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A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau’s Trench Art (ca. 1917)
Text by Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes
Mar 26, 2024

Thierry Dornberger’s family keepsakes include a memento exceptionally delicate. His great-grandfather, Hippolyte Hodeau, was a World War I private who served in Argonne. As Dornberger relates, Hodeau “made the trenches and was gassed. Following the dull sound of a shell falling . . . he was wounded in the ear.” Like many soldiers, Hodeau spent hours huddled in these muddy channels. In order to kill time, perhaps, or lift his spirits, he gathered leaves from an oak tree — elongated, striated, forest green — and used a form of relief carving to inscribe the names of his daughters, Andrée and Eléonore, as well as the word “souvenir” and what looks like “Argonne”.
“Trench art”, as it’s called, wasn’t necessarily fashioned in dugouts and wasn’t usually so fragile. Collectors seek out letter openers made of shrapnel; crucifixes made of bullets; and artillery shells fashioned into everything from bracelets to clocks to candelabras. Wooden walking sticks were festooned with intricate carved heads, and tiny valentine pillows sewn and beaded for sweethearts back home. Hodeau’s engraved leaves are part of this resourceful genre, but there is another artistic tradition to which they also belong — that of arborglyphs, or tree carving. Humans have long regarded trees as witnesses. Basque sheepherders in the American West wrote poetry on birch, Confederate Civil War soldiers graffitied their names in trunks, and various Aboriginal Australian tribes honored the dead on bark. Whereas these gestures leave a bit of the human in the landscape, Hodeau’s engravings take a bit of the landscape with the human. “I was here” says one; “I was there” says the other.
As unique as his objects may seem, Hodeau was not alone in carving leaves. The art form flourished during World War I as a way to enhance letters home with a unique lightweight enclosure. Soldiers used a needle or knife to whittle between the oak and chestnut veins, leaving only words or, sometimes, an image. Due to the partial opacity of perforated leaves, the carvings are especially enchanting when lit from behind; sometimes they’re called “feuilles de poilus”, or “tree leaf lace”.
Little has been written about this kind of memorialization, but French military history forums brim with amateur investigators and collectors. The user “GillesR”, for instance, reports tracing a leaf that reads “Souvenir Alsace” to an infantryman named Bringuier, who was left for dead on the battlefield in 1914, captured by the Germans, and subsequently released as unfit for combat after the amputation of his left arm. Andre Dupuis of the 52nd Territorial Infantry Regiment emblazoned “CapNap” in 1915, whereas Alfred Laperrière was fond of writing longer, more complicated phrases — “Souvenir de Serbie” (Serbian souvenir); “Je pense à toi” (Thinking of you); “Ton mari aimant” (Your loving husband).
Words predominate, though there are startling exceptions. The Jardin Botanique de Nancy claims to have unearthed a silhouette of a soldier in profile, perhaps a self-portrait. Bernard Dauphin’s website gathers an assortment of leaves reading “Souvenir”, “Helene”, and “Yvonna” (the last enclosed in a heart), and tells of meeting a Frenchman who was deported to Germany during World War II under the service du travail obligatoire and who survived by traded carved leaves for sausage. Other specimens have no author, and no story. It seems that these type of leaves have only recently been gathered for exhibition. A 2022 show at the Halle Saint-Piere in Paris apparently included a “mémoire végétale de la Grande Guerre” (botanical memorial of World War I), while the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, exhibited a remarkable collection of leaf portraiture in that same year.
This eco-trench art might have quietly composted were it not for Europeana’s 1914–1918 project, which drew attention to the phenom by soliciting information from the public and digitizing thousands of fragile artifacts.

source: public-domain-review

author: Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes

type: collection

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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Maria Catharina Prestel’s Printed Cabinet of Drawings (ca. 1780s)
Text by Miya Tokumitsu
Apr 24, 2024

From the Renaissance onward, drawings have fascinated collectors and connoisseurs, who often perceive them as intimate affordances of an artist’s creative process — prized as mediums of an artist’s physical gestures. As unique works, drawings can exist in only one collection at a time, where they are typically secreted away from the vast majority of eager spectators. Reproductions offer art lovers a satisfying degree of access to these works, but to create convincing facsimiles in the early modern era required a challenging technical feat: translating drawings into print.
In the 1770s and 1780s, the enterprising artist Maria Catharina Prestel (1747–1794) was hard at work in Frankfurt, refining her printmaking technique to meet the demand of this secondary drawings market, reproducing sheets by Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and others. She capitalized upon a new printing technique, aquatint, that allowed printmakers to render areas of tone in etchings. In her engaging history of aquatint, Rena M. Hoisington notes that Prestel and her colleagues manipulated aquatint in combination with a host of other intaglio printing processes, including line etching, soft-ground etching, and chalk-manner etching in order to best replicate particular drawings. In some instances, she used several printing plates to create multicolor prints when reproducing drawings with various inks and washes on colored paper. In one particular tour de force, Prestel applied gold dust onto freshly printed ink lines to recreate the metallic tonal heightening of Jacopo Ligozzi’s Triumph of Truth Over Envy.
Together with her husband, Johann Gottlieb Prestel (1739–1808), and an apprentice, Regina Catharina Schönecker (ca. 1762–ca. 1818), Maria Catharina created three portfolios of prints after drawings in private collections, which they took care to reproduce at scale. Although Johann’s name appears on the portfolio covers, it is now acknowledged that Maria Catharina was the creator of a significant portion of the prints, among them some of the most technically complex. She and Johann eventually separated, and Maria Catharina moved to London, where she resumed her printmaking career. She remained there until her death in 1794.
Opening one of the Prestel portfolios was a sensuous and intellectually rewarding experience. The prints were mounted onto sturdy sheets for easy handling, and viewers could bring each one close to their eyes to inspect its numerous details and guess its artist before turning the image over to read the informative inscriptions on the reverse. Hoisington points out that this format allows connoisseurs to admire both the drawings reproduced and the craft of printed facsimiles.
The Prestels’ portfolio titles were in French and are named after cabinets where the drawings they reproduced were kept. Within the world of art collecting, Kabinett (German), kabinet (Dutch), or cabinet (French) refers to a room for viewing collections of small-scale artworks, including drawings. The term encompasses both the physical and metaphorical aspects of enclosure — these were walled spaces designed for the intimate appreciation of treasures. A cabinet is an interior within an interior, a place of privacy and curiosity and mystery, a capsule that contains things to discover. Beyond disseminating drawings of some of the canonical figures in European art, the Prestels offered their collectors just such a room of their own.

author: Miya Tokumitsu


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Grotesqueries at Gethsemane: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Passio Verbigenae (ca. 1580)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 27, 2024

In his final days, Christ is haunted by grotesqueries. Cherubs and putti ogle the last supper’s lamb. Hybrid creatures sprout up in the Garden of Gethsemane. And during his descent into Limbo, demonic bodies roar and hiss at the Son of God.
A series of thirteen prints by Jan Sadeler (I) after Marcus Gheeraerts (I), the Passio Verbigenae Quae Nostra Redeptio Christi (ca. 1580) employs a monstrous mélange of genres, sitting somewhere between a passion print series and a design book, a sacred narrative and a grotesque statuary. Subtly advertising ornamental patterns suitable for painters, silversmiths, and textile workers, these oval, cartouche-like images dissolve the distinction between framing and content. Strap- and scrollwork penetrate the scenes; biblical characters navigate jungles of exotic arabesques. On the cusp of modernity, these sixteenth-century engravings arrive at a postmodern tenet: any supposed distinction between a narrative and its frame is an illusion, a feint.
The designs for these prints were created when Gheeraerts resided in Antwerp, after a decade’s exile in London. A stalwart reformist, he had fled after the Low Countries’ iconoclastic Beeldenstorm in 1566. Tried in absentia for heresy, Gheeraerts may have designed the Passio Verbigenae with economic, imperial, religious forces in mind. There was a bullish European market for ornamental prints in the mid-sixteenth century; early modern travelogues were increasingly detailing monstrous encounters with hybrid creatures abroad; and in the wake of iconoclasm, the mimetic claims of religious imagery was increasingly called into question. “Gheeraerts’s grotesques . . . work against verisimilitude and thus the Catholic image doctrine”, writes Tianna Helena Uchacz. “They cast the religious representation not as a truthful reportage guaranteed by mimesis but as an image — this is, an artifice of the human hand.”. And yet, by confounding the devotional gaze with a labyrinth of ornamental excess, which appears to swell as Christ approaches death, the images also seem to plot a path toward a new form of worship. Centuries later, artists now substitute for prophets in a secular age, and artworks offer a glimpse of the mysteries that icons once contained.

author: Hunter Dukes


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Flemish Proverbs by Jan Wierix (ca. 1568)
Text by Miya Tokumitsu
Mar 14, 2024

“I wear mourning, seeing the world in which so much deceit abounds.” So laments The Misanthrope as he skulks along, withdrawn emotionally and sartorially, in a deep-hooded cloak. But world-weariness does not amount to wisdom in Jan Wierix’s engraving; rather than serving as a hermetic sanctum, the misanthrope’s heavy garment only blinds him to the fact that the world — personified as a waddling orb — has caught up to him to steal his purse. The Misanthrope belongs to a series of twelve engraved roundels depicting literal enactments of Flemish proverbs, each concerned with some aspect of human folly or treachery. Seven of the scenes, collected below, were engraved by Wierix; the precise authorship of the remaining five remains mysterious. Rather like many actual proverbs, the Proverbs’ motifs look backward to origins that are uncertain in some respects while maintaining vitality through repetition, reuse, and appropriation.
In addition to The Misanthrope, the other six scenes engraved by Wierix include: a man shooting arrows into the ground; a hawker praising his own wares; a man playing a jawbone like a fiddle; a crowd crawling into a rich man’s asshole; a husband berated by his wife; and mendicant monks begging at unresponsive homes. The five more obscure scenes depict: the blind leading the blind; a man warming himself by his neighbor’s house fire; a fool perched on an egg; a horse frightened by an ambulant bale of hay; and an agitated peddler seated by a bride. To a contemporary anglophone audience, some of the scenes are comprehensible; for instance, the archer seems to symbolize the expenditure of energy on futile endeavors, similar to “spinning one’s wheels”. Others refer to specific Flemish proverbs of varying obscurity.
It is not known who provided the initial designs for these engravings. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had long been considered the originator of the compositions, and in fact Bruegel had supplied designs for mass-market prints early in his career. He also maintained an interest — popular in the sixteenth-century Low Countries — in literal renderings of proverbs, most famously in his painting, Dutch Proverbs, a busy scene in which around 126 proverbs are enacted before the spectator. Wierix’s Misanthrope unmistakably references Bruegel’s independent painting of the subject, and the roundel format and the count of the prints echo the circular vignettes of Bruegel’s Twelve Proverbs panel, although none of the scenes in that painting are repeated in the prints. The prints only demonstrate that the engravers, Wierix and a possible collaborator, were familiar with some of Bruegel’s imagery, not that Bruegel himself was an active participant in their production. Indeed, Walter Gibson has noted that a set of drawings initially thought to be designs for the roundels, are now considered to have been made after them, and that eleven of the twelve engravings (The Misanthrope being the one exception) may well have been designed by Wierix himself or someone else working with him.
Nevertheless, all of the engravings in the series could be described as Brugelian in their attitude and style. In addition to directly referencing an artist’s known works, imitating or attempting to elicit another artist’s manner — even in the creation of original compositions not sourced from that artist’s oeuvre — was a deliberate artistic practice in the sixteenth century. Artists and publishers kept close track of the print-buying public’s responses to their collective offerings. If a particular artist’s work became popular, it was common for others to create images in a similar vein. Indeed, none other than Bruegel himself began his career designing prints in the “mode” of a popular, elder artist: Hieronymus Bosch.
Bruegel haunts the entire Proverbs series even though he neither conceived of it nor intentionally supplied its designs. His spectral presence affected their reception and future iterations. Several of the Proverbs were reformulated in later prints, and two painted versions of the crawling brownnosers were created by none other than Bruegel’s son, Pieter Bruegel the Younger.


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The Afterimage of Death: Dr. Berkeley's Discovery (1889)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jan 16, 2024

In 1888, the year before Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery was published, Jack the Ripper mutilated his second victim, Annie Chapman. Lacking a witness to the murder, the press wondered if an image of the killer might be preserved on his victim’s retinas — recoverable using the budding science of optography. This was an era when new media seeped into conceptions of the world and self, as sight, hearing, and other senses were extended beyond the body’s traditional reach. Telegraphy offered spiritualists a “medium” through which to conceive of instantaneous communication between the realms; phonography freed the voice from the biological limits of its body, allowing the dead to speak across their graves; and photography became a model for how images are imprinted on the eye and mind. That last analogy begged some questions: If photographs can outlive their subjects, and memory works like photography, do images somehow endure in the brain after death? Could these undead memories be recovered with the right technologies?
Tinkering in his laboratory with microscopic slides, the protagonist of Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt’s sci-fi novel, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, suddenly yells eureka. He calls his labmate Farrington over to look through the scope. “Carefully focusing the object glass up and down, he studied the field for a while. The thing he saw was merely a view of a crowded city street, and, though wonderful as a micro-photograph, which he immediately assumed it to be, there was nothing about it, on that supposition, to create keen excitement as Berkeley evidently felt.” Things are stranger than they appear. An urban metropolis up close, the specimen on the slide looks, without magnification, like a smattering of “brain-tissue”. Berkeley lets out an unsteady laugh. “What have I to do with micro-photographs? Man! I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve proved that there are pictures in the brain and that I can develop them—for that is a section of brain-tissue and it came—it came from the Centre of Memory!”
Like so many tragedies, the book begins with marriage. Ashford Berkeley is an absorbed scientist — absorbed in his work, absorbed in himself — living a life abroad after an undisclosed accident of youth. Tellingly, he does not “meet” his future wife, Aline Lefevre; “she came into his field of vision one evening in Paris”. He fails at making conversation; she doesn’t mind at all. “She had read that in America it was only the women that talked.” And so, Aline carries forth on her schooling in England, contemporary art, how she admires “the things that are new”. Ashford stares at his feet, tells her that she should visit America, “which is very new.” They marry and move to New York, but they put off “getting acquainted”: he is too busy with science. Aline grows wistful; Ashford neglects her for months on end. He takes her to France, leaves her with an aunt for the summer, flees back to New York to work alongside Farrington on his one true love, science. She writes long, impassioned letters, which are reproduced at length. We never see him respond. There is talk of Aline returning home early. Time passes and the letters grow sedate, “as if they were carefully made to conform to some pattern the girl kept in her mind of what such letters ought to be”.
Meantime, Farrington is sore that Berkeley beat him to the scientific discovery of the century, and jealous of his labmate’s new wife, whom he has yet to meet. Waking late after a long evening in the laboratory, he buys the morning paper and reads about a bloody crime just a few blocks away in New York. A hotel reported that a “M. et Mme. Massoneau, France” had checked in to a private parlor the previous evening, before the husband, in an agitated state, asked for directions to Jersey City and Chicago. A housekeeper later heard groans behind the door and entered to find Mme. Massoneau soaked in blood and clutching an oriental dagger. Suicide is suspected until the plot grows more sinister. “M. Massoneau” seems to be a lover with whom the woman eloped to escape married life in France. Farrington visits her in the hospital and hears her final words. “Tell—my—husband—”, but she doesn’t finish the sentence. The coroner hires Farrington to do the autopsy, and his examinations reveal very little — it seems like “a case for Sherlock Holmes”. Nevertheless, he brings her brain back to the laboratory; after dragging his feet, Berkeley prepares the slides. His beloved technique, his sole devotion and pursuit for so many years, is working once again. He starts to see dim memories of childhood. Autumn at an English boarding school. The streets of Paris. A joyful wedding. His own two eyes. . .
We know almost nothing about Richard Slee, whom is unfortunately sometimes credited as the sole author of Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery. On the other hand, Cornelia Atwood Pratt (1865–1929) is a forgotten nineteenth-century force. Born in Ohio, she graduated from Vassar before working as a journalist in Seattle. She wrote for popular periodicals like the Critic, the Century, and Harper’s Weekly, and served as a tastemaker for new literary forms on the cusp of modernism: “the map of the world and the atmosphere of civilization are changing radically”, she wrote in 1901. “A corresponding change in art should not be surprising.” Her short story collections, A Book of Martyrs (1896) and The Preliminaries (1912), were widely reviewed, as was her novel, The Daughter of a Stoic (1896). Reading her polemic — “Letter to the Rising Generation” (1911), published in the Atlantic Monthly — we see that Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery is barely science fiction. Cornelia Atwood Pratt believed that she was living on the cusp of a new historical era:
The brain-specialists and the psychologists between them have given in the last ten years what seems conclusive proof of the servitude of the body to the Self. . . . Coming as this psychological discovery does, in the middle of an age of unparalleled mechanical invention and discovery, it is almost—is it not?—as if the Creator of men had said, “It is time that these children of mine came to maturity. I will give them at last their full mastery over the earth and over the air and over the spirits of themselves. Let us see how they bear themselves under these gifts.”


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Mayday, Mayday: Capital and Labor (1907)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 1, 2024

Labor is of divine origin, and no man should be ashamed that he is a workman. . . . We are a country of millionaires and beggars, and between these two extremes of society, there is a chasm so wide that no power under our present system of selfishness and private greed can bridge it.
The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at the mercy of a boss; and her “sacrifices and sufferings” serve to further “the unlimited and unearned wealth of the rich”. Jobs bleed into the weekend, robbing workers of “the Sabbath rest”; economic inequality affects our “prospects of old age”; the wealthy are “indifferent” to the sufferings of the lower classes; “political corruption is on the increase”; “the Capitalists and the great corporations have generally been able to secure legislation in their favor”; and automation provides no new jobs when we are “superseded by the machine that takes [our] place”.
How are we to fight the tentacles of capitalist exploitation, which regrow, hydra-like, with greater fortitude at every setback? Harris is bullish on labor unions, which he believes are “the most natural and effective method of reaching the desired end”, supportive of “temperate anarchists”, who will one day be praised for “arousing the masses against the oppressions under which they suffered”, and disdainful of “nihilists” for their “lawlessness and Godlessness”. While pickets, strikes, and legislative reform all earn measured praise in these pages, as does a plan to “Christianize the Capitalist”, his most sustained discussion is reserved for socialism. Harris believes that “thoughtful men are rapidly clearing their minds of the prejudice that they have held against Socialism” — a sentiment that feels, with hindsight, more than a little optimistic. He preaches the merits of nationalizing utilities, railroads, communication networks, and food manufacturers, and believes that a Christian socialist form of political economy will soon triumph worldwide, supplying “every human being with ample food, clothing, shelter and education”. There will be universal healthcare, a comfortable retirement at sixty years old, and an elimination of capitalism’s wasteful practices. His treatise ends with a vision of the future, one we are perhaps still waiting for:
When the war is over, and the din of battle no longer disturbs a peace-loving people, what will be the opinion of that fortunate generation as it reviews the past? It will most naturally regard our present Capitalistic system as the second of the Dark Ages in which day and night mingled in strange confusion. . . . The question arises from the murmuring masses of today, “Will humanity ever be free?”
Below you will find illustrations by Paul Krafft for Capital and Labor. A worker prunes the rosebuds of a monopolist, the personifications of vice and graft steer the nation’s motorcar off a cliff, and, in the most chilling image, skulls are stacked high to form an obelisk in memory of “the victims who were crushed under capitalism”.


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Paper Gems: Early Modern Blackwork Prints
Text by Miya Tokumitsu
Jan 30, 2024

Early modern prints are recycled waste products of everyday life. Paper was fashioned from soiled and tattered linen, which was boiled and beaten into pulp, then strained and dried in sheets. Ink was an admixture of lampblack or soot blended with oil. Rags and grime thus became the material basis for print media, once wrought through the printmaker’s resurrective craft. As printmakers of this period continued to discover, this act of applying ink to paper with a printing matrix and a press could be accomplished via an astonishing multitude of techniques, some quite esoteric.
One unusual technique, called blackwork, resulted from the adaptation of an enameling process known as champlevé. In traditional metalwork, champlevé entails filling shaped voids in a metal object, such as a brooch or box lid, with a powder of colored glass and sometimes, metal. The object is then heated to melt and bind these fillings, and, once cooled, polished until smooth and an image or pattern becomes crisply legible. To create blackwork prints, shaped voids are gouged into a copper printing plate (rather than a piece of jewelry or decorative object) and filled with a concoction of thick ink (rather than colored glass). When pressed onto paper, the inked voids print areas of pure black that contrast with the unprinted paper; the resulting image was often an intricate pattern or lacy ornamental motif. Artists who made these prints frequently combined blackwork with the linear compositional elements of traditional burin engraving.
Blackwork prints often signaled explicitly the technique’s origins in jewelry design. The earliest known print of this kind is a design for a ring and bezel. Insect and flower motifs are common in blackwork prints, as they are in jewelry. Many of these prints present designs for hypothetical objects like pendants, brooches, or earrings. As they imagined these objects that could be, but as yet did not exist, blackwork engravers were determined to make their own works — paper prints — precious and full of visual interest. The prints of Jean Toutin (1578–1644) and Elias Holl II (1611–1657) depict pendants and gemlike motifs suspended in the air above figural compositions that seem to bear little logical relation to them. Their jewelry designs and arabesques float over scenes of minimal narrative: harvesters pushing wheelbarrows; strolling couples. These curious juxtapositions anticipate department store window displays that appeared centuries later, where scenes of light narrative suggestion, in miniature, become backdrops for salable items. One printmaker, Giovanni Battista Constantini (active 1615–1628), understood that sex sells: in Octagonal Case and Two Other Motifs Held by Ignudi (1622), the contours of two blackwork patterns brush suggestively across the genitals of the nude male figures presenting them. ※※Indexed under…Jewellerydesign's influence on blackwork
In addition to functioning as design proposals, these printed motifs could also manifest more purely as compositional experiments that toyed with the pictorial elements of scale, perspectival space, and contour. As Madeleine Viljoen suggests, the blackwork process itself provided specific content to many of these prints, invoking the air and gusts that produced the soot of printing ink and the creative spiritus of engraving. In one print by Toutin, for instance, a blackwork pendant hovers above a furnace tended to by a goldsmith and an assistant who clutches bellows.
The production of blackwork prints spanned only a few decades, from the mid-1580s through the 1620s. Shifting tastes in fashion and ornament are the commonly understood causes of blackwork’s decline, but that does not explain why these engravers were either unsuccessful or uninterested in adapting blackwork to other types of imagery. Perhaps blackwork was too bound up in increasingly out-of-vogue designs for audiences — and makers — to conceive of the labor-intensive technique as fit for anything else. Nevertheless, for a time, these prints’ creators appropriated both the design principles and craft techniques of jewelry-making for graphic art, and in so doing, created objects of virtuosity and whimsy.


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Photographs of Palestinian Life (ca. 1896–1919)
Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green
Apr 30, 2024

Girls pose in ornately embroidered tatreez. Women hold cauliflowers stacked four heads high; men carefully consider the heaps at a watermelon market. Commerce thrives: olive oil soap factories pile their bars by the thousands; merchants grade glossy bushels of Jaffa oranges; and in the bazaars, cutlers sharpen sickles and farriers fit shoes. Domari speakers raise their hands toward the camera in a grove on Mt. Hermon; women hoist water pots in the Druze community of Daliyat al-Karmel; men wear the tarboosh and prepare a Passover feast of roasted meat. Recreation takes many forms, from gramophone cafes to concerts, nargilah sessions to calisthenics. Families dressed in white walk through a cemetery after Ramadan; mourners mass for the funeral of a rabbi in Jerusalem; mothers attend a bible class shoulder to shoulder in Bethlehem. A family pitch their tent high above the Dead Sea, and, with his feet firmly planted, a man stares out over the fertile olive groves of Gaza.
These images of Palestine before the British Mandate — all from stereograph collections held by the Library of Congress and Brown University — fall into two broad categories: stereoscope cards (made by overseas companies such as Keystone View and Stereo-Travel) and photographs produced by the American Colony based in Jerusalem (who would often provide stereoscope manufacturers with scenes). The vast majority of images produced by such organizations were intended to feed a “Holy Land” mania that increasingly obsessed the United States throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold books about Palestine. In addition to the rise of international tourism, this fixation was fueled by a wave of Christian thought in which Palestine was seen as a neglected Ottoman “backwater” in need of restoration, revitalization, and resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ. For those unable to make the transatlantic steamer, the “Holy Land” was brought home in the form of travelogues, photo books, theme parks, exhibitions, and, of course, through stereoscope cards, which — with their 3D technology — offered a unique form of sacred pilgrimage for the armchair traveler.
While most of the photographs focus on historical and biblical sites — with locals demoted to mere ornamental function — the frame occasionally falls on Palestine’s inhabitants, capturing daily routines and peak experiences alike. Many of these images, often assembled to hide all traces of modernity, still carry the air of scriptural reconstruction (if not actually staged as such, then created in retrospect through captioning and biblical citation). But in others, we witness a less filtered vision of the everyday. Though, of course, a partial view and still the product of an orientalist gaze, we are offered in such photographs a valuable glimpse of Palestine at the turn of the century. Beneath the surface of biblical fantasy, we can glean a land alive with history and potential, a populace immersed in the comings and goings of village, city, and family life — a vision of Palestine that is anything but, as the early Zionist slogan would have it, a “land without a people”.
Agrarian scenes predominate — when these photographs were taken, Palestinians were cultivating olives, cotton, tobacco, dura, sesame, and exporting barley to the United Kingdom, wheat to Italy and France, and Jaffa oranges around the world. In many of the photographs, women are shown at work: coffee gets ground with pestles; olives are gathered and pressed; wheat is measured, sifted, and eventually baked into bread. Of the roughly half a million residents in the Ottoman sanjaks that composed Palestine in this period, some seventy-five percent were farmers, living in more than seven hundred villages. The other twenty-five percent dwelled in towns and cities, making a living from education, commerce, government, religion, and artisanry. Joyful school scenes, coffeeshop conversations, shopkeepers and craftspeople hard at work, and ecstatic festivals all feature here. At the turn of the century, before the establishment of Mandatory Palestine and the large-scale increase of Zionist immigration, the Ottoman census recorded the population as roughly 85% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 4% Jewish. The stereoscope enthusiast would have contemplated scenes of religious and family life from all of these populations, and there’s a hint here at the kind of harmony and intermixing described in the memoirs and diaries of Jerusalem residents such as Wasif Jawhariyyeh and Yaakov Yehoshua, which detail Christians dressing up for Purim festivities, Sephardic Jewish musicians performing at Islamic weddings, and Muslim women learning the Ladino language of their neighbors.
How one views these photographs today will likely be colored by their knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted. The end of World War I would see the Ottoman Empire dissolve, the Balfour Declaration signed, and the British Mandate begin. Waves of Zionist settlement — encouraged by favorable Mandate policies and spurred by the terror of antisemitism in Europe — led to huge shifts in demography and power. These were changes that would ultimately prove devastating to the Palestinian Arab population in particular, from the Nakba of 1948, through the Naksa of 1967, to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. In Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024), Johnny Mansour speaks about what photographs like these mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.”

author: Hunter Dukes and Adam Green


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Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 11, 2024

The villagers of Strasbourg may have heard about a war in heaven while reading the Book of Revelation; in 1554, they witnessed one with their own eyes. As a broadsheet published in June of that year records, a bloody, fiery ray bisected the sun, followed by a clash between cavalry — each side bearing guidons. War raged for hours, and then, as suddenly as they appeared, the combatants trotted off into the clouds. Seven years later, this time in Nuremberg, the Bavarian horizon was blotted out by an extraterrestrial skirmish between unidentified orbs. “The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour”, wrote the broadsheet’s author. Some of these vehicles crashed down beyond the city limits, while a terrifying, arrow-like object appeared in the air. “Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.”
These were not isolated incidents. German broadsheets in the Holy Roman Empire conveyed all kinds of wondrous phenomena through woodcuts: “anomalies in the sun, moon, stars . . . stones and fire falling from the sky, rainbows, miraculous births, rains of blood”, tracks Daniela Wagner. Unexplainable events happened so frequently that they were christened Wunderzeichen, wonder-signs. Between 1550 and 1559 alone, there were more than four hundred broadsheets and tracts published that recorded these prognostic events. The phenomena were also preserved in news pamphlets, astrological literature, sermons, scientific treatises, correspondence, personal diaries, and “wonder books”, broadsheets bound into a single volume.
For many readers in this period, encounters with these reports and images were signs that the end was nigh. Although apocalypticism was not a novel concept, it gained newfound intensity during the Reformation. “By 1560”, writes Robin Bruce Barnes, “[clerical] attention to the unusual had become nothing less than an obsession”. New Protestant translations of the Bible rendered the Book of Revelation in particularly dramatic terms, while Luther and his acolytes encouraged followers to look upward and augur the future. “We see the Sun to be darkened and the Moon, the stars to fall, men to be distressed, all the winds and waters to make a noise”, he preached during a sermon about the Second Coming. “How many other Signs also, and unusual impressions, have we seen in the Heavens, in the Sun, Moon, Stars, Rain-bows and strange Apparitions, in these last four years?” Far from folk superstition, the belief in Wunderzeichen as portents of the Last Judgment was shot through with eschatology. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), who systematized Luther’s theology, saw these scenes painted across the sky as communications from God:
For if these signs are not meant to be considered, why are they written and painted on the sky by divine providence? Since God has engraved these marks in the sky in order to announce great upheavals for the states, it is impiety to turn one’s mind away from their observation. What are eclipses, conjunctions, portents, meteors or comets if not oracles of God which threaten great calamities and changes for the life of men?
Some speculate that the prophetic attention to celestial bodies was sometimes fueled by ergotism — the fungal infection that swept across cereal grains in much of northern Europe. Ingesting these crops produced delirium, hallucinations of fire and religious fervor. Drugs aside, the skies were alive with astronomical wonder, which was ripe for interpretation in even the soberest eyes. Northern lights streaked across the horizon like blood. Solar halos, sun dogs, and light pillars were frequent and mysterious. A 1556 comet was widely reported across Europe and Asia, spotted by awe-eyed observers from Britain to China. And each shooting star further unfolded a narrative of religious reformation. One broadsheet published in Nuremberg during May of that same year, for example, depicts Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia as damaged by an earthquake. It did not surprise readers that this destruction occurred alongside the appearance of a comet: eliding Islam with Catholicism, the text suggests that “the papacy—polemically identified as the Roman Antichrist—will also get its desserts”, writes Jennifer Spinks.
Just as Victorian encounters with ghosts surged after the invention of photography, media technologies also played a part in propagating these sixteenth-century visions. Most of the images below come from Einblattdruck, a form of broadsheet that consisted of a title, woodcut, and an account of wonder. These sheets could be created rapidly, disseminated widely, and purchased cheaply. News and current events were thus being printed with greater speed and reach than ever before. As such, genres evolved and hybridized with haste. In the early 1520s, so-called “siege prints” — graphic tableaux of battles — became particularly popular. And astronomical almanacs were some of the most widely consumed vernacular texts in the Holy Roman Empire. Is it any surprise, then, that battles between stars started appearing in the skies, wedding these two genres, evidenced by woodcuts of astrological siege? The art historian Aby Warburg — puzzled why, in the midst of the Reformation, a seemingly new form of paganism flourished — concluded that “astral deities . . . enjoyed a peripatetic Renaissance, in words and pictures, thanks to the new printing houses of Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig”.
The observance of celestial phenomena tapered off in the seventeenth century — as the doom foretold by the heavens finally came to Earth in the form of the Thirty Years’ War. Strangely enough, in the eighteenth century, very similar signs appeared in the skies over Riga, which deeply influenced a certain printer in Philadelphia’s views of revolution. For more on that story, see our post on A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763).
Below you can browse a selection of broadsheets containing accounts of wonders, courtesy of Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek.


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Distortions and Grimaces: Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 9, 2024

One wonders how many children might have tugged at a parent’s coattails to cajole a present of Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands when it was first released in 1921. A glance at any one of its 120 illustrations, all done by the author himself, would surely have scared off all but the most intrepid young readers. The Carpenter — an unnaturally tall, blue top-hatted, androgynous character in yellow bell-bottoms with a folding, insect-shaped airplane strapped to his back — joins a motley troupe of nine musicians (including Bing, taller still than the Carpenter, his face covered by a hawkish black harlequin mask; Peter, a fly-voiced fiddle player with spidery fingers; and Melinda, a selfish girl oblivious to everything and everyone but her own whims) for an outing upon the Thames in their Blue Boat.
Uniformly incompetent and absent-minded, all have crooked postures, slightly misshapen limbs, faces like porcelain dolls, absurd arabesque costumes, and an air of vaporous unreality. Towing the Shark — a submarine piloted by a fellow dressed as a monstrous cod — and a dirigible christened the Lemon of Gold, the ten adventurers set off from Greenwich Pier while making a din with their incongruous instruments, and by the time they have reached the river’s mouth, a gale has set both the dirigible and the submarine adrift. The Carpenter must lend his instrument — a musical saw — to cut down the mast. Everyone escapes a watery grave when he then unfolds his airplane and leads the Travelers on a willy-nilly, topsy-turvy trip to a series of islands inhabited by beings even more uncanny and alien than them.
On the Round Island, along with peacocks and pelicans, they meet a fiendish parrot who warns them to beware of the Balligoors and Coomasis who are known to strangle, hang, and behead any hapless shipwrecked mariners. A ferocious lion and a crown of spherical and cuboid birds accost them on another isle. They go on to encounter a pigwing, a kind of guinea pig with diaphanous useless wings; a crowd of cyclopes who wish to cage them; the Galipodes — storks with little hats made of pastry dough; and atavistic silhouetted creatures with masks of dried leaves. Both de Bosschère’s ten travelers and the archipelago dwellers are relentlessly chimerical and asymmetrical as rendered by his hand. One feels a slight frisson of gooseflesh with every encounter.
Growing up together in the small village of Lier in the desolate Campine moorland of the Low Countries — isolated by having arrived to this Flemish-speaking, intensely pious area as a French-speaking family headed by a free-thinking atheist physician and naturalist — Jean and his beloved sister Marie, who suffered from a cleft lip, were bullied and ostracized. Long before Marie starved herself to death at the age of eighteen, Jean (who recalls making his first drawings at age three) shrank back from the world’s avarice, cruelty, and insensitivity. Even in his most tender and innocent literary and artistic productions — he wrote and illustrated half a dozen other children’s books, and, in the last decades of his life, four exquisite works of natural history — he is “the enraged one”, his inner rebellion perennially erupting to diagnose society’s malaise of soul.
In January 1915, six months after the German invasion of Belgium, de Bosschère fled Brussels for London, carrying with him a notebook filled with sketches in which both the invaders and the invaded were marked by such unsettling dark distortions and grimaces that British censors confiscated them. Like his first books of poetic prose, his early works in English — Twelve Occupations (1916); The Closed Door (1917); The City Curious (1920) — contain their own unsettling sketches, engravings, and woodblock prints. While London appears less grotesquely sinister and threatening than Paris, he still manages to find its most anguished, tormented places; even his fairy tales cannot escape an unrelenting probing of ugliness and despair.
For all his misanthropic severity, de Bosschère was the fiercest of friends. In Paris, he was an intimate of Antonin Artaud, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, and André Suarès; in London, he counted Ezra Pound, T. H. Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad Aiken, and T. S. Eliot among his circle. Recognized by all who knew him as a genius, the reader of any of his works must summon a certain courage to meet his strikingly sensitive gaze at the spectacle of life. Despite its grotesqueries, Weird Islands actually makes for a gentle and humane place to begin.
You can browse a selection of Jean de Bosschère’s illustrations for Weird Islands below.

author: Kevin Dann


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Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Mar 6, 2024

Pomelos, pomegranates, plantains, and the sociopolitical importance of a seedpod. When Maria Sibylla Merian first set foot in Suriname, her senses were overcome with surprising tastes, sights, and smells. A dissected soursop and a hovering Owlet Moth; shining pepper plants and pineapple fibers which stung her German-born tongue. In her two years of exploration before contracting a malaria-like illness, Merian expounded upon the sweetness of watermelon, just as she dutifully detailed the long-misunderstood process of butterfly metamorphosis. The result was a compilation of sixty elaborate engravings, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) — a fascinating catalog of New World plants, animals, and insects. Nestled within these pages, we find a fragmentary understanding of indigenous knowledge, the morsels of information which were shared with Merian by members of the enslaved population. Yet of the many species and processes which Metamorphosis revealed, most potent of all is an account of a singular, seemingly innocuous species of seedpod.
As a young girl growing up in Frankfurt, Merian would often travel to the countryside to search for caterpillar larvae. She raised silkworms at thirteen years old, and gave thorough attention to every subtle shift in the physiology of her specimens. When she moved to Nuremberg with her husband in 1670, she was hired to teach illustration to wealthy, unmarried women, thereby securing herself access to some of the finest gardens in Germany, elaborate oases for the insects she studied. In 1690, now the mother of two young daughters, Merian divorced. And by 1699, after a decade of supporting herself through art, she was given permission from the city of Amsterdam to undertake research in Suriname with her youngest daughter, Dorothea. Lacking the financial backing from commercial enterprise that was typical for other Dutch naturalists, the pair stayed fiscally afloat through the sale of roughly 255 of their own paintings. Rumors abound that this voyage was partially paid for by the director of the Dutch West India Company, but there is no acknowledgement of sponsorship in Merian’s writing, and she was quite open with her criticism of colonial merchants. To her, their myopic obsession with sugar was self-destructive, disappointing. There were so many other potentially world-altering plants available for export, and it was her job to illuminate their existence.
Merian’s work would not have been possible without the knowledge of enslaved peoples, both of African and Amerindian descent. Through her interactions, Merian documented indigenous plant names, as well as their traditional medicinal uses. Perhaps it was because she was a woman that she was made privy to the use of peacock flower (or red bird of paradise) seeds as a natural abortifacient. It was rare for a female to travel without a man, even rarer for her to do so for the purpose of work. Perhaps the duo of her and Dorothea appeared trustworthy enough, or perhaps they were so meddlesome that the information was begrudgingly surrendered. Regardless, Merian understood the painful depth and breadth of the abortifacient’s importance while writing Metamorphosis:
The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.
Merian returned to Amsterdam in 1701, opening a shop to sell her specimens and engravings. In 1705, Metamorphosis was published. Her engravings served as one of the first natural histories of Suriname, while her depictions of butterflies helped dispel the myth that insects were spontaneously generated out of mud and standing water. As Metamorphosis was shepherded through several editions and translations following Merian’s death in 1717, her work gained a larger audience. In spite of this, the medicinal use of the peacock flower was seemingly ignored. Instead, the plant became increasingly popular as an eye-catching, uncomplicated, ornamental shrub. First exported to Europe in the late seventeenth century, Caesalpinia pulcherrima took up residence in leading botanical gardens such as the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, yet was excluded entirely from the official pharmacopeias of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Other New World medicines were tested and embraced — cinchona for malaria, guaiacum for syphilis. Although there was no specific law forbidding the study of abortifacients at this time, physicians and scholars proved ignorant or chose strategic omission. In this way, the plant that was originally leveraged as a life-altering act of self-ownership by the enslaved peoples of Suriname — a physical refusal to feed the cycle of slavery — was shipped across the Atlantic, and shorn of its history. ※※Indexed under…Lossof botanical knowledge

author: Paloma Ruiz


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Unwashed Furry Masses: Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 15, 2024

For the feline minded, there is rarely too much of a good thing when it comes to cats; Wanda Hazel Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) tells a tale that proves the rare exception. Considered the oldest American children’s book still in print, it continues to delight the contemporary eye. A superbly talented lithographer, Gág helped popularize the double-page spread in illustrated children’s literature, collaborating on this volume with her brother, who lettered the text by hand. In 1928, The Nation placed Millions of Cats on its list of distinguished titles, and it won a Newbery the following year, a rare award for picture books.
The story opens on an elderly couple: they are so very lonely. The woman lands on an idea — “If we only had a cat!” — and her husband sets off to find one. He trudges across sunlit landscapes and cool valleys until he comes across a hill completely covered with cats. Trillions of cats. Which one to choose? They are all so pretty. He picks a white one and then a black and white one and then a fuzzy gray one and then brown and yellow one . . . eventually he picks them all. Once he brings his new friends home, the old woman is more practical — trillions of cats is just a few too many — and decides they will ask the cats to choose. This is a mistake. “’No, I am the prettiest! . . . No, I am! I am! I am!’ cried hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of voices, for each cat thought itself the prettiest.” They begin to quarrel and hiss and claw and scratch. After a while, all falls silent. The couple look outside and cannot find a single cat. “‘I think they must have eaten each other all up,’ said the very old woman, ‘It’s too bad!’” But there is, of course, one runty kitten hidden out in the high grass, whom they welcome in and feed and raise. “‘It is the most beautiful cat in the whole world,’ said the very old man. ‘I ought to know, for I’ve seen — Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats — and not one is as pretty as this one.’”
Born into the German-speaking community of New Ulm, Minnesota, Wanda Gág (1893–1946) was raised by immigrants from Bohemia. Her father was a photographer, the son of a woodcutter, and entrusted her with the family’s artistic legacy on his deathbed: “Was der Papa nicht thun konnt’, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen” (What father couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish). And she did. Gág won a scholarship to the Minneapolis Art Institute, where she became interested in socialist and anarchist writing, before relocating to New York in 1917 for the Arts Student League and to make a living as a commercial artist and illustrator. She hung out with the other kind of Bohemians — leftist artists in Greenwich Village — contributed to socialist magazines like The Liberator and New Masses, and eventually married the labor organizer Earle Marshall Humphreys, who would become her artistic collaborator. But before she accepted his hand, she made her intentions firm: “I would marry no man unless he would promise to run the house during my drawing moods and would excuse me from scrubbing floors.” (A few years after their marriage, she published Gone is Gone: or, The Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework.) The couple had no children; Gág’s inspiration arose from something within: “I don’t write books for children. . . . I write for the child I am myself”, assembling material from “all the helpless fringes and frayed edges of our groping lives”. Her focus on the lives and plights of others caught the attention of Ernestine Evans, an editor impacted by the politically engaged children’s books produced in the Soviet Union, who agreed to publish Millions of Cats.
It’s easy to read Millions of Cats as a simple story about the pleasures of pets — a Good Dog, Carl for the fairer species, a tale about the subjective beauty of a chosen cat. But Gág’s politics create tempting flights of interpretation. Julia L. Mickenberg, in Learning from the Left (2005), goes so far as to write that “Millions of Cats tells a very disturbing story about the barrenness of bourgeois living, greed, competition, environmental degradation, and senseless violence.” Viewed through this lens, the couple live in isolation, walled off from meaningful community; the trillion cats consume entire ponds and ecosystems and remain unsated; they devour their brethren and are devoured in turn — all to earn a spot in the couple’s family structure, their bourgeois home. Curiously, the trope of cats eating themselves up entirely can be found in The German Ideology: “the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.” Marx and Engels evoke this tale while pitting Max Stirner against Ludwig Feuerbach, but Gág seems to draw upon a similar image to portray a form of blindness. The beauty of a new family member trumps the deaths of a trillion starving orphans. It’s like they never existed: they simply melt into air.


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Never-again Land: J. M. Barrie's My Lady Nicotine (1896)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 6, 2024

Before he conceived of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie decided it was time to grow up and quit smoking. He justifies this decision in My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke (originally published in 1890), which begins with a common trio of arguments against substance addiction. The bodily and spiritual ruin; the economic impact; the pain caused to loved ones. In the case of our narrator (who seems to be a lightly fictionalized Barrie): he felt frequently like he was dying; realized several oriental rugs could be purchased yearly with the money saved; and delayed his marriage six months when his fiancée demanded cessation. Slowly, however, this “study” diffuses into a different mode. At the introduction’s close, fidgeting in the drawing room with postprandial cravings, he listens to his wife sing a sweet and mournful song, which takes his thoughts far away, to a parlor on the top floor of an inn, where time seems to slow as his body's hunger warmly fades, like coals in the hearth that throw light around this room — onto newspapers, through smoke rings, across the faces of gentleman friends, and against the contours of a tobacco jar. It’s a lost world, once known so well, and he pulls up a chair and begins to pack a pipe. “After a time the music ceases, and my wife puts her hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I start a little, and then she says I have been asleep. This is the book of my dreams.”
It is also a book of Barrie’s dreams past. The volume was stitched together from pieces he had written anonymously for the St James’s Gazette, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, and elsewhere, published to “establish his title to the contents in the face of pirates and rival claimants”, writes Denis Mackail. And yet it works surprisingly well as a single unit, whatever kind of unit that may be. There are: chapters on the pleasures of apparatus — pouches, smoking tables, the choice of stem and bowl; short stories masquerading as essays about friends, the men with whom our narrator smokes; speculations about literary history (surely Spenser puffed in bed); epistolary correspondence; a ghost story; three dream visions; and unfiltered wit. The only throughline to it all is how the chapters mirror the instincts of a smoker’s mind: although it may stray to other subjects, the prose always returns at steady intervals to the preoccupations of nicotine.
We catch sight of the author’s slight social awkwardness, his odd sense of humor, the famed idiosyncrasies. Embittered in his youth for failings of wit, the narrator would “lay in a stock of repartee on likely subjects” the night before entering “the society of ladies”. All of this changed once he acquired his pipe. Known to scoffers as “the Mermaid”, its mouthpiece was a cigarette holder, which required “months of unwearied practice . . . before you found the angle at which the bowl did not drop off.” He turned this to his advantage at parties.
She observed the strange-looking pipe. . . . It is possible that she may pass it by without remark, in which case all is lost; but experience has shown me that four times out of six she touches it in assumed horror, to pass some humorous remark. Off tumbles the bowl. “Oh,” she exclaims, “see what I have done! I am so sorry!” I pull myself together. “Madam,” I reply calmly and bowing low, “what else was to be expected? You came near my pipe — and it lost its head!” She blushes, but cannot help being pleased; and I set my pipe for the next visitor.
Perhaps it’s best that this man quit smoking.
While it might seem quite at odds with Neverland, My Lady Nicotine, like Peter Pan and Wendy (1904), is concerned with fleeting youth, a stage of bachelor life that has the trappings of childhood in a way: simple pleasures, imaginative adventures with companions, idleness, tranquility, and a sense that these days might go on forever, until they don’t. The book ends on a maudlin image. The narrator sits each night alone in the drawing room, while his wife sleeps upstairs. At a certain hour, a neighbor through the wall, whom he has never met, sparks a meerschaum pipe, and our man puffs his empty piece in solidarity until he hears the neighbor clearing out his bowl’s final ash. “Therefore when his last tap says good-night to me I take my cold briar out of my mouth, tap it on the mantel-piece, smile sadly, and so to bed.”
For a slightly different take on nicotine, see Juliette Bretan’s essay “Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz”. And for a film about a smoker pitted against Tinkerbell’s cousin, see our post on Princess Nicotine (1909).


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The Art of Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s “Michelangelo of Tattooing” (ca. 1905)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 12, 2024

It’s an era when tattoos are no longer taboo: men and women flock to a London studio to enjoy cooling drinks, a snug stove, and the steady hum of a modern electromagnetic machine, fitted with interchangeable needles for fine lines and shading. Inked on their skin are designs “gathered from all corners of the globe” — Japanese dragons, The Last Supper, a fox hunt in full cry — and words from Arabic, Burmese, and other tongues. Snakes, lizards, and frogs are a current vogue. Coloration has come a long way since the early days: ultramarine blue and emerald green, once thought impossible, are now shot freely into the dermis. Officers get their regimental badges emblazoned; “some of our best-known society men” proudly sport a patch or crest. “Tired of constantly rouging her cheeks”, a woman stops by for the application of permanent makeup. It’s truly a tattoo enthusiast’s paradise . . . Sutherland Macdonald’s studio in Victorian England.
“It is no exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of men and even women are more or less decorated in this manner at the present moment”, writes Gambier Bolton in “Pictures on the Human Skin”, an 1897 article for London’s Strand Magazine from which the above descriptions are drawn. (A year later, R. J. Stephens would put the number of tattooed at 100,000 in London alone.) Bolton goes on to describe the current loci of artistic tattooing: “England, America, Burmah, and Japan”, and posits that Britain’s fascination with inked skin stretches back to before the Norman Conquest, when tattooing was “universally” practiced on the Isles. To illustrate his article, he begins with a coat of arms design by Sutherland Macdonald, the first British tattoo artist to open a public studio, “The Hammam” on Jermyn Street in London. “No one in the past, and no man living to-day, can compare with Macdonald in placing really artistic pictures on the human skin.”
The photographs of Macdonald’s artworks, collected below, are records from the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall, and perhaps relate to a service detailed by Bolton: “in more than one instance the copyright of some particularly striking image has actually been purchased outright, so no one but the wealthier patrons of the Jermyn Street studio shall have the use of them.” (This seems to have been the case with a tattoo of Psyche and Amour on the back of one Captain Studdy, whose copyright is registered to Macdonald.) During the late 1800s, tattoos became a fixation for the upper classes; as Macdonald himself remarked in an 1889 interview in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I have tattooed many noblemen, and also several ladies.” Scholars occasionally attribute the shifting class connotations of tattoos to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales — his decision to get marked while visiting the Jordan River and, later, to have his sons supposedly tattooed in Japan by Hori Chiyo, Macdonald’s competitor on the international stage. Describing tattooing as “the popular pastime of the leisured world” in an 1898 article titled “Tattooed Royalty”, R. J. Stephens named just a few of the majestically inked — Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Prince and Princess Waldemar of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece, King Oscar of Sweden, the Duke of York, the Grand Duke Constantine, Lady Randolph Churchill — many tattooed by Macdonald himself.
Part of Macdonald’s genius was his ability to court wealth by elevating the status of his artform. Earlier in the nineteenth century, tattoos were shadow signs — encountered on the bodies of sailors, soldiers, and recidivists, occasionally described in medical literature or criminology handbooks, but largely obscured from public discourse. Macdonald changed these perceptions by wearing a white coat (emulating a medical professional), using the latest technologies (he is credited with inventing the first electromagnetic tattoo machine), operating in proximity to a popular Turkish bath (playing up fashionable orientalism with a studio full of luxurious cushions), and registering a legitimate practice in the Post Office Directory (necessitating the creation of a new category of business). He cunningly referred to himself as a tattooist, distinguished from the workaday tattooer: “He lays great stress on the ‘IST’”, writes Bolton, “as he classes the ‘ER,” with the plumber and bricklayer, whilst the work of the tattooist, he claims, should rank with the professions”. By 1900, L’Illustration had named Macdonald “the Michelangelo of tattooing”. The photographs below can only hint at the depth of color and nuanced texture that admirers attributed to his works.


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Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 2, 2024

“The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and imagination full of the ineffable Italian garden-magic, knows vaguely that the enchantment exists; that he has been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more enduring, more intoxicating to every sense than the most elaborate and glowing effects of modern horticulture; but he may not have found the key to the mystery. Is it because the sky is bluer, because the vegetation is more luxuriant?”
So begins Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), which followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). The novel’s success and Italian setting — as well as her work on an earlier volume, 1897’s The Decoration of Houses — caught the eye of an editor at Century magazine, who commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. She shipped out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely, as she had done since childhood on an almost annual basis — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy”.
When not villa-hopping, Wharton rubbed shoulders with the countesses Papafava of Padua and Maria Pasolini of Rome, and rode in her first motor car. “In a thin spring dress, a sailor hat balanced on my chignon, and a two-inch tulle veil over my nose, I climbed proudly to my perch, and off we tore across the Campagna”. By March 18, she could report to her editor that she had already taken “innumerable photographs” and made notes on no less than twenty-six villas, “many unknown or almost inaccessible, & I hope to do nearly as many more in the next month.” She ends her letter tactfully, economically, asking for a 33 percent raise. “All this has increased our expenses considerably—especially, of course, I mean, the trips to out of the way towns & the long drives—& though you may think such investigations are unnecessary for the magazine articles, you will appreciate, I am sure, how much they will add to the value & importance of the book.”
She wasn’t wrong: Italian Villas and their Gardens analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions by the American painter Maxfield Parrish (featured in our gallery below), which Wharton’s text was designed, in part, to accompany. The volume itself is enchanting — its cover inlaid with gold tablature, the images veiled by protective layers of engraved velum. Across these pages, we encounter familiar landscapes — Villa d’Este and the Boboli Gardens, the Mannerist Medici villa and the abutting Borghese park — but Wharton layers architectural history with fine-grain description, and fresh impressions germinate from this well-turned loam. The grounds at Villa Albani in Rome are “laid out in formal quincunxes of clipped ilex”, its gardens “seem to have been decorated by an archaeologist rather than an artist”. She is particularly sensitive to weightiness: the famous water theater at the Villa Aldobrandini is “a heavy and uninspired production”; a portico built under the direction of Winckelmann exhibits “the heavy touch of that neo-Grecianism which was to crush the life out of eighteen-century art”. While Parrish’s images were widely praised, some critics were dispirited by Wharton’s tone, claiming she was “almost too impartial in her appreciation”. A few Century editors agreed, calling the sister articles “too dry and technical”. They asked Wharton to liven things up; her reply was curt. If they wanted “sentimental and anecdotal commentaries”, she would gladly annul her contract. All of her articles subsequently appeared.
The book remained one of Wharton’s favorite projects. In A Backward Glance, her 1934 autobiography, she writes: “I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue.”


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Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints (1855)
Text by Erica X Eisen
Feb 21, 2024

Legend has it that when the tremors of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake had finally subsided, there were so many dead that survivors were forced to carry their loved ones’ bodies away in sacks of coal and sake barrels. With much of the city having been built on reclaimed marshland — often using heavy, rigid materials — Japan’s capital was a sitting duck for what was then the worst natural disaster in living memory. As aftershocks continued to roil the city for weeks on end, even those whose houses had miraculously escaped collapse took to living in the streets rather than chance having the ceiling fall down around them as they slept.
All the same, these dramatic conditions did not prevent a new genre of artwork from flourishing amid the rubble: a type of woodblock print known as namazu-e. Rooted in a myth that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a great catfish (or namazu in Japanese), these prints typically feature one or more of the titular creatures being set upon by angry humans or subdued by the gods. Associations between catfish and natural disasters predate the 1855 earthquake, with popular tales relating how the Shintō deity Kashima kept seismic shifts in check by pinning down the fish’s head with a stone. (Other versions show the creature being trapped by a gourd, visually referencing an idiomatic expression related to accomplishing a seemingly impossible task.) But it was only in the aftermath of the Ansei Edo earthquake that the idea surged to prominence in Japanese visual culture. Hundreds of these prints were issued between when the earthquake struck Edo on November 11 and when the government issued an official ban in December of the same year. Within that narrow sliver of time, anonymous printmakers across Edo — themselves still reeling from the calamity — managed to produce a truly remarkable range of images within the confines of the genre. The namazu sprout human limbs; they are led around by the “reins” of their whiskers or served up as a meal. They visit Edo’s red-light district; they dress as swordsmen and sumō wrestlers. Purchasers would typically have displayed these prints in their homes (or what was left of them), where the images acted as protective charms casting their apotropaic power over the building and those who inhabited it.
What is perhaps most striking about these post-earthquake prints is the incongruity between the devastation wrought by the disaster and the emotional tenor of the images that symbolically depict it. Walleyed, their mouths stretched into toothy grins, the catfish seem unbothered by the chaos they leave in their wake — and oblivious to the mob that sets about bashing and slicing them along the way. As a genre, namazu-e prints refuse the mournfulness one might expect, instead embracing an anarchic sense of humor that transforms the unpredictable ferocity of the natural world into an almost loveable — and ultimately placable — rascal.
While many histories of the Ansei Edo earthquake have emphasized its disproportionate impact on the city’s poor, the scholar Gregory Smits writes that the actual data is not so clearcut. Jōtō Sanjin, who published a written account of a walk he took in the aftermath of the earthquake, describes the wealthy area of Daimyō kōjō (Lords’ Lane) as being not only flattened but burnt over — many of the aristocratic manors having contained stores of imported saltpeter. If certain upper-class districts were particularly hard hit, by contrast, commoners across various professions stood to benefit both from the widespread rebuilding projects and aid monies splashed out by a central government anxious to head off potential discontent (natural disasters being commonly read as signs of cosmic discontent with the powers that be). This itself would become a favored theme of namazu-e artists, who satirically depicted firefighters, builders, and the like praying for earthquakes out of selfish greed. Here is another attempt to take what might be moments of profound rupture and reconcile them with familiar schemas: the avarice of our fellow mortals, not the apathy of the gods, is ultimately to blame for the calamities that befall us all.
It is the socially leveling aspect of the earthquake’s impact that is to account, at least in part, for the celebratory spirit that characterizes so many of the prints created in the weeks following the disaster. In one memorable example, a catfish commits seppuku, only to have money spill out of the slash in his belly instead of blood. In another, the artist has endowed the catfish with a whale-like blowhole out of which it expels a shower of coins, to the delight of onlookers on the shore. In this subgenre of namazu-e, writes Smits, the fish are imagined as forces of yo-naoshi, or world-rectification, restoring balance to society by redistributing wealth hoarded by the rich. Beneath the rubble of the old world, a new and fairer one perhaps lay waiting — for those willing and able to bring it into being.
The following examples of namazu-e come from a collection titled “Ansei ōjishin-e” (Ansei Great Earthquake Pictures), courtesy of Japan’s National Diet Library. The artist names are unknown as most of these catfish prints were published illegally and without artist signatures to evade censorship from the shogunate.
Note: The English versions of the titles are by machine translation and so likely far from perfect.

author: Erica X Eisen


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I Also Am Formed Out of the Clay: Animated Putty (1911)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Mar 5, 2024

Decades before Gumby rode Pokey and Wallace petted Gromit, tendrils of clay writhed with agency on a dim screen. Ernst Haeckel once fantasized about Urschleim, a kind of primeval sludge from which all biological beings arose; Animated Putty (1911), considered Britain’s first stop-motion clay animation film, imagines a pliable material giving rise to manifold forms. While the substance used is likely synthetic — as is the case in almost all “clay” animation — the putty seems to gather associations from its medium’s tellurian precursor. An inverted plant pot, devolving back into raw materiality, expels nuggets of clay from its drainage hole, which roll themselves into a primitive snake, and then an eagle’s face. After a rose unfurls from the stuff of earthenware, a windmill raises itself into existence. Next comes a beautiful woman with flowers in her hair. When we blink, her visage dissolves into a demon, which spawns lesser imps from its mouth. It begins to resemble a primordial story, like clay is a primordial substance: an unformed orb evolves into a child’s face and the cycle begins again, with each new viewing.
The pure expressiveness of Animated Putty, absent of any artist’s visible hand — plasticity giving rise to spontaneous orders of ideas — feels indebted to older traditions of imagining the animate: Galatea and Pygmalion; Pinocchio and Geppetto; golems brought to life from inanimate clay, who subsequently escape their animator’s yoke. In this trick film’s seemingly spontaneous generation, however, we catch sight of animation’s depersonalized artistry, recalling James Joyce’s description of the artist who, “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (Or here, cleaning the clay embedded under his nails.) Directed by Walter R. Booth, a magician whose pivot to cinema we’ve featured before, Animated Putty (as well as 1909’s Animated Cotton) were collaborations with the naturalist, nature documentarian, microphotograph enthusiast, and animator F. Percy Smith. It is perhaps Smith’s belief in the transformative power of attention that vitalizes Animated Putty. When asked by a colleague about techniques for pest control in her infested barn, he once (rather unhelpfully) replied: “If I think anything is a pest, I make a film about it; then it becomes beautiful.”


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Lithographs from Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s Java-Album (1854)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Feb 13, 2024

Java-Album was printed from drawings by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn to accompany a four-volume travelogue about his expeditions in the Dutch East Indies, published in 1854. The images were printed at great trouble — eleven color lithograph plates, with a twelfth tipped in as frontispiece to Volume 1— but they were not, by all accounts, appreciated by Junghuhn’s readers. Whereas the writing was judged literary, exuberant, and melodic, the renderings, as one critic wrote, “ha[ve] a hardness that makes the landscape look unnatural”. The sensuousness of Junghuhn’s prose apparently made his pictures feel sterile.
Born in Prussia in 1809, Junghuhn was one of those nineteenth-century polymaths whose name is trailed by a blitz of professions: geographer, linguist, botanist, volcanologist, physician, quinine farmer, mountaineer, cartographer, and “Java’s Humboldt”. He did not admire very many people (in fact, he did not like very many people), but the naturalist Alexander Humboldt was an exception, and this moniker would have pleased him.
Junghuhn arrived in Batavia (now Jakarta) around 1835 as a young man. He’d been forced by his father to study medicine, but then life stalled when he was jailed for fighting a duel. He escaped prison after a year and half, fled to France and joined the French Legion, but was discharged shortly after as unfit. Employment with the Dutch colonial government apparently had a low bar for entry. Junghuhn was hired as a doctor, though he proved a misanthrope without much aptitude for doctoring. After a few years, his superiors asked if perhaps he’d like to explore the mountainous interior of Java, which had never been mapped.
Any other European transplant would have thought this task too dangerous to merit consideration. The area was known as a roiling terrain of great heights and active volcanoes. Even the urban areas of the Dutch East Indies were considered life-threatening to Europeans, who were slow to acclimatize to the relative heat and humidity, especially when they clung to their Western dress. Junghuhn himself published an article claiming that within eight years of arrival, 90% of Europeans were either dead or sick. (Racist fears of miscegenation were not deeply buried; stay in your climate also meant stay with your race.) Add to the volcanoes and heat various storybook animals: crocodiles, wild pigs, monkeys, rhinoceroses, and scorpions — all which obsessed and terrified the Europeans. Tigers were so plentiful they prowled public plazas. Batavia may have been called “Jewel of Asia” and “Queen of the East”, but it was also called “Europeans’ Graveyard”.
Junghuhn, however, defiant and bristly by nature, decided that the expedition was a perfect assignment. He traveled for about twenty months, and despite many near-death experiences, rapturously enjoyed his time. In fact, he felt more contentment than he’d ever experienced before — his people weren’t people, it turned out, they were trees. Junghuhn wrote his travelogue after returning to Europe, though the drawings he claimed to have produced and colored in situ.
The vantage point of each is insistently high. Junghuhn’s affection for the aerial view, which he called the “instructive vista”, was born of many factors, including philosophical prerogative. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, he privileged the eye as the best teacher of all — better than books, better than tutors, better than hands. But also, he judged the elevated mountain climate more pleasant, the major flora more dignified, and the cultural traditions more refined than at lower elevations. (Tengger, Sumatran, and Sundanese villages were higher than those of the Javanese, who lived near sea level, and for whom Junghuhn had total contempt.) The Hindu Sundanese, for instance, surrounded their villages with tall hedges of bamboo, which Junghuhn found charming; the volcano they worshiped, the nearby Bromo, struck him as deserving of worship. Junghuhn came to the conclusion that height truly does equal greatness, and mapped his preferences accordingly. One could predict his fondness for specific plants, animals, and humans based on their level of elevation.  ※※Indexed under…ElevationFondness for plants and people based on
As the drawings show, the Dutch had already introduced the cultivation system in 1830, according to which Java’s lands were planted with cash crops that made a fortune for the colonial state by exploiting and starving the locals. Junghuhn’s mapping project was very much an arm of colonialist power, though he criticized the cultivation system loudly enough that he was reprimanded by the Governor-General. He also advocated socialism, and thought Christians shouldn’t be allowed to proselytize. One scholar describes him as “this most uncolonial of colonials”.
The critic who thought Junghuhn’s drawings “unnatural” and “hard” is not incorrect, but perhaps Junghuhn wasn’t aiming for naturalness. It’s possible that Java-Album’s stylized sterility was a deliberate effort to counter his audience’s assumptions that tropical landscapes are fetid, chaotic, uncontrollably profuse.
Nonetheless, Junghuhn takes many liberties. The volcanoes are tamed, the farming terraces spaced like lines on a ruler, the moss tendrils delineated. There is no indication that this place has a smell, or a temperature. Junghuhn presents the mountain Gamping as pristine, even though its limestone was being rapaciously mined, and he sets humans at the edges as if to indicate scale, not because this is their home.
Most conspicuous of all is the absence of fog: apparently ubiquitous in the areas where Junghuhn was traveling, it never appears in his pictures. He includes a few disciplined puffs of steam and a few billowy clouds, but absent entirely is the misty vapor that, on any given day, would have prevented Junghuhn from seeing clearly.
Find ten of Java-Album’s lithographs, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, below. The eleventh image (of Mount Merapi) seems to be missing from their collection, so we have used an image held by Leiden University Library, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, instead.

author: Sasha Archibald


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Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Occult Chemistry (1908)
Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Apr 16, 2024

“Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” So wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction”, collected in The Common Reader (1925).
It is meant as advice to novelists, but this quotation may also be a squib directed at the prominent theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater who were doing exactly this. Their findings were presented in an illustrated book, Occult Chemistry, first published in 1908, although their investigative project continued for many more years, with subsequent editions appearing into the 1930s. “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”, they concluded. “It is formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This is, to say the least, an unorthodox view of chemistry, which is in some ways the least mysterious of sciences.
Besant was born in 1847. Around 1871, she rejected her previously devout Christianity, separated from her clergyman husband, became a freethinker, matriculated for a science degree at London University, but did not take it, advocated for birth control, and then joined the Fabians. In 1888, she turned to theosophy, moved to India, translated the Bhagavad Gita, and joined the Indian National Congress and the campaign for Indian self-government. Theosophy began as a late Victorian spiritualist movement which held that the nature of things is deeper than can be discovered by empirical science. In Besant’s own definition, “It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the Divinity whose life he shares.”
Leadbeater, born in 1854, turned to theosophy having served as an Anglican priest and became a prolific author of the movement’s books and pamphlets. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “an observant traveller on the astral plane”. He met Besant in 1894, and the two began their chemical observations almost immediately. Leadbeater used his clairvoyant talents, while Besant, with her scientific inclination, made sure that they followed a respectable methodology. Their first book together, though, was a psychological exploration called Thought-Forms (1901), which depicted experiences and feelings, such as varieties of love and anger, in coloured diagrams resembling abstract art.
Their chemical method was — conveniently perhaps — “unique and difficult to explain”. Its clairvoyant aspect was based on a Yoga principle that one can reduce one’s self-conception to minute proportions so that very small objects appear large. The observer then simply draws what he sees on paper and his commentary may be taken down by a stenographer. It is much like somebody using a microscope and, in the view of its adherents, no less objective. Transcripts of the dialogue between Leadbeater and their illustrator, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, which were included in Occult Chemistry, display admirable frankness during these observation sessions, but do not really explain much more.
Besant and Leadbeater’s investigations in Occult Chemistry begin with “four gases in the air” — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and “a fourth gas (atomic weight=3) so far not discovered by chemists.” These were the simplest elements. As the atomic number increased, so did their geometric complexity of the atoms. Sodium, for example, was “composed of an upper part, divisible into a globe and 12 funnels, a lower part, similarly divided; and a connecting rod.” The atoms were duly grouped, not as in the periodic table (which is organized according to atomic number and reveals different elements’ related chemical properties), but according to overall shapes: spikes, dumbbell, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, crossed bases, and star. Thus, boron, nitrogen, and vanadium, for example — elements with little in common chemically — all “have six funnels opening on the six faces of a cube”.
Even the simplest element, hydrogen, was found to comprise eighteen units, which they called anu, in reference to the indivisible in Jain metaphysics. As the work progressed, Besant and Leadbeater “found” new elements, such as “meta-neon” and “platinum A” with positions intermediate between the established elements, and began to include simple compounds such as copper sulphate and benzene. In water, “The Oxygen double snake retains its individuality, as indeed it usually does, while the two Hydrogen atoms arrange themselves around it.”
Although Besant’s and Leadbeater’s science is clearly misguided, their interest was obviously sincere, and their labour fairly exhaustive. At a time when there was no other means of “seeing” atoms, what is truly remarkable is that their visualizations so closely resemble those developed later by chemists relying on Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure from 1913 and laws of quantum mechanics not worked out until the 1920s. The cloudlike volumes known as atomic orbitals within which the electrons of an atom may circulate around its nucleus are today visualized as fuzzy-edged spheres, dumbbells and doughnut rings.

author: Hugh Aldersey-Williams


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The Age of Impoliteness: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners (1774 edition)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 27, 2024

In the 1770s, a contagion was sweeping England and women were in danger: the danger of “contracting habits entirely opposite to their natural delicacy”. Take Belinda, for example, who after dinner, equipped with a linen napkin, “rummages the most remote cavities of her mouth and gums”, all the while thinking this behavior reflects “an infallible mark of her familiarity with the bon ton of fashionable life.” The contagious disease of bad manners did not discriminate by sex, however. It also infected fathers, with their eighteenth-century dad jokes: the man who “render[s] his whole family miserable, by making them dependent on his humour or caprice”. It corrupted the man-spreading public schoolboy, who, when in coffeehouses amid the public, “spreads himself before the chimney, and ‘gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air’”. Inoculation was possible, and the vaccine came in book form: a 1558 treatise by Giovanni della Casa, newly translated and prefaced by Richard Graves (who wrote the words above) in 1774: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners.
Il Galateo, as it is known in Italian, had been making waves in England for centuries by the time this edition was released. The work — first translated into English in 1576 by Henry Peterson — was immediately taken up by young Oxbridge scholars, who wanted to ditch their reading lists for practical knowledge that would serve them at the Elizabethan court. Gabriel Harvey, for example, in a 1580 letter to Edmund Spenser, reports what Cantabs were clandestinely consuming in their sets: “Machiavell a great man: Castilio of no small reputation, Galateo and Guazzo never so happy.” It makes sense that a new translation would be needed in the late-eighteenth century, an era marked by unprecedented mobility. The nascent Industrial Revolution created a burgeoning middle class of merchants and employees who found themselves attempting to ascend the greased rungs of an increasingly nuanced social hierarchy. The Earl of Chesterfield described the situation four years after Graves’ translation of Galateo hit bookshelves: “An aukward country fellow, when he comes into company better than himself, is exceedingly disconcerted. He knows not what to do with his hands, or his hat”. Unlike bloodlines, however, good behavior can be aped, and the popularity of etiquette books in this period — not to mention the rise of the novel — speaks not only to a desire for pecuniary emulation but also social mimicry.
The takeaway from Galateo is simple — politeness is the art of pleasing others. Some examples of virtuous behavior are easy to enact. Well-bred men neither take “monstrous strides” nor let their hands “hang dangling down”. Indecent and improper men make a habit of “thrusting their hands into their bosoms, or handling any part of their persons which is usually covered”. Loud and messy sneezers were as detested in Della Casa’s time as our own, those people who deign to “sputter in the very faces of those that sit near them”. Spittle, the public paring of fingernails, and flatulence are held in eternally low esteem. Pages are devoted to table manners. Toothpicks make one look “like a bird going to build his nest”; only “inn-keepers and parasites” express great pleasure when consuming food and wine. Other examples are less accessible, such as the prohibition on smelling anything you intend to eat or drink. One emergent theme is a kind of social prophylaxis for the sensorium. The politest personages in Galateo are those that keep the mouth, ears, and eyes free of offensive stimulus — protecting their own bodies and those of their peers. The motif is taken to ends that seem initially odd, at least to the modern-day reader, who is told that it is rude to peruse personal correspondence in front of guests. The logic makes sense, however, for one should never portray themselves as bored, idle, or distracted in the company of others: the affront of an acquaintance checking text messages over drinks predates smartphones by several centuries, it seems. ※※Indexed under…HandsEtiquette involving
In addition to prohibitions of the body, there are dicta regarding the spirit. Men must not be too “thoughtful” — “wrapt up in your own reflections” — or exceedingly sensitive, for to socialize with the latter kind of person is like being “surrounded with the finest glass ware; to which the slightest stroke may be fatal”. Discussing dreams is boorish, for most people are not “wise men amongst the ancients” but see only “trifling and frivolous” images thrown against the screen of sleep. Lying is bad. Arrogance is bad. Gossip should be reined in by a government of the tongue. No one ever wants unsolicited advice. People who subject others to “jingling puns” mistake wit for the shopworn speech of the low and vulgar. A prostitute should never be described as such — “an immodest woman” will do just fine. Galateo ends with a bit of rhetoric that evinces its author’s grace and manners: “because each of the particulars hitherto mentioned is marked but with a slight degree of error, therefore there can be no great harm in neglecting the whole”. What could be more gauche than instructing a stranger how to act?
Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556) was a Florentine humanist and cleric, born into mercantile wealth with aristocratic origins. After a libertine youth in which he penned obscene poems, he leveraged family connections, which trumped his shaky religious convictions, and found himself appointed Archbishop of Benevento. Initially angling after a cardinalate, the change of papal regime led Della Casa to take retirement, living “in tranquility, rest, and idleness amongst my books”. Here he set about composing, among other texts, what we now would call an etiquette manual, addressed to a young nobleman. Written between 1552 and 1555, Il Galateo was completed just a year before his death. In the months of his final decline, Della Casa asked a nephew to incinerate his compositions, but — thanks again to a network of family and friends — Il Galateo was published posthumously, seeing French, Spanish, German, and Latin editions circulating before the century’s turn, and dozens of others since. The work’s subsequent influence was so great that it inspired envy and impolite admonishments from other writers: Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy wonders how Della Casa managed to compose such a work — spending, as he did, “the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers”.
For another Italian book of manners from the sixteenth century, see our post on Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528).