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Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art (1853)

Mar 10, 2020

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


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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Bed Series: An Intimate Look Behind the Scenes at a Paris Brothel (1890s)

Apr 21, 2020

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

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Henrique Alvim Corrêa’s Illustrations for The War of the Worlds (1906)

May 5, 2020

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


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Urania’s Mirror; or, a View of the Heavens (circa 1825)

Dec 10, 2019

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


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Sarah Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed (1828)

Feb 5, 2020

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


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Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron (ca. 1353)

Apr 15, 2020

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


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The Expressions of Emotion in the Pigeons (1909–11)

Apr 30, 2020

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


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Edouard Joseph d’Alton’s Illustrations of Animal Skeletons (1821–1838)

Mar 4, 2020

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


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John Gould’s Mammals of Australia (1845–63)

Jan 23, 2020

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


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Richard Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855)

Mar 24, 2020

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


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Glossary of Censored Words from a 1919 Treatise on Love

Feb 13, 2020

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


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Plague Doctor Costumes

Mar 17, 2020

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


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Adalbert Stifter’s Rock Crystal (1846)

Dec 22, 2019

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


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London's Dreadful Visitation: A Year of Weekly Death Statistics during the Great Plague (1665)

Mar 26, 2020

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


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Japanese Firemen’s Coats (19th century)

Feb 18, 2020

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


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Coughs, Sneezes, and Jet-Propelled Germs: Two Public Service Films by Richard Massingham (1945)

Mar 5, 2020

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


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Olympic Diving Diagrams (1912)

Aug 11, 2012

Diagrams showing the trajectory of the major dives as performed at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.


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Cleopatra (1912)

Jul 18, 2012

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


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An Exact and Authentic Narrative of the 2nd Baltimore Riot (1812)

Jul 27, 2012

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


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Leo Tolstoy´s Fables for Children (1904)

Aug 7, 2012

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


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Fashion Parade amongst the Ruins of Rome (1964)

Jul 10, 2012

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


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Winners in the Fifth Olympiad (1912)

Aug 3, 2012

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


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The life and death of Mr. Badman presented to the world in a familiar dialogue between Mr. Wiseman and Mr. Attentive (1900 edition)

Jul 24, 2012

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


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Manuscript of Ismail al-Jazarī’s Ingenious Mechanical Devices (ca. 17th century)

Jul 9, 2012

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


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Jack and Jill and old Dame Gill (1806)

Jul 31, 2012

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


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Aeolian Piano Rolls (1903)

Jul 20, 2012

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


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Photos of a Square Dance in McIntosh County, Oklahoma (1940)

Aug 1, 2012

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


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Kaishi Hen, an 18th Century Japanese anatomical atlas

Aug 6, 2012

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


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The Yama Yama Man - Ada Jones (1909)

Aug 2, 2012

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


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The Fifth Olympiad: the Official Report of the Olympic Games of Stockholm 1912

Aug 3, 2012

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


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The Celestial Atlas of Flamsteed (1795)

Jul 5, 2012

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


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Catalogue of the 68 Competitive Designs for the Great Tower for London (1890)
Text by Adam Green
Jul 16, 2012

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

author: Adam Green


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The Dodo and its Kindred (1848)

Jul 19, 2012

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


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Fancy Dresses Described or What to Wear at Fancy Balls (1887)

Jul 7, 2012

A comprehensive guide to all things fancy dress, with detailed descriptions of costume ideas, from the more abstract such as "Air", "Africa" "Dew" and "Five o Clock Tea", to the more specific in a "Moravian Pesant" and "Henry III of France".


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J. J. Grandville’s Illustrations from The Flowers Personified (1849)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 30, 2012

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

author: Hunter Dukes


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WW2 U.S. Soldier Drag Show (1942)

Jul 26, 2012

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


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Hortus Malabaricus (1678-1693)

Jul 13, 2012

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


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17th-century Heraldry Designs (1695)

Jul 23, 2012

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


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Rhyming Drugstore Advertisements (1885)

Jul 17, 2012

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


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Remembrance of Teams Past

Aug 8, 2012

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


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Various Apocalyptic Scenes from the Prophetic Messenger (ca. 1827–61)

Oct 23, 2019

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


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“Firelight Flickering on the Ceiling of the World”: The Aurora Borealis in Art

Dec 5, 2019

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


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The Golfer’s Rubáiyát and other 20th-Century Parodies

Jul 24, 2019

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


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Dorothy Wordsworth’s Journal of a Few Months’ Residence in Portugal (1847)

Oct 29, 2019

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