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk. But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front. Do you tell me that now? I do in troth. Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas! Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all! Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond? You deed, you deed! I need, I need! It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars. It all but husheth the lethest zswound. Oronoko! What’s your trouble? Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist? Father of Otters, it is himself! Yonne there! Isset that? On Fallareen Common? You’re thinking of Astley’s Amiptheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers. Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper. It’s well I know your sort of slop. Flap! Ireland sober is Ireland stiff. Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me! Your prayers, I sonht zo! Madammangut! Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen? Was I what, hobbledyhips? Flop! Your rere gait’s creakorhueman bitts your butts disagrees. Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannerls? You won your limpopo limp from the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow. Holy Scamander, I sar it again! Near the golden falls. Icis on us! Seints of light! Zezere! Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth on the dwyergray ass them four old coldgers owns. Are you meanem Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory? I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them. Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indies? Wait till the honeying of the lune, love! Die eve, little eve, die! We see that wonder in your eye. We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more. The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find. My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset. Forgivemequick, I’m going! Bubye! And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot. Your evenlode. So save to jurna’s end! My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place. I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way. Towy I too, rathmine. Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes! And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills. Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters. Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry. Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John. Befor! Bifur! He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their plinky lemony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves. But at milkidmass who was the spouse? Then all that was was fair. Tys Elvenland! Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew. Ordovico or viricordo. Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be. Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person? Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan. Hircus Civis Eblanensis! He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans. Ho, Lord! Twins of his bosom. Lord save us! And ho! Hey? What all men? Hot? His tittering daughters of. Whawk? Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

public-domain-review

Jun 15, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:38.402270

a-19th-century-vision-of-the-year-2000

Lost Futures: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000 Jun 30, 2012 What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000. Some technologies are wonderfully prescient. Chicken eggs are incubated with machines. Tailoring is partially automated. Crowds assemble at the symphony for electronic music. The most accurate depictions are in the theaters of warfare and industrial agriculture — testament to the driving economic forces of technological development across the twentieth century: gatling guns affixed to automobiles, blimp-like battleships, fields cut with combine harvesters. As is so often the case, other predictions fall some way off the mark, failing to go far enough in thinking outside the confines of their current technological milieu (hence the ubiquity of propellers, a radium fireplace, not to mention the distinctly nineteenth-century dress). Still other predictions remain bizarre, mainly those that anticipated rapid nautical conquest: submarine divers trawling the sea’s surface for seagulls, underwater croquet, a whale bus (exactly as it sounds). These somewhat prescient scenes did not see the light of day until their future was nearly at hand. A few sets of cards were printed by Gervais in 1899 but he died during production. For the next quarter century, the cards sat idle in his defunct toy plant — future visions shelved in a basement like forgotten relics from the past. An antiquarian bought the archive, transferring it to his own crypt for fifty more years, until the Canadian writer Christopher Hyde stumbled across them at his Parisian shop. Hyde in turn lent the cards to science-fiction author Isaac Asimov, who republished them in 1986, with accompanying commentary, in the book Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000.

public-domain-review

Jun 30, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:38.732533

tennis-with-muybridge-1887

Tennis with Muybridge (1887) Jul 2, 2012 Plates 294 to 299 of Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking collection from 1887 titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements, a massive portfolio with 781 plates comprising of 20,000 photographs. In the preceding four years Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of Muybridge's work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. One of his favoured subjects to show the human form in locomotion was the tennis player. (Wikipedia). Learn more about Muybridge's pioneering research into human and animal locomotion, and see the wonderful photographs, in Taschen's epic 2014 tome Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs.

public-domain-review

Jul 2, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:39.232732

hawaiian-ciribiribin-1919

Hawaiian Ciribiribin (1919) Jul 3, 2012 Instrumental Hawaiian guitar version by the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe of Alberto Pestalozza's oft recorded classic "Ciribiribin" originally composed in 1898. Frank Ferera is considered to be the first great star of Hawaiian music. Ferera first visited the mainland United States as part of the Keoki E Awai troupe, and gained fame with the troupe by performing to an estimated 17 million people in a seven-month period at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He married Helen Louise Greenus, daughter of Seattle businessman Albert E. Greenus, and as the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe toured with her throughout the USA, in 1915 signing up to Columbia Records. "Ciribiribin" was to be one of the very last songs they recorded together. In December 12, 1919, Helen Louise mysteriously disappeared while the couple were on board the steamship SS President, from Los Angeles back to their home in Seattle. She had apparently gone on deck for a walk at 4 a.m. and never returned.

public-domain-review

Jul 3, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:39.684086

the-first-six-books-of-the-elements-of-euclid-1847

The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid (1847) Jun 21, 2012 Oliver Byrne (1810–1890) was a civil engineer and prolific author of works on subjects including mathematics, geometry, and engineering. His most well known book was this version of 'Euclid's Elements', published by Pickering in 1847, which used coloured graphic explanations of each geometric principle. The book has become the subject of renewed interest in recent years for its innovative graphic conception and its style which prefigures the modernist experiments of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Information design writer Edward Tufte refers to the book in his work on graphic design and McLean in his Victorian book design of 1963. In 2010 Taschen republished the work in a wonderful facsimile edition. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Jun 21, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:40.150210

lambeth-walk-nazi-style-1942

Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style (1942) Jun 20, 2012 In 1942, Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information made a short propaganda film, "Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style", which edited footage of Hitler and German soldiers from Leni Riefenstahl's classic Triumph of the Will to make it appear as if they were marching and dancing to the song "The Lambeth Walk". A member of the Nazi Party achieved attention in 1939 by declaring "The Lambeth Walk" (which was becoming popular in Berlin) to be "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping" as part of a speech on how the "revolution of private life" was one of the next big tasks of National Socialism in Germany. The film so enraged Joseph Goebbels that reportedly he ran out of the screening room kicking chairs and screaming profanities. The propaganda film was distributed uncredited to newsreel companies, who would supply their own narration. This version is from the Universal Newsreel company: "The cleverest anti-Nazi propaganda yet! You will howl with glee when you see and hear what our London newsreel friends have cooked up for Hitler and his goose-stepping armies. The 'Nasties' skip and sway in tune to the Lambeth Walk!"

public-domain-review

Jun 20, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:40.579980

a-manual-of-gesture-1875

A Manual of Gesture (1875) Jun 6, 2012 Based heavily on Gilbert Austin's Chironomia of 1806, this book by Albert. M. Bacon explores the art of hand gestures, particularly in relation to effective public oratory - all complete with a system of notation and many practise examples with which to hone one's skills. As Bacon states in the preface: "Agreeable sounds and harmonious action — one addressing the ear, and the other the eye — combine to perfect the orator."

public-domain-review

Jun 6, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:41.051529

development-of-a-salamander-1920s

Development of a Salamander (1920s) Jun 4, 2012 Early biological silent film, made sometime in the 1920s, which uses time-lapse photography to show the development of a salamander from egg to larvae. From the Department of Anatomy at Yale University.

public-domain-review

Jun 4, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:41.540681

paradise-found-the-cradle-of-the-human-race-at-the-north-pole-1885

Paradise Found: the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885) Jun 14, 2012 A book by William Fairfield, the first president of Boston University, placing Atlantis at the North Pole, as well as the Garden of Eden, Mount Meru, Avalon and Hyperborea. Warren believed all these mythical lands were folk memories of a former inhabited far northern seat where man was originally created. From the preface: This book is not the work of a dreamer. Neither has it proceeded from a love of learned paradox. Nor yet is it a cunningly devised fable aimed at particular tendencies in current science, philosophy, or religion. It is a thoroughly serious and sincere attempt to present what is to the author s mind the true and final solution of one of the greatest and most fascinating of all problems connected with the history of mankind.

public-domain-review

Jun 14, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:41.837516

a-history-of-mourning-1890

A History of Mourning (1890) Jun 28, 2012 A history of mourning, burial customs, and funerary rites. "Then occurred an event unique in history," continues this naive contemporary chronicle. "The body of Inez was lifted from the grave, placed on a magnificent throne, and crowned Queen of Portugal. The clergy, the nobility, and the people did homage to her corpse, and kissed the bones of her hands. There sat the dead Queen, with her yellow hair hanging like a veil round her ghastly form. One fleshless hand held the sceptre, and the other the orb of royalty. At night, after the coronation ceremony, a procession was formed of all the clergy and nobility, the religious orders and confraternities which extended over many miles each person holding a flaring torch in his hand, and thus walked from Coimbra to Alcobaga, escorting the crowned corpse to that royal abbey for interment. The dead Queen lay in her rich robes upon a chariot drawn by black mules and lighted up by hundreds of lights." The scene must indeed have been a weird one. The sable costumes of the bishops and priests, the incense issuing from innumerable censers, the friars in their quaint garments, and the fantastically-attired members of the various hermandades, or brotherhoods some of whom were dressed from head to foot entirely in scarlet, or blue, or black, or in white with their countenances masked and their eyes glittering through small openings in their cowls ; but above all, the spectre-like corpse of the Queen, on its car, and the grief-stricken King, who led the train when seen by the flickering light of countless torches, with its solemn dirge music, passing through many a mile of open country in the midnight hours was a vision so unreal that the chronicler describes it as "rather a phantasmagoria than a reality." In the magnificent abbey of Alcobasa the requiem mass was sung, and the corpse finally laid to rest.

public-domain-review

Jun 28, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:42.325981

coloured-engravings-of-the-fugger-family

Coloured Engravings of the Fugger Family May 31, 2012 Throughout the course of the 15th and 16th century The Fugger Family from Augsburg became became one of Europe's most powerful merchant dynasties. They replaced the de' Medici family as probably Europe's most influential family, taking over many of the Medici assets as well as their political power and influence. Ennobled at the beginning of the 16th century, the Fuggers began to withdraw step by step from business during the second half of the century and as the 1600s began adopted an aristocratic lifestyle. Jakob Fugger, who died in 1525, is considered to be one of the richest persons of all time, and is today referred to as Jakob Fugger 'the rich'. The series of images below are a selection from the Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum. Quae in familia natae. Quaève in familiam transiervnt. Quot extant aere expressae imagines, a limited edition of highly elaborate coloured engravings, published exclusively in 1593 and 1618 for the family members which they depicted. The work was commissioned by Philipp Eduard Fugger and carried out in the most part by the Augsburg engraver Dominicus Custos (see also his Atrium Heroicum)

public-domain-review

May 31, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:42.819779

japanese-designs-1902

Images from Japanese Design Magazine Shin-Bijutsukai (1902) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 1, 2012 Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art) magazine appeared during a watershed in Japanese publishing history: when pattern and design books became standalone works of art. The first Japanese pattern books — colorless woodblock manuals, known as hinagata-bon (雛形本) — were created in the 1660s, when political stability and a bullish economy fostered an expansion in fashion and a desire for voguish textiles. While growing out of this genre, the colorful and abstract designs in Shin-Bijutsukai magazine (1902–1906) reflect a convergence of historical and technological shifts in turn-of-the-century Japanese society. Notably, artists traveling abroad on government grants encountered Art Nouveau and Japonisme — the Western European fondness for a mediated, Japanese aesthetic — which they, in turn, folded back into domestic patterns: forging originality through the prism of cross-cultural pollination. Emboldened by innovations in book production, such as newfound color-printing capabilities, and seeking to keep pace with developments in manufacturing, the Unsōdō and Unkindō publishing houses began to collaborate with artists to print a type of book known as zuan-chō (図案帳), featuring designs for textiles, lacquerware, screens, ceramics, and other crafts. As the British Library notes, “some of these were meant as source books for artisans”, but others “were conceived as beautiful objects to be enjoyed for their own sake”. Published by Unsōdō, Shin-Bijutsukai was edited by Furuya Kōrin (1875–1910) and overseen by Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the artist of A World of Things (Momoyogusa), who has been hailed as “the greatest twentieth-century Japanese designer”. Sekka taught at what is now Kyoto City University of the Arts, in one of several departments dedicated to design that were established in the late 1890s. There is a balance in Kōrin’s life and work between the traditional and the modern. Influenced by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rinpa school of painting, Kōrin chose his pen name knowingly, styling himself as an “[Ogata] Kōrin of the modern age”, in reference to the artist after whom the Rinpa school was coined. In 1907, Furuya Kōrin published the two-volume Designs after Kōrin, which, unlike other Rinpa-influenced pattern books dating back to 1706, weds aesthetic approaches of the Art Nouveau with older motifs. Following his mentor, Kōrin secured a teaching position in the same department as Sekka, and fashioned himself to be his teacher’s professional and artistic successor, only to pass away at the age of forty-five. Like its editor, Shin-Bijutsukai (1902–1906) plots a similar course between timeless themes and novel influences — with title pages announcing, in English, a “New Monthly Magazine of Various Designs by the Famous Artists of To-Day”. With contributions from a variety of artists, the most striking designs in the magazine are captivatingly abstract and layered, dislocating the imagination from place or period: pastel blobs beneath a translucent surface crackled with leaf shapes; oozing, cellular frames encasing beautiful plant matter; a forest whose canopy dissolves into a wash of spilled wine. You can browse 1902 issues of Shin-Bijutsukai as a collected set, courtesy of the Smithsonian, at archive.org. For another pattern book produced at this same time, see our post on Ueno Seikō’s unique designs.

public-domain-review

Jun 1, 2012

Hunter Dukes

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2024-05-01T21:41:43.326547

the-illuminated-sketchbook-of-stephan-schriber-1494

The Illuminated Sketchbook of Stephan Schriber (1494) Jun 15, 2012 Selected pages from the Spätgotisches Musterbuch des Stephan Schriber, a manuscript which appears to be some kind of sketchbook, belonging to a fifteenth-century monk working in South-West Germany, where ideas and layouts for illuminated manuscripts were tried out and skills developed.

public-domain-review

Jun 15, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:43.784461

san-francisco-earthquake-aftermath-1906

San Francisco Earthquake Aftermath (1906) Jun 10, 2012 Haunting footage on the streets of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake which devastated much of the city, left more than 300,000 people homeless and killed over 3000. The earthquake was the first natural disaster of its magnitude to be documented by photography and motion picture footage. This film appears to be made by amateurs who attached a camera to a car driven around the city. Noticeable is the huge amount of people out sightseeing amid the rubble. See also this Edison newsreel showing scenes of the rescue operation and clearup. And see "A Trip Down Market Street" which shows the streets of San Francisco only 6 days prior to when the earthquake hit.

public-domain-review

Jun 10, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:44.243325

what-to-draw-and-how-to-draw-it-1913

What to Draw and How to Draw It (1913) Jul 4, 2012

public-domain-review

Jul 4, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:44.548005

novum-instrumentum-geometricum-1607

Novum Instrumentum Geometricum (1607) Jun 22, 2012 Illustrations from Leonhard Zubler's Novum Instrumentum Geometricum (1607). Zubler was a Swiss goldsmith and instrument maker who is credited with introducing the use of the plane table into modern surveying. This book demonstrates the use of his instruments in techniques of triangulation, particularly in the context of warfare.

public-domain-review

Jun 22, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:45.004127

the-whole-booke-of-psalmes-collected-into-englishe-metre-1584

The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into Englishe Metre (1584) May 27, 2012 Thomas Sternhold published his first, short collection of nineteen Certayn Psalmes between mid-1547 and early 1549. In December of 1549, his posthumous Al such psalmes of Dauid as Thomas Sternehold ... didde in his life time draw into English Metre was printed, containing thirty-seven psalms by Sternhold and, in a separate section at the end, seven psalms by John Hopkins. This collection was taken to the Continent with Protestant exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor, and editors in Geneva both revised the original texts and gradually added more over several editions. In 1562, the publisher John Day brought together most of the psalm versions from the Genevan editions and many new psalms by John Hopkins, Thomas Norton, and John Markant to make up The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected into English Meter. In addition to metrical versions of all 150 psalms, the volume included versified versions of the Apostles' Creed, the Magnificat, and other biblical passages or Christian texts, as well as several non-scriptural versified prayers and a long section of prose prayers largely drawn from the English Forme of Prayers used in Geneva. Sternhold and Hopkins wrote almost all of their Psalms in the "common" or ballad metre. Their versions were quite widely circulated at the time; copies of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter were bound with many editions of the Geneva Bible, and their Psalms were used in many churches. The Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was also published with music, much of it borrowed from the French Geneva Psalter. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

May 27, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:45.492525

correct-postures-for-housework-1920s

Correct Postures for Housework (1920s) Jun 18, 2012 Series of photographs taken of Miss Ruth Kellogg demonstrating correct postures for various forms of housework. Photos taken by Troy for Delineator magazine. No date given, but Miss Kellogg was at Cornell 1921-26.

public-domain-review

Jun 18, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:45.949681

the-faerie-queene-1596

The Faerie Queene (1596) May 27, 2012 Original 1596 first edition of the second part to Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene - disposed into twelue bookes, fashioning XII. morall vertues - a book published, according to Spenser, to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” It is a highly allegorical tale, the adventures of several medieval knights, dragons, damsels in distress, etc., in a mythical "Faerie land" ruled by the Faerie Queene, all used to explore moral issues and what makes for a life of virtue under the reign of his 'Queene' Elizabeth. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer and Il Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, whom Spenser greatly admired. He originally indicated that he intended the poem to be twelve books long, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Read the first 3 books in Part 1 in this later (and slightly more legible!) edition from 1859.

public-domain-review

May 27, 2012

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2024-05-01T21:41:46.447306

navaho-legends-1897

Navaho Legends (1897) Jun 28, 2012 Book from the American Folk-Lore Society compiling Navaho myths and legends and including also a lengthy introduction on the history, beliefs and customs of the Navaho people. I. THE STORY OF THE EMERGENCE. 136. At To'bIllhaskI'di (in the middle of the first world), white arose in the east, and they regarded it as day there, they say ; blue rose in the south, and still it was day to them, and they moved around ; yellow rose in the west and showed that evening had come ; then dark arose in the north, and they lay down and slept. 137. At To'bIllhaskI'di water flowed out (from a central source) in different directions ; one stream flowed to the east, another to the south, and another to the west. There were dwelling-places on the border of the stream that flowed to the east, on that which flowed to the south, and on that which flowed to the west also.

public-domain-review

Jun 28, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:46.909536

frances-power-cobbe-the-peak-in-darien-1882

Frances Power Cobbe’s “The Peak in Darien: The Riddle of Death” (1882) Feb 11, 2020 Humans have always wondered what becomes of individual consciousness after death. Does it disappear all at once? Fade? Does it find some new existence in a dimension the living cannot see? In the nineteenth century, belief in some sort of unseen spiritual world was taken for granted by almost everyone. But with the Second Great Awakening in America came the birth of “spiritualism”, which held that the dead (or rather “discarnate humans”) were not only able but eager to speak to the living, with the aid of mediums, who often charged a pretty penny for their services. In 1882 — five years before the Seybert Commission debunked slate writing, spirit rappings, and ghost photography, among other spiritualist practices — the Irish writer and women’s rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) published an essay called “The Peak in Darien: The Riddle of Death.” Cobbe, who was no friend of superstitions, begins by observing that “inquirers into so-called ‘Spiritual’ manifestations” have bitten off more than they can chew by trying to “obtain communication with the dead”. Instead, she suggests, we might better “penetrate the great secret of mortality” by paying attention to the dying. While she concedes “it is possible that the natural law of death may be that the departed always sink into a state of unconsciousness, and rather dip beneath a Lethe than leap a Rubicon”, she adds, “there is also at least a possibility that consciousness is not always lost, but is continuous through the passage from one life to another”. Cobbe finds proof of this possibility in the many reports of happy visions seen by the dying. A lover of poetry, Cobbe connects these deathbed visions with John Keats’ description, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, of the awe Cortez must have felt when, “with eagle eyes”, he first stared at the Pacific— ... and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise —Silent, upon a peak in Darien. A dying person is, according to Cobbe, our “forerunner on the hill-top” and perhaps shows “by his looks and actions, since he is too far off to speak to us, that he beholds from his ‘Peak in Darien’ an Ocean yet hidden from our view?” Cobbe cites a number of deathbed scenes in which the dying are gladdened to see their deceased children and relations, or become ecstatic at the sight of a vision invisible to others — such as the elderly man “dying of a painful disease” who, in his last moments, “opened his eyes wide, and gazed eagerly upward with such an unmistakable expression wonder and joy that a thrill of awe passed through all who witnessed it”. But perhaps the most curious incident Cobbe relates concerns a dying lady who was delighted to see, one after another, three of her brothers who had long been dead, and then, apparently, recognized last of all a fourth brother, who was believed by the bystanders to be still living in India. The coupling of his name with that of his dead brothers excited such awe and horror in the mind of one of the persons present that she rushed from the room. In due course of time, letters were received announcing the death of the brother in India, which had occurred some time before his dying sister seemed to recognize him. Indeed, in the years since the publication of Cobbe’s essay, the term “Peak in Darien” Experiences has come to describe, in the words of Bruce Greyson, a range of “mystical experiences” in which the dying see either a dead person they could not have known was dead or a dead person they could never have known at all. Though this is a somewhat narrower definition of a “Peak in Darien” Experience than Cobbe intended, it does speak to our abiding fascination with what becomes of consciousness, individuality, and experience after death. Cobbe herself expresses it very well: [F]or most of us, God be thanked, no dream of celestial glory has half the ecstasy of the thought that in dying we may meet — and *meet at once*, before we have had a moment to feel the awful loneliness of death — the parent, wife, husband, child, friend of our life, soul of our soul, whom we consigned long ago with breaking hearts to the grave. Their “beautiful” forms…entering our chamber, standing beside our bed of death, and come to rejoin us for ever, — what words can describe the happiness of such a vision? It *may* be awaiting us all. There is even, perhaps, a certain probability that it is actually the natural destiny of the human soul, and that the affections which alone of earthly things can survive dissolution will, like magnets, draw the beloved and loving spirits of the dead around the dying. I can see no reason why we should not indulge so ineffably blessed a hope.

public-domain-review

Feb 11, 2020

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2024-05-01T21:41:47.951283

w-w-denslow-illustrations-wonderful-wizard-of-oz-1900

W. W. Denslow’s Illustrations for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) Jan 8, 2020 L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first book in what became a fourteen-volume series. It sold nearly 15,000 copies within a month of its publication in September 1900 and remains the most popular of the Oz books — not least of all because it’s the only one illustrated by W. W. Denslow, whose depictions of Dorothy, Toto, and all the other creatures and landscapes of Oz have become so iconic as to be inseparable from Baum’s story. Denslow wasn’t simply a hired hand. Before he and Baum collaborated on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, they had already worked together on other projects, including Father Goose: His Book, which became the bestselling children’s book of 1899. Their insistence on including full-color illustrations in Father Goose turned out to be crucial to its success, but it also meant they had to agree to pay all printing costs. This was the case with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, too, which was even more lavishly illustrated. Denslow worked closely with Baum to create pictures of characters and landscapes not described in the text. He was truly a co-creator. As Denslow said, he had to “work out and invent characters, costumes, and a multitude of other details for which there is no data — and there never can be in original fairy tales.” Born in Philadelphia in 1856, William Wallace Denslow started drawing early. In the words of Michael Patrick Hearn: He soon developed into an extraordinarily adaptable designer and went wherever the work was. He roamed the countryside drawing lithographs for county atlases in New York and Pennsylvania. He designed theater posters and other advertising in Philadelphia and New York City. When the daily press started using pictures, he went from paper from paper from New York to Chicago to Denver to San Francisco and back to Chicago…. He supplemented [his] income by designing dozens of book covers for Rand McNally and supplying hundreds of little pictures for Montgomery Ward’s mail order catalogues. In almost every design could be found his totem — a tiny seahorse. After 1900, Denslow was rather rich. He held joint copyright with Baum for most of the books they worked on together, as well as for the Broadway musical The Wizard of Oz, which debuted in 1902. After breaking permanently with Baum when they quarreled over royalty shares for this musical, Denslow, according to a 2013 article in the Bahamian paper Bernews, “used the profits he made from illustrating L. Frank Baum’s classic Oz book to buy Bluck’s Island in the Great Sound, build himself a turreted castle-like house, and proclaim himself King Denslow I.” “A delightful old reprobate who looked like a walrus”, as the poet Eunice Tietjens quipped, Denslow was not exactly a modest man. Musicals and money were not Denslow’s forte. He invested a considerable amount in the ill-fated 1905 Broadway production of The Pearl and the Pumpkin (a children’s book he created with Paul West in 1904). By 1908, Denslow was broke. He moved to Buffalo, New York, and worked for the Niagara Lithograph Company; then to New York City, where he worked for an agency, earning a salary of $25 per week. Years of alcohol abuse by then had taken their toll. “In 1915, [Denslow] unexpectedly sold a cover to the popular humor weekly Life,” Hearn writes, “went on a bender with the money, caught pneumonia, and died. He was only 58 years old.” Looking at Denslow’s illustrations today, one can see how essential they were to the cultural legacy of The Wizard of Oz on page, stage, and screen.

public-domain-review

Jan 8, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:48.260474

the-jester-1908

The Jester (1908) Jan 21, 2020 Ah, the magic of cigarette smoke! In this film from 1908 — most likely directed by the British magician and filmmaker Walter R. Booth, though titled in Dutch here and digitized by the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam — a woman dressed as a jester makes things appear, disappear, and transform every times she exhales… Puff! She turns a throne into a pedestal. Puff! On that pedestal, a terrier appears. But the jester’s magic is not limited to now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t stuff. She can also make her body spin like a pinwheel and her face revolve like a mask. In a second scene, spookily blue, the jester conjures a Pierrette and a Pierrot, whom she splits into two Pierrots. This is predictably followed by a boxing match between the Pierrots to see who will win the hand of the miserable-looking Pierrette. Less predictably, the match ends with the two men becoming one again. The victorious Pierrot now claims Pierrette, who looks more miserable than ever in the moments before she changes into another woman and Pierrot changes into an apple, which the new woman eats. Finally, the jester returns with her cigarette, re-conjures Pierrette, and hides her in a cigar box. In a brief final scene, with everything now pinkish red, the jester pours Pierrette out of the cigar box back into the world, and with a hefty dose of nicotine transforms her into a twirling girl in a party dress. Then she separates Pierrette from that girl and makes her twirl as well. The End. An entertaining, if rather eerie, bagatelle from the early days of film, The Jester reminds us how magical the medium must have been for audiences — and how bewildering for actors — accustomed to the stage. Aside from the dog, whose chops are impeccable, everyone in the film looks either terrified or vaguely amused.

public-domain-review

Jan 21, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:48.692527

six-plays-of-the-yiddish-theatre-1916

Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre (1916) Jan 21, 2020 In the autumn of 1911, Franz Kafka went to see several performances of a Yiddish theater troupe who’d recently arrived in Prague. Mesmerized, he noted down the details in his diaries, dwelling on everything from the costumes of "Mrs K, ‘male impersonator’" to the plots of the melodramas and the "long-drawn-out forward movement" he heard in the melodies of the songs. Over the next few months, while the troupe was stranded in Prague due to money troubles, Kafka became increasingly fascinated by the world of the Yiddish theater — an itinerant subculture that found a home wherever there were enough Yiddish-speakers to support them. Reading Kafka’s diary entries, which record not only the performances but the friendships he struck up with the actors, one soon realizes how sizable this subculture once was. It had its share of infighting (arguments over who was "the greatest Jewish writer"), its celebrities ("‘the great Adler,’ from New York, the most famous Yiddish actor, who is a millionaire"), and its hardships: "Mrs Tschissik", Kafka writes, "has protuberances on her cheeks near her mouth. Caused in part by hollow cheeks as a result of the pains of hunger, childbed, journeys, and acting…" Theater in Yiddish had not been around for very long when Kafka discovered it. The first modern Yiddish theater production was staged in 1876 at an open-air garden in Bucharest; its impresario, the poet Avrom Goldfaden (1840–1908), would afterward become a one-man industry, composing operettas that were distributed and performed all through Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. From the beginning, however, Goldfaden struggled to get audiences to accept serious plays (rather than vaudevillian combinations of music, comedy routines, and melodrama). His own humble ambition was to become "the Yiddish Shakespeare", but he continually found that all audiences wanted was, as he put it, "a good glass of wine and a song". The translator Isaac Rosenberg’s edition of Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre, published in 1916, at the height of the First World War, is a document of a later era. By then, Yiddish playwrights — many of whom had been born in present-day Poland or Russia and then emigrated to New York City — had long begun to expand the repertoire beyond shtick mixed with music. Six Plays collects work by four playwrights central to expanding this repertoire. Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948), sometimes called "the Yiddish Maeterlinck", became famous for the moody atmospheres and terse dialogue of his drama, here well represented by "In the Dark", in which an odd-job man, his daughter, and his blind mother exchange laments on a winter evening in "two long and narrow rooms in a deep cellar". David Pinski (1872–1959), who as a boy had been destined for a career as a rabbi in his native Russia, was much celebrated by Yiddish theatergoers and critics in the early decades of the twentieth century. He often wrote on biblical themes, as he does here in "Abigail": the story of a woman who has a love affair with King David. His other great subject, in Goldberg’s words, was "the struggle and tragedy of the Jewish proletariat", as is evident in a second play, "Forgotten Souls". Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) — confusingly listed under his birth name, Solomon J. Rabinowitsch — remains one of the best-known Yiddish playwrights. His talents were vast. At fifteen he wrote a Jewish version of Robinson Crusoe and never looked back, composing, over the course of his life, dozens of plays, several novels, an autobiography, and countless stories, including Tevye’s Daughters, which formed the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The Aleichem play included here, "She Must Marry a Doctor", is pure vaudeville — a proto–Marx Brothers routine in which Abram, the studious and thoroughly modern young man, and Sholom, the old-fashioned matchmaker, couldn’t be more hilariously at odds: ABRAM: [pompously] The word despot is derived from "despotism"… Now do you understand?SHOLOM: [Shakes his head.] And what does despotism mean?ABRAM: Despotism is the same as despot… A despot means a tyrant — despot and tyrant are practically the same, and for heaven’s sake don’t bother me any longer! [*Turns to his books and begins to thumb over the pages.*] Last but not least, Sholem Asch (1880–1957) — another Yiddish playwright whose work is still regularly performed — is represented by two plays, "Winter", about a self-sacrificing sister, and "The Sinner", an allegorical play about death which takes place entirely in a graveyard. Neither of these, however, give a very good idea of what Isaac Rosenberg calls Asch’s "erotomania", alluding to his masterpiece God of Vengeance, in which a Jewish brothel-keeper tries to become respectable. With its portrayal of Jewish prostitutes, its rough handling of the Torah, and its depiction of a lesbian kiss (the first ever seen on a Broadway stage), God of Vengeance was destined to be shut down on charges of obscenity not long after it premiered in 1923. Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre opens a door into a vibrant literary universe not often discussed nowadays. You can find modern translations of plays by some of the same authors here. And you can read more about Yiddish literature in general — and browse a number of texts and images — at the Yiddish Book Center’s impressive Digital Library.

public-domain-review

Jan 21, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:49.131104

francois-de-nome-imaginary-ruins

François de Nomé’s Imaginary Ruins Jan 16, 2020 A cathedral collapses. The fires of hell rage. Fantastic ruins stand in unrecognizable surroundings. Above it all, the sky swirls with ominous clouds. These baroque paintings, with their theatrical chiaroscuro, saturated colors, and love of columns of every kind, were forerunners of the fantastic architecture depicted in Piranesi’s capricci — though for us they perhaps more immediately bring to mind the work of surrealists and futurists such as De Chirico, Dalí, and Ernst. They are the work of François de Nomé. Born in Metz (present-day France) in 1593, Nomé moved to Rome while still a child and studied there with the Flemish artist Balthasar Lauwers. In 1610, he relocated to Naples, where — as far as anyone can tell — he would remain for the rest of his life. Nomé’s visions of imaginary cities and ruins, though exceptional, are not without counterparts in the Naples of his day. The paintings of Didier Barra (also born in Metz and with whom Nomé shared a studio in Naples) are similar enough that, up until the twentieth century, both his and Nomé’s work was attributed to a mysterious man named Monsù Desiderio. There’s no question Nomé’s paintings bear comparison with Barra’s, especially in their fascination with perspective and their use of color. But nothing ever quite matches the menace of Nomé’s skies or the extravagance of his scenes. His paintings of Atlantis, the burning of Troy, and assorted Roman rubble demonstrate a real talent for discovering beauty in disaster — and a real love for dreaming up ever more elaborate architecture. You can explore our selection of Nomé’s extraordinary pictures below. Note: While we are fairly certain all pictures can be sensibly attributed to Nomé, some doubt does remain in some cases. The titles given are also, in some cases, approximations — the true title not always being entirely clear.

public-domain-review

Jan 16, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:49.637829

studies-on-twilight-phenomena-after-krakatoa

Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa (1888) Text by Adam Green Apr 9, 2020 On the 27th August 1883, on a small island in Indonesia, the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano peaked — the violent culmination of one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history, the explosion of which was heard as far as 3000 miles away. In addition to the terrible devastation (36,000 deaths were attributed to the eruption) strange optical effects the world-over were reported, a result of the massive plume of ash and debris sent into the upper atmosphere. Skies at the beginning and end of the day, when the sun was lowest in the sky, were particularly affected, glowing strange colours for years following the eruption and enrapturing and intriguing scientists, writers, and artists alike. Given the nature of the mystery — a scientific phenomenon expressing itself in such dramatic visuals — attempts to document and explain it often took the form of an interdisciplinary effort, both art and science working in tandem. One such example is a German book published in 1888 — Untersuchungen über Dämmerungserscheinungen: zur Erklärung der nach dem Krakatau-Ausbruch beobachteten atmosphärisch-optischen Störung, which roughly translates as "Studies on twilight phenomena: to explain the atmospheric-optical disturbance observed after the Krakatau eruption". While most of the book is an exploration via text, by the German physicist Johann Kiessling, the final pages are given over to a wonderful series of chromolithographs from watercolour images by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, all featured below. Pechuël-Loesche was a German naturalist, plant collector, and watercolour painter who travelled extensively, including to West Africa where he accompanied Paul Güssfeldt on the Loango Expedition of 1873–76 and played a role in the founding of the Congo state. Although most of Pechuël-Loesche's images in the Studies on Twilight Phenomena book are from the years following the Krakatoa eruption, three hail in fact from the "Loango Coast" (in modern-day Republic of Congo), from his time on the Loango Expedition. As for Johann Kiessling's text, it proved pivotal in the understanding of these strange post-Krakatoa skies, explaining as it did the enigmatic phenomenon in terms of ash-cloud particles diffracting sunlight. Seeking to replicate the effect through laboratory experimentation Kiessling designed and built a fog chamber. It was an invention which, together with Kiessling's successful experiments, proved instrumental in the development of Charles Thomas Rees Wilson's cloud chamber which was used in particle physics to detect the paths of radioactive particles. You can read more about the artistic and literary response to the strange skies caused by Krakatoa, in particular in relation to Gerard Manley Hopkins, in our essay "The Krakatoa Sunsets" by Richard Hamblyn.

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2020

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:50.108398

man-and-nature-1864

George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) Jan 8, 2020 We have known about the origins of our disaster for longer than we like to imagine. More than 150 years ago, George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) published Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action — a study of how human action modifies the physical world, from the crust of the earth to the atmosphere. The scope of Man and Nature is vast. Beginning with chapters on “the general effects and the prospective consequences of human action upon the earth’s surface and the life which peoples it”, Marsh then proceeds to trace the history of man’s industry as exerted upon Animal and Vegetable Life, upon the Woods, upon the Waters, and upon the Sands; and to these I have added a concluding chapter upon Probable and Possible Geographical Revolutions yet to be effected by the art of man. Despite the vastness of the project, Marsh’s message to readers was clear: If people do not take care of the earth, the earth will cease to take care of them. If we now find this claim self-evident, this is partly due to Marsh’s “epoch-making” work. For centuries, it had been taken for granted that the resources of the land and the sea were inexhaustible. Marsh, however, mustered historical evidence against this mythological claim, pointing out that the Mediterranean landscapes described by ancient writers seldom resembled their “present physical condition”: [M]ore than one half of their whole extent — including the provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants — is either deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population. What Marsh here calls “desolation” is what’s now known as “desertification” brought about — as he also argues in Man and Nature — by the destruction of forests. Marsh was born in rural Woodstock, Vermont, in 1801. Like his father, Charles, he would attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire before going on to study law and serve as a representative to Congress. He wrote his many books — including an Icelandic grammar, a study of the camel, and two volumes of English linguistics — while leading an active life as a lawyer, statesman, and ambassador, first to the Ottoman Empire (in 1852–53) and later to Italy, where he would be the longest-serving envoy in US history, remaining there from 1861 until his death in 1882. Unlike many early American conservationists, Marsh was more a scholar than an outdoorsman. Whereas John Muir made arguments for preserving the wilderness that appealed to the heart, Marsh aimed squarely at the head. He was fond of forests and other wild spaces (and played a role in the establishment of the Adirondack Park in New York State), but he emphasized above all the harm to humanity their destruction might cause — desertification, flooding, resource scarcity, and soil erosion, among other things. Human action transforms the earth, Marsh writes in the concluding pages of Man and Nature, “though our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still more their ultimate consequences.” Lest this seem like a reason to shrug our shoulders and turn our backs, Marsh adds: But our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes […] and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin. The mystery of how our actions affect the landscape was not, Marsh wanted us to understand, an excuse for irresponsibility; it was rather a reason to take responsibility for learning about the ongoing “action and reaction between humanity and the material world”.

public-domain-review

Jan 8, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:50.549082

nooks-and-corners-of-old-new-york

Nooks and Corners of Old New York (1899) Jan 28, 2020 Charles Hemstreet’s 120-year-old guidebook to lower Manhattan is, surprisingly, not at all obsolete. Probably this is because its interest lies in the past. While some of the landmarks Hemstreet mentions in order to orientate the reader (a patch of grass here, a building there) are by now long gone, anyone who has a passing familiarity with “old New York” can enjoy the book’s blend of local knowledge and historical trivia. One learns, for example, that Bowling Green, the minuscule park at the southern tip of Broadway (once much larger) was originally the centre of sports for colonists, and has been the scene of many stirring events. The iron railing which now surrounds it was set up in 1771, having been imported from England to enclose a lead equestrian statue of King George III. On the posts of the fence were representations of heads of members of the Royal family. In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was dragged down and molded into bullets, and where the iron heads were knocked from the posts the fracture can still be seen. Hemstreet delights in these sorts of details. He especially likes to describe the pile-on of events in some of Manhattan’s oldest places, such as Castle Garden — a small artificial island built in 1808–1811 and later, in the 1860s, incorporated into the mainland. “It was the first real home of opera in America,” Hemstreet tell us, before launching into a litany of names and dates: General Lafayette was received there in 1824, and there Samuel F. B. Morse first demonstrated the possibility of controlling an electric current in 1835. Jenny Lind, under the management of P. T. Barnum, appeared there in 1850. In 1855 it became a depot for the reception of immigrants; in 1890 the officers were removed to Ellis Island, and in 1896, after many postponements, Castle Garden was opened as a public aquarium. In the 1890s, New York had already changed many times beyond recognition. Still, at that time much more of the past remained intact. Obviously, Hemstreet — like E. C. Peixetto, whose pen-and-ink drawings nicely illustrate Nooks & Corners — was attuned to these visible traces. “Chatham Square,” he writes, “has been the open space it is now ever since the time when a few houses clustered about Fort Amsterdam”; “Thames Street is as narrow now as it was one hundred and fifty years ago, when it was a carriageway that led to the stables of Etienne De Lancey”. Writing about Greenwich Village, Hemstreet tells us that it was built on the site of a Native American settlement, in a fertile region whose natural drainage afforded it sanitary advantages which even to this day make it a desirable place of residence. There was abundance of wild fowl and the waters were alive with half a hundred varieties of fish. There were sand hills, sometimes rising to a height of a hundred feet, while to the south was a marsh tenanted by wild fowl and crossed by a brook flowing from the north. It was this Manetta brook which was to mark the boundary of Greenwich Village when Governor Kieft set aside the land as a bouwerie for the Dutch West India Company. Bouwerie is Dutch for “farm”. (This, as you might guess, accounts for how the Bowery — which used to be the road to Peter Stuyvesant’s farm — got its name.) Hemstreet, who was also the author of The Story of Manhattan and When Old New York Was Young (as well as a practical guide to newspaper reporting and at least one novel), is almost entirely forgotten today. Yet his books on knickerbocker history are well worth looking into. Readers of Luc Sante’s Low Life — or anyone enamored with the city’s lore — will find something fascinating on every page.

public-domain-review

Jan 28, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:51.025354

anecdotes-of-painters-engravers-sculptors-and-architects

Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art (1853) Mar 10, 2020 Before Wikipedia cornered the market on capsule biographies, there was no shortage of books about the lives of the eminent and famous. These books were not limited to a single subject or a small group of subjects, as in most modern biographies, but ran the gamut from encyclopedia-like volumes with thousands of entries arranged in alphabetical order to more disorderly assemblages of arcana and anecdotes. This three-volume collection by the excellently named Shearjashub Spooner falls unquestionably into the latter category. Spooner (1809–1859) was an American writer, art enthusiast, physician, and dentist. (His other books include Guide to Sound Teeth, Art of Manufacturing Mineral Teeth, and Treatise on Surgical and Mechanical Dentistry.) The publication of these three volumes — as well as other art-related books, such as Boydell’s Illustrations of Shakespeare, were a “labor of love” for the overworked Dr Spooner. In his introduction to volume one of his Anecdotes, he understandably complains (in third person, following the editorial conventions of the day) that “in order to find time for these enterprises, and still attend to the calls of his profession”, he had been “obliged to deprive himself of repose and relaxation” on every day except the Sabbath. The contents of Spooner’s Anecdotes are organized in an idiosyncratic way, freely mixing the American and the ancient Greek. Chapter headings range from “Painting from Nature” and “Advantages of the Cultivation of the Fine Arts to a Country” to the more specific headings you might expect in such a book (“Michael Angelo and Julius II”, “Rubens’ Visit to Italy”). Give over to the idiosyncrasy, however, and you’ll soon discover all sorts of amusing and amazing stories, such as this one, entitled “A Painter’s Retort Courteous”: Jean Ranc, an eminent French portrait painter, was sometimes annoyed by impertinent and vexatious criticism. Having exhausted all his talent upon a particular portrait, the friends of the sitter himself refused to be pleased, although the sitter himself appears to have been well satisfied. In concert with the latter, Ranc concerted a plan for a practical retort. After privately painting a copy of the picture, he cut the head out of the canvas, and placed it in such a position that the original could supply the opening with his own veritable face, undetected. After all was ready, the cavilers were invited to view the performance, but they were no better pleased. Falling completely into the snare, the would-be critics were going on to condemn the likeness, when the relaxing features and hearty laughter of the supposed portrait, speedily and sufficiently avenged the painter of their fastidiousness. There are several excellent stories about the eccentric English painter George Morland (1763–1804), including the artist John Hassell’s account of how he first met him: “As I was walking…towards Paddington on a summer morning…I saw a man posting on before me with a sucking-pig, which he carried in his arms like a child. The piteous squeaks of the little animal, and the singular mode of conveyance, drew spectators to door and window; the person however who carried it minded no one, but to every dog that barked — and there were not a few — he sat down the pig, and pitted him against the dog, and then followed the chase which was sure to ensue. In this manner he went through several streets in Mary-le-bone, and at last, stopping at the door of one of my friends, was instantly admitted. I also knocked and entered, but my surprise was great on finding this original sitting with the pig still under his arm, and still greater when I was introduced to Morland the painter.” One of the inspirations for Spooner’s Anecdotes is doubtless Giorgio Vasari’s sixteenth-century Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects — a foundational work of art history that presents short gossipy biographies of such people as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Paolo Uccello (biographies from which Spooner quotes at length). In terms of form, however, Spooner’s Anecdotes much more resemble John Aubrey’s seventeenth-century Brief Lives — a heterogeneous work in which Aubrey gathered together stray facts about everyone from the famous (John Milton, Thomas Hobbes) to the obscure (Elizabeth Broughton, a gentlewoman who ran away from home and became a sex worker in London). If there is nothing quite this risqué in Spooner’s Anecdotes, there is much to enlighten and entertain. It’s interesting to know that the American portrait artist Gilbert Stuart “maintained that a likeness depended more on the nose…than any other feature”; but it’s downright delightful to picture him — as Spooner describes — putting “his thumb under his own large and flexible proboscis, and turning it up”, exclaiming: “who would know my portrait with such a nose as this?”

public-domain-review

Mar 10, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:51.205257

toulouse-lautrec-bed-series

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Bed Series: An Intimate Look Behind the Scenes at a Paris Brothel (1890s) Apr 21, 2020 Think of Toulouse-Lautrec and the first thing that springs to mind may be exuberant scenes filled with black stockings and white underskirts, wide hats and red scarves, dancehalls crowded with theatrical revellers. Somewhat lesser known, though no less memorable, are his more intimate studies — such as this series showing prostitutes together in bed, painted sometime between about 1892 and 1895. Towards the end of 1892, a Paris brothel on the rue d’Ambroise commissioned Lautrec to decorate its salon, which he did in a series of sixteen panels each centring on an oval portrait of a different woman who worked there. During this time Lautrec would apparently spend extensive periods living in the brothel itself, where he was apparently accepted as a friend and confidant, which allowed him to observe the everyday lives of the women more closely. He ended up producing hundreds of related artworks, with this intimate bed series perhaps encapsulating his fascination most acutely. The painting known simply as The Bed (above) is the most famous in the series. It depicts two women gazing at each other beneath sheets and blankets lit by an oil lamp. Another, known as In Bed, shows the couple gazing into each other’s eyes with arms exposed. The two other pictures in the series — both called In Bed: The Kiss and which seem to depict the same couple — are more explicitly erotic. ※※Indexed under…Kissbetween lesbians painted by Toulouse-Lautrec But even these, as in many of Toulouse-Lautrec’s representations of same-sex female love, are voyeuristic without being especially lascivious. As the blog Secret Lesbians puts it: Lautrec’s depiction of lesbianism is particularly notable because it doesn’t fetishise sexual intimacy between women or present it as spectacle for the male gaze. Lautrec was trying to capture small, tender moments in the lives of the women he met, and he did so with humanity and sensitivity. In a world of constructed sexuality and fantasy, he finds the real relationships, and reveals to us the hidden lives of queer women in the nineteenth century. It’s also worth noting these pictures were made in a brothel catering to heterosexual male customers, adding another layer to our interpretation. By emphasizing these women’s individuality and mutual affection, Toulouse-Lautrec provides us, in the words of a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, “a glimpse of real intimacy in an otherwise constructed world of sexual extravagance and simulated fantasy”.

public-domain-review

Apr 21, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:51.538960

henrique-alvim-correa-war-of-the-worlds

Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s Illustrations for The War of the Worlds (1906) May 5, 2020 H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was first published in 1897 with illustrations by the British artist Warwick Goble. These were inky, black-and-white depictions of Wells’ story of a Martian invasion — eerie, imaginative, exciting, and thoroughly of their late Victorian time. Three years later, The War of the Worlds was published in French, translated by Henry-D. Davray (1873–1944), an accomplished litterateur who specialized in the work of Wells, Kipling, Wilde, and Yeats. The translation was reprinted several times in the following years, but not issued with illustrations until 1906, when the Brazilian artist Henrique Alvim Corrêa took on the task. Not a great deal is known about Corrêa, who died of tuberculosis at age thirty-four, only a few years after the illustrations featured here were published. According to The History Blog, Corrêa was born into a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro family. His father was a lawyer (who died when Corrêa was seven), his stepfather was a banker who moved the family first to Lisbon in 1892, and then to Paris in 1893. Here, Corrêa studied under the military painter Édouard Detaille and exhibited paintings of military scenes in the Paris Salons of 1896 and 1897. Then, in 1898, Corrêa eloped with Blanche Fernande Barbant, the daughter of Charles Barbant (who illustrated Jules Verne and engraved the drawings of Gustave Doré). Cut off by his family, living in Brussels, and with a newborn baby to feed, Corrêa was for a while willing to do whatever work came along, whether it was designing advertisements or painting houses. By 1900, however, he was financially successful enough to have opened a studio. During the first decade of the twentieth century, as The History Blog puts it, Corrêa “developed a style of strong contrasts and dynamic movement in both drawing and painting,” returning again and again to themes of “eroticism and violence individually and in combination”. Reading The War of the Worlds in 1903, Corrêa saw a work perfectly suited to his talents and obsessions. He did several illustrations of the book “on spec” and traveled to London to show them to Wells, who was apparently so impressed he invited him to illustrate the new Belgian edition of Davray’s translation. “Alvim Corrêa”, Wells said after the artist had died, “did more for my work with his brush than I with my pen”. One can see the reason for Wells’ enthusiasm. Every one of Corrêa’s illustrations bursts with imagination, eliciting fascination and terror. The post-apocalyptic landscape introducing Book One, “The Arrival of the Martians” — with its extraterrestrial tripods (looking like a cross between octopuses and water towers) and its impressive depth of field — presages not only the surrealist style of painting then brewing in Paris but the Hollywood sci-fi movies of the 1950s, with their campy mix of silliness and horror. The image of a blurry woman, erotically posed, being attacked by a Martians’ tentacles — which introduces Chapter Two — may contain a reference to Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, but certainly it also represents a central motif in Corrêa’s art. (The only other major work he completed before his death in 1910 was a series of drawings called Visions Érotiques done under the pseudonym Henri Lemort, i.e. Henry the Dead Man.) There is something visceral about almost all of Corrêa’s images. The first sighting of a Martian crawling from its ship is unsettling, perhaps because the postures of the man and the emergence of the creature are so ordinary — it could be a picture of someone recoiling at the appearance of a snake or spider. The illustration of the Martians first training their fiery death beam at a group of humans may be familiar to us from a thousand comic books, but it also conjures visions of the very real Great War to come. You can see all of Corrêa’s illustrations below — including London houses with eyes in the windows and a flooded city street loomed over by a Martian ship.

public-domain-review

May 5, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:51.880530

uranias-mirror-or-a-view-of-the-heavens

Urania’s Mirror; or, a View of the Heavens (circa 1825) Dec 10, 2019 These thirty-two astronomical star-chart cards, printed and hand-coloured, have long been known under the name “Urania’s Mirror”. In a box with a printed label depicting Urania, the Muse of Astronomy, accompanied by Jehoshaphat Aspin’s little book A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy, these charming 8x5½-inch images of the constellations were first published by Samuel Leigh of London in 1824 or 1825. Lively and colorful as they are, they were enormously popular — and probably very helpful to amateur astronomers learning to read the heavens. Each card is, in P. D. Hingley’s description, “pierced with holes corresponding in size to the magnitudes of the brightest stars. Thus when held up to the light they give quite a realistic representation of the constellation pattern”, which the student could memorize and rediscover in the night sky. The illustrations themselves are of interesting provenance. Based on Alexander Jamieson’s A Celestial Atlas (1822), they were engraved by the British engraver and cartographer Sidney Hall (1788–1831) from a design mysteriously said to have been made by “a lady”. Over the years, admirers of the cards speculated the lady in question might be, among others, Caroline Herschel or Mary Somerville; but in 1994, the astronomer Hingley chanced upon a document revealing Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam (1765–1840) to be the “Author of Urania’s Mirror”. Though, as Ian Ridpath points out, this may not be the final solution to the mystery: Bloxam’s wife, Ann (1765–1835), “was the sister of Sir Thomas Lawrence the portrait painter, so she might deserve at least a share of the credit as the anonymous ‘lady’”. Multiple editions of Urania’s Mirror appeared in Britain and America in the 1820s and ’30s, during the first stargazing craze, and the card set has been reproduced many times since — even as recently as 2004, by Barnes & Noble (repackaged as The Night Sky: A View of the Heavens).

public-domain-review

Dec 10, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:52.341012

sarah-goodridges-beauty-revealed-1828

Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed (1828) Feb 5, 2020 It is a painting so seductive, so intriguing, we cannot help but want to know the story behind it. Adding to the seductiveness is the fact that these pale breasts encircled by a swirl of cloth, painted on a thin plate of ivory 2.6 inches high and 3.1 inches long, belonged to the woman who painted them: an accomplished miniaturist named Sarah Goodridge (b. 1788). Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Goodridge sent this particular miniature (enclosed in a leather case that could be closed with two clasps) to the recently widowed United States senator Daniel Webster in 1828. Goodridge’s relationship with Webster had begun a year earlier and would continue until his death in 1852. Though obviously attracted to each other, the two saw each other infrequently: Webster visited Goodridge in Boston several times, paying her to paint his and his family’s portraits, and Goodridge, for her part, visited him twice — once in 1828, after the death of his first wife, and again in 1841–2, when he was separated from his second wife. “Whether Webster had any sexual involvement with [Goodridge] cannot be proved one way or the other,” Webster’s biographer Robert Remini says cautiously, before adding: “although the fact that she sent him a self-portrait with her breasts exposed raises suspicions.” But Beauty Revealed is not a “self-portrait with the [Goodridge’s] breasts exposed”; it’s a self-portrait exclusively of her breasts. As Dr Chelsea Nichols points out, on her blog The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things, Goodridge was sending Webster the 19th-century equivalent of “a saucy nudie pic” (which also managed, by hiding her face, to protect her identity from prying, puritanical eyes). There’s no denying Beauty Revealed is a proto-sext — a sext kept by Webster all his life and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by his descendants. Just as remarkably, though, it’s an artful eroticization of the tradition of “eye miniatures” — said to have begun when George IV wanted to send his beloved Maria Anne Fitzherbert a token of his affection. Eye miniatures — which were also typically painted on small sheets of ivory — acted as a substitute for the gaze of the absent beloved. Beauty Revealed, of course, acted as a substitute for something else. Like the miniature portraits Goodridge painted for hire, this picture of her bare breasts was meant to be treasured and touched. It was, clearly, meant to arouse. John Updike, in his 1993 speculative essay “The Revealed and the Concealed”, imagines that Goodridge sent Webster Beauty Revealed as an erotic “offer”, as though to say: “Come to us, and we will comfort you… We are yours for the taking, in all our ivory loveliness, with our tenderly stippled nipples”. If this was the case, Updike continues, “the offer…was not taken. Webster needed not just love but money.” In May of 1829 he courted the wealthy Catherine Van Renssalaer, and when that didn’t work out turned to Caroline Le Roy, the daughter of a prominent New York merchant, whom he soon married. Goodridge remained single all her life. Nichols, in her equally speculative post, detects in Goodridge’s self-portrait not a sexual offering but “the confidence and passions of a woman way ahead of her time, who has proudly embraced the eroticism of her body and role as cherished mistress”. She suggests that Goodridge may well never have married deliberately, because she wanted to retain her independence as an artist at a time when being an artist was far from an easy thing for a woman to do. Why, after all, should we assume this miniature has any connection with marriage? Our stories about Goodridge’s painting are bound to tell us more about ourselves than about Goodridge or Webster. As Updike concludes: My reconstruction of events isn’t especially likely, but neither is the existence of *Beauty Revealed*. We must argue backwards from its unique datum — a singularity in American art, and a dazzling peep beneath another century’s voluminous clothes.

public-domain-review

Feb 5, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:52.806826

the-decameron

Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (ca. 1353) Apr 15, 2020 The art of keeping ourselves entertained while quarantined dates back many centuries. In 1349, following a bubonic plague epidemic that killed more than half the population of his native Florence, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) wrote The Decameron — a bingeworthy collection of tales told by seven women and three men who've fled the city and confined themselves in an empty villa in the countryside. With time on their hands, they decide that, every evening, each of them will tell a story touching on a pre-established theme. Taking one day off a week for chores, and of course skipping the Sabbath, they tell one hundred stories about knights and ladies, tricksters and reprobates, star-crossed lovers, and randy monks and nuns. Each of the ten storytellers, collectively called the Brigata (Italian for “brigade”), has his or her own personality. There is the beautiful, modest Neifile; the fiery, self-possessed Fiammetta, thought to be based on a woman Boccaccio was in love with; the witty, forthright, often transgressive Dioneo, thought to be a surrogate for Boccaccio himself. It is only Dioneo who's allowed to diverge from the themes that govern the stories of any given evening — themes set by the person selected to be that evening's King or Queen. Thus, when Neifile is Queen, “discourse is had of the fortune of such as have painfully acquired some much-coveted thing, or, having lost, have recovered it”, and Dineo takes it as an opportunity to tell the raunchiest tale in the Decameron. It's so raunchy, J. M. Rigg (who penned the 1903 English translation featured above, widely considered the most complete of the many public domain attempts) elected not to translate it, leaving the dirtiest bits in Italian. To put it very briefly into English: a beautiful young woman named Alibech who wishes to become a Christian hermit goes wandering through the Tunisian desert, trying to get a monk to show her the ropes. Fearing, however, that they'll be “ensnared by the Devil” if they accept her as a pupil, all the monks tell her there is another holy man “not far from here who is much better able to teach thee that of which thou art in quest than I am”. This goes on until she comes to a young monk named Rustico, who has no such compunctions. He contrives to have them both strip naked, and when “the resurrection of the flesh” occurs a few inches below his abdomen, he tells Alibech this is the Devil, who will torment him until he is put back in Hell. “Now I certainly see that those worthy men... were telling the truth about how sweet a thing it is to serve God”, Alibech tells Rustico a few days later (with thanks to Wayne A. Rebhorn's modern translation, for I'm sure I can't recall any other thing I've done that has been so delightful or given me so much pleasure as putting the Devil back in Hell. And for that reason, in my judgment, anyone interested in doing something other than serving God is an ass. And that, Dineo explains, is the origin of the sexual euphemism “putting the devil back into hell”. Such is the sort of entertainment one can expect to find in Boccaccio's always-lively tales from plague-time. Which isn't to suggest Boccaccio shirked mention of the plague itself. It is discussed in several of the stories and, at greatest length, in the introduction, written in the author's own voice: In Florence, despite all that human wisdom and forethought could devise to avert it, as the cleansing of the city from many impurities by officials appointed for the purpose, the refusal of entrance to all sick folk, and the adoption of many precautions for the preservation of health; despite also humble supplications addressed to God, and often repeated both in public procession and otherwise, by the devout; towards the beginning of the spring of the said year [1349] the doleful effects of the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that shewed as if miraculous. Whether Boccaccio himself was a witness to the 1349 epidemic in Florence is still debated among scholars. By 1349, he may already have been in Ravenna. But in any event he'd certainly seen the horrors of the Black Death: the sudden deaths, the disappearance of whole families, the endless burials often performed without ceremony (for a “dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat would be to-day”). The Brigata would have been escaping exactly this sort of daily horror, though you might not know it from the lovely series of miniatures that adorn an edition of the book held by the National Library of the Netherlands, depicting them from the moment they meet at the Church of Santa Maria Novella through the telling of their various stories in villa-bound self-isolation. Still, it’s no wonder the stories they favored were so bawdy — and the rules they established for telling them so complicated — trying as they were to take their minds off the uncontrollable devastation nearby. Boccaccio's stories themselves were drawn from many sources, ranging from classical Greek and Latin to local gossip, from the myths of India to those of the Middle East — and would inspire many other stories in turn. Geoffrey Chaucer borrowed heavily from it in The Canterbury Tales, as did Shakespeare and Keats. Its stories have also inspired many visual artists over the centuries, perhaps most notably Sandro Botticelli who in his series The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti illustrates events from the eighth story of the fifth day. More recently, it has fired the imaginations of the novelist Kathryn Davis, whose The Silk Road (2019) puts a sci-fi twist on the frame story, and the filmmaker Jeff Baena, whose The Little Hours (2017) is loosely based on the first and third stories of the third day. All good reading, and good watching, for our own uncertain, self-isolated times.

public-domain-review

Apr 15, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:53.429293

emotion-in-the-pigeons

The Expressions of Emotion in the Pigeons (1909–11) Apr 30, 2020 In a series of three in-depth articles, the American psychologist and behavior scientist Wallace Craig (1876–1954) examined the “voice and manners” of blond ring doves, mourning doves, and — in the concluding article featured above — the already-extinct passenger pigeons. In addition to being a thinker-up of great titles (“The Voices of Pigeons regarded as a means of Social Control” being another), Craig had a talent for attending closely to our avian neighbors. At the time Craig wrote this piece on the passenger pigeon, it was still not clear whether the bird was extinct. (Unfortunately, it was.) But he believed that, even if it were, it was “equally important to publish whatever is known of its voice, as a matter of permanent record”, especially regarding its distinct voice and “prodigious gregariousness”. The delights of the text are many. For example, Craig’s meticulous notes on the bird’s “bearing”: “Ordinary walking pace of male, 12–13 steps in 5 seconds.” “In eating, female pecks at rate of about 12 pecks in 5 seconds on an average, and as head moves through considerable arc, its motion is very quick. The mumbling of each seed, also, is very quick.” “Especially active and noisy in early morning.” Equally engaging are the categories Craig comes up with to give a sense of the bird’s emotional behavior, including enmity (the male passenger pigeon was “a particularly quarrelsome bird, ever ready to threaten or strike with his wings… and to shout defiance in his loud strident voice”), fear, and alarm. But Craig’s ear for pigeon talk is unparalleled. The Kah and the Coo (common to all pigeons and doves) were accompanied, among passenger pigeons, by the “copulation-note”, “the keek”, “scolding, chattering, clucking”, “the vestigial coo or keep”, and “the nest-call”. As soon as we are about to despair that, however well Craig describes them, we will never be able to hear these unique cries, we turn the page and find he has created musical notation imitating many of these calls, including those made when “alighting on a perch among a lot of other birds” or fighting, talking “masterfully, toward female” or “gently, toward mate”. Those who dismiss all pigeons as “sky rats” may be surprised to read about the elaborateness of their emotional lives and mating rituals. (“When the female becomes amorous, instead of edging away from the male when he sidles up to her, she reciprocates in the ‘hugging’, pressing upon the male in somewhat the same manner that he presses upon her.”) Certainly, Craig makes clear what a complex creature the world lost when the last passenger pigeons were hunted to extinction around the turn of the last century. His manner of writing about the bird is downright personal, and we believe him, at the end of the article, when he tells us all its “peculiarities seem to hang together, making a consistent character.” Read below the two previous articles in Craig's series — the second part on the mourning dove in the same 1911 issue of The Auk, and the much longer first part on the blond ring-dove from two years earlier in a 1909 issue of The Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology.

public-domain-review

Apr 30, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:53.974332

comparative-osteology

Edouard Joseph d’Alton’s Illustrations of Animal Skeletons (1821–1838) Mar 4, 2020 In a series of comparative studies published from 1821 to 1838, and collected under the title Die vergleichende Osteologie [The Comparative Osteology], the Baltic German biologist Heinz Christian Pander (1794–1865) and the Italian-born German naturalist and artist Edouard Joseph d’Alton (1772–1840) presented an extraordinary illustrated atlas of animal bones. The diverse range of animals the work covers (or rather uncovers) include elephants and hippopotamuses, hyenas and polar bears, giraffes and camels, porcupines and red squirrels, as well as the extinct megatherium or giant ground sloth. They are depicted both as complete skeletons inside a silhouette of the living animal and also in separate studies of individual skulls and other bones. The collaborator responsible for these elegant illustrations was d’Alton, a professor of art history at the Prussian Academy of Arts and the University of Bonn, where one of his students was a young Karl Marx. Pander, who lived in Latvia and was a member of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, is remembered for his extensive research of fossils in the Baltic regions. There, he made groundbreaking studies of trilobites (the extinct arthropod familiar from natural history museums) and first described conondonts (an extinct eel-like creature). You can browse our selection of d’Alton’s memorable illustrations below, with a focus on the striking images which show the skeletal forms within the living silhouettes.

public-domain-review

Mar 4, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:54.469625

john-gould-mammals-of-australia

John Gould’s Mammals of Australia (1845–63) Jan 23, 2020 In 1838, the English ornithologist John Gould set sail for Australia with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Gould. The previous year John had examined the bird specimens Charles Darwin brought back from the second voyage of the Beagle, bringing his deep knowledge and patient attention to bear on the unfamiliar bodies of mockingbirds and finches from South America and the Galápagos. His discovery that what Darwin had believed to be blackbirds and “gross-bills” were in fact finches would turn out to be integral to the theory of evolution. The purpose of the Goulds’ two-year sojourn in Australia was specifically to study birds. John had earned his reputation as an ornithologist through the publication of A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains and a five-volume Birds of Europe, both illustrated by Elizabeth (with a few plates in the latter book by Edward Lear). By traveling in Australia, he hoped at once to widen the world’s knowledge of birdlife and complete a magnum opus. In the event, however, the non-bird animal life he found too fascinating not to chronicle. In addition to his seven-volume Birds of Australia, he also published A Monograph of the Macropodidae, or Family of Kangaroos and the three-volume Mammals of Australia. The gorgeous lithographs included in The Mammals of Australia were made by H. C. Richter, based on drawings done by both Elizabeth and John during their time on the continent. These indelible images — of the platypus, the sugar glider, and the Tasmanian tiger, among others — introduced countless nineteenth-century readers to the existence of these extraordinary creatures. They continued to be reproduced in books and as posters today. As we now realize, thanks in part to the work of naturalists like the Goulds, Australia’s unique fauna is as fragile as it is unique. The existence of the egg-laying mammals called monotremes, such as the platypus, and marsupials such as the kangaroo, is due to the geographical isolation of Australia which occurred about ninety-nine million years ago. At that time, according to the fossil record, a number of monotremes and marsupials dwelled on other landmasses — but almost all of these species, apart from the American opossums, died out long ago. Only in Oceania, separated from the rest of the world by many miles of ocean, were these unusual animals able to thrive. These animals are currently more threatened than ever. When the first humans came to Australia more than 40,000 years ago, their hunting and modification of the landscape appears to have driven some species, including the giant bird called genyornis, to extinction. The practices of European settlers, who first arrived in large numbers in the eighteenth century, indisputably led to the extinction of at least fifty-four more species and the endangerment of many others. At present, the fires devastating Australia imperil more than 100 species of animals and plants. So far twenty-nine people and more than one billion animals have been killed in this calamity, whose far-reaching consequences are impossible to imagine.

public-domain-review

Jan 23, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:54.943936

richard-deakin-flora-of-the-colosseum-of-rome

Richard Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855) Mar 24, 2020 In this charming volume, the English doctor and amateur botanist Richard Deakin examines the natural wonders of one of the most famous ruins of ancient Rome. Deakin’s object is, he writes, to call the attention of the lover of the works of creation to those floral productions which flourish, in triumph, upon the ruins of a single building. Flowers are perhaps the most graceful and most lovely objects of the creation but are not, at any time, more delightful than when associated with what recalls to the memory time and place, and especially that of generations long passed away. They form a link in the memory, and teach us hopeful and soothing lessons, amid the sadness of bygone ages. One may be surprised to learn that no fewer than 420 species used to grow in the Colosseum (among them “56 species of Grasses…and 41 of the Leguminous or Pea tribe”) — and not only in the Colosseum but on it, for it must be remembered that, though the ground occupied by the building is about six acres, the surface of the walls and lodgment on the ruins upon which they grow is much more extensive, and the variety of soil is much greater, than would be supposed without examination; for, on the lower north side, it is damp, and favourable to the production of many plants, while the upper walls and accumulated mould are warmer and dryer, and, consequently, bettered suited for the development of others; and, on the south side, it is hot and dry, and suited only for the growth of differently constructed tribes. The Colosseum, when Deakin saw it, was an ecosystem unto itself. P. B. Shelley, visiting the place a few decades earlier, had marveled at how the vast human structure had been transformed by time into an amphitheater of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the fig tree, and threaded by little paths which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries: The copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet. Even in the 1840s and ’50s, as Deakin was gathering the samples for his book, the Colosseum’s plants were being destroyed by alterations and restorations — a fact he found lamentable. “To preserve a further falling of any portion is most desirable”, Deakin granted; but to carry the restorations, and the brushing and cleaning, to the extent to which it has been subjected, instead of leaving it in its wild and solemn grandeur, is to destroy the impression and solitary lesson which so magnificent a ruin is calculated to make upon the mind. In years since, the Colosseum has been so thoroughly altered and so frequently visited, all trace of the place’s former floral lushness has disappeared. Flora of the Colosseum thus gives us a glimpse into an unfamiliar version of a familiar ruin, which once appealed more to the nature-loving romantic than to the fact-collecting history buff. Not that Dr Deakin shirks facts. His catalogue of plants is eminently scientific and extensive, nearly doubling the number listed in an earlier Italian catalogue and including certain flowers that grew nowhere else in Europe. According to Paul Cooper, one solution to this “botanical mystery” may be the African animals, such as lions and giraffes, that were brought to the arena to perform and fight. These poor creatures, destined to kill and be killed for the pleasure of the ancient Roman crowds, scattered seeds that had been stowed in their fur and scat, populating the place with exotic blooms. That these blooms are now gone is regrettable; but at least — to strike a Deakinsian note — we can still see their trace in this hopeful and soothing book.

public-domain-review

Mar 24, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:55.268019

glossary-of-censored-words-from-a-1919-book-on-love

Glossary of Censored Words from a 1919 Treatise on Love Feb 13, 2020 The use of Latin to conceal or encode sexually charged or controversial language has a long history (see, for example, our essay on Emmanuel Swedenborg’s erotic dreams). As one might expect, a no-nonsense 458-page treatise on the "science of sex-attraction" would present plenty of opportunity for such Latinate veiling and Bernard S. Talmey’s Love does not disappoint. In fact, so replete with Latin substitutions is the work (particularly in the sections on "pathological activities") that in its second edition Tolmey was urged to include some help for the persistent and curious reader who might not be so proficient in Latin. Enter a most unusual bilingual glossary. Ranging from the familiar (cunnilingus, fellatio, libido), to the expected (sugo for “suck”, lambo for “lick”, fricare for “rub”), to the distinctly worrisome (gallina for “hen”, canis for dog), to the plain intriguing (nono quoque die for "every nine days"), the list gives a fairly good sense of what’s to come in Talmey’s study of the varieties of human sexual experience. A gynecologist at Yorkville Hospital in New York City, Talmey (1862–1926) published three books on sexuality before the appearance of Love, which served as a sort of summa. He was particularly interested in if, and how, male and female sexuality differed. This interest led him to research and write an early paper on the psychology of transvestites as well as to consider at length what we would now call gender nonconformity — what Talmey called anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa (a female soul in a male body), or vice versa. With such a career-long dedication to discussing and thinking about sex, Talmey was not one to shy away from speaking directly on the matter, and (as he writes in his preface) the pervasive use of Latin in his book was dictated not by “prudery” but “as a protection against the criticism of those who would take umbrage to plain sex expression”: For the impure everything is impure. Fortunately such people’s knowledge of Latin is, as a rule, very slight, and for them this treatise will remain a sealed book. Physicians and lawyers for whom this book was written know enough Latin grammar, enabling them to apprehend the meaning of all those phrases necessary for the understanding of the main points of the treatise. There is a good deal the prudish of 1919 would have been aghast to see in print that strikes a modern reader as rather tame. However, Talmey’s accounts of sexual abuse and bestiality — copulation with geese, hens, and dogs — remain eternally disturbing, even with their learned Latin camouflage: The girl, a domestic servant, was always moral before her illness. When she began suffering from hysterical attacks, amato liberos in fidem suam commissos exhibebat ad constuprandum et noctu spectatores rerum turpium eos faciebat, while the whole household was asleep under the influence of narcotics. When she was discovered and driven out of the house, the formerly modest girl became shameless and finally meretricium fecit. And elsewhere: Rosse reports the case of a young white, unmarried woman in Washington who was surprised in flagrante delicto with a large English mastiff, who in his efforts se solvere a puella caused an injury of such a nature that she died from hemorrhage within an hour. This is the dark side of Love. There are also many lighter, more enlivening passages in this book promoting “sex enlightenment” and “sex discussion”. As Talmey conducts us through his history (often dated, sometimes upsetting, but never dull) of sexuality, he points out a number of interesting sights, drawing on everything from the Bible to Darwin. Talmey’s way of talking about sexual matters might also spice up our own vocabulary. The Latin words he lists may have been intended to conceal their meaning from a prudish public, but in their labials and plosives and plurality of vowels they remain strangely alluring — sexy if you will, or lovely if you’d rather.

public-domain-review

Feb 13, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:55.759116

plague-doctor-costumes

Plague Doctor Costumes Mar 17, 2020 Today, with the coronavirus now officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, images of hazmat suits and medical professionals in full-body scrubs and surgical masks are flooding the news. The sight of so many in these outfits makes many of us more than a little anxious — but we do recognize them as effective attire for limiting the spread of disease. Indeed, there’s now a global surgical mask shortage because of the number of people outside the medical profession who’ve purchased these items. In the seventeenth century, during the epidemics of bubonic plague that swept western Europe, plague doctors (who exclusively treated the infected) took to wearing a very different kind of costume to protect them from the miasma, or “bad air”, then believed to carry disease. This fanciful-looking costume typically consisted of a head-to-toe leather or wax-canvas garment; large crystal glasses; and a long snout or bird beak, containing aromatic spices (such as camphor, mint, cloves, and myrrh), dried flowers (such as roses or carnations), or a vinegar sponge. The strong smells of these items — sometimes set aflame for added advantage — were meant to combat the contagious miasma that the costume itself could not protect against. ※※Indexed under…Odouras protection against contagion Plague doctors also carried, the scholar G. L. Townsend chronicles, a “wand with which to issue instructions”, such as ordering disease-stricken houses filled with spiders or toads “to absorb the air” and commanding the infected to inhale “bottled wind” or take urine baths, purgatives, or stimulants. These same wands were used to take a patient’s pulse, to remove his clothing, and also to ward off the infected when they came too close. (A potent tool for social distancing if ever there was one!) ※※Indexed under…Urinebaths to ward off plague In fact, however strange this early-modern hazmat suit looks, it was not entirely useless. The ankle-length gown and herb-filled beak designed to fight off harmful miasmata would also have offered some protection against germs. The invention of the plague doctor costume, complete with beaked mask, is credited to the French physician Charles de Lorme (1584–1678), who’s thought to have developed it in 1619. By 1636, it had proved popular enough it was worn as far away as Nijmegen (in the east of the present-day Netherlands); but it became ensconced in European culture once and for all during the Plague of 1656, which killed nearly half a million people in Rome and Naples. Plague doctors at this time were required — by the contracts they signed with municipal councils — to wear the costume. The appearance of one of these human-sized birds on a doorstep could only mean that death was near. As the costume came to be adopted by plague doctors throughout western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it more and more entered the collective imagination. Plague doctors were such a common sight in Venice, their costume was taken up as a Carnival outfit, effectively incorporating this symbol of mortality into the annual celebration of life. The costume also inspired a stock character in Commedia dell’Arte (the unsettling Medico della Pesta) as well as, no doubt, thousands upon thousands of nightmares as terrifying as anything dreamed up by David Lynch. One of the most intriguing of the plague doctor images we’ve found is a painted coat of arms belonging to Theodore Zwinger III (1658–1724), a Swiss doctor and descendant of Theodore Zwinger I (1533–1588), the Swiss doctor and humanist whose Theatrum Humanae Vitae is considered, the historian Helmut Zedelmaier writes, “perhaps the most comprehensive collection of knowledge to be compiled by a single individual in the early modern period”. The painting depicts a plague doctor on one side of a blazon and a man in a ruff on the other — perhaps representing both the medical and the scholarly traditions of the Zwinger clan? Some sort of duality is being represented, at any rate — and the extraordinarily avian plague doctor (even his eyes look birdlike!) lends something mysterious to the picture. Perhaps even more intriguing is a photograph taken on Poveglia, a tiny Venetian island which, for more than a century from 1793, acted as a plague quarantine station (and eventual grave) for an estimated 160,000 people. According to Theodor Weyl’s On the History of Social Hygiene (1904) — where it was originally printed — the photo shows one man wearing a vintage plague mask (found on the island in 1889) while the other holds a kind of “waffle iron” used in the disinfection of a cache of letters (also found on the island). This raises the question: is the man on the right actually trying to protect himself by donning this centuries-old mask (the smells of which can only be imagined)? Or is it all staged — done in fun — a demonstration of antiquarian findings? One can’t help but wonder. You can browse a whole range of plague doctor images from all over Europe below.

public-domain-review

Mar 17, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:56.269836

rock-crystal-adalbert-stifter

Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1846) Dec 22, 2019 There’s no dearth of extraordinary literary Christmas stories, from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. One of the lesser-known Yuletide masterpieces, at least in the English-speaking world, is Rock Crystal — a novella by the Austrian author Adalbert Stifter (1805–1868) beloved by Thomas Mann, W. H. Auden, and W. G. Sebald. Stifter, born in the Bohemian village of Oberplan, was the son of a linen weaver. Educated in a Benedictine monastery and at the University of Vienna, he became an inspector of schools. His life was not a happy one. A compulsive overeater, subject to depression and anxiety, he was not respected as a novelist in his lifetime. One of his adopted daughters died of typhus, and another ran away from home and drowned herself. At the age of sixty-two, suffering from cirrhosis and extreme depression, Stifter cut his own throat. All is not darkness and gloom, however, in Stifter’s prose. He was, to quote Hannah Arendt, “the greatest landscape painter in literature…someone who possesses the magic wand to transform all visible things into words and all visible movements—into sentences”. (Indeed Stifter’s calmness — his willingness to write about anything and everything — served as an inspiration for Sebald in books such as The Rings of Saturn.) The story of Rock Crystal is quite sweet, simple, and altogether transfixing. A shoemaker from a small Alpine village called Gschaid marries a dyer’s daughter from Millsdorf, which lies on the far side of a mountain pass. This transmountain marriage displeases many in Gschaid and Millsdorf, including the bride’s father, who withholds most of his daughter’s dowry and refuses to visit her in Gschaid. The bride’s mother, however, is not so hard-hearted, especially after the children, Conrad and Susanna, are born: If mothers love their children and long for them, this is frequently, and to a much higher degree, the case with grandmothers; they occasionally long for their grandchildren with an intensity that borders on morbidness. The dyer’s wife very frequently came over to Gschaid now, in order to see the children and to bring them presents. Then she would depart again after giving them kindly advice. But when her age and health did not any longer permit of these frequent journeys and the dyer for this reason objected to them, they bethought themselves of another plan; they changed about, and now the children visited their grandmother. On the day before Christmas one year, Conrad and Susanna go to have a holiday meal with their grandparents in Millsdorf. They are warned by both their parents and grandparents to “take good care” not to get chilled or overheated, and above all not to go to sleep outdoors. Sure enough, halfway home between Millsdorf and Gschaid, they are surrounded by blinding snow. Stifter’s descriptions of the children’s brave journey through the snowstorm are unforgettable: The footprints they left behind them did not remain visible long, for the extraordinary volume of the descending snow soon covered them up. The snow no longer rustled, in falling upon the needles, but hurriedly and peacefully added itself to the snow already there. The children gathered their garments still more tightly about them, in order to keep the steadily falling snow from coming in on all sides. Taking shelter beneath rocks “as large as churches”, they wait out the storm, which after several bone-chilling hours gives way to an “enormous stillness…in which no snow-crystal seemed to move” and the now-cloudless sky is lit up by “thousands and thousands of simple stars”. Rock Crystal has a happy ending, appropriate to a Christmas tale, but the story in the end is less about the children’s adventure than it is about their realization of nature’s power, embodied in the mountain, which from now on they will look up to more attentively, when they are in the garden; when, as in the past, the sun is shining beautifully and the linden-tree is sending forth its fragrance, when the bees are humming and the mountain looks down upon them beautifully blue, like the soft sky. Reading the book, one can see why Thomas Mann called Stifter “one of the most extraordinary, the most enigmatic, the most secretly daring and the most strangely gripping narrators in world literature” and why Auden was so impressed by his handling of the almost fairytale-like subject matter: To bring off, as Stifter does, a story of this kind, with its breathtaking risks of appalling banalities, is a great feat. What might so easily have been a tear-jerking melodrama becomes in his hands a quiet and beautiful parable about the relation of people to places, of man to nature. You can read the slightly abridged Lee M. Hollander translation above (and in plain text and eBook formats here) or, if you’re looking for a print version, check out the version translated by Elizabeth Mayer and the poet Marianne Moore published by Pushkin Press in the UK and NYRB Classics in the US.

public-domain-review

Dec 22, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:56.759716

londons-dreadful-visitation-bills-of-mortality

London's Dreadful Visitation: A Year of Weekly Death Statistics during the Great Plague (1665) Mar 26, 2020 Epidemics are on all our minds right now. Probably many of us could use a break from the relentless stream of statistics, percentages, and predictions related to Covid-19. Still, we thought a look at some statistics from an era when modern medicine had not yet been born might provide a little perspective. It was a need for historical perspective that, in fact, pushed Ellen Cotes to publish London's Dreadful Visitation, which collected all the “bills of mortality” printed in London during the Great Plague of 1665 (in which 100,000 people, or a quarter of the city’s population, perished). Lamenting the disappearance of the bills from the earlier "Great Plague" of forty years before ("the sight of them hath been much desired these times"), Cotes “resolved to communicate unto the Nation, these subsequent leaves” so that “Posterity may not any more be at such a loss”. But what were these “bills of mortality”, and how did they come about? As early as 1592, London parish officials had instituted a system for keeping track of deaths in the city, trying to curb the spread of the plague by tracking it and quarantining victims and those who lived with them. Since it was not then legally required to report deaths to a central authority, the officials hired “searchers of the dead”, whose job it was to locate corpses, examine them, and determine cause of death. These “searchers” were not trained in any kind of medicine. Typically they were poor, illiterate, older women whose contact with the infected isolated them socially and often brought their lives to an early end. They were also, in one of the more gruesome examples of gig work offered by history, paid per body. The causes of death reported by searchers were recorded by sextons and clerks on weekly bills of mortality — sheets sold like broadsides for a penny, meant to let citizens know where the disease had spread. The bill of mortality featured above comes from a week in September 1665, when the epidemic was at its height. As you can see toward the bottom right-hand corner, a total of 7,165 people in 126 parishes were proclaimed to have died of “Plague” — a number most historians believe to be low, considering how many people (Quakers, Anabaptists, Jews, and the very poor, among others) were not taken into account by the recording Anglicans. In addition to the alarming number of plague deaths, Londoners, of course, continued to die by other means, both familiar and strange. Many familiar maladies hide behind the enigmatic naming. “Rising of the Lights”, dreamy though it sounds, was a seventeenth-century term for any death associated with respiratory trouble (“lights” being a word for lungs). “Griping in the guts” and “Stopping of the stomach” were similarly used for deaths accompanied by gastrointestinal complaints. "Spotted feaver" was most likely typhus or meningitis. Many labels — such as "suddenly", "frighted", and "grief" — speak of the often approximate nature of assigning a cause (not carried out by medical professionals but rather the "searchers"). "Planet" referred to any illness thought to have been caused by the negative influence/position of one of the planets at the time (a similar astrological source lies behind the name Influenza, literally influence). Other causes of death endemic to seventeenth-century England practically litter the bills. Tuberculosis, both in the form of “Consumption” and of “Kingsevil” (a tubercular swelling of the lymph glands which was thought to be curable by the touch of royalty), killed hundreds of people every month. “Surfeit”, meaning overindulgence in food or drink, could sometimes be interchangeable with “Gowt” (gout) or “Dropsie” (edema). And the toll childbearing took on both mother and infant is also painfully evident on the bill, with its entries for “Childbed”, “Infants”, “Stillborn”, “Abortive”, "Teeth" (babies who died while teething), and “Chrisomes” (a catch-all for children who died before they could talk). ※※Indexed under…Teethas listed cause of death Probably the entries that strike us most, because they set us telling a story in our minds, are those that read like captions in an Edward Gorey book: “Killed by a fall from Belfrey at Alhallowes the Great”, “Burnt in his Bed by a Candle at St. Giles Cripplegate”, or “Drowned in a Tub of Wash in a Brewhouse at St. Giles in the Fields”. Three years before the Great Plague ravaged London and Cotes published her book, founder of statistical science John Graunt published his Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662). In this pioneering work he analyses the statistics offered up by bills from previous decades – just the kind of useful work which Cotes wanted to (and did) facilitate with her compilation. A useful overview, from 1908, of the history of the Bills of Mortality can be read here, and another from 1843, here. And from a more poetic response to such bills, see William Cowper's Stanzas on Mortality, a collection of his poems that were attached to the bills of mortality for the parish of Northampton from 1787–93.

public-domain-review

Mar 26, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:57.233311

japanese-firemans-coats-19th-century

Japanese Firemen’s Coats (19th century) Feb 18, 2020 During the Edo period in Japan (1615–1868), crowded living conditions and wooden buildings gave rise to frequent fires — so frequent in fact it was said that “fires and quarrels were the flowers of Edo”. The socially segregated brigades formed to combat these fires were made up of either samurais (buke hikeshi) or commoners (machi hikeshi), but whatever their class their methods were the same: they would destroy the buildings surrounding the fire in an effort to contain it. Although experiments with wooden pumps were made, limited water supply rendered this more modern firefighting method impractical. Each firefighter in a given brigade was outfitted with a special reversible coat (hikeshi banten), plain but for the name of the brigade on one side and decorated with richly symbolic imagery on the other. Made of several layers of quilted cotton fabric, using a process called the sashiko technique, and resist-dyed using the tsutsugaki method, these coats would be worn plain-side out and thoroughly soaked in water before the firefighters entered the scene of the blaze. No doubt the men wore them this way round to protect the dyed images from damage, but they were probably also concerned with protecting themselves, as they went about their dangerous work, through direct contact with the heroes and creatures represented on the insides of these beautiful garments.

public-domain-review

Feb 18, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:57.724991

coughs-sneezes-and-jet-propelled-germs-1945

Coughs, Sneezes, and Jet-Propelled Germs: Two Public Service Films by Richard Massingham (1945) Mar 5, 2020 At a time when the spread of disease is on everyone’s mind and governments the world over seek to educate the public in how to help contain the Coronavirus through hand-washing PSAs of all kinds, we thought it a good opportunity to highlight two short, memorable, and mercifully amusing public service films made in 1945 and 1948 respectively. Whereas PSAs of today mostly come in our social-media feeds and through television adverts, these informational “trailers” were shown before or in between main features at the local cinema, informing the public about everything from the importance of wartime rationing to the post-war workings of the new National Health System. The first film featured here, Coughs and Sneezes from 1945, begins with a comic montage of practical jokes. “You may have met a few people who like doing this sort of thing,” the narrator says, as we watch a series of people be bonked on the head, tripped, or knocked head over heels; “they’re a nuisance, I agree — but pretty harmless.” The scene then turns to another kind of nuisance, which isn’t harmless at all: a man who sneezes without covering his mouth. This danger to society is promptly hauled into a room for instruction in proper use of his handkerchief and, in a follow-up film, Don’t Spread Germs (Jet-Propelled Germs) from 1948, further instructed in how to properly clean his handkerchief — in a bowl of disinfectant separate from the family wash. The director, and star, of both these films is Richard Massingham (1898–1953), a former Senior Medical Officer at the London Fever Hospital (and hypochondriac) who showed a largely self-taught talent for filmmaking as early as 1933, when he made a movie about the hospital where he worked. Other movies — about a dreadful trip to the dentist, among other subjects — followed. He rose to prominence during the war years with government-backed films such as The Five-Inch Bather (1942), which joyfully supported the war department’s recommendation to bathe in no more than five inches of water with images of elephants, kittens, and Massingham himself, bathing with childlike glee. After the war, too, he went on promoting good hygiene and good sense, not only in Jet-Propelled Germs but in the wonderfully surrealistic Watch Your Meters (1947). As a hypochondriac as well as a doctor, Massingham was obviously passionate about subjects that promoted public health. So, in honor of his life and work, remember: “coughs and sneezes spread diseases!” Be well, and take care! (See a series of GIFs made from the Coughs and Sneezes film here.)

public-domain-review

Mar 5, 2020

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:58.163408

olympic-diving-diagrams-1912

Olympic Diving Diagrams (1912) Aug 11, 2012 Diagrams showing the trajectory of the major dives as performed at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

public-domain-review

Aug 11, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:59.133429

cleopatra-1912

Cleopatra (1912) Jul 18, 2012 Cleopatra - a Romance of a Woman and a Queen - depicts Helen Gardner in the title role and as centrepiece to the series of elaborately staged tableaux which tell the story of her various love affairs, first with the handsome fisherman-slave Pharon, and then with Marc Antony. The film is created by the Helen Gardner Picture Players and was based on a play written by the French dramatist Victorien Sardou, the man who wrote La Tosca (1887), the play behind Puccini's opera Tosca 13 years later.

public-domain-review

Jul 18, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:41:59.563234

an-exact-and-authentic-narrative-of-the-2nd-baltimore-riot-1812

An Exact and Authentic Narrative of the 2nd Baltimore Riot (1812) Jul 27, 2012 A small book giving various eye witness accounts of the "Second Baltimore Riot", one of the most violent anti-federalists attacks during the War of 1812. The first riot took place just over a month before when the Baltimore based "pro-British" Federalist newspaper The Federal Republican denounced the declaration of war. On the night of June 20th a mob stormed the newspaper’s offices destroying the building and its contents. A truce was eventually negotiated and the owner of the paper, Alexander Hanson, and his employees were taken into protective custody. In July, after spending a few weeks in Georgetown, Hanson brought his newspaper back to a building in Baltimore and continued to write editorials denouncing the war. Once again, a mob lay siege to the building but this time Hanson and his employees fought back with gunfire, reportedly killing two of the mob. A military force intervened and again escorted Hanson and his supporters to jail for their protection. The following night the mob broke into the jail and nine Federalists, including Hanson, were hauled out into the street and given a severe three-hour beating, including being stabbed with penknives and having hot candle wax dropped into their eyes. Eventually the authorities intervened. One of the paper's employees, a Revolutionary War veteran named James Lingan, had been killed while Hanson was to die only seven years later never having fully recovered. No one ended up being brought to justice for the attacks.

public-domain-review

Jul 27, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:00.038243

leo-tolstoys-fables-for-children-1904

Leo Tolstoy´s Fables for Children (1904) Aug 7, 2012 As well as writing such lengthy literary classics as Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy turned his hand to writing stories for younger readers. Most of the works in the collection above, translated here by Leo Wiener, had their seed in primers which Tolstoy wrote for the school which he established in 1849 for peasant children at his country estate, Yasnaya Polyana (Clear Glades). In the huge variety of tales - through a host of kings, hermits, peasants and talking animals - he expounds his clear vision for a more human and socially just society.

public-domain-review

Aug 7, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:00.488377

fashion-parade-amongst-the-ruins-of-rome-1964

Fashion Parade amongst the Ruins of Rome (1964) Jul 10, 2012 In the same year as 1964's epic blockbuster The Fall of The Roman Empire starring Sophia Loren, Alec Guniess, and James Mason comes this strange little newsreel showing the latest wool fashions being modelled amidst the tourist sites of Rome. The narrator has a particular penchant for the punned quip, and the occasional mysterious phrase - "What does she see amongst the ghosts of Roman Senators? This vibrant at-home naked wool challis in a floral print. Where the ancients praised Caesar she praises the inspiration of its designers".

public-domain-review

Jul 10, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:00.947475

winners-in-the-fifth-olympiad-1912

Winners in the Fifth Olympiad (1912) Aug 3, 2012 Pictures of the winners of each event of the Stockholm 1912 Olympic Games - as featured in the The Fifth Olympiad: the Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912, published in 1913 by Wahlstrom & Widstrand, Stockholm.

public-domain-review

Aug 3, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:01.441915

the-life-and-death-of-mr-badman-presented-to-the-world-in-a-familiar-dialogue-between-mr-wiseman-and-mr-attentive-1900-edition

The life and death of Mr. Badman presented to the world in a familiar dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive (1900 edition) Jul 24, 2012 Beautifully designed turn-of-the-century edition of John Bunyan's companion piece to The Pilgrim's Progress, originally published in 1680, in which two characters have a dialogue about sin and redemption over the course of a long day. In his preface titled "The Author to the Reader," Bunyan announces that Mr Badman is a pseudonym for a real man who is dead. Mr Badman's relatives and offspring continue to populate Earth, which "reels and staggereth to and fro like a Drunkard, the transgression thereof is heavy upon it." In a mock eulogy, Bunyan says Mr Badman did not earn four themes commonly part of a funeral for a great man. First, there is no wrought image that will serve as a memorial, and Bunyan's work will have to suffice. Second, Mr Badman died without Honour, so he earned no badges and scutcheons. Third, his life did not merit a sermon. Fourth, no one will mourn and lament his death. Bunyan then describes the sort of Hell awaiting Mr Badman, citing biblical scripture. He said he published it to address the wickedness and debauchery that had corrupted England, as was his duty as a Christian, in hopes of delivering himself "from the ruins of them that perish." (Wikipedia). The stunning illustrations for this 1900 edition published by Heinemann are by Staffordshire born father and son illustrator duo George and Louis Rhead.

public-domain-review

Jul 24, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:01.906879

arabic-machine-manuscript

Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī’s Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century) Jul 9, 2012 The images gathered below come from an anonymous copy of Ismail al-Jazarī’s thirteenth-century treatise on the construction of machines. While this copy is undated, it forms part of a manuscript (collecting various Arabic scientific texts) bound in the seventeenth century and preserved at Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek (Ms. or Fol. 3306). Al-Jazarī, who passed away in 1206, served as the chief engineer for the court of the Artuqids in Diyarbakir. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices lives up to its name, detailing lock-like devices for raising water, sophisticated zodiac clocks, avian automata able to produce song, and a showering system for King Salih, who “disliked a servant or slave girl pouring water onto his hands for him”. He invented bloodletting technologies, mischievous fountains, segmental gears, and a chest (sundūq) that featured a security system with four combination dials — presumably a safe for storing valued possessions — and has been subsequently dubbed “the father of robotics”, due to his creation of a life-like butler who could offer guests a hand towel after their ablutions. Al-Jazarī’s contemporaries already recognized his eminence as an engineer, referring to him as unique and unrivaled, learned and worthy. He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his. The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices contains some fifty mechanical devices divided into six categories: clocks; vessels and figures for drinking sessions; pitchers, basins, and other washing devices; fountains and perpetual flutes; machines for raising water; and a miscellaneous category, where we find a self-closing door. The second category is perhaps the most intriguing, and grants some insight into the extravagant concerns of al-Jazarī’s courtly patrons. One machine — “a standing slave holding a fish and a goblet from which he serves wine to the king” — is programmed to dispense clarified wine every eighth of an hour for a certain period. Numerous similar devices follow: robots that drink from goblets, which are filled from the recycled contents of their stomachs; automaton shaykhs that serve each other wine that each consumes in turn; a boat full of mechanical slave girls that play instruments during drinking parties. Not unlike our “AI assistants”, al-Jazarī’s inventions are never allowed to transcend the category of indentured laborer, reproducing the inequalities of social relations across the human-machine divide. The illustrations from the Berlin manuscript are notably different than some of its sister specimens, such as the ornate pair of manuscripts held in Leiden. Here the images are mainly in-line illustrations and seem more focused on technical details and inner workings than other versions, which tend to lean toward aesthetic exteriors. Red and yellow predominate, offset by the occasional body of water in indigo blue. Gears and levers are rich in tone, while humanoid figures get left as simple, colorless sketches. To the contemporary viewer, the illustrations invert the power dynamic that is so present in al-Jazarī’s text. Machines come to the foreground; humans are incidental figures, almost irrelevant. For more on al-Jazarī’s mechanical devices, visit this helpful webpage. And you can browse other inventive machines in our post on Agostino Ramelli. A complete list of manuscripts containing al–Jazarī’s treatise can be found here.

public-domain-review

Jul 9, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:02.393789

jack-and-jill-and-old-dame-gill-1806

Jack and Jill and old Dame Gill (1806) Jul 31, 2012 Extended version of the famous nursery rhyme in which, in addition to fetching some water, Jack and Jill get into various scrapes with animals, swings, see-saws, and the ever-chastising Old Dame Gill. The illustrator goes uncredited in the book, though the back page is dedicated to a special rhyme advertising the booksellers/publishers J.Aldis: "Dame Gill had been to Aldis / To buy them all books / You may see how they are pleased / by the smiles in their looks / Now if you are good and deserving regard / This book full of pictures shall be your reward."

public-domain-review

Jul 31, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:02.818097

aeolian-piano-rolls-1903

Aeolian Piano Rolls (1903) Jul 20, 2012 The piano roll was the first medium which could be produced and copied industrially and made it possible to provide the customer with actual music quickly and easily. It consisted of a roll of paper with perforations punched in it, the position and length of which determined the note played on the 'autopiano' (also known as a player piano, or pianola). These self-playing pianos contained a pneumatic mechanism that operated the piano action via the pre-programmed rolls. These recordings are from the rolls of the Aeolian Company, one of the biggest producers of the automatic piano. By 1903, the Aeolian Company had more than 9,000 roll titles in their catalog, adding 200 titles per month. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Jul 20, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:03.309164

photos-of-a-square-dance-in-mcintosh-county-oklahoma-1940

Photos of a Square Dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma (1940) Aug 1, 2012 Photographs taken during a square dance in McIntosh County in Oklahoma by photographers working for the U.S. government's Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA and later the Office of War Information (OWI) between 1939 and 1944 made approximately 1,600 color photographs depicting life in the United States, including Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The pictures focused on rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working.

public-domain-review

Aug 1, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:03.766647

kaishi-hen-an-18th-century-japanese-anatomical-atlas

Kaishi Hen, an 18th Century Japanese anatomical atlas Aug 6, 2012 Images from Kaishi Hen (Analysis of Cadavers), an anatomical atlas from the dawn of experimental medicine in Japan, published in Kyoto in 1772. The book details, in exquisite woodcut illustrations by Aoki Shukuya (d. 1802), the experiments and findings of Kawaguchi Shinnin (1736-1811).

public-domain-review

Aug 6, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:04.082293

the-yama-yama-man-ada-jones-1909

The Yama Yama Man - Ada Jones (1909) Aug 2, 2012 "The Yama Yama Man" was written by Karl Hoschna (music) and Collin Davis (lyrics) for the Broadway show The Three Twins (1908). Bessie McCoy's signature performance of the song, in a satin Pierrot clown costume with floppy gloves and a cone hat, was key in establishing the song's popularity. The July 25, 1908, edition of Billboard magazine reported the following story how the song originated. When The Three Twins was rehearsing in Chicago, prior to first opening, Karl Hoschna, the composer, was asked to furnish a "pajama man song". He wrote one called The Pajama Man only to learn that it could not be used owing to another pajama number booked at the Whitney Opera House the next day. Gus Sohlke, the stage director, happened to pass a toy store and saw in the window a doll built out of triangles. Realizing that this had never been used in stage work he decided to have a triangular man chorus in place of The Pajama Man. That afternoon as he, Collin Davis and Hoschna sat together wondering what they would call the song, Sohlke kept repeating "Pajama jama yama yama". Suddenly he brightened up and cried "Did either of you fellows ever hear of a Yama Yama Man?" Of course neither one had and Sohlke confirmed "Neither have I! Lets call the new song Yama Yama Man". Quickly Davis set to work to write a lyric around the title and that night Sohlke and Hoschna locked themselves in a room with Bessie McCoy and rehearsed the Yama song and dance for five hours. Ada Jones recorded "Yama Yama Man" in 1909 for Victor Light Opera Company. The lyrics for verse two and three were changed, verse two being more bawdy. It spent five weeks at #1 in 1909 and was the most popular song of her career. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Aug 2, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:04.576077

the-fifth-olympiad-the-official-report-of-the-olympic-games-of-stockholm-1912

The Fifth Olympiad: the Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912 Aug 3, 2012 The official report of the Olympic Games held in Stockholm in 1912. As exhaustive account of all there is to know about the 5th Olympiad including all the bureaucratic wranglings and preparations for the Games, the actual results and also a wonderful series of portraits of the winners. The 1912 Games were the last to issue solid gold medals and, with Japan's debut, the first time an Asian nation participated. They were also the first to have art competitions, the first to feature the decathlon and pentathlon, both won by Jim Thorpe, women's diving and women's swimming, and also the first to introduce electric timing. (Wikipedia) See pictures of the winners portrait series from the book here in our images collection.

public-domain-review

Aug 3, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:05.019826

the-celestial-atlas-of-flamsteed-1795

The Celestial Atlas of Flamsteed (1795) Jul 5, 2012 John Flamsteed (1646-1719) was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. He catalogued over 3000 stars and was responsible for several of the earliest recorded sightings of the planet Uranus, which he mistook for a star and catalogued as '34 Tauri'. In 1729, ten years after his death, a star atlas based on observations he made, the Atlas Coelestis, was published by his widow, assisted by Joseph Crosthwait and Abraham Sharp. The changes in the positions of stars (the original observations were made in the 1690s), led to an update made in the 1770s by the French engineer Nicolas Fortin, supervised by the astronomers Le Monnier and Messier from the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. The new version, called Atlas Fortin-Flamsteed, was a third of the size of the original and also had artistic retouching to some illustrations (mostly Andromeda, Virgo and Aquarius). The names of the constellations are in French (not in Latin) and included some nebulae discovered after the death of Flamsteed. The images below are from an updated version published in 1795, titled Atlas Céleste de Flamstéed, produced by Mechain and Lalande, with new constellations and many more nebulae. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Jul 5, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:05.320955

catalogue-of-the-68-competitive-designs-for-the-great-tower-for-london-1890

Catalogue of the 68 Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London (1890) Text by Adam Green Jul 16, 2012 A catalogue showing the entries for a competition to design a new tower for London. The year previous, 1889, saw the hugely successful Eiffel Tower go up in the centre of Paris, and the good people of London, not to be outdone, decided to get one of their own. A wonderful array of designs were put forward. Many were suspiciously similar to the Eiffel Tower and many erred on the wackier side of things, such as Design no.19, the "Century Tower", reminiscent of a huge screw, and London Vegetarian Society's design for an "aerial colony" which came complete with hanging vegetable gardens a one-twelfth scale replica of the Great Pyramid on its summit. The very practical design number 37 by Stewart, McLaren and Dunn was eventually chosen to be awarded the 500 guinea prize-money and built in Wembley Park. Construction began in 1892 but the company in charge of the erection, The Metropolitan Tower Company, soon ran into problems including falling chronically behind schedule due to marshy ground and then financial difficulties which eventually led to their liquidation in 1889. Construction ceased after only 47 metres had been completed. The abandoned “tower” (known as Watkin’s Folly, or The London Stump) remained a spectacle in the park for a number of years before being deemed unsafe and blown up in 1904. Wembley Stadium ended up being built over the site for the 1923 British Empire Exhibition. When the stadium was rebuilt in 2000, the lowering of the level of the pitch resulted in the concrete foundations of the failed tower being rediscovered.

public-domain-review

Jul 16, 2012

Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:05.807111

the-dodo-and-its-kindred-1848

The Dodo and its Kindred (1848) Jul 19, 2012 This seminal 1848 monograph sets out to separate the myth from reality regarding perhaps the world's most famous extinct bird. The book was borne from a dissection of the dried out head of the last remaining stuffed Dodo, carried out by Strickland and Melville in the mid 19th century.

public-domain-review

Jul 19, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:06.295872

fancy-dresses-described-or-what-to-wear-at-fancy-balls-1887

Fancy Dresses Described or What to Wear at Fancy Balls (1887) Jul 7, 2012 A comprehensive guide to all things fancy dress, with detailed descriptions of costume ideas, from the more abstract such as "Air", "Africa" "Dew" and "Five o Clock Tea", to the more specific in a "Moravian Pesant" and "Henry III of France".

public-domain-review

Jul 7, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:06.777875

the-flowers-personified-1847

J. J. Grandville’s Illustrations from The Flowers Personified (1849) Text by Hunter Dukes Jul 30, 2012 “Unhappy the man who never had his eyes fill with tears at the sight of a particular flower. Such a one can have been neither a child nor a youth. He can have had neither mother, sister, nor affianced bride. He never loved.” This is the tone and tenor throughout Les Fleurs animées (The Flowers personified), a collection of floral — and sometimes florid — writing, featuring playful illustrations by J. J. Grandville (1803–1847), engraved and hand-colored by Charles Michel Geoffroy. Imagining common flowers as a series of ornately-dressed women, Grandville’s illustrations are simultaneously fanciful, instructive, otherworldly, and frightening. Sweet Pea guzzles directly from the watering can, for she is always parched. Narcissus looks for her reflection in a pond and finds a prostrating bottlefly and lizard gazing back. Sensitive (Mimosa pudica) is pursued by a giant slug and gentlemanly critter. Some images play upon their flowers’ intoxicating properties: Hemlock’s toad and rabbit companions succumb to poison; Grapevine gets drunk with a starling; and beetles nod off beneath Poppy’s dew. Two flowers seem unable to be personified: Helichrysum is represented by a ring-like crown and ouroboros, perhaps due to its connotations of immortality, which shine down on a faded scythe; tobacco is not to be associated with ladies — clay pipes and a hookah billow smoke with no one there to inhale. The illustrations culminate in a grand ball, where floral ballerinas frame the stately procession of spring. These images illustrate an unclassifiable miscellany of texts written by Alphonse de Candolle, Taxile Delord, and Alphonse Karr, which includes: a full music score (“The Forget-Me-Not”); otherworldly denizens of hidden floral worlds (The Flower Fairy, Maguertine the Oracle of the Meadows); short stories masquerading as Platonic dialogues (“A Lesson in Botanical Philosophy”) and lyric elegies (“The Weeping Willow”). Some of the motifs feel like pressed flowers, preserved from time’s blight within the folds of a forgotten book. Other texts buckle under the tiresome equation of femininity and fragility, as well as a recourse to heavy-handed allegory. “The Traffic in Flowers”, for instance, compares florists and botanists to the slave traders of Cairo and Constantinople — with Grandville’s illustration playing on the moral panic regarding white slavery in the mid-nineteenth century — and calls for the abolition of pruning shears: “Do not plants and flowers live as really as men? Do you not see, cruel friends of science, that you are abominable stranglers? If the daisy could only cry out, you would be compelled to throw over its head a pitch-plaster.” Below you can browse all fifty-two of Grandville’s illustrations from the original 1847 edition of Les Fleurs Animées. The Internet Archive also has a later 1867 edition, with updated colouring, and Nehemiah Cleaveland’s 1849 English translation. For another set of images related to the personification of seasonal change, see our post on Walter Crane’s A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden(1899).

public-domain-review

Jul 30, 2012

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:07.275765

ww2-u-s-soldier-drag-show-1942

WW2 U.S. Soldier Drag Show (1942) Jul 26, 2012 Universal Newsreel showing WW2 soldiers of Fort Slocum in a "Girlie Show" - an all singing, dancing, and cross-dressing version of "Swing Fever". According to Internet Archive user Michael A. Cavanaugh: This show was originally scheduled for before Christmas 1941. According to the post newspaper, The Casual News I(15) 15 Nov 1941 p 1, it "centers around the vicissitudes of an intellectually inhabited Army post once it has been invaded, via the draft, by a group of swing musicians." The libretto was written by Pfcs Richard Burdick and Horace Sutton; music by Capt. Louis E. Tepp, Miss Marcelle Meyer and Burdick. (Burdick had civilian stage experience, Meyer was with the YMCA which sponsored the production. The film clip seems to be of the YMCA stage, basement of bldg. 82.) It was written specifically for the talent on post, and included Pfc Danny Lapidos (director of the Ft. Slocum Dance Band), S/Sgt Abraham Small (director of the Post Band; that may be him directing the music in the film clip), Kay Sharp (daughter of a Sgt on post), Lt. Samuel Ogden, Capt Eric Anderson & Lt John Steele. The post newspaper completely downplayed the crossdressing aspect (which the newsreel plays up). Before the WAACs arrived in 1943 there were few women on post (only daughters & civilian employees e.g. the YMCA); later stage productions at Slocum would feature more integrated casts, and the WACs would be active participants. As in the Army generally the post band was very important. This is a rare clip of the band as well as of social life at Ft Slocum (1861-1965), "the Ellis Island of the US Army".

public-domain-review

Jul 26, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:07.717072

hortus-malabaricus-1678-1693

Hortus Malabaricus (1678-1693) Jul 13, 2012 Selected illustrations from the stunning Hortus Malabaricus (Garden of Malabar), an epic treatise dealing with the medicinal properties of the flora in the Indian state of Kerala. Originally written in Latin, it was compiled over a period of nearly 30 years and published in Amsterdam between 1678 and 1693 in 12 volumes of about 500 pages each, with a total of 794 copper plate engravings. The book was conceived by Hendrik van Rheede, who was the Governor of Dutch Malabar at the time, and he is said to have taken a keen personal interest in the compilation. The work was edited by a team of nearly a hundred including physicians (such as Ranga Bhat, Vinayaka Pandit, Appu Bhat and Itti Achuden) professors of medicine and botany, amateur botanists (such as Arnold Seyn, Theodore Jansson of Almeloveen, Paul Hermann, Johannes Munnicks, Joannes Commelinus, Abraham a Poot), and technicians, illustrators and engravers, together with the collaboration of company officials, clergymen (D. John Caesarius and the Discalced Carmelite Mathaeus of St. Joseph’s Monastery at Varapuzha). Van Rheede was also assisted by the King of Cochin and the ruling Zamorin of Calicut. Prominent among the Indian contributors were three Gouda Saraswat Brahmins named Ranga Bhat, Vinayaka Pandit,Appu Bhat and Malayali physician, Itti Achuden, who was an Ezhava doctor of the Mouton Coast of Malabar. The book has been translated into English and Malayalam by Dr. K. S. Manilal. (Wikipedia)

public-domain-review

Jul 13, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:08.178265

17th-century-heraldry-designs-1695

17th-century Heraldry Designs (1695) Jul 23, 2012 Select images from the book Nouveau Livre de Differens Cartouches, Couronnes, Casques, Supports et Tenans - roughly translated as a New Book of Different Cartouches (the central oval), Crowns, Helmets, and both Animal and Human Supports - engraved by Charles Mavelot and published in 1695 in France. The book's subtitle announces its practical use for "painters, sculptors, engravers, goldsmiths, weavers, embroiderers and others".

public-domain-review

Jul 23, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:08.498917

rhyming-drugstore-advertisements-1885

Rhyming Drugstore Advertisements (1885) Jul 17, 2012 These rhyming advertisements were created by "commercial rhymist" W.N.Bryant for a variety of drugstores in the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Indian Territory. They contain some ingenious sections of poetic flair, and strangely all end on a cigar-related note. Not sure if too many people would quite have the patience these days to stay still for the time required to get through the whole thing - though with such enticing headlines as "Ah! There" and "Why will you die?", perhaps so.

public-domain-review

Jul 17, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:08.979363

remembrance-of-teams-past

Remembrance of Teams Past Aug 8, 2012 With the end of the 2012 Olympics now in sight, we celebrate the world of amateur sport with some photographs of local teams from yesteryear. Pictures from Flickr: The Commons, click on images for more info and source.

public-domain-review

Aug 8, 2012

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:09.276856

various-apocalyptic-scenes-from-the-prophetic-messenger-ca-1827-61

Various Apocalyptic Scenes from the Prophetic Messenger (ca. 1827–61) Oct 23, 2019 These colored lithographs, labelled as apocalyptic scenes by the Wellcome Collection, were printed in conjunction with the astrological magazine the Prophetic Messenger, aka Raphael’s Almanac, which ran from 1827 to 1861. Raphael, a pen name, was intended to invoke the power of the archangel Raphael — traditionally linked to Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It was used by several British astrologers in the first half of the nineteenth century, who together contributed to the revival of astrology. While the lithographs are difficult to interpret on their own, they do give us a sense of how Raphael’s astrological predictions differed from the ones generally found in newspapers today. They are not, for one thing, very concerned with the destiny of individuals. Instead, they favor crowded scenes of warfare and disaster, including pictures of shipwrecks, earthquakes, riotous assemblies, lightning storms, and demons. Queen Victoria, Napoleon III, the Boxer Rebellion, “Hibernia pleading with Brittania,” “a mob addressed by rival orders” — these were the common subjects of the day. While not always easy to decipher, apparently the meanings to these cryptic scenes would be spelled out in the subsequent issue of the magazine. Poring over the elaborate cartoons with their gathering of figures, texts, symbols, and landscapes, one begins to see the appeal of Raphael’s view of the world. At least it attempted to make sense of the huge, unpredictable movements of history, which still fail to make sense to us today.

public-domain-review

Oct 23, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:10.332589

aurora-borealis-in-art

“Firelight Flickering on the Ceiling of the World”: The Aurora Borealis in Art Dec 5, 2019 About fifty miles above sea level, far beyond the outer reaches of the ozone layer, there lies a huge stretch of air called the thermosphere, where temperatures soar to 2000° Centigrade. Particles in this part of the sky are so scarce that, as Lyall Watson writes, “not enough of them strike a body in orbit to transfer such awesome heat,” though there are more than enough to “combine with other charged particles thrown into the edges of our atmosphere by gusts of solar wind” and create the “awesome display of pyrotechnics” we call the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis, or the Northern and Southern Lights: Such auroras concentrate around the polar circles, appearing a few hours after sunset as pale greenish glows that brighten until phantom curtains of lime green, gold, and magenta arch across the sky, as though a gigantic explosion had taken place just over the edge of the world and heaven itself was on fire. These lights, which Louise B. Young compared to “firelight flickering on the ceiling of the world”, have been capturing the imaginations of artists and storytellers since time began. The Inuit of Hudson Bay believed they were the lanterns of demons in search of lost souls; the Norse saw them as the spears, armor, and helmets of the Valkyries leading fallen soldiers to Valhalla; Greenlanders thought they were the dancing spirits of children who had died at birth. Death has been associated with polar auroras from the first. The Ngarrindjeri of southern Australia have referred to the lights as the campfires of the dead, while the Inuit of northern Alaska, saw them as evil. Even in the lands between these two geographical extremes, auroras have been a cause for concern. Seneca, in his Naturales Quaestiones, records that, during Tiberius’ reign (14–37 AD), an aurora above the city of Ostia, near Rome, glowed so intensely that a military unit stationed nearby, believing the town was on fire, galloped to the rescue. In eighteenth-century Europe, the Aurora Borealis, like so many aspects of nature, was largely transformed from an object of horror into an object of wonder. The English explorer and naturalist Samuel Hearne, in his Journey from Prince of Wales’ Fort in Hudson Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795), wrote with surprise that, during the long winter nights north of the Canadian lake Athapapuskow, the Aurora Borealis provided sufficient light for him to read even “a very small print”. Hearne was also the first European to note the noise that the lights seem to make “as they vary their colours or position”. “I can positively affirm,” he wrote (in a passage that would later entrance both Wordsworth and Emerson), “that in still nights I have frequently heard them make a rustling and crackling noise, like the waving of a large flag in a fresh gale of wind.” There have been many theories about the origins of auroras over the years. Seneca wondered whether they were formed above or below the clouds. Hearne, like many people in his time, believed they consisted of a storm of comets. Benjamin Franklin theorized they were the result of electricity gone haywire in the upper air. It was not until the twentieth century that the Norwegian scientist Kristian Birkeland (1867–1917) laid the foundations of our current understanding of the phenomena, though, in fact, there’s still a good deal about them scientists don’t understand. Auroras remain a cause for wonder — a reminder of the strange, moving beauty of the universe, which extends so far beyond us it boggles the mind. John Steinbeck, in Travels with Charley, expresses this nicely when, on his way to Maine in a camper van, he goes out into the night to get his dog some biscuits and happens to look up: the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater. In colors of rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost-sharpened stars shone through it. What a thing to see at a time when I needed it so badly! See below our highlights from more than 200 years of artists’ attempts to capture the magical display of the Aurora Borealis.

public-domain-review

Dec 5, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:10.806639

the-golfers-rubaiyat-and-other-20th-century-parodies

The Golfer’s Rubáiyát and other 20th-Century Parodies Jul 24, 2019 The poems of the Persian astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) have met a strange fate in English. Edward FitzGerald’s loose translation of them — titled The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859) — would go on to become one of the most popular books of poetry in the Anglophone world. Since 1879, it has been reprinted hundreds of times — nearly every year — and has been translated into over eighty languages. A hundred years ago, says curator Molly Schwartzburg, “the average American and certainly every poet writing in English could quote stanzas of [FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát] verbatim.” With its extreme popularity and easily imitable rhyming quatrains, it’s perhaps no surprise that The Rubáiyat has prompted a number of parodies. Writers have gone wild over the years riffing on FitzGerald’s translation — not only emulating the rhyme schemes but adapting the original’s lofty tones to their own less than lofty purposes. Take FitzGerald’s first quatrain: Wake! For the sun, who scattered into flightThe Stars before him from the Field of Night,Drives Night along with them from Heav’n and strikesThe Sultán’s Turret with a Shaft of Light. And then turn to just a few of the parodies published in the twentieth century: Oliver Herford’s The Rubáiyát of a Persian Kitten (1904), Carolyn Wells’s The Rubáiyát of a Motor Car (1906), Helen Rowland’s The Rubáiyát of a Bachelor (1915), and Wallace Irwin’s The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, Jr. (1902) (Clicking on the right hand pages below will take you to the first quatrains.) One of the finer examples of the faux-Rubáiyát genre is H. W. Boynton’s The Golfer’s Rubáiyát. Like the others, it takes a mundane subject and pronounces upon it in grandiose tones. But unlike many of his fellow parodists, Boynton doesn’t overplay his hand. His stanzas are always eminently droll, his jokes good-humored, his puns relentless — striking a particularly wonderful balance between the quotidian language of the fairways with the philosophical flights of the original. And all housed within a charming set of illustrated frames. Boynton, born in Connecticut in 1869, was a critic for The Atlantic Monthly at the time he composed The Golfer’s Rubáiyát. In addition to writing literary biographies (of Washington Irving and Bret Harte, among others), Boynton would go on to edit several collections of English poetry, including Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Pope’s Complete Poetical Works. His parody is the result of a more-than-passing acquaintance with English verse. Just a year before Boynton's death, in 1946 there was published a second golf-themed Rubáiyát parody, The Rubáiyát of a Golfer by J. A. Hammerton. If we are to believe the declarations in the introduction then it seems Hammerton wrote his book with seemingly no knowledge of Boynton’s — suggesting Khayyám’s poems celebrating epicurean delights were destined to be taken up by English-speaking golfers with a taste for verse.

public-domain-review

Jul 24, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:11.246357

dorothy-wordsworths-journal-of-a-few-months-residence-in-portugal-1847

Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Few Months’ Residence in Portugal (1847) Oct 29, 2019 The first Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855) is perhaps best known as a diarist, some of whose entries provided her brother William with material for his poems. When in April 1802, William saw “a crowd, / A host of golden daffodils,” he was not, strictly speaking, wandering lonely as a cloud. His sister Dorothy was by his side, noting how the flowers grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing. But Dorothy was not only a gifted diarist and William’s close companion. She was also an intrepid traveler. In 1803, she went with her brother and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Scotland, composing a manuscript that would not be published until after her death. In 1818, she and her friend Mary Barker were the first women to scale Scafell Pike — the highest mountain in England. Dorothy’s account of this feat was a bit troublingly “borrowed”, without attribution, by her brother in his A Guide through the District of the Lakes. The second Dorothy Wordsworth (1804–1847), aka “Dora”, was, of course, named after her aunt — and in many ways followed in the first Dorothy’s footsteps. She was, in the words of Wordsworth scholar Judith W. Page, a “dutiful daughter who assume[d] a major role in her father’s life…taking dictation, presiding at tea, visiting neighbors, threatening to become a scholar”. But Dora showed herself to be perhaps even bolder than her aunt, when, in 1843, at the age of thirty-nine, she married the Anglophone poet and Portuguese translator Edward Quillinan —very much against her father’s wishes. Two years later, she traveled with Quillinan to Portugal (where he had been born) and wrote a memorable account of her impressions and experiences there. Her descriptions of Portugal reveal a keen eye and a warm sense of humor. They also reveal her homesickness. The trip southward had been undertaken for the benefit of Dora’s health — she was suffering from tuberculosis — and in the end she remained away from England for about a year. In one passage, Dora laments the pleasure the boys of Oporto take in setting off fireworks (to the displeasure of horses and passersby), but even here she finds beauty in something she doesn’t exactly love: Having dwelt so long upon the disagreeable effects of rockets, I must be excused for describing one scene in which they played no vulgar part. It was at night, the signal gun of our English steamer roused me from a deep sleep. I got up — opened the shutters. A full moon was shining brilliantly; the white breakers of the bar were as visible as they were audible… To the north all seemed wrapped in gloom; but in that direction my heart lay. I again looked anxiously into the deep gloom, and a heave of some friendly wave brought into view a galaxy of bright stars floating upon the waters; it was as if a constellation had come down from the heavens to rest… Dora’s travels took her from Oporto into the north Portuguese countryside, where she observed the beaches, forests, hills, and vineyards. Her father’s poetry was never far from her mind. She spied “old cork-trees scattered here and there, single or in clumps; old, I say, for every cork-tree that I see looks, like Wordsworth’s thorn, ‘as if it never had been young’”. The sites of Britain, too, continually served as touchstones. Huge stones seen on the journey over Mount Estremo reminded her of “the bowderstone and Borrodale; and many of our prospects today were of Cumbrian feature”. Yet, despite her mal du pays, Dora was obviously alive to her surroundings. She learned a great deal about Portuguese literature and culture, and recorded her reactions, not only to the heat, but to the beauty of the Lusitanian countryside. Sadly, Dora died from tuberculosis in 1847, only a little more than a year after returning from continental Europe. She is buried in Rydal, in a field that her father, mother, and aunt planted with hundreds upon hundreds of daffodils. Above we've featured the first edition. A second edition was published in 1895 which includes an introductory "memoir" by Edmund Lee and you can see that here.

public-domain-review

Oct 29, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:11.874900

chester-hardings-my-egotistigraphy-1866

Chester Harding’s My Egotistigraphy (1866) Sep 10, 2019 In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, America was a land that allowed for improbable transformations. A person could, like Daniel Boone, be born to a weaver on the western frontier, fight in two wars, invade the Indian territory of Kentucky, go bankrupt as a businessman, flee to Spanish Louisiana, and end up becoming a folk hero lauded for his exploits as a hunter, trapper, and all-round honest dealer. Boone’s trajectory was, of course, out of the ordinary — but it would be hard to overestimate the importance of self-reinvention in America’s early days. Chester Harding (1792–1866), the artist who painted the only known portrait of Boone, was himself a master of self-reinvention. Born in rural Conway, Massachusetts, he moved in his teens to the western part of New York State, where he helped his family build a log house in the wilderness. By age nineteen, however, he yearned for something beyond a local life of labor. When the War of 1812 broke out — he recalls in his laconic memoir, My Egotistigraphy — “I changed my mode of life”. This first attempt to get away from home was not wholly successful. Serving as an army drummer, Harding was posted to Sackets Harbor, New York, on the shore of Lake Ontario, which was “threatened with attack by the British.” But the only attack Harding suffered was of the dysentery that laid him low until he was discharged and sent back to his hometown. Once the war was over, Harding struck out on his own as a businessman, selling a patent for a new spinning-machine part in Connecticut. All in all, it did not go well. He lost most of his money gambling and soon went into debt. After marrying and becoming a father, he tried becoming a tavern-keeper to stave off his creditors but only managed to pay off “some old debts by making new ones.” One night, to avoid imprisonment, he took off alone to Pittsburgh, where he found work as a house painter. But he was so “lonely and unhappy” that, as soon as I had saved a few dollars, I started for my wife and child. I walked over mountains, and through wild forests, with no guide but the blazed trees. Bears, wolves, deer, and turkeys I met so often, that I would hardly turn around to look at them. Reunited with his family, Harding scraped by as a sign painter and fell in with a fellow “sign, ornamental, and portrait painter” named Nelson, whose portraits obsessed him: He [Nelson] would not let me see him paint, nor would he give me the least idea how the thing was done. I took the pictures home, and pondered on them, and wondered how it was possible for a man to produce such wonders of art. At length my admiration began to yield to an ambition to do the same thing. I thought of it by day, and dreamed of it by night, until I was stimulated to make an attempt at painting myself. I got a board; and, with such colors as I had for use in my trade, I began a portrait of my wife. I made a thing that looked like her. The moment I saw the likeness, I became frantic with delight: it was like the discovery of a new sense; I could think of nothing else. From that time, sign-painting became odious, and was much neglected. In the years to come, Harding would travel around America, painting portraits for small fees, first in New York, then in Paris, Kentucky, with later stays in Philadelphia, and St. Louis. After spending two years in London honing his craft, Harding returned to Boston and earned a reputation as one of the most accomplished American portraitists of his day. He painted President James Madison, several congressmen (including Daniel Webster), and many businessmen, philanthropists, and their wives. But perhaps his most memorable portrait remains his early picture of Daniel Boone. Certainly, Harding’s recollection of painting this picture forms one of the most memorable passages in his memoirs: I found the object of my search engaged in cooking his dinner. He was lying in his bunk, near the fire, and had a long strip of venison wound around his ramrod, and was busy turning it before a brisk blaze, and using salt and pepper to season his meat… He was ninety years old, and rather infirm; his memory of passing events was much impaired, yet he would amuse me every day by his anecdotes of his earlier life. I asked him one day, just after his description of one of his long hunts, if he never got lost, having no compass. “No,” said he, “I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” My Egotistigraphy is an eccentric book. Harding did not have the energy to finish it before he died. His son filled in the remaining pages with quoted diary entries and letters, as well as his own much less colorful narration. Still, it remains a fascinating self-portrait of a “self-made man”.

public-domain-review

Sep 10, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:12.355652

john-reynolds-book-of-murder-tales-1621-1635

John Reynolds’ Book of Murder Tales (1621–1635) Nov 4, 2019 We don’t know the year of John Reynolds’ birth or death, but according to the Dictionary of National Biography, he “flourished” between 1620 and 1640, at which time he must have been in his thirties and forties (give or take a few years). Born in Exeter — and known to his contemporaries as “John Reynolds, merchant of Exeter”, to distinguish him from other writers of the same name — he traveled on business to France, Spain, and probably Italy, where he collected the stories that make up his six-volume Triumphs of Gods Revenge and the Crying and Execrable Sin of (Wilful and Premeditated) Murther — one of the earliest examples of “true crime” writing in English. As in most true crime writing, Reynolds is careful to insist he’s writing about murder only in order to underscore the punishment meted out to murderers: If our contemplation dive into elder times, and our curiositie turne over the varietie of ancient and moderne Histories (as well Divine as Humane) wee shall find that Ambition, Revenge, and Murther, have ever prooved fatall crimes to their undertakers: for they are vices which so eclipse our judgements, and darken our understandings, as we shall not only see with griefe, but find with repentance, that they will bring us shame for glory, affliction for content, and misery for felicity[.] This piously moral declaration looks a little suspicious today, especially if we consider the obvious relish Reynolds takes in his stories of marriages gone wrong: Idiaques causeth his sonne Don Ivan to marrie Marsillia, and then commits Adultery and Incest with her; She makes her Father in Law Idiaques to poyson his old wife Honoria, and likewise makes her owne brother De Perez to kill her Chamber-maid Mathurina; Don Ivan afterwards kils De Perez in a Duell; Marsillia hath her brains dasht out by a horse, and her body is afterwards condemned to be burnt; Idiaques is beheaded; his body consumed to ashes, and throwne into the ayre. The Triumphs of Gods Revenge was a politically charged work. The first volume was published in 1621, during the era of the Spanish Match — when the Count of Gondomar, the famously “scheming” Spanish ambassador, was trying to push Protestant Prince Charles into a marriage alliance with the Catholic Maria Anna of Spain. “It has been speculated,” the scholar Berta Cano-Echevarría writes, “that Reynolds produced this collection of tales on the violent consequences of unhappy marriages as an acceptable way of promoting support for the Protestant cause in England”. (This political/religious subtext was partly what led the Jacobean playwrights Middleton and Rowley to adapt one of Reynolds’ murder stories for their 1622 play The Changeling.) There was also a narrative advantage to setting his stories in Catholic countries on the continent, since by doing so Reynolds could describe these places, to quote Cano-Echevarría again, “(in implied contrast to England) as sites of deceit and debauchery”. The Triumphs of Gods Revenge strikes us today as above all a rich resource for old murder tales. Jealousy and incest, sadism and cannibalism, death by poisoning and by lightning bolt, by pistols and by immurement, abound. Every element of Gothic fiction and melodrama seems already present in Reynold’s pages: Catalina causeth her Wayting Mayd Ausilva two severall times attempt to poyson her owne Sister Berinthia; wherein fayling, shee afterwards makes an Empericke, termed Sarmiata, poyson her said Mayd Ansilva: Catalina is killed with a Thunder bolt, and Sarmiata hang'd for poysoning Ansilva. Antonio steales Berinthia away by her owne consent; whereupon her Brother Sebastiano fights with Antonio, and kills him in a Duell: Berinthia in revenge hereof, afterwards murthereth her Brother Sebastiano; she is adjudged to be immured betwixt two Walls, and there languisheth and dyes. Sanctifiore (upon promise of mariage) gets Ursina with childe, and then afterwards very ingratefully and treacherously rejecteth her, and marries Bertranna: Ursina being sensible of this her disgrace, disguiseth herselfe in a Friers habit and with a case of Pistols kils Sanctifiore as he is walking in the fields, for the which shee is hanged. Reynolds’ books were popular enough to be printed in a single volume in 1635 — and reprinted many times after that, with illustrations depicting the wages of sin he described. The woodenness of the human figures being stabbed, tortured, and tossed into holes only adds to the horror. You can peruse captioned images from this remarkable early-modern true crime below. You can also page through a digital scan of the printed version above, or read a clear copy of the text here.

public-domain-review

Nov 4, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:12.802974

buffon-and-de-seves-quadrupeds-1754

Buffon and de Sève’s Quadrupeds (1754) Sep 17, 2019 From 1749 to his death in 1788, the Comte de Buffon composed thirty-six volumes of his monumental Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. This vast work covers not only what we would still call “natural history”, such as the study of animals and plants, but also the subjects of physics, chemistry, and mineralogy. Each subject is introduced by a general essay, followed by a series of more specialized articles (all composed by Buffon). For example, in the case of quadrupeds — the main focus of Buffon’s volumes on non-ornithological animal life — we find sections on both domestic animals and wild animals, each vividly, if sometimes reductively, described. Buffon, intent on drawing “scientific” connections between animals, often obscures their individuality in the process. A donkey appears to him to be “no more than a degenerated horse”, and he asserts with perfect seriousness that “if sheep disappeared from the earth, goats could easily serve the same purpose” — meaning, naturally, that they could just as easily supply humans with meat, milk, wool, and tallow. Fortunately, Jacques de Sève, the artist Buffon chose to illustrate his descriptions of quadrupeds, took more than enough delight in depicting each animal’s individual qualities to make up for what Buffon’s descriptions at times lack. Consider de Sève’s rendition of the wildly horned Wallachian sheep (or Racka), looking soulful before a high romantic castle upon a rock. Or the even more soulful faces of his sloths, monkeys, and apes. De Sève seems to have been especially fond of painting bats — even if he often posed them, oddly, sitting on a mound of turf among mountains. (Perhaps he was trying to emphasize that, despite their capacity for flight, they were indeed quadrupeds.) The winningly anthropoid faces of so many of de Sève’s illustrations jump out at us immediately, but the backgrounds, too, are fascinating. In addition to the flora and sweeping landscapes, on the horizon we've often architectural clues as to where in the world these animals might reside. In several the animals are placed amid ruins. All of de Sève’s illustrations are equipped with identifying captions except one, listed simply as l’animal anonyme (the unidentified animal). Most later naturalists agreed it must be meant to represent a fennec fox, though some have also suggested a bat-eared fox. Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain: de Sève loved drawing large ears. With their strangely human faces and richness of setting, De Sève’s wonderful illustrations, engraved for publication in the Histoire by Louis Le Grand, are a true treasure of eighteenth-century naturalism. See many more of our highlights from the book below.

public-domain-review

Sep 17, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:13.323929

the-human-pyramids-of-juste-de-juste-ca-1540

The Human Pyramids of Juste De Juste (ca. 1540) Nov 21, 2019 These etchings of flayed (écorché) men in acrobatic poses attributed to the Italian-born Juste de Juste (ca. 1505–1559) were almost certainly produced at the court of Fontainebleau in the 1530s. Juste de Juste was born near Florence in the early 1500s. He was the son, grandson, and nephew of Italian sculptors whose work was central to the Renaissance. Both his father and uncle —called Antoine and Jean Juste, respectively — had made their names in France, creating monuments for palaces and churches from Brittany to Paris. When he came of age, Juste de Juste followed in his elders’ footsteps. During the 1530s, he was employed at the château of Fontainebleau as a painter, sculptor, and stucco worker. It’s at least plausible he did some etchings there as well. The French art critic Jules Renouvier (1804–1860) was the first to propose Juste de Juste as the author of this set of human pyramid prints, claiming that — to quote the art historian Catherine Jenkins — the “jumbled monograph that appears on five of the prints […] untangled to form the name IVSTE.” However, the monograph can also be untangled to form the name VISET — and the records show that an obscure engraver called Jean Viset was in fact employed at Fontainebleau in 1536. Whoever is responsible for them, these etchings remain striking examples of the beauty of the work produced by the School of Fontainebleau, which encompassed nearly every art form — from furniture making to oil painting, sculpture to interior design. They are also notable for their influence on Henri Matisse, whose painting Dance (1910) borrows the visual energy of the old etchings to make of it something, modern, colorful, and no less strange.

public-domain-review

Nov 21, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:13.800763

the-cubies-abc-1913

The Cubies’ ABC (1913) Dec 3, 2019 The 1913 Armory Show in New York City introduced the American public to the works of “a number of foreign artists,” as the journalist Frederick James Gregg wrote at the time, “who, though they are well known in Europe, are for the most part but names to New York and America”. These unfamiliar foreign artists included not only indisputably cutting-edge Cubists and Futurists, such as Braque, Picasso, Brancusi, and Duchamp. This was also the first time most Americans had the chance to see paintings by a number of 19th-century painters long become canonical in Europe — among others Ingres, Delacroix, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. In the face of all this novelty, the public was confused, dismissive, and more than occasionally outraged. When, for example, a New York Times questionnaire asked an anonymous American artist for a “straight-from-the-shoulder opinion on the Cubists and the Futurists,” he replied: The Cubists and the Futurists simply abolish the art of painting. They deny not only any representation of nature, but also any known or traditional form of decoration. They maintain that they have invented a symbolism which expresses their individuality, or as they say, their souls. If they have really expressed their souls in the things they show us, God help their souls! We tend to forget, now that the Cubists and Futurists have become as integral to the history of art as the painters of the Dutch Golden Age and the Italian Renaissance, how hostile most people — even most artists — felt toward the non-representational innovations of the artists on display at the Armory. For every open-minded viewer like William Carlos Williams, who later said he was “tremendously stirred” by what the show represented, there were dozens who felt more like the anonymous American quoted above — or like Mary Mills and Earl Harvey Lyall, who immortalized their disgust with “the Cubies”, stars of a novel alphabet book published sometime before the end of 1913. The mean-spirited, if sometimes hilarious, text of The Cubies’ ABC was composed by Mary (1879–1963), about whom nothing is known. The equally mean-spirited, if somewhat cutesy, illustrations were done by her architect husband, Earl (1877–1932). Mary’s poems primarily take aim at the artists featured in the Armory Show: B is for Beauty as Brancusi views it.(The Cubies all vow he and Braque take the Bun.)First you seize all that’s plain to the eye, then you lose it;Next you search for the Soul and proceed to abuse it.        (They tell me it’s easy and no end of fun.) D is for Duchamp, the Deep-Dyed Deceiver,Who, drawing accordeons [sic], labels them stairs,With a lady that must have been done in a fever,—His model won’t see her, we trust, it would grieve her!—        (Should the stairway collapse, Cubie’s good at repairs.) But she also saves some abuse for Gertrude Stein (“Eloquent scribe of the Futurist soul”) and reckons, fairly honestly, with the fear that anti-modern “standpatters” such as the Lyalls felt on seeing the Armory Show: Q’s for the Queerness we Stand-patters feelWhen Progressive young Cubies start Art reformation.They’re strong on Initiative, praise the Square Deal:“Though the Cubic is best!” they aggressively squeal:        “Painting things as you see them is rank deformation!” Within a few decades, of course, the non-representational art many Americans thought was an aberration had become the norm on both sides of the Atlantic. To quote Frederick James Gregg, summing up the whole Armory affair in Harper’s Weekly only a few weeks after the show opened: “The moral is that there is nothing final in art, no last word, and that the main thing is not to be taken in on one hand, and not to be blind on the other.”

public-domain-review

Dec 3, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:14.292653

photographs-of-japanese-sword-guards-1916

Photographs of Japanese Sword Guards (1916) Sep 24, 2019 In the mid-1890s, after health problems forced him to give up landscape painting, Georg Oeder (b. Aachen, Germany, 1846) threw himself into collecting Japanese art and artifacts — above all ukiyo-e prints and sword guards (tsuba). His collection of tsuba, which was one of the most extensive in the world at the time, was photographed and printed in a catalogue published in 1916. This catalogue is now almost all that remains of Oeder’s collection, most of which was auctioned off or lost after his death in 1931. Oeder prided himself on being a conscientious collector. He amassed his tsuba, as well as other examples of Japanese sword mountings, during a seven-year stay in Tokyo. There, with the help of Wada Tunashiro and Akiyama Kysaka, as he writes in his introduction to the catalogue, he “purged the collection of counterfeits, eliminated excesses, and not infrequently obtained missing items”. Oeder was, thankfully, likewise conscientious about the photography and documentation of his collection, whose marvels bring pleasure to expert and amateur alike. The tsuba in Oeder’s catalogue represents a wide range of styles. The earliest tsuba were made of leather or iron and served mainly the practical purpose of balancing the weapon and protecting the swordsman’s hand while thrusting. Then, over the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (during the late Muramachi and Momoyama periods), new metals were incorporated, including copper, silver, shakudō, and bronze — allowing artisans to develop more complex motifs. These complex motifs, running the gamut from floral patterns to animal and human figures, make for some of the most memorable in Oeder’s collection. When the Edo period began in 1603, tsuba grew more and more important as crest-like symbols for high-ranking samurai, who were no longer so frequently at war. As their function became increasingly symbolic, their designs and became increasingly ornate, and their materials (e.g. gold, which is not well suited for use in combat) increasingly flamboyant. By the end of the sixteenth century, the artisans who fashioned these symbols had already begun to specialize, to the point that they started signing their impressive handiwork. (Today, the work of these artisans, such as Shoami, Hoan, Yamakichi, and Owari, continue to be sought after by collectors.) Oeder’s collection contained a number of Japanese sword mountings other than tsuba as well. There were kozuka, menuki (the ornaments on the handles of knives and swords), kashira (pommels), and fuchi (ferrules). All of them reveal exquisite beauty.

public-domain-review

Sep 24, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:14.613261

the-narrative-of-henry-box-brown-1849

The Narrative of Henry Box Brown (1849) Sep 26, 2019 Henry Brown was born a slave, sometime around 1815, in Louisa County, Virginia. After the farmer who owned his family died, the teenage Brown was separated from his parents and siblings, and sent to work in a tobacco factory in the city of Richmond. There, at the Baptist Church, he fell in love with a woman named Nancy, whom he married in 1836. It was in the late 1840s, when the pregnant Nancy and their three children were sold to a Methodist preacher in North Carolina, that Brown decided he would try escaping to freedom in the North. “Ordinary modes of travel he concluded might prove disastrous to his hopes”, the abolitionist William Still writes of Brown in The Underground Railroad; “he, therefore, hit upon a new invention altogether, which was to have himself boxed up and forwarded to Philadelphia direct by express.” With the aid of a Massachusetts-born white man called Samuel Smith, who, in exchange for a sum of money, arranged for the box to be received at the office of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in downtown Philadelphia, Brown had himself shipped via Adams Express on March 23, 1849. After twenty-six hours of rough handling by deliverymen, he was pried from his coffin and — being a deeply religious man — sung a song of thanksgiving he had written, based on Psalm 40. “To a great extent”, the literary scholar John Ernest writes, “Brown himself promoted his story and crafted his own fame, from the song he sang when he emerged from his box to the career he launched after his story became public knowledge.” Indeed, in the months directly following his escape, Brown took “Box” as his middle name; published Narrative of Henry Box Brown, who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide, Written From a Statement of Facts Made By Himself; and went on tour in New England, telling his story and singing songs of his own composition. By the end of 1849, he was already putting some of the profits from his book to create a moving panorama called Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery, which would premiere in Boston in April 1850. According to Ernest, this panorama consisted of a series of paintings on a sheet of canvas reported to be 50,000 feet long that would be gradually unwound to reveal successive scenes related to Brown’s personal experience and to the history of slavery and the slave trade. By 1851, Brown was internationally well known. In England, where he moved after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law the previous year, he continued to speak, sing, and present his panorama, as well as to stage reenactments of his escape, arranging to have himself shipped from Bradford to Leeds to bring attention to the American abolitionist cause. He also published a second, revised version of his Narrative, which included more information about his escape, as well as the lyrics of several of his songs. For the rest of his life, Brown remained a performer. In the 1860s, after the Civil War broke out, he began touring as a mesmerist and conjurer — first in England and later in North America, where he returned in 1875, appearing under the name “Prof. H. Box Brown”. A showman par excellence, Brown never sensationalized the hell of slavery. “The tale of my own sufferings is not one of great interest to those who delight to read of hair-breadth adventures, of tragical occurrences, and scenes of blood,” Brown insists, with extreme humility, in his Narrative: “my life, even in slavery, has been in many respects comparatively comfortable.” In the hundred and seventy years since Brown’s daring getaway, he has been the subject of everything from documentaries and museum exhibits to performance pieces and operas. The story has, after all, a heroic, almost Houdini-esque tinge of romance. Still, it’s essential to remember the context of Brown’s heroism. In the nineteenth century, Ernest writes, “audiences who heard Brown speak knew that a central part of his story involved the loss of his wife and children”. For the last hundred or more years, however, “attention to Brown’s story has focused primarily on his escape, even on the dimensions of the box itself, and on his subsequent career as a public lecturer and performer” — diminishing the depths of pain, and hope, that led Brown to hatch his plan in the first place. Brown was never reunited with Nancy and their children. It would have been unlikely, if not impossible, that he would have been able to find them after emancipation; their surnames, among other things, would long since have changed. In 1855, Brown was remarried to Jane Floyd (the daughter of a Cornish tin worker) and in later years toured with her and their three children, performing as a family act until Brown’s death in Toronto in 1897. The Narrative of Henry Box Brown takes the reader back before the box came into picture, giving us a glimpse of an extraordinary human being. Read more about Henry Box Brown here, and purchase John Ernest’s excellent edition of the Narrative (second edition) here.

public-domain-review

Sep 26, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:14.927799

the-geometric-landscapes-of-lorenz-stoer-1567

The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567) Nov 5, 2019 Though these images may at first appear the handiwork of a Futurist or M. C. Escher imitator, they are in fact the work of a sixteenth-century artist named Lorenz Stoer. Not much is known about Stoer. Born in Nuremberg in the 1530s, he is said to have been a student of a student of Albrecht Dürer (who introduced the principles of linear perspective into northern Europe after studying them in Bologna). Stoer’s name does not appear in the records, however, until April 8, 1555, when Emperor Ferdinand I grants him the exclusive right to print a book titled Perspectiva a la Laurentia Stoëro. As it happened, this book was either never published or all copies of it have been lost to time. In the winter of 1556–1557 Stoer’s wife, Anna, died (as can be gleaned from the Nürnberger Totengeläutbuch, which lists payments for the tolling of death-knells). Perhaps because of this loss, or because of mounting debts, as early as 1558 he moved to Augsburg, where he registered as a painter and draughtsman. In 1594, he returned to Nuremberg. His last drawing is dated 1599. During his long residence in Augsburg, Stoer published his only (or only surviving) book, Geometria et Perspectiva. This singular creation, which is not at all like most of the text-heavy treatises on linear perspective printed in the sixteenth century, contains no typography and very little in the way of words — none at all, apart from the title page, which reads (in Christopher S. Wood’s translation): Geometria et Perspectiva, containing various ruined buildings, useful to intarsia workers, as well as for the special pleasure of many other amateurs; ordered and arranged by Lorenz Stoer, painter and citizen of Augsburg. This long title is surrounded by an oval ornamental band with the motto “Who would do right by everyone? No one would even try”, four regular polyhedrons, and four irregular solids. Intended to be “read” by intarsia workers (that is, artists who inlay sections of wood to decorate floors, walls, and furniture), Geometria et Perspectiva did indeed leave its mark on northern European furniture-making: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Albert and Victoria Museum in London both possess cabinets with decorations in Stoer’s style. But by now the book has outlived and outstripped its original purpose. What makes Geometria et Perspectiva so enduringly remarkable, from Wood’s perspective, is that it: makes no effort to teach perspective or to provide rules; it simply gives results, pictures in perspective. The eleven numbered woodcuts all use the same formula: a complex stereometric solid or combination of solids juxtaposed to a kind of dreamlike thicket of solid volutes, brackets, and frames, a scrollwork trellis. The polyhedrons and the scrollwork are smounted in the foregrounds on terraced platforms before landscape settings with masses of round-arched ruins and sometimes obelisks, columns, or staircases. What first strikes non-specialist eyes is how very modern Stoer’s pictures look — how abstract and even proto-surrealist. The copy of Geometria et Perspectiva digitized by the University of Tübingen, which we have drawn on here, is all the more striking for its use of color. (Most reproductions of the book are black and white.)

public-domain-review

Nov 5, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:15.406550

yggdrasil-the-sacred-ash-tree-of-norse-mythology

Yggdrasil: The Sacred Ash Tree of Norse Mythology Nov 26, 2019 With its branches in the heavens and its roots in the underworld, the Cosmic Tree is a common feature of religions and mythologies around the globe. Stories of such trees have been recorded in the Americas, Asia, India, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe — and while the species and specifics may vary from place to place, one thing almost always hold true: the Cosmic Tree is central to the structure of the universe. The sacred Norse Yggdrasil — says E. O. James in his classic archaeological study The Tree of Life (1966) — is perhaps “the Cosmic tree par excellence”. A giant ash tree described in both the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson’s 13th-century Prose Edda, Yggdrasil stands at the absolute center of the Norse cosmos. Its roots connect it with the Nine Worlds, and it is tended by the three Norns Urðr, Verðandi, and Skuld (powerful female figures who roughly correspond to the three Fates of Greece), who water it from the magical Well of Urðr. Probably the most famous story associated with Yggdrasil concerns Odin, who in order to gain the wisdom of the runes and the favor of the Norns hung upside down “nine long nights, / wounded with a spear […] / on that tree of which no man knows where its roots run”. ※※Indexed under…Odinand Yggdrasil In Norse cosmology, there is no more important entity than Yggdrasil. When it dies, the myths tell us, the whole world of the gods dies with it. Nearly every Norse text that mentions Yggdrasil emphasizes that the tree is not only sacred, it is mortal, and sorely in need of compassion and protection. Odin, in the Poetic Edda, says that Yggdrasil “suffers agony / more than men know, a stag nibbles it above, but at its side it’s decaying, and Níðhöggr [a malicious serpent or dragon] rends it beneath”. Elsewhere in the Eddas, we’re told that countless dangerous serpents slither below Yggdrasil; a squirrel is constantly scurrying up and down its trunk, bringing news; and Gullinkambi, one of three roosters whose crowing will signal Ragnarök (the Twilight of the Gods), nests in Yggdrasil’s upper canopy like a sentry. The deep origins of Yggdrasil are mysterious. The English scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson has plausibly suggested its mythology developed from ancient north Eurasian shamanic traditions, according to which a tree rising through the center of the world was thought to act as a sort of ladder to descend into the underworld or ascend into the heavens. Such a concept is familiar in many cultures, from the Hungarian égig érő fa (topless tree), to the Vedic Indian sacred fig tree called the ashvattha (which Krishna, in the Upanishads, says has no beginning or end), to its Buddhist descendant, the Bodhi, under which Gautama reached enlightenment. Certainly, the tradition of holy trees has found an enduring role in Scandinavian culture. Warden trees, known as tuntre in Norwegian and vårdträd in Swedish, are still planted in centrals place on many farms today. These trees, if well taken care of, are thought to bring good luck to the farm and the people who live there. It’s a belief not so far removed from ancient lore — which held that the court of the gods was “kept beneath a great ash and it was there they meted out justice”.

public-domain-review

Nov 26, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:15.755692

persian-demons-from-a-book-of-magic-and-astrology-1921

Persian Demons from a Book of Magic and Astrology (1921) Oct 24, 2019 These watercolours come from a bound manuscript written by a rammal — or soothsayer — in Isfahan, Iran. According to Ali Karjoo-Ravary, the paintings were added one or two decades after the composition of the text — a treatise on spells and demons, “among other creatures, that are associated with each sign of the zodiac.” The pictures, Karjoo-Ravary continues: are accompanied with ritual prescriptions for dealing with the different creatures. The author attributes his knowledge to the Biblical Solomon, who was known for his power over demons and spirits. Not all of the 56 painted illustrations in the manuscript depict demonic beings. Amongst the horned and fork-tongued we also find the archangels Jibrāʾīl (Gabriel) and Mikāʾīl (Michael), as well as the animals — lion, lamb, crab, fish, scorpion — associated with the zodiac. But most of the figures shown are far from ordinary or angelic. A blue man with claws, four horns, and a projecting red tongue is no less frightening for the fact that he’s wearing a candy-striped loincloth. In another image we see a moustachioed goat man with tuber-nose and polka dot skin maniacally concocting a less-than-appetising dish. One recurring (and worrying) theme is demons visiting sleepers in their beds, scenes involving such pleasant activities as tooth-pulling, eye-gouging, and — in one of the most engrossing illustrations — a bout of foot-licking (performed by a reptilian feline with a shark-toothed tail). ※※Indexed under…TeethExtraction of The wonderful images draw on Near Eastern demonological traditions that stretch back millennia — to the days when the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud asserted it was a blessing demons were invisible, since, “if the eye would be granted permission to see, no creature would be able to stand in the face of the demons that surround it.” You can see our pick of the illustrations below, starting with the double-page spreads of the signs of the zodiac with their associated demons followed by more highlights from the bevy of delightful images.

public-domain-review

Oct 24, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:16.242554

eskimo-folktales

Eskimo Folktales (1913) Dec 10, 2019 Knud Rasmussen (1879–1933), the child of a Danish missionary, grew up in western Greenland among the Kalaallit people, whose culture fascinated him from an early age. As a child, he learned to speak their language and, as he grew older, also learned from them how to hunt, drive dog sleds, and survive in harsh arctic weather. After a brief and not very successful career as an actor and opera singer in Denmark, Rasmussen returned to to the polar regions as an explorer and anthropologist, writing travelogues and ethnographies including the highly popular People of the Polar North (1908). By the end of his life, he was known as the “father of Eskimology”. The translator W. W. Worster’s claim, in his introduction to Rasmussen’s Eskimo Folktales, that “No man is better qualified to tell the story of Greenland, or the stories of people” will rightly raise some eyebrows today. Yet, all things considered, Rasmussen appears to have been both familiar with and relatively respectful of the people he called “Eskimos” (an Algonquin word for their neighbors to the north not typically used by Inuit people). His collection of their tales, “taken down from the lips of the Eskimo story-tellers themselves”, offers a fascinating glimpse into a complex culture. Many of the stories in Eskimo Folktales revolve around adventures. “The Two Friends who Set Off to Travel Round the World”, for example, recounts the epic voyage of two men who, together with their wives, set off in opposite directions to see the globe, hoping they’ll eventually meet again: It took a long time to get round the world; they had children and they grew old, and then their children also grew old, until at last the parents were so old that they could not walk, but the children led them. At last, one fateful day, they all meet up — “and of their drinking horns there was but the handle left, so many times had they drunk water by the way, scraping the horn against the ground as they filled them.” Elderly and wise now, all the two friends can say to each other after all these decades of traveling is: “The world is great indeed”. As in most collections of folktales the world over, there are a good number of stories about human encounters with the nonhuman: “The Woman who Had a Bear as a Foster-Son”, “The Insects that Wooed a Wifeless Man”, “When Ravens Could Speak”, “The Raven who Wanted a Wife”, “The Man who Took a Vixen to Wife”, “The Man who Became a Star”. There are also a good number of stories about supernatural phenomena, including creation myths (“How the Fog Came”) and journeys to the underworld (“Qalagánguasé, who Passed to the Land of Ghosts”). More than a few of the stories combine these two themes — and some of these are outright terrifying. “The Boy from the Bottom of the Sea who Frightened the People of the House to Death” begins: Well, you see, it was the usual thing: “The Obstinate One” had taken a wife, and of course he beat her, and when he wanted to make it an extra special beating, he took a box, and banged her about with that. One day, when he had been beating her as usual she ran away. And she was just about to have a child at that time She walked straight out into the sea, and was nearly drowned, but suddenly she came to herself again, and found that she was at the bottom of the sea. And there she built herself a house. Below the sea, the woman gives birth to a boy, whose eyes are jellyfish, whose hair is seaweed, and whose mouth looks like a mussel. Although she is terrified of her progeny, she raises him underwater, until eventually he pleads with her to be allowed to go to the surface. She agrees, but only if he’ll go to the house whose inhabitants refused to take her in when she used to run away from his brutal father, who died long ago. The boy does as she tells him (“be sure to look as angry as you can”), and frightens everyone inside to death. Another terrifying cautionary tale, “Artuk, who Did All Forbidden Things”, tells of a widower who refuses to bide by tradition. He butchers frozen meat while in mourning, shakes out his inner coat on the ice, and drinks water that’s melted from an iceberg: “And all these things he did in scorn of that which his fellows believed. For he said it was all lies.” One day, however, when he is about to go out hunting, he feels afraid — and for good reason. His dead body is found the next day, “far out on the ice, torn to pieces, as is the way with those whom the spirits have punished for refusing to observe the customs of their forefathers”. There are a few more lighthearted stories — for instance “When the Ravens Could Speak”, which begins: Once, long ago, there was a time when the ravens could talk. But the strange thing about the ravens’ speech was that their words had the opposite meaning. When they wanted to thank any one, they used words of abuse, and thus always said the reverse of what they meant. But the real attraction of the Eskimo Folktales is their darkness and their directness — a combination that, Worster says, gives these Greenlandic storytellers “a place among the poets of the world”. In addition to the tales, the book also boasts numerous illustrations by various unnamed "native Eskimo artists", which we've included in the gallery below.

public-domain-review

Dec 10, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:16.583559

augustus-janssons-queen-city-ink-adverts-1903-1907

Augustus Jansson’s Queen City Ink Adverts (1903–1907) Oct 1, 2019 These advertisements for the Queen City Printing Ink Company are taken from The Inland Printer — a trade journal that began its run in 1884 and is still being published on a limited basis today. The bold illustrations, by Augustus Jansson, show off the impressive colours and typography offered by this renowned company based in Cincinnati (nicknamed “the Queen of the West”) but with offices in American cities from Boston to Minneapolis. Jansson — born to Swedish parents in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1866 — began a several-year stint working for Queen City Publishing in 1903. By then he had, in the words of the Cambridge Chronicle, become “well known to the public through his poster work, which, for originality and design, is unequalled”. He was also an accomplished postcard artist, cartoonist, tableware designer, and the author of an illustrated book for children called Hobby Hoss Fair. Jansson produced many full-page layouts for Queen City, including the remarkable Ink Beasts Parade, with its Magenta Ponies and Orange-Yellow Ibexiaticus, and a series of doll-like figures. As one can see from a wider sampling of Jansson’s work (see here, here and here), it seems these figures were his specialty. Below we've featured, in order of their publication, as many of Jansson's colour ads for Queen City as we could find in the Smithsonian's collection of the Inland Printer — with the Ink Beasts Parade series beginning after fourteen images.

public-domain-review

Oct 1, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:17.062220

the-history-of-burke-and-hare-and-of-the-resurrectionist-times-1884

The History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (1884) Aug 28, 2019 “Of all the criminal events that have occurred in Scotland,” George MacGregor writes in the introduction to this History of Burke and Hare, few have excited so deep, widespread, and lasting an interest as those which took place during what have been called the Resurrectionist Times, and notably, the dreadful series of murders perpetrated in the name of anatomical science by Burke and Hare. The “Resurrectionist Times” MacGregor mentions began roughly in the late seventeenth century — when the demand for cadavers among Scotland’s budding anatomists outpaced the legal supply of unclaimed foundlings, orphans, paupers, executed criminals, suicides, and victims of violent death. By the 1710s, doctors’ assistants were regularly unearthing bodies from Scottish cemeteries during the night, protected from discovery by the fact that “no one except the most hardy would in that age venture near a churchyard after the ‘gloaming’”. Public outcry against these ghoulish deeds was great. Still, as MacGregor points out, nothing “was likely to put a stop to a practice which was being found useful on the one side and profitable on the other”. Despite a riot that ended in the destruction of an Edinburgh anatomical theatre in 1725 and a violent attack on Glasgow’s medical school in 1749, body-snatching continued to be widespread in the cities of Scotland until the passing of the Anatomy Act in 1832, when “the violation of the sepulchres of the dead for scientific purposes was rendered unnecessary, and absolutely inexcusable”. MacGregor relates a number of hair-raising stories about “resurrectionists”. One, for example, concerns the body of a man named Henderson, stolen from a country churchyard by two young men who afterward stopped off at a pub with poor Henderson stowed in a sack. Curiously enough, however, the pub belonged to Henderson’s family. When the police came, the young men — desperate for a hiding-place — stashed the stolen dead man in his widow’s bed. Later that night, after the grave robbers were gone, she would discover him lying there, “clad in the grave-clothes she had made with her own hands”. But the most unsettling stories MacGregor tells revolve around the murders committed for money paid out by anatomists who asked no questions. In 1752, Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie killed a boy of eight or nine in exchange for two shillings and ten pence from some Edinburgh doctors’ apprentices. The two women were hanged for their crime within days. Seventy-six years later, in the same city, the serial murderers William Burke and William Hare — with the aid of their wives, Helen McDougal and Margaret Hare — escaped the notice of the authorities for over a year. Between January and October 1828, Burke and Hare (after having stolen a corpse for profit the previous November) murdered at least sixteen people in cold blood, delivering all of their victims — sometimes still warm — to Robert Knox, who paid anywhere from eight to ten pounds. The usual method for finding a victim was for Hare to prowl the streets seeking vulnerable people (the old, the infirm, the heavy drinking) and invite them back to a room at Log’s Lodging-House, where Burke was waiting. They then usually proceeded to get their guests drunk — after which Burke would immobilize them while Hare suffocated them. MacGregor’s accounts of the murders are gruesome, but they are not meant to be sensationalist. He is above all interested in the social conditions that led to these murders, and in the differing psychologies of the murderers themselves: There is little reason to doubt that Burke was in the first instance a man of finer nature than Hare, though their guilt in the end was at least equal. Hare, it seems, could play his part in the slaughter of a fellow-mortal without any qualms of conscience, and he slept as quietly the night after he had provided a “subject” for the doctors, as if his soul were unstained with guilt. Burke, however, was a man of a different temperament, and though reckless he could not altogether banish the moral teachings of his church from his mind… He could not sleep without a bottle of whisky by his bed-side, and he had always on the table a two-penny candle, burning all the night. When he wakened, sometimes in fright, he would take a draught at the bottle, often to the extent of half of its contents at a time, and that induced sleep, or, rather, stupor. The December 1828 trial of Burke and Hare, their wives, and Knox, resulted in a guilty sentence only for Burke, who was hanged in January in front of a huge crowd (said to be as large as 25,000). In an ironic twist, a few days later Burke's corpse was publicly dissected (again before huge crowds) — the anatomist, according to legend, at one point dipping his quill pen into Burke's blood and writing "This is written with the blood of Wm Burke, who was hanged at Edinburgh. This blood was taken from his head". Burke's skeleton was given to Edinburgh Medical School, where it can be seen today, and a pocketbook supposedly bound with his skin is on display at Surgeons' Hall Museum. As for the others, in February, Hare was released from prison and never heard from again. Dr Robert Knox, disgraced, eventually left Edinburgh and settled in the London borough of Hackney, where he worked as a physician until his death in 1862. The trial of Burke and Hare — as well as that of the copycat “London Burkers” who employed the same methods in 1830–1831 — was instrumental in the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act. This reformed the laws that regulated the supply of medical cadavers and so put an end to the circumstances that made these murders for profit possible. “Happily,” MacGregor a bit too sunnily concludes, “the resurrectionist times were not without their good elements as well as their bad.”

public-domain-review

Aug 28, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:17.532958

john-margolies-photographs-of-roadside-america

John Margolies’ Photographs of Roadside America Aug 29, 2019 The culture of the American road has been much celebrated — and much criticized. Lawrence Ferlinghetti saw the rise of the automobile and the construction of the interstate system (which began in the 1950s) as a new form of punishment inflicted on the populace. Driving in their cars, “strung-out citizens” were now plagued by legionnaires                                false windmills and demented roosters…      on freeways fifty lanes wide                                                        on a concrete continent                                                                spaced with bland billboards                                            illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness The architectural critic and photographer John Margolies (1940–2016), on the other hand, saw there could also be home-made beauty in the buildings and signs locals built on the American roadside. For almost forty years, he documented the most remarkable examples he found, publishing some of his discoveries in books and consigning the rest to an archive, which has now been purchased by the Library of Congress who, in a wonderfully gracious move, have lifted all copyright restrictions on the photographs (though art works shown in some photographs may still be under copyright). Readers of Ferlinghetti would not be surprised to see Margolies’ archive offer up no end of "false windmills" and "demented roosters". But the billboards he preferred to photograph illustrated relatively humble "illusions of happiness". He also found no shortage of signs graced with attention-grabbing, groan-inducing puns. Probably one of his favorite roadside phenomena to document, however, were novelty buildings. He especially liked structures that mimicked their own shape or function, whether this was as witty as a car wash shaped like a whale or as uncomplicated as a coffeehouse shaped like a coffeepot. Almost all of Margolies’ work was done in the interest of preserving images of what would otherwise be lost to time. Even his first book, published in 1981, was elegiacally called The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America. From the start, Margolies knew the quirky motels, miniature golf courses, diners, billboards, and gas stations were being endangered by franchising and changing fashions — not to mention changing patterns of automobile traffic. (For decades now, most drivers have, of course, opted for the high speed-limits of superhighways and the convenience of service areas, leaving the old local highways in the lurch.) Today, this collection of Marogolies’ photographs offers an invaluable tour of the diverse vernacular architecture and signage of North America. Some of these wonders remain, while others have gone the way of the dinosaur — which, as it happens, remains one of the American roadside’s most frequent denizens. You can view all 11,710 of the colour slides in hi-res digitisations on the Library of Congress, and also a slightly lower-res but easy-to-browse selection of 1,555 on Flickr: The Commons.

public-domain-review

Aug 29, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:17.861086

octave-uzannes-the-end-of-books-1894

Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894) Sep 2, 2019 The end of books has been declared many times. Over a century before the invention of the e-reader and the meteoric rise of the audiobook and podcast, ardent French bibliophile Octave Uzanne (1851–1931) wrote a story, inspired by rapid advances in phonographic technology, imagining how printed text might disappear. The premise of “The End of Books” is eminently Victorian. On a Friday evening in the early 1890s, a group of men is walking home together from a talk given by William Thomson at the Royal Institute in London. Fired up after hearing the famous physicist explain that the end of the world was “mathematically certain to occur in precisely ten million years” (based on calculations regarding the gradual cooling of the sun), these “philologians, historians, journalists, statisticians, and merely interested men of the world” proceed to wax poetic about their own theories of the future — ranging from an art critic’s pronouncement that museums will soon be burned to the ground to a “gentle vegetarian” and learned naturalist’s assertion that all nutriment will be taken in the cruelty-free “form of powders, sirups, pellets, and biscuits.” One of these men — called the Bibliophile — is asked his opinion on the future of books. He replies as follows: If by books you are to be understood as referring to our innumerable collections of paper, printed, sewed, and bound in a cover announcing the title of the work, I own to you frankly that I do not believe (and the progress of electricity and modern mechanism forbids me to believe) that Gutenberg’s invention can do otherwise than sooner or later fall into desuetude as a means of current interpretation of our mental products. “Printing”, he continues, “is…threatened with death by the various devices for registering sound which have lately been invented, and which little by little will go on to perfection.” This claim causes a stir among the Bibliophile’s learned interlocutors, who plead with him to explain what he means. “I take my stand,” he says, “upon this incontestable fact, that the man of leisure becomes daily more reluctant to undergo fatigue, that he eagerly seeks for what he calls the comfortable, that is to say for every means of sparing the organs.” Considering that reading is hard on the eyes, the brain, and the rest of the body (which is forced by the act of reading into “various fatiguing attitudes”), he predicts that all printed matter will soon be replaced by recorded matter. Authors will become “Narrators” or “Tellers”; journalists will become announcers; interviews and speeches will be recorded on phonographs to be played for the public later. The Bibliophile’s vision of the bookless future is in some ways prescient. Radio, and more recently podcasts and audiobooks, vie in popularity with their print equivalents. But they don’t seem poised to replace text completely. What Uzanne and his Bibliophile do not foresee is the rise of visual culture in the twentieth century — the evolution of cinema, television, and the internet, where images of all kinds swarm our screens. In fact the Bibliophile’s version of the future is charmingly analog — smacking more of steampunk than of Philip K. Dick: The phonography of the future will be at the service of our grandchildren on all the occasions of life. Every restaurant-table will be provided with its phonographic collection; the public carriages, the waiting-rooms, the state-rooms of steamers, the halls and chambers of hotels will contain phonographotecks for the use of travellers. The railways will replace the parlor car by a sort of Pullman Circulating Library, which will cause travellers to forget the weariness of the way while leaving their eyes free to admire the landscapes through which they are passing. It’s curious to consider that the new technology of being able to record and reproduce sound made Uzanne think books would soon be a thing of the past. Perhaps his dire predictions about the end of books can help us put more recent dire predictions in perspective. Audio and video may take up some of the time we’d otherwise spend reading; yet the technology of the book always seems to prevail. Obviously, it did back when Uzanne was writing, but even today it marches stubbornly on. You can read a nice text (and e-reader) version here, and also browse below the illustrations by French illustrator, etcher, lithographer, caricaturist, novelist, and all around futurologist, Albert Robida (and see some of his other future visions here).

public-domain-review

Sep 2, 2019

collection

2024-05-01T21:42:18.176026