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Phantom Bouquets: Two Books on the Art of Skeleton Leaves (1864)
Text by Elaine Ayers
Sep 6, 2022

These two short treatises, both published in 1864, detail the art of producing “phantom flowers”: snow-white bouquets of leaves and seeds reduced to their very veins. Part of a legacy of attempts to preserve fragile plants long beyond their lifespans — from Anna Atkins’ iconic cyanotypes to the tradition of drying herbarium specimens — scientists and artists have worked for centuries to capture floral ephemerality. Stemming from much older East Asian techniques for “skeletonizing” plants, first fully described in Europe by Dutch anatomist Frederick Ruysch, the “phantom” process of putrefaction, flesh removal, and chemical bleaching rivaled early modern anatomical practices in its complexity. Skeletonization crossed the Atlantic in the 1860s, quickly taking hold of a primarily American female public intent on combining the arts and sciences into displays of taste driven by a growing fervor for natural history.
Making phantom flowers took an enormous amount of intricate skill — an art which, to some, “seemed designed for female hands exclusively”. After collection, leaves would be covered in hot water and stored in sunlight for roughly a month, until the rotted tissue could be carefully removed with fingers or a soft artist’s brush. These skeletonized leaves were then bleached using a sensitive chemical solution of chloride or lime, dried, and mounted either upright under a glass cloche or flat in a frame. Rarely exhibited on their own, the finest phantom flowers were grouped together into nearly translucent bouquets, where any imperfections could be artfully hidden away.
The finished objects resembled “perfectly bleached artificial lace-work or exquisite carvings in ivory”, and were described as revelatory, even religious. Observing the full process from decay to ever-lasting beauty was to “lift the soul from groveling things up to the regions of poetry and of love”, thought Edward Parrish, author of The Phantom Bouquet (1864). Calling skeleton leaves an “emblem of Resurrection”, the anonymous author of Phantom Flowers (1864) exemplifies the broader religious undercurrents driving nature for so many nineteenth-century readers. Creating these arrangements was to watch leaves transform, Christlike, from “corruption” to their “final and perfect beauty”.
Designed primarily by and for women, phantom flowers fit into a growing trend of arranging natural specimens for display in the upper- or middle-class home, as Victorian parlors filled with taxidermied insects, delicate seaweed albums, and even miniature aquaria. Unlike scientific societies or public lecture halls, private parlors offered one of the few spaces where women could gather to discuss the newest discoveries in natural history. Reflective of their owner’s taste, education, worldliness, and observational skills, the parlor was an ideal environment for rare phantom flora to hold centerstage. The commercial value of these mounted bouquets is carefully buried in the depths of the treatises. Despite introducing the art as a process that would contribute directly to a woman’s botanical expertise, laying bare “the admirable laws which govern” the natural world, the author of Phantom Flowers admits that “to American minds especially”, the primary question readers might ask is: “Will it pay?”
Here, then, is the conundrum underlying the production of artful specimens so characteristic of Victorian parlor displays. While these authors underscored the scientific, aesthetic, and even religious nature of working with plants in such intimate, embodied ways, these objects were never far removed from the commercial and colonial realms of Victorian Britain and America. Perhaps paradoxically, the trend died out quickly. Phantom flowers have, for the most part, become rare ghosts of the nineteenth century. Attempting to preserve ephemeral floral beauty for eternity, these objects now largely exist as skeletons of the past, an experiment in preservation that did not last.
You can browse a selection of skeleton leaves shown in the two volumes below, and similar specimens arranged as picture frames in another post of ours on a set from the Library of Congress. For a detailed look at the process itself, see this British Pathé film from 1932.


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Peter Fabris’ Illustrations for William Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei (1776–79)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 6, 2022

A British diplomat serving as Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, William Hamilton (1730–1803) spent a large part of his life in Naples — observing volcanic activity, collecting antiquities, and shepherding adventurous travelers, including kings and queens, to the summit of magma-rich mountains. Present for the eruptions of Mount Vesuvius during the mid-to-late eighteenth century, Hamilton wrote Campi Phlegraei in two parts, with a tertiary supplement, based on his Observations on Mount Vesuvius (1772) for the Royal Society. Composed as a bilingual French and English edition, the work is a notable watershed in volcanology, trading biblically-inflected narratives of catastrophe and creation for precise observational description. To illustrate these volumes in a manner true to his approach, Hamilton recruited the English-born Neapolitan artist Peter Fabris, otherwise known for his paintings of the city’s “pulsating street life — with sellers of melons, cooked apples, corn, truffles and fried pastries”, writes Robert Holland. Hamilton charged Fabris to paint with “the utmost fidelity”, making sure “each stratum is presented in its proper colours”, and fifty-nine of the resultant gouaches were engraved and hand-colored to accompany Campi Phlegraei (literally, the flaming or fiery fields, named after the area west of Naples). In curator and writer James Hamilton’s assessment, Fabris “revolutionized the art of the volcano, and changed our ways of seeing them”.
The illustrations progress from macro- to microscopic worlds as we traverse the volumes. Detailed renderings of tufa, scoriae, and pumice follow from nocturnal landscapes lit by brimstone and fire, winter scenes with smoke pluming through snow. Although engaged with late-Romantic reimaginings of the pastoral, picturesque, and sublime, Fabris seems almost able to dissolve aesthetic history in his landscapes by foregrounding an enduring wonder for the unstable geological processes beneath our feet — capturing the awe of those moments when bedrock becomes anything but. In two complementary images, recording the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779 during day and night, the volcano sprays tephra and lava like a monstrous Roman candle, while figures appear to dance and prostrate in joy or agony across an illuminated bay.
Of course, this had all happened before. In 79 CE, a seventeen-year-old Pliny the Younger looked up from his writings, gazing across the Bay of Naples, and noticed what seemed to be an odd cloud formation, like “an umbrella pine” atop Vesuvius’ peaks. At times “it looked light colored”, he noticed during the course of his observation, and “sometimes it looked mottled and dirty with the earth and ash it had carried up”. He informed his uncle, Pliny the Elder, who, emboldened by scholarly fascination and an impending sense of catastrophe, summoned a fleet of quadriremes. As “tall broad flames blazed from several places on Vesuvius”, the Elder uttered fortune favors the brave and then set sail into a coruscating dark, calming his shipmates by assuring them that the inferno was merely a bonfire set by peasants without the means of extinguishment. This history and the story of what happened next stems from a sole surviving eyewitness account: the nephew narrating his uncle’s demise. In two letters written to Tacitus twenty-five years after the event, Pliny the Younger describes with lasting terror Pompeii’s burial beneath pyroclastic flows. “Then we saw the sea sucked back, apparently by an earthquake, and many sea creatures were left stranded on the dry sand. From the other direction over the land, a dreadful black cloud was torn by gushing flames and great tongues of fire like much-magnified lightning. . . . We were amazed by what we saw, because everything had changed and was buried deep in ash like snow.”
Visiting Vesuvius in the late 1700s was to encounter a past made newly palpable. The cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum had begun to be exhumed from their ashen limbo. And after a period of relative peace since 1767, Vesuvius awoke once again, bubbling with various degrees of activity between 1770–1779 and 1783–1794. As young British gentlemen capped their education through tours across Europe’s classical landmarks, perhaps with a copy of Edmund Burke in tow, they often sought sublimity on the slopes of the volcano and were sometimes guided by Hamilton. “In many ways more authentic than other stops along the Grand Tour” — writes Noam Andrews in an article about Hamilton’s “love affair with Vesuvius” — “this site was alive: visitors could revel in the volcano's sublimity, cautiously witnessing occasional spurts of pre-catastrophe”.
You can browse a selection of Fabris’ illustrations, courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, below, and a rare, complete set of the Campi Phlegraei volumes, held by the Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

source: public-domain-review

author: Hunter Dukes

type: collection

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


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The Dream of Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland, California (1924)

Jan 29, 2012

In 1924 California's Tribune-American newspaper ran a competition for its readers to write in with their most unusual dreams and the winning entry was made into a short film. This is Mrs L.L. Nicholson from Oakland's dream of losing her baby, rowing across San Francisco Bay, picking up some fish, and eventually discovering her lost child in a most unusual place and in trouble with the law.
Internet Archive user "kingwaylon" has added a nice homemade soundtrack to this version here.


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Uriah Jewett and the Sea Serpent of Lake Memphemagog (1917)

Dec 1, 2011

A very curious little book concerning a poet named Uriah Jewett, a sea serpent, the disappearance of a cheat named Hoyt, and the possible illegitimate child of Prince Arthur born in the forests of Canada.


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The Daddy Long Legs of Brighton

Dec 8, 2011

The Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway was a unique coastline railway in Brighton, England that ran through the shallow waters of the English Channel between 1896 and 1901. Magnus Volk, its owner, designer and engineer, had already been successful with the more conventional Volk's Electric Railway, which had then not been extended east of Paston Place. Facing unfavourable geography, Volk decided to construct a line through the surf from a pier at Paston Place to one at Rottingdean. The tracks were laid on concrete sleepers mortised into the bedrock, and the single car used on the railway, a huge pier-like building which stood on four 23 ft (7.0 m)-long legs, was propelled by electric motor. It was officially named Pioneer, but many called it Daddy Long-Legs. Construction took two years from 1894 to 1896. The railway officially opened 28 November 1896, but was nearly destroyed by a storm the night of 4 December. Volk immediately set to rebuilding the railway including the Pioneer, which had been knocked on its side, and it reopened in July 1897. In 1900 the council decided to build a beach protection barrier, which unfortunately required Volk to divert his line around the barrier. Without funds to do so, Volk closed the railway. A model of the railway car is on display (along with a poster for the railway) in the foyer of the Brighton Toy and Model Museum. (Text from Wikipedia)


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The Lost World (1925)

Jan 22, 2012

Silent film adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel of the same name. Directed by Harry O. Hoyt and featured pioneering stop motion special effects by Willis O'Brien (an invaluable warm up for his work on the original King Kong directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack).
In 1922, Conan Doyle showed O'Brien's test reel to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, which included Harry Houdini. The astounded audience watched footage of a Triceratops family, an attack by an Allosaurus and some Stegosaurus footage. Doyle refused to discuss the film's origins. On the next day, the New York Times ran a front page article about it, saying "(Conan Doyle’s) monsters of the ancient world, or of the new world which he has discovered in the ether, were extraordinarily lifelike. If fakes, they were masterpieces".
It is a film of many firsts: first film to be shown to airline passengers, in April 1925 on a London-Paris flight by the company Imperial Airways; first feature length film made in the United States, possibly the world, to feature model animation as the primary special effect, or stop motion animation in general; first dinosaur-oriented film hit, and it led to other dinosaur movies, from King Kong to the Jurassic Park trilogy.


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Yuletide Entertainments (1910)

Dec 22, 2011

Christmas recitations, monologues, drills, tableaux, motion songs, exercises, dialogues and plays, suitable for all ages. From the introduction: "It becomes more and more a part of Christmas gayety to present the legends, or the spirit of it, to the eye as well as the mind. For this purpose the following pages have been prepared in play and pantomime, songs and marches, drills and recitations. While the needs of adults have not been forgotten, those of the children have been most largely remembered, since Christmas is pre-eminently the children's festival. A word to those who take charge of such affairs may not be amiss. Precision of movement is the keynote of success for everything of this kind. This does not mean stiffness, but it does mean exactitude and certainty. Uncertain gestures in speaking; scattered attack and close in singing ; hesitation in acting ; and, more than all, careless motions and marching in the drills (corners not formed squarely, motions only half in unison, etc.) — all these are fatal to that success which makes such entertainments entertaining. Here, as everywhere else, "What is worth doing at all, is worth doing well."


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Edison reading Mary Had a Little Lamb (1927)

Feb 9, 2012

In this 1927 recording made by Thomas A. Edison at the Golden Jubilee of the Phonograph ceremony, he recalls the first words he spoke into the phonograph, a recital of the "Mary Had a Little Lamb" nursery rhyme. In his writings, Edison recounts further the 1878 recording:
I designed a little machine using a cylinder provided with grooves around the surface. Over this was to be placed tinfoil, which easily received and recorded the movements of the diaphragm ... Kruesi (the machinist), when he had nearly finished it, asked what it was for.
I told him I was going to record talking, and then have the machine talk back. He thought it absurd. However, it was finished, the foil was put on; I then shouted 'Mary had a little lamb,' etc. I adjusted the reproducer, and the machine reproduced it perfectly.
I was never so taken aback in my life. Everybody was astonished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.
This original recording was thought lost until scientists at the the University of California Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in collaboration with the Library of Congress had a go at recreating it using "optical imaging".


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Amundsen’s South Pole expedition

Dec 14, 2011

This wonderful set of photographs come from the pages of The South pole; an account of the Norwegian Antarctic expedition in the "Fram," 1910-1912, Roald Amundsen's account of his expedition which became the first to reach the South Pole on 14 December 1911, just five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott. Amundsen and his team returned safely to their base, and later learned that Scott and his four companions had died on their return journey. Amundsen's initial plans had focused on the Arctic and the conquest of the North Pole by means of an extended drift in an icebound ship. He obtained the use of Fridtjof Nansen's polar exploration ship Fram, and undertook extensive fundraising activities. Preparations for this expedition were disrupted when, in 1909, the rival American explorers Frederick Cook and Robert E. Peary each claimed to have reached the North Pole. Amundsen then changed his plan and began to prepare for a conquest of the South Pole; uncertain of the extent to which the public and his backers would support him, he kept this revised objective secret. When he set out in June 1910, even most of his crew believed they were embarking on an Arctic drift. Amundsen made his Antarctic base, "Framheim", in the Bay of Whales on the Great Ice Barrier. After months of preparation, depot-laying and a false start which ended in near-disaster, he and his party set out for the pole in October 1911. Although the expedition's success was widely applauded, the story of Scott's heroic failure overshadowed its achievement. For his decision to keep his true plans secret until the last moment, Amundsen was criticised for what some considered deception on his part. Recent polar historians have more fully recognised the skill and courage of Amundsen's party; the permanent scientific base at the pole bears his name, together with that of Scott. (Text based on Wikipedia)


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Gulliver’s Travels (1939)

Jan 22, 2012

1939 cel-animated Technicolor feature film directed by Dave Fleischer and produced by Max Fleischer for Fleischer Studios, based upon the Lilliputian adventures of Gulliver as depicted in Jonathan Swift's 18th century novel. Produced as an answer to the success of Walt Disney's box-office hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs of 1937, Gulliver was only the second cel-animated feature film ever released, and the first produced by an American studio other than Walt Disney Productions.


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Santa Claus Proves There is a Santa Claus (1925)

Dec 23, 2011

Santa Claus Proves There is a Santa Claus (with song "Christmas Comes But Once a Year") by Ernest Hare (1925). Hare's recording career began when he became Al Jolson's understudy in the Broadway musical Sinbad during 1919-20. He went onto record with the Cleartone Four, the Crescent Trio, the Harmonizers Quartet, and the Premier Quartet. He made a series recordings with Al Bernard in the late 1910s and the start of the 1920s. After he met Billy Jones in 1919, they went on to do numerous recordings together for Brunswick, Edison and most other major U.S. record companies of the era. They gained fame as "The Happiness Boys" and by 1928 they were the highest-paid singers in radio earning $1,250 a week.


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The Night Before Christmas (1905)

Dec 24, 2011

1905 version directed by Edwin S. Porter of the poem first published anonymously in 1823 and generally attributed to Clement Clarke Moore. Porter's version is the very first film adaptation of the famous tale. Musical accompaniment added later, made up mostly of old cylinder recordings from the same studio and period. (For silent version see here).


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James Joyce’s Chamber Music (1918 American Edition)

Feb 3, 2012

Collection of love poems by James Joyce, originally published by Elkin Matthews in May, 1907, the same year he refused Joyce's manuscript for Dubliners. Composed and revised between 1901 and 1906, the bulk of them were written for an imagined love, before he first 'stepped out' with his wife to be Nora in 16 June 1904. The title "Chamber Music" was reportedly a pun relating to the sound of urine tinkling in a chamber pot, though this seems to be a later embellishment by Joyce of the title's meaning. ※※Indexed under…Urinepun for James Joyce’s poetic tinklings
Joyce to Stannie, Feb 1907:
I don't like the book but wish it were published and be damned to it. However, it is a young man's book. I felt like that. It is not a book of love-verses at all, I perceive. But some of them are pretty enough to be put to music. I hope someone will do so, someone that knows old English music such as I like. Besides they are not pretentious and have a certain grace. I will keep a copy myself and (so far as I can remember) at the top of each page I will put an address, or a street so that when I open the book I can revisit the places where I wrote the different songs.
Joyce to Stannie, 11 Feb 1907:
I have certain ideas I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary...
Joyce to Stannie, April 1907, debating cancelling the book:
All that kind of thing is false... (Ellmann's paraphrase: ...insincerity and fakery... an ironic note to make them modern... essentially poems for lovers and he was no lover).
Joyce to Nora, 21 Aug 1909:
I like to think of you reading my verses (though it took you five years to find them out). When I wrote them I was a strange lonely boy, walking about by myself at night and thinking that some day a girl would love me. But I never could speak to the girls I used to meet at houses. Their false manners checked me at once. Then you came to me. You were not in a sense the girl for whom I had dreamed and written the verses you find now so enchanting. She was perhaps (as I saw her in my imagination) a girl fashioned into a curious grave beauty by the culture of generations before her, the woman for whom I wrote poems like 'Gentle lady' or 'Thou leanest to the shell of night'. But then I saw that the beauty of your soul outshone that of my verses. There was something in you higher than anything I had put into them. And for this reason the book of verses is for you. It holds the desire of my youth and you, darling, were the fulfilment of that desire.
In Nov 1909 Joyce had an elaborate handwritten copy bound as a Christmas present for Nora including this comment:
Perhaps this book I send you now will outlive both you and me. Perhaps the fingers of some young man or young girl (our children's children) may turn over its parchment leaves reverently when the two lovers whose initials are interlaced on the cover have long vanished from the earth. Nothing will remain then, dearest, of our poor human passion-driven bodies and who can say where the souls that looked on each other through their eyes will then be. I would pray that my soul be scattered in the wind if God would but let me blow softly for ever about one strange lonely dark-blue rain-drenched flower in a wild hedge at Aughrim or Oranmore.
Joyce to Gorman, 1931:
I wrote Chamber Music as a protest against myself.


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A Catalogue of Polish Bishops

Jan 12, 2012

The Catalogus Archiepiscoporum Gnesnensium Vitae episcoporum Cracoviensium (Catalogue of the Archbishops of Gniezno and Lives of the Bishops of Cracow) by Jan Długosz is a 16th century manuscript illuminated by Stanislaw Samostrzelnik between 1531-1535. Today it resides in the collection of the National Library in Warsaw.


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Mythical Monsters (1886)

Jan 14, 2012

An exploration into all beasts fabled, fabricated, fantastical, and fanciful, from across the world, including the Chinese and Japanese dragon, unicorn, phoenix, and the spate of sea serpents sighted off the nineteenth-century New England coast.


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Madame Tussaud’s Napoleon Relics, Pictures and Other Curiosities (1901)

Jan 23, 2012

Madame Tussaud's 1901 Catalogue of Napoleon Relics, Pictures and Other Works of Art and Curiosities. Although famous for her wax work models, the Madame Tussaud's exhibition also featured a weird and wonderful array of historical memorabilia, including: a scrap of the cravat Charles I wore on the morning of his execution; the shrunken head of a South American chief; the oriental costume of Richard Burton; and an incredible medley of Napoleonic relics including numerous carriages, a lock of his hair, the bedsheets of his death bed, and a strip of the willow tree under which he used to sit and was eventually buried when in exile.


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Presidents and Turkeys

Nov 24, 2011

Happy Thanksgiving!
The pictures below are from the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation, a ceremony that takes place at the White House every year at which The President of the United States is presented with a live turkey, usually of the Broad Breasted White variety. Since 1989, the first Thanksgiving of President George H. W. Bush, it has been official policy for the president to grant the turkey a "presidential pardon" and thus spare the bird from ending up on the dining table. On Nov. 19, 1963, just days before his assassination, John F Kennedy spontaneously spared a turkey but did not grant an official "pardon".


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The Enchanted Drawing (1900)

Nov 30, 2011

From Edison films catalog: "Upon a large sheet of white paper a cartoonist is seen at work rapidly sketching the portrait of an elderly gentleman of most comical feature and expression. After completing the likeness the artist rapidly draws on the paper a clever sketch of a bottle of wine and a goblet, and then, to the surprise of all, actually removes them from the paper on which they were drawn and pours actual wine out of the bottle into a real glass. Surprising effects quickly follow after this; and the numerous changes of expression which flit over the face in the sketch cause a vast amount of amusement and at the same time give a splendid illustration of the caricaturist's art." Musical accompaniment by Philip Carli.


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The Embalming Jars of Frederik Ruysch

Jan 24, 2012

Frederic Ruysch (1638-1731) was a Dutch botanist and anatomist, remembered mainly for his groundbreaking methods of anatomical preservation and the creation of his carefully arranged scenes incorporating human body parts. These remarkable 'still life' displays blurred the boundary between the demonstrative element of scientific preservation and the symbolic and allegorical of vanitas art. As well as his larger more elaborate anatomical displays (as seen above) he would also keep his specimens of limbs, fetuses and the carcasses of small animals carefully embalmed in individual glass jars. Offsetting the macabre contents he would create 'flowering' lids, decorating them with beads, fishes, shells, artificial flowers and lacy garments - the little scenes often echoing the life the jar's contents had once known. The images below are extracted from Ruysch's Thesaurus animalium primus (1710).


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Time-Lapse Demolition of the Star Theatre, New York (1902)

Jan 29, 2012

Time-lapse shot of the demolition of the Star Theatre in New York City, one brick at a time. Produced by American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and preserved by the Library of Congress.


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The Voice of Florence Nightingale

Dec 13, 2011

The recording was made on 30th July 1890 to raise money for the impoverished veterans of the Charge of the Light Brigade. The full transcript of the recording says: 'When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore. Florence Nightingale.' In fact, there are two recitations; this second one having slightly altered wording to the first, which was presumably a practice session.


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Labors of the Months from the Très Riches Heures

Feb 8, 2012

The Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (or simply the Très Riches Heures) is probably the most important illuminated manuscript of the 15th century, "le roi des manuscrits enluminés" ("the king of illuminated manuscripts"). It is a very richly decorated Book of Hours containing over 200 folios, of which about half are full page illustrations. It was painted sometime between 1412 and 1416 by the Limbourg brothers for their patron Jean, Duc de Berry. They left it unfinished at their (and the Duc's) death in 1416. Charles I, Duc de Savoie commissioned Jean Colombe to finish the paintings between 1485-1489. Featured here are the Labors of the Months, the section illustrating the various activities undertaken by the Duke's court and his peasants according to the month of the year. Most of the illustrations show one of the Duke's castles in the background, and each are accompanied by a sun carrying Phoebus beneath an archway depicting the appropriate zodiac signs. (Wikipedia)


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Whitney Brothers Quartet - The Little Red Drum (1908)

Jan 19, 2012

1908 song from the Whitney Brothers Quartet, putting to music "The Drum", a poem by Eugene Field about children playing a game of "Cowboys and Indians".
I’m a beautiful red, red drum,And I train with the soldier boys;As up the street we come,Wonderful is our noise!There’s Tom, and Jim, and Phil,And Dick, and Nat, and Fred,While Widow Cutler’s BillAnd I march on ahead,With a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd a tum-titty-um-tum-tum—Oh, there’s bushels of fun in thatFor boys with a little red drum!
The Injuns came last nightWhile the soldiers were abed,And they gobbled a Chinese kiteAnd off to the woods they fled!The woods are the cherry-treesDown in the orchard lot,And the soldiers are marching to seizeThe booty the Injuns got.With tum-titty-um-tum-tum,And r-r-rat-tat-tat,When soldiers marching comeInjuns had better scat!
Step up there, little Fred,And, Charley, have a mind!Jim is as far aheadAs you two are behind!Ready with gun and swordYour valorous work to do—Yonder the Injun hordeAre lying in wait for you.And their hearts go pitapatWhen they hear the soldiers comeWith a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd a tum-titty-um-tum-tum!
Course it’s all in play!The skulking Injun crewThat hustled the kite awayAre little white boys, like you!But “honest” or “just in fun,”It is all the same to me;And, when the battle is won,Home once again march weWith a r-r-rat-tat-tatAnd tum-titty-um-tum-tum;And there’s glory enough in thatFor the boys with their little red drum!


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Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936)

Dec 4, 2011

Considered by many to be the best film adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1886 novel of the same name, said by Polly Hovarth to be "the Harry Potter of his time"- starring Freddie Bartholomew, Dolores Costello, and C. Aubrey Smith. A nine-year-old Brooklyn boy living in poverty, moves to England to live with an aristocratic grandfather he's never known after he is told he's heir to a British earldom.


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Harry Clarke’s Illustrations for Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination (1919)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Jan 19, 2012

Since Edgar Allan Poe’s stories of suspense and horror were first compiled as Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1902, many gifted artists have tried their hand at illustrating them, notably Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and Gustave Dore. But perhaps it is the Irishman Harry Clarke who has come closest to evoking the delirious claustrophobia and frightening inventiveness of “Poe-land”. For the 1919 edition of Tales Clarke created the twenty-four monochrome images featured below. Their nightmarish, hallucinatory quality makes you wonder if he was on something, until you remember the stories.
A new iteration with eight colour plates was published in 1923. Calla Editions recently reprinted this second edition and gave it a sane price tag. You can learn more about the under-appreciated stained glass artist behind the mesmeric illustrations in our essay “Harry Clarke’s Looking Glass” by Kelly Sullivan.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


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Stella Maris (1918)

Dec 4, 2011

A 1918 silent film staring Mary Pickford, directed by Marshall Neilan, written by Frances Marion and based on William J. Locke's novel. Stella Maris, a beautiful, crippled girl, who is cared for by a rich family, and the orphan Unity Blake, fall in love with same man, John, who is still married to (though separated from) a cruel wife.


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Pirates (1922)

Aug 30, 2011

Published in 1922, based on the writings of Captain Charles Johnson from 1735, with additional foreword and illustrations from C.Lovat Fraser.


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Giambattista della Porta’s De humana physiognomonia libri IIII (1586)

Aug 30, 2011

Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615), also known as Giovanni Battista Della Porta and John Baptist Porta, was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples at the time of the Scientific Revolution and Reformation. These are pages from his book on physiognomy De humana physiognomonia libri IIII.


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Suddenly (1954)

Sep 17, 2011

Frank Sinatra stars as John Baron, a psychopathic killer, who along with two other men, has been hired to assassinate the President, and holds a family hostage while waiting for his target. It was long thought that Lee Harvey Oswald actually saw Suddenly on television in October 1963 (one month before the assassination of Kennedy), but an investigation of the claim eventually proved it to be untrue.


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Faust (1926)

Aug 26, 2011

F.W. Murnau's telling of the classic German legend, starring Gösta Ekman as Faust, Emil Jannings as Mephisto, Camilla Horn as Gretchen/Marguerite, Frida Richard as her mother, Wilhelm Dieterle as her brother and Yvette Guilbert as Marthe Schwerdtlein, her aunt. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic version. Considered by many to be his best film, outshining even his more well known "Nostferatu".
Download from Internet Archive
Note this film is in the public domain in the US, but may not be in other jurisdictions. Please check its status in your jurisdiction before re-using.


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The Mechanism of Human Physiognomy

Aug 19, 2011

Plates from Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne's 'Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine', published by Jules Renouard, Paris, in 1862. By applying electrodes to male and female volunteers, Duchenne was able to activate individual muscles in the face. He saw the human face as a map, the features of which could be codified into universal taxonomies of inner states, with each muscle representing a 'movement of the soul'. He listed 53 emotions that could be classified in terms of muscular action.


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Intolerance (1916)

Sep 4, 2011

Director D.W. Griffith is perhaps most know for his groundbreaking but controversial film Birth of Nations (1915), but his follow up Intolerance (1916) (which can be seen perhaps partly as a response to accusations of perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Klu Klux Klan in Birth of Nations) is considered by many to be his masterpiece, and indeed the greatest film of the whole silent era. Griffiths mammoth film, also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages.", consists of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrated mankind's intolerance during four different ages in world history. Intolerance was a colossal undertaking filled with monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and more than 3,000 extras.


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Scarlet Street (1945)

Aug 21, 2011

Widely regarded as one of Fritz Lang's best films, Scarlet Street is based on the French novel La Chienne (The Bitch) by Georges de La Fouchardière. Somewhere between film noir and black comedy, the plot revolves around a man in mid-life crisis who befriends a young woman whose fiancé persuades her to con him out of some of the fortune she thinks he has.


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Horse Laughs (1891)

Sep 13, 2011

Remarkably strange little book on account of much of the humour being lost over the passage of time - often resulting in surreal, if not somewhat disconcerting, little scenes.


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The Last American (1889)

Aug 19, 2011

Short future history novel from John Ames Mitchell (1845–1918). First published in 1889, it is the fictional journal of Persian admiral Khan-Li, who in the year 2951 rediscovers North America by sailing across the Atlantic.


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Antony’s Address Over The Body of Caesar (1914)

Aug 26, 2011

Marc Antony's famous speech from William Shakespeare's Tragedy of Julius Caesar, performed by Harry E. Humphrey in 1914.


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Never Weaken (1921)

Sep 4, 2011

American comedian Harold Lloyd's last short film before he moved permanently into feature-length production. It is one of his trademark "thrill" comedies, featuring him dangling from a tall building, `a technique which he was to perfect two years later in his classic Saftey First! from 1923. The plot revolves around his attempts to commit suicide after he finds out the woman he loves will marry another. Available also with an added soundtrack here.


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The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

Aug 21, 2011

Early Alfred Hitchcock film starring Ivor Novello, based on a story by Marie Belloc Lowndes and a play Who Is He? co-written by Belloc Lowndes, concerning the hunt for a serial killer in London. According to Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto the film is "the first time Hitchcock has revealed his psychological attraction to the association between sex and murder, between ecstasy and death." The film also features Hitchcock's first recognizable film cameo, something which was to become a standard practice for the remainder of his films.


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The Phantom of the Opera (1925)

Sep 17, 2011

First film adaptation, directed by Rupert Julian, of Gaston Leroux's novel. The film features Lon Chaney in the title role as the deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House, causing murder and mayhem in an attempt to force the management to make the woman he loves a star. It is most famous for Lon Chaney's intentionally horrific, self-applied make-up, which was kept a studio secret until the film's premiere.


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Trapeze Disrobing Act (1901)

Aug 21, 2011

A naughty little skit from 1901 filmed by the Edison company.


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Space Colony Art from the 1970s

Aug 23, 2011

In “The Colonization of Space”, his 1974 essay for Physics Today, Princeton professor of physics Gerard K. O’Neill (1927–1992) wrote that the key for extraterrestrial habitation is “to treat the region beyond Earth not as a void but as a culture medium, rich in matter and energy”. Were construction to commence shortly, he predicted “nearly all our industrial activity could be moved away from Earth’s fragile biosphere within less than a century from now”. Rather than terraforming Mars, or settling the jungles of Jupiter, O’Neill proposed constructing habitable cylinders — modifications of the environments first designed by John Desmond Bernal in 1929 — that would spin on their axes through space, simulating Earth’s gravity and using a system of mirrors and apertures to approximate tellurian days and seasons. In his High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1977), written as a speculative dispatch from the future, it is the accommodating gyroscopic cylinder, not the planetary sphere, that holds the secret for life freed from earthen ground.
To go on with our situation, it's a comfortable life here. Fresh vegetables and fruit are in season all the time, because there are agricultural cylinders for each month of the year, each with its own day-length. We grow avocados and papayas in our own garden, and never need to use insecticide sprays. Of course we like being able to get a suntan without ever being bitten by a mosquito. To be free of those pests, it's worth it to go through the inspections before getting aboard the shuttle from Earth.
The cylinder becomes a kind of Eden regained in O’Neill’s fantasy, an Arcadia retrofitted with solar panels and cosmic-ray shields. Not only can you slurp personal papayas under a bug-free sun, but laborers tasked with processing raw space materials will have time for “reading magazines” during their zero-gravity commutes. Resource mining will be automated, leaving workers plenty of opportunity for “swapping stories and passing the coffee-pot back and forth”. Even television reception will be better, and “the ubiquitous, ugly TV antenna of American suburbia will vanish”, due to receivers built directly into the cylindrical endcaps.
The images gathered below were created in the mid-1970s during O’Neill’s summer research programs on space colonization held at NASA’s Ames Research Center. The artists include Don Davis, who would later help design the visuals for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos series, and Rick Guidice, who illustrated space projects for NASA across fifteen years. In an interview about the project, Davis discusses how his images of O’Neill’s ideas still have a “freshness”, for they continue to embody “the aspirations people have had ever since the space age began”. While this is certainly true — and the artists’ visions of artificial cylindrical worlds have had an outsized influence on science fiction — these psychedelic vistas populated by high-tech homes and cocktail-sipping residents were also a product of their cultural climate.
It was a heady time for both artists and theorists. A report on O’Neill’s 1977 summer study, claiming that space cities would be feasible by 1990, appeared next to Timothy Leary’s unhinged essay about “The Psychological Effects of High Orbital Migration”, in which the hallucinogen researcher expressed his concerns about “the South Americanization of Space (i.e. the emergence of civil-service bureaucracies, military dictatorships, class struggle, centralized monopolies, imposition of standardized life-styles)”. As the space race cooled off during the Cold War’s Détente — symbolized by the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz mission, which saw American and Soviet astronauts shaking hands in outer space — O’Neill lost faith in NASA’s ability and political will to support new ventures in space colonization. From the late 1970s onward, in Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy’s words, “he never stayed from a belief that the private sector would be the only organization capable of opening the space frontier”. It seems one of his students was listening intently. If Jeff Bezos’ mockups of Blue Origin space colonies feel as dated as they do grim, it is because they borrow heavily from Gerard O’Neill, whom he studied under at Princeton in the 1980s, and the artworks featured below.


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Excerpt from Handel’s Israel in Egypt (1888)

Sep 13, 2011

Until the discovery of an 1860 recording of “Au clair de la lune” in 2009, this haunting excerpt from Handel's oratorio recorded in 1888 was the oldest known recorded human voice in existence. A note on the cylinder reads: "A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away". It was recorded by Col. George Gouraud, a foreign sales agent for Thomas Edison on June 29 at The 1888 Ninth Triennial Handel Festival at Crystal Palace, London, only a few days after the death of the German Emperor, Friedrich III. The conductor is August Manns.


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Quicksand (1950)

Sep 4, 2011

Film noir directed by Irving Pichel starring Mickey Rooney, in what many consider to be the best performance of his career, Peter Lorre, and Jeanne Cagney. Needing money for a date, Rooney borrows $20 from the cash register, starting a chain of events that includes car theft, burglary, and possibly murder.


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Operation Cue (1955)

Sep 4, 2011

Original color version of the 1955 atom bomb test in Nevada, showing the effects on test houses and utilities located at various distances from the blast. Operation Cue was one of a myriad of smaller tests conducted under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) developmental program, Operation Teapot.


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Men in Wigs

Aug 24, 2011


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Field Columbian Museum (1894–1920)

Sep 13, 2011

Opened in 1894, the Field Columbian Museum was created to house the artefacts from the anthropology, botany, geology and zoology collections at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Originally named the Columbian Museum of Chicago, the museum originally occupied the only building remaining from the Exposition, the Palace of Fine Arts, now home to the Museum of Science and Industry. In 1921 the Museum moved to its present site on Chicago Park District property in the centre of town. The Museum has undergone a few name changes in its time. In 1905, the name changed to Field Museum of Natural History to honour the Museum's first major benefactor, Marshall Field, and so also to better reflect its focus on the natural sciences. A further name change occurred between 1943 and 1966, when the museum was known as the Chicago Natural History Museum, before it reverted to the Field Museum of Natural History.


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Landscape and Marine Views of Norway

Aug 16, 2011

Selection of images from "Landscape and marine views of Norway" (ca.1890-1900), a set in the Library of Congress' Photochrom Prints Collection. Photochrom prints are colorized images produced from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic limestone printing plates, with each colour tint applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, tint stones. A very popular method at the turn of the century.


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Are You Popular? (1947)

Aug 21, 2011

One of the best examples of post-World War II social guidance films - jam-packed full of useful tips.


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Annie Oakley (1894)

Aug 28, 2011

Annie Oakley was probably the most famous marksman/woman in the world when this short clip was produced in Edison's Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Barely five feet tall, Annie was always associated with the wild west, although she was born in 1860 as Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee (or Moses) in Darke County, Ohio. Nevertheless, she was a staple in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show and similar wild west companies. Because of her diminutive stature, she was billed as "Little Sure Shot."
The man assisting her is this appearance is probably her husband, Frank E. Butler. Annie had outshot Butler (a famous dead-eye marksman himself) in a shooting contest in the 1880's. Instead of nursing his bruised ego because he had been throughly outgunned by a woman, Butler fell in love, married Little Sure Shot, and became her manager. Theirs was a solid and happy marriage that lasted 44 years, and when Annie died on November 3, 1926, at age 66, a heartbroken Butler followed her to the grave 18 days later.


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Betty Boop: Minnie The Moocher (1932)

Sep 18, 2011

Minnie the Moocher defined Betty's character as a teenager of a modern era, at odds with the old world ways of her parents. In the cartoon, after a disagreement with her parents, Betty runs away from home, accompanied by her boyfriend Bimbo, only to find themselves in a haunted cave. A ghostly walrus (rotoscoped from live-action footage of Calloway), sings Calloway's famous song "Minnie the Moocher", accompanied by a whole troupe of other ghosts and skeletons. This haunting performance sends the frightened Betty and Bimbo back to the safety of "home sweet home".


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Alexander in the Bathysphere
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 12, 2022

While the bathysphere was not named until the 1930s (“bathy” from the Greek prefix for deep), humans may have been using diving bells for millennia. In the Problemata, a text contentiously credited to Aristotle, the philosopher tells how his student Alexander the Great descends to the depths of the sea in “a very fine barrel made entirely of white glass”, as a later poet would put it. The reasons for this descent differ across time. For some, it was to scout submarine defenses surrounding the city of Tyre during its siege. Others depict the Macedonian king met with a cruel vision of the great chain of being, stating, upon resurfacing, that “the world is damned and lost. The large and powerful fish devour the small fry”. In one particularly elaborate version, Alexander submerges with companions — a dog, cat, and cock — entrusting his life to a mistress who holds the cord used to retrieve the bathysphere. However, during his dive, she is seduced by a lover and persuaded to elope, dropping the chains that anchor Alexander and his animal companions to their boat. Through a gruesome utility, the pets help him survive: the cock keeps track of time in the lightless fathoms, the cat serves as a rebreather to purify the vessel’s atmosphere, and the poor hound’s body becomes a kind of airbag, propelling Alexander back to the sea’s surface.
In the visual arts, Alexander’s primitive submarine did not prove popular until more than a millennium after his death, when various vernacular adaptations of the Alexander Romance, a largely fictional biographical account, became a common subject for illuminated manuscripts. The miniatures, folios, and tapestry gathered below show Alexander menaced by denizens of the deep. A fourteenth-century illumination made in Flanders has a gigantic fish hovering above the glass keg — where the sceptered emperor sits framed by flaming sconces — while his dog deserts him for ghostly nudes, who seem to taunt the cuckolded king. A twin-tailed siren appears to wear Alexander’s crown, while the submariner crouches helplessly, in a miniature from Johannes Harlieb’s fifteenth-century Alexander, and an illumination featured in Jean Wauquelin’s version of the romance imagines the king flanked by tusked mammals and Gog-and-Magog-style cannibals eating underwater apples. From chalk-and-ink drawings, through half-colored scenes, to a seventeenth-century version of the “Serbian Alexandria” — where a seemingly depthless crowd of bowler-hatted men watch as a creature, resembling the lovechild of a scorpion and lobster, blindsides Alexander — this fantastical episode has led to diverse representations across countries, languages, and centuries. “Although not part of the original narrative and only later attached to the Romance in European, Arabic, and Persian traditions”, writes Su Fang Ng, the diving bell became iconic, “recasting the conqueror into an ‘inventor and sage’”. A particularly stunning sixteenth-century visualization was inspired from a Perisan epic poem, made, as Kanishk Tharoor recounts, by “a Hindu artist in India for a Turkic Muslim ruler with strong ties to Central Asia”. Here Alexander leaves behind a rolling landscape of castles and ice-encrusted mountains for the uncharted world below.
The bathysphere’s formal containment mirrors two other episodes from the Alexander legend: his aerial flight (f. 20v), charioted by griffins, which served as an exemplum superbiae (example of pride) on medieval church facades, and his meeting with Diogenes of Sinope, the philosopher who lived in a barrel. As Plutarch recounts in Alexander, the king was impressed by how the Cynic paid him no mind, desiring only that the monarch not cast a shadow over the patch of sun in which he was lazing. “It is said that Alexander was so struck by this”, writes Plutarch, that he declared: “But verily, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes”. Perhaps a similar longing for alternative lives shows through in the images featured here. Not content with having conquered large swaths of the earth, the emperor seeks a newer world. During one first-person rendering of the tale, after his diving bell has been crushed by an aquatic beast, the king tells himself: “Alexander, now you must give up attempting the impossible, or you may lose your life in attempting to explore the deep.”


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Judith Sargent Murray’s On the Equality of the Sexes (1790)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Feb 8, 2022

For as long as women have been wearing decorative jewelry, donning designer clothing, and delighting in female companionship, we have been accused of a proclivity for the fanciful. Stereotypes abound about the feminine urge to tell stories: the secretly slanderous best friend; the garrulous old woman tirelessly engaged with spreading gossip. In her essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) sardonically examines these misogynistic stereotypes, turning them upside down. She argues that the vicissitudes of female fashion are evidence of artistry, and the story-telling a natural symptom of untapped creativity. Those characteristics, which are so often cast in a negative light, could actually be the result of incredible imagination. In Sargent’s understanding, the only difference between gossip and ground-breaking scientific invention is a lack of access to education.
In the year 1779, Sargent wrote an essay entitled “The Sexes” and proceeded to circulate it amongst friends for over a decade. That piece’s revised counterpart, “On the Equality of the Sexes”, was published in 1790, in the March and April issues of Massachusetts Magazine (a “Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment”). Although Sargent published under the pseudonym “Constantia” — occasionally going by “The Reaper”, “Honora Martesia”, “Mr. Vigilius”, or “The Gleaner” — her identity as the author of “Equality” was fairly well-known.
Born into a family of wealthy, ship-owning merchants, Sargent received a preliminary education which far outweighed that of other American women at the time. The first of eight children, she was taught how to read and write by her mother, and was then allowed to share a tutor with her younger brother Winthrop. This arrangement lasted until Winthrop turned ten, when he was sent to Boston Latin School in preparation for his enrollment at Harvard only three years later. These clear disparities, present even within the close confines of her familial circle, were a catalyst in her advocacy for equal education. “Equality” argues that one cannot deny women’s inherent ability to use reason and judgment, especially when they are not given the opportunity to train academically. While “nature with equality imparts”, it is our cultural nurturing of female minds that has been left in the dark.
An influence behind “Equality” was the unavoidable sociopolitical rumbling of the American Revolution. In 1775, the first full-fledged battle broke loose in Lexington and Concord, and by 1779, having declared independence from England, the American colonies were locked in a long-winded war to ensure their continued sovereignty. Surrounded by the wide-spread rhetoric of liberty, equality, and a right to the pursuit of happiness, Sargent was inspired to apply these same principles to the sexes. The language of war is a recurring facet of “Equality”, as Sargent describes the intricate social dance between men and women. When girls enter into the world, “it is expected that with the other sex we should commence immediate war. . . we must rise superior to, and obtain a complete victory over those who have been long adding to the native strength of their minds”. Not only are women expected to defend against the sexual and romantic advances of men, Sargent also suggests that they must engage in an intellectual battle against those who have been given the advantage of a long and thorough education.
Drawing a parallel between the colonies and equality-seeking women — rebellious bodies attempting to throw off the reigns of an oppressive ruler — Sargent writes that “we will meet upon every ground, the despot man; we will rush with alacrity to the combat, and, crowned by success, we shall then answer the exalted expectations which are formed”. In spite of such victorious imagery, Sargent quickly goes on to clarify that, although women are equal in terms of imagination, reason, memory, and judgment, we are beholden to men for their physical superiority. In a plea largely uncharacteristic of the essay as a whole, she asks, “shield us then, we beseech you, from external evils”. This, too, is potentially a byproduct of revolutionary trepidation. The same year that Sargent wrote “The Sexes”, the coastal air of Gloucester unexpectedly filled with the sound of alarms. It was rumored that four warships were steadily approaching the harbor, and Sargent, alone in her house, was forced to flee into the woods along with countless other terrified women and children. Although the warships never arrived, Sargent remembered this moment of vulnerability, as well as the men who rushed to the coastline while she ran for the trees.
“On the Equality of the Sexes” quickly became an important foundation for the figure of the “Republican Mother”. As the United States began its establishment as an independent nation, there was an emphasis on the woman’s duty to raise patriotic sons. The writings of John Locke were popular amongst the social elite, who spread his philosophy that children are innately innocent, and must be carefully molded through motherly warmth. Abigail Adams was a large proponent of educating mothers so that they, in turn, could educate their sons to be smart future voters. The values of republican motherhood can be detected in Sargent’s suggestion that women should be educated in order to serve as happier companions to their husbands. This argument seeks to elevate the position of women without disturbing traditional gender roles. Readers are repeatedly reassured that women will continue to clean homes and bake cakes, but an education will allow them to cater to their husbands’ and sons’ intellects as they do so.

author: Paloma Ruiz


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“The Rainbow for their Guide”: Mary Gartside’s New Theory of Colours (1808)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Apr 12, 2022

Mary Gartside’s An Essay on a New Theory of Colours is the expanded edition of An Essay on Light and Shade (1805), “one of the rarest and most unusual books about colour ever published”, claims Alexandra Loske, a historian of colour and curator at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. On the surface, this tract appears to sit neatly within the tradition of instructional artist’s manuals. Indeed, Mary Gartside worked as a watercolour teacher and botanical painter, exhibiting her drawings at the Royal Academy in 1781. And yet, the Essay makes use of an intellectual palette whose spectrum exceeds Gartside’s pedagogical contemporaries. It is best remembered, rather, as an exemplar of the myriad early-nineteenth century treatises on colour — works inspired, in part, by the newfound availability of novel pigments.
Gartside’s Essay is largely concerned with those gradations between the primary colours, appealing to both students and “philosophical readers” through its discussion of tint, warmth, transformation, and luminance. Referencing Isaac Newton’s experiments with prismatic refraction (picture Pink Floyd’s album art for The Dark Side of the Moon), Gartside explains the phenomenon to “young ladies who have not seen [the Prismatic Spectrum]”, while offering analysis and critique of eighteenth-century theories proposed by Gerard de Lairesse and William Herschel, namely the latter’s investigation into the order of colours. Not only did Gartside antedate James Sowerby’s A New Elucidation of Colours (1809) and Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810) — drawing parallel conclusions about “the effect of colour combinations, the significance of light and shade in relation to tints, and the eye of the beholder as the centre and origin of colour perception” — the handcoloured illustrations for the Essay, unique to each volume, have been deemed some of the earlier examples of abstraction in painting.
We know very little about Gartside’s biography. According to Loske, she appears to be one of the only nineteenth-century women to have composed “theoretical treatises on colour”, nearly a century before Emily Noyes Vanderpoel published her Color Problems (1902). “The very modesty of the genre”, writes Ann Bermingham, in reference to why the theorist had to disguise her optical treatise as a how-to guide, “obscured the originality of [her] inquiries”, which, in turn, allowed Gartside to pursue scientific matters without reproach. Read in this light, one footnote in the Essay becomes particularly illuminating:
. . . though I know the old masters took the rainbow for their guide, the little opportunity I have had of seeing their works, has prevented me observing how they availed themselves of the lessons it afforded them. They also possessed a degree of philosophical knowledge, that made them profit more speedily from their observations than any one can do without that knowledge; who must ignorantly copy nature, till some scientific person shall point out the way to do it to advantage.
Yet if Gartside did, in fact, “copy nature” in her floral work, it was not out of ignorance, and the results were anything but derivative. Resembling hydrangeas refracted through an otherworldly prism, the watercolour illustrations that accompany her Essay — featured below — are described by the artist as “compact blots of colours”, which, placed before the beholder’s imaginative eye, are capable of conjuring white dog roses, scarlet poppies, and wild hops, “clinging with graceful wreaths and festoons” to evergreen shrubs.


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Albrecht Dürer’s Pillow Studies (1493)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 22, 2022

In his early twenties, after years of wanderjahr-ing across Europe, Albrecht Dürer returned home to Nuremberg, now fully trained in his craft. During this moment of transition, the young artist completed a double-sided line-drawing in pen. On one side, we find a self-portrait of Dürer. The artist is bodiless, except for an outsized hand, posed as if holding a pen too thin to see. A pillow appears below his shoulder-length hair, pressed into a hatched shadow, which mirrors the darkness of his palm. While the artist’s portrait is believed to have been a preparation for Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle (1493) — considered “one of the earliest independent self-portraits in Western painting” — the presence of hand and cushion create an unlikely trinity. There is “a harmony that you wouldn’t expect at first”, says curator Stijn Alsteens, as the observing eye, recording hand, and object of study come into alignment. Yet there is also something uncanny about the chosen perspective, for the pillow “looms upward toward the viewer, unsupported, at an angle that is difficult to explain”. This spatial ambiguity, argues Freyda Spira, “brings to life a composition that could easily have looked like three isolated studies”.
On the verso side, we find a composition brought to life in another way — six pillows, contorted into the shape of fitful sleep, which seem to slip between the waking world and the stuff of dreams. There is the same spatial ambiguity of the recto: the hatching on the first two pillows extends beyond their borders to become shadows on the page, while the other cushions float in a depthless vacuum. No countenance of the artist features here, but if you look long enough, the cushions’ folds may assume the contours of distorted faces. “Once set in motion”, writes Joseph Leo Koerner, “this game of ‘seeing as’ can be played indefinitely, transforming corners into noses, chins, or satyrs’ horns, and creases into mouths and brows, until each pillow is animated by a number of hypothetical masks frowning, laughing, fretting, and speaking”. The drawings take the German word for pillow, Kopfkissen (headpillow), literally, fashioning Kissen into Kopf.  ※※Indexed under…Facesin pillows
Dürer’s treatment of the pillow can be neatly nested in the tradition of “drapery studies”, a vehicle for a young artist to explore the play of light on folds and its expressive possibilities. And yet, when viewed in relation to Dürer's self-portrait overleaf, the six pillows also read like notes toward the artist’s later aesthetic theories, articulated in the postscript to the third volume of The Four Books on Human Proportion, especially his concern with dream, reality, and the imagination’s recombinatory powers. “Therefore, if he [the artist] were to live many hundreds of years, and labor to the best of his abilities, if he so wished, through the power of God he would daily spill out and make new forms of men and other creatures that nobody had ever seen or thought of before.” Anticipating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of the imagination’s esemplastic power — “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation. . . [the imagination] dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” — by several centuries, Dürer also admonishes the would-be Prometheus. An artist “should be cautious not to make something impossible that nature would not allow, unless it would be that one wanted to make a dream work [traumwerk], in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.” These pillows, then, might be viewed as a kind of memory foam, which not only preserves the partial imprints of a sleeper’s face, but also the fantastic, hybrid creatures that populate her dreamscapes.  ※※Indexed under…FoldingFigures created throughMemoryPillows retaining


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William James on the Stream of Consciousness (1890)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Feb 1, 2022

First published as a standalone volume on February 2, 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses turns one hundred this week. Even if you have never immersed yourself in the modern reimagining of Homer’s seafaring epic, a related phrase may have drifted across your awareness: the name for a narrative technique employed by Joyce, Djuna Barnes, Jean Toomer, Virginia Woolf, and myriad other writers that rub shoulders within the ever-bulging periodic and aesthetic borders of modernist literature: stream of consciousness.
Scholars believe “stream of consciousness” was first used as a description of literary style by the British writer May Sinclair, during a review of Dorothy Richardson’s novels for The Egoist in 1918. Eschewing the “philosophical cant of the nineteenth century” — mannered depictions of the world that passed for “realism” — May prefers the mess of the mind. “Reality is thick and deep, too thick and too deep, and at the same time too fluid to be cut with any convenient carving-knife.” To capture this fluidity, the novelist must “plunge in”, which Richardson does in her monumental thirteen-novel Pilgrimage sequence. “In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and going. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on”, writes May. Although James Wood and others have argued that there is nothing uniquely modernist about representing “the movement of the mind” upon the page, the psychological theory of mind that informs May’s review can be traced to a chapter in William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890).
Harvard professor, physician, investigator of psychic communication, “father of American psychology”, and the brother of novelist Henry James, William James begins “The Stream of Thought” by acknowledging that any psychological vocabulary will be rough-hewn when it comes to the fine-cut facets of mental phenomena, comparing what follows to “a painter’s first charcoal sketch upon his canvas, in which no niceties appear”. But the psychologist is being modest, for he immediately launches into a polished discussion of “anesthetic somnambulists”, subconscious personages, and the possibility of thoughts existing without a thinker. This is all a preface for the larger concept: that our minds seem to ebb and flow with ideas, while emotions behave almost tidally, rising and falling in relation to intangible forces, as if a moon presses gravitationally upon our psychic seas.
James was not the first to analogize the mind as a river — Alexander Bain had used the phrase “stream of consciousness” in 1855 and the Buddhist concept of “mindstream” (citta-santāna), characterizes selfhood in a similar way. In The Principles of Psychology, “the stream of thought” becomes a carefully chosen image for the flux of subjectivity: how ideas, feelings, and sensations, both present and past, cohere into the experience of a continuous self, that ever-present “I”, which meanders through the mind from childhood until our deaths and possibly beyond. Invoking Heraclitus by name, James repurposes his idea — that a person can never wade into the same river twice: “no state once gone can recur and be identical with what it was before. . . . In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.” Beneath this stream, to continue his fluvial metaphor, sits the silt and pebbled bed of the unconscious, voluntary and involuntary memories, and even alternative persona. In contrast to the theories of Pierre Janet, Jean-Martin Charcot, and other early psychologists who practiced at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris (and cultivated damaging theories regarding female hysteria), James thought “the fact that the mind contains multiple streams of consciousness which at times rise to the surface was not something to be feared”, writes Alicia Puglionesi. In other words, the self contains multitudes and always has.
If consciousness is a stream, what are the banks and channels that guide its course? James alighted on a concern that would preoccupy spelunkers of cognition in the decades to follow: the deadening effects of habit, the diminishing returns of repetitive pleasures, whether gustatorial, aesthetic, or spiritual. As if trying to refresh the perception of his reader’s glazed eyes, James lapses literary when addressing the topic, assuming the voice of a world-weary male:
From one year to another we see things in new lights. What was unreal has grown real, and what was exciting is insipid. The friends we used to care the world for are shrunken to shadows. . . once so divine, the stars, the wood, and the waters, how now so dull and common! the young girls that brought an aura of infinity, at present hardly distinguishable existences; the pictures so empty; and as for the books, what *was* there to find so mysteriously significant in Goethe, or in John Mill so full of weight?
The turn of the century saw a proliferation of treatises on the dulling effects of routine. Works such as Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1873) Albert Lemoine’s L’Habitude et L’Instinct (1875), Georg Simmel’s “The Metropolis in Mental Life”(1903), and Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique” (1917) evidence the widespread concern — voiced by philosophers, art historians, literary theorists, sociologists, and novelists across a wealth of languages — about the way increasingly mechanized, mediated, and urbanized societies downregulate stimulus response. While Pater speculated that “our failure is to form habits”, Samuel Beckett would concede in a 1930 essay on Marcel Proust that the stream of consciousness only appears consistent due to the regulatory effects of habitual action: “Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.” Though influenced by Henri Bergson, Beckett’s idea may not have been possible without the work of William James, who dedicated a 1914 essay to the topic, and meditated on habit and the continuity of selfhood at length in “The Stream of Thought”.
Art has long offered an antidote to what James describes as the decay of excitement into insipidity. In Percy Shelley’s famous dictum: “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar”. From Stephen Hero, his early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to Finnegans Wake, written in a stream of unconsciousness — “an imitation of the dream-state” — Joyce maintained a cryptic interest in the ability of literary language to prompt epiphany, defined, by his character Stephen, as: “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture of in a memorable phrase in the mind itself. . . . it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.” In Ulysses, the “stream of consciousness” technique not only faithfully represents the mind by violating the supposed objectivity of nineteenth-century realism, as May Sinclair described, but leaves its reader, perhaps, with an enhanced consciousness of their own cognition.
Take, for instance, a scene in the “Lestrygonians” episode that occurs along the waters, when the adman Leopold Bloom crosses Dublin’s O’Connell Bridge over the River Liffey. We begin in the third person, as a narrator describes how Bloom scans the river, finding a clever advertisement — for a London clothier, selling trousers in its Dublin outlet at eleven shillings a pair — mounted on a docked and rocking rowboat:
His eyes sought answer from the river and saw a rowboat rock at anchor on the treacly swells lazily its plastered board.        Kino’s        11/-        TrousersGood idea that. Wonder if he pays rent to the corporation. How can you own water really? It’s always flowing in a stream, never the same, which in the stream of life we trace. Because life is a stream.
The ad is not summarized or offset by quotation marks: we see it as Bloom does. And suddenly, without marked transition, we are inside his mind, surfing the stream of consciousness as Bloom reflects, like Heraclitus and James before him, on the everchanging fluidity of inner and outer life. It’s a brilliant passage, for — as aqueous advertising seeps into free-flowing thought — Bloom himself becomes an advertisement for Joyce’s style, how the author approximates the treacly swells of cognition, plunging us deep into the thick river of reality.


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Orra White Hitchcock’s Scientific Illustrations for the Classroom (1828–40)
Text by Elaine Ayers
Apr 28, 2022

After meeting and falling in love with Edward Hitchcock, her employer at Massachusetts’ Deerfield Academy, Orra (née White) married him in 1821, beginning a lifetime of professional collaboration while raising a family amid piles of rocks and research tomes. Highly trained, white, and wealthy, she was far from an oddity in nineteenth-century education. Like many other women of her class, Hitchcock received extensive instruction in the arts and sciences, making a name by working alongside, not beneath, a man who had easier access to academic opportunities. Variously lauded as “an anomaly” and “the most remarkable” of their era, her scientific illustrations have rarely been considered on their own terms — admired for the natural historical and religious knowledge they contain — without being made an exemplar of the broader category of “women’s work”.
Moving to Amherst when Edward was appointed Professor of Chemistry and Natural History, the couple embarked on a decades-long exploration of the Connecticut River Valley’s botany and geology. While Edward lectured to eager young students about the principles of nature, from the depths of oceans to the granite veins of the earth, Orra produced more than sixty hand-colored scientific illustrations on poster-sized linen swaths designed to be hung on classroom walls.
Ranging from extinct mammals like Megatherium (a genus of giant ground sloth) through lithic strata to fossilized footprints, the collection is striking for its modern abstraction, anticipating the later works of George Maw. Although some of Hitchcock’s geological illustrations seem far from “accurate” in their specificity (or lack thereof), her devotion to clear and concise visual communication bespeaks a deep-seated understanding of complex scientific principles. Hitchcock was occasionally drawn toward the fantastical — as in her drawing of a monstrous octopus devouring a ship — making some of her work feel more at home alongside creations by later spiritualist artists, such as Hilma af Klint, than with her contemporaries’ textbook illustrations.
Like later spiritualist visionaries, Hitchcock viewed art, science, and religion as an observational holy trinity. These practices (that we might now consider disparate) worked perfectly in concert, producing a deeply devout view of the planet’s sedimentary and biological principles. Serving within New England’s Congregationalist Church, the Hitchcocks believed in “gap creationism” — an argument for the undefined lapse between the two separate creation events described in the Book of Genesis — and saw no conflict in interpreting the Bible literally in light of the growing evidence for ever-longer geologic time. Using dramatic color and simple line techniques, Orra Hitchcock points to a deceptively simple consistency underlying some of the most controversial questions of the day.
By illustrating and describing fossil records, the puzzling living creatures around them, and local landscapes so marked by change, Orra and Edward honored the complexity, and, paradoxically, the elemental simplicity, of God’s hand in shaping the earth. While it can be easy to assume a wholesale paradigm shift in evolutionary thinking after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Hitchcock’s illustrations allow us to remember the many naturalists who were able to reconcile religious ideas about the world’s origins with growing evidence for its much-older beginnings.
Edward’s oft-cited dedication to Orra in his 1851 The Religion of Geology and its Connected Sciences rings of the pandering patriarchal gratitude found in so many books of the past: “how little could I have done in the cause of science, had you not, in a great measure, relieved me of the cares of a numerous family!” Nevertheless, the couple’s love, expressed through the language of science, comes through clearly in their personal correspondence. Far from merely translating her husband’s discoveries into visual imagery, Hitchcock produced original knowledge about extinction, stratigraphy, and their evidentiary features in the surrounding landscape. Working next to Edward in their Amherst home, Orra meticulously outlined and hand-colored bolts of linen, training eager young students to recognize and describe geological and natural-historical phenomena. Future students can view Hitchcock’s wide-ranging illustrations, featured below, courtesy of Amherst College.

author: Elaine Ayers


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Ferdinand van Kessel’s Four Parts of the World (ca. 1689)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Mar 23, 2022

In these bewildering landscapes by Flemish artist Ferdinand van Kessel (1648–1696), the built environment of the human world feels almost superfluous. The guard towers of Puerto Rico, plazas of Damascus, and church steeples of Stockholm are all sequestered behind a series of vibrant animal tableaus. Commissioned circa 1689 for King John III Sobieski of Poland, Ansichten aus den vier Weltteilen mit Szenen von Tieren (Views from the four parts of the world with scenes of animals) consists of sixty-eight oil paintings atop copper plates. For each continental region — Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas — sixteen nine-inch-wide landscape scenes from the outskirts of notable cities are organized around a large, central panel, forming four complete works of more than five feet in length.
Born into a lineage of renowned artists including Jan and Pieter Bruegel (the Elders), Ferdinand’s father, Jan van Kessel, was an accomplished painter in his own right, whose unique style distinguished him from other well-known naturalist illustrators. Rather than reproducing rows upon rows of carefully organized organisms, Jan van Kessel brought his creatures to life through dynamic compositions. Nearly three decades prior to his son’s commission, it was Jan who produced the original Four Parts of the World series (ca. 1660). Here, his technical skill and aesthetic bravado are on full display. Lions stand dramatically on muscular hind legs. Predatory birds dig their talons into snakes. Alligators are shown hatching from metallic blue eggs as rhinos puncture seemingly indifferent elephants.
Garnering illustrative skill from his father’s works, Ferdinand inherited Jan’s meticulously crafted models of myriad flora and fauna. While Ferdinand’s “views” differ formally from those of his father, some include strikingly similar elements. Place their scenes for “Amsterdam” side by side and you will see the same pair of hares, a brown one leaping forth from its burrow, as its pale companion stalls. Elsewhere, as if recognizing his debts, Ferdinand forms an autograph out of insects, the way his father had in the central panel for Europe. When their landscapes approach remote climes, however, the Van Kessels’ painted creatures become increasingly strange, as observational accuracy decays into the exotic imaginary. “These fascinating pieces”, writes the art critic Saim Demircan, “reveal an undulating representation of angst. . . namely that of the unknown”. In a landscape from Jan van Kessel’s America, for example, muscular mermen with azul and yellow hair sit in conversation by the beach, alongside a fish that resembles a rotorcraft, thanks to a headdress of squid limbs. These same characters can be seen in Ferdinand van Kessel’s depiction of Luanda, Angola. Not only had neither artist actually observed these animals, but — at a distance from Europe — Africa and America blend together into a shared terrain of fantasy.
The collection-like quality of the Van Kessels’ paintings recall the Kunstkammer tradition — rooms of curiosity replete with odd or foreign rarities, from antique art to ivory tusks — but their paneled arrangements also evoke kunstkasten: a class of seventeenth-century decorative cabinets, which often featured painted miniatures on copper sheets. By displaying their works in compartmentalized frames, Ferdinand and Jan van Kessel recast “the materials and luxury status of the kunstkast in order to create a fundamentally different, inverted object that privileges small-scale paintings over the furniture in which they were traditionally embedded and subordinated”, argues the curator Nadia Baadj. Freed from these enclosures, the paintings become like the landscapes they depict: the built environment of the human world recedes into a backdrop against which to experience miraculous, dynamic, and colorful, if sometimes impossible, animal forms.
Below you can browse our selections from Ferdinand van Kessel’s Ansichten aus den vier Weltteilen series, courtesy of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum via Wikimedia Commons. You can also explore Jan van Kessel’s Africa, America, Asia, and Europe in the Museo del Prado’s collections.


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Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition)
Text by Kevin Dann
Feb 17, 2022

Widely celebrated by art historians as the first design text of the American Arts & Crafts movement, Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education revolutionized the American classroom. When Dow’s program for liberating individual artistic “Power” (his term for self-expression) came along in 1899, arts education was still locked into the academic tradition of copying the masters. Dow gave primary, secondary school, and even university teachers a visual grammar, a pattern language toolbox that could be used to make every aesthetic decision: right down to the decoration of their studios or the parlors in their homes. Composition’s presentation of visual art as an analytic and constructive — rather than imitative — activity was the first tangible breath of abstraction to reach the American classroom. And, for more than half a century, it was hailed by artists and art instructors alike as offering a system to create freely constructed images on the basis of harmonic relations between lines, colors, and patterns.
Dow’s pedagogical mastery had humble Yankee roots; as an eighteen-year-old high school graduate in 1875, he taught farm children and teenagers in a one-room schoolhouse in a remote corner of Ipswich, Massachusetts. About this same time, Dow took up sketching as a complement to his pioneering antiquarian research in Ipswich’s town records, and then, finding inadequate the heliotype productions of his own hands and those of Boston printers, he began to practice wood engraving and lithography, always with a craftsman’s rigor. (He once spent an entire day hand-grinding a carpenter’s awl into an engraving tool for his first experiments with carving local pear wood.) Absent from the early editions of Composition, some of these experiments appear in the greatly expanded 1913 edition, which also includes color plates.
Printed in green-gray ink, the 1905 edition beautifully conveys Dow’s central principle of “Notan” — a neologism adopted from Ernest Fenellosa, the influential art historian and Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator of Oriental Art, who combined the Japanese words for “light” and “dark” to describe the play and placement of contrast, without the distraction of other elements like color, texture, and fine details. Drawing on Dow’s experiences with students at both Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute (1896–1903) and his own Ipswich Summer School of Art (founded in 1890), Composition was unique in its inclusion of student work right alongside that of Renaissance and Japanese masters.
While scholars unanimously attribute Dow’s artistic embrace and pedagogical promotion of ukiyo-e — the “pictures of the floating world” depicted in Japanese woodblock prints — to his encounter in early 1891 with Fenellosa, Dow had for a dozen years been cultivating a wholly original program of minimalist abstraction that grew organically out of his love for Ipswich’s unparalleled riparian landscape. When he declared that “one evening with Hokusai gave me more light on composition and decorative effect than years of study of pictures”, it was due to a lifetime of haunting the marshy borders of the Ipswich River, Labor in Vain Creek, and Thatch Bank, which led Dow into mysticism, nurtured by his reading of Whitman and Thoreau as well as the Quietist tracts of French mystic Madame Guyon.
Copying the inscriptions on seventeenth-century tombstones in Ipswich’s burying grounds, Dow appreciated how the blue, green, purple, and even pink-tinted slate gravestones harmonized with the hues of this region. His preference for the bluish haze of cyanotypes (a collection of 264 of which are viewable here) over photography was of a piece with his aversion to the stark white marble of modern headstones, which he called “coldly out of place by the side of the mossy green and purple slates of the first settlers, partaking of the colors of ground and sky”.
The woodblock stamp on Composition’s title page — which imaged the low drumlin Eagle Hill fairly floating in the midst of the “Silver Dragon”, Dow’s name for a meandering tributary of the Ipswich River — bears the Greek letters for synthesis. Dow’s emblem proclaimed not just the synthesis of East and West, but of one’s inner landscape with outer Nature, which for this native of an inland reach of Plum Island Sound’s tidal estuary, was a floating world of dories, gundalows, hardwood copses, salt hay ricks, and billowing cumulus clouds rolling in from the Atlantic.

author: Kevin Dann


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Philipp Hainhofer’s Große Stammbuch (1596–1633)
Text by Kevin Dann
Mar 17, 2022

Art dealer and diplomat Philipp Hainhofer's 227-page volume collects the signatures of over seventy-five of Europe’s most notable seventeenth-century nobles. A richly illustrated album amicorum — a kind of friendship book for preserving the autographs of acquaintances — the Große Stammbuch was renowned in Hainhofer’s lifetime, becoming one of Augsburg’s must-see artworks. This vellum Kunstkammer brings together the royal, semi-divine hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II [17], King of Denmark Christian IV [20] and Cosimo II de’ Medici [30] with exquisite drawings, a painting on silk, and embroidered panels made by dozens of artists, including Georg Behem, Tobias Bernhard, Joseph Heintz, Johann Mathias Kager, Lucas Kilian, Jacopo Ligozzi, and Anton Mozart.
The cosmopolitan connoisseur Hainhofer rarely traveled without his Stammbuch, which he showed off to a wide network of aristocrats to win new contributions. A single entry was often the result of months spent negotiating with a signatory and artists. Though occasionally a royal would commission her own page, Hainhofer usually had the leaves painted to his taste, which the duchess or king would then sign and otherwise personalize (with mottos or brief inscriptions). Expenses — paid by the contributor — ranged from ten to fifty ducats. By 1610, Hainhofer was regularly receiving invitations for personal audiences with potential autographers. And, in September 1612, when Hainhofer visited François de Lorraine [103] to solicit his hand, the Count attempted to keep the book by force, only surrendering it after the diplomatic intervention of the Elector of Cologne.
Hainhofer’s passion for natural history encircles the earliest signatures, gathered from university friends while he was an eighteen-year-old law student in Padua and Siena. The borders of entries by Ludwig Eberhard [137], the Count of Schwarzenberg [165], and Georg Christoph Ursenpeckh [179] harbor a menagerie of Italian birds, insects, and reptiles. For Johann Christoph, Baron of Puchaim [187], Hainhofer had an unidentified artist feature the red admiral butterfly, hinting perhaps at the signatory’s delicate qualities. There are also two double-page paintings of flora and fauna [138 and 180], one planted with Tulipa — the Asian import that led to horticultural mania in the first half of the seventeenth century.
Coats-of-arms grace most of the Stammbuch’s pages, flanked by an array of intriguing allegorical figures and scenes that attest to the virtues of the signers, only a few of whom were sufficiently intimate with Hainhofer to be considered sui amico, “his friend”. By all accounts, the polyglot Hainhofer was as charming as the most dashing courtiers. Cultivating an insider’s ease with both trade guildsmen and emperors, he possessed expert knowledge of art, music, literature, and history. Famous for wearing a vial of fragrant rose balm around his neck, Hainhofer was genteel enough to win the favor of a dozen women royals, including Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia [24].
Hainhofer is best known to art historians for having overseen the creation of the Pommerscher Kunstschrank, an elaborate wonder cabinet for Philip II, Duke of Pomerania, his most important client and surely the closest friend included in the Stammbuch. Outside of Rudolf II and Cosimo II de’ Medici, Philip is the only person to merit two pages in the album. Facing the page bearing his motto and signature [37], we find a miniature portrait in black ink with liquid gold framing and decoration, fringed by four hymns of praise to the Lord. A Latin verse below declares that Philip’s “task was to polish the genius of the Muses”, which largely came about through his collaboration with Hainhofer. Lines of German text delineate Philip’s clothing and facial features, but they are difficult to decipher. That is one of the many labors left for the Herzog August Bibliothek’s scholars, who are in the midst of a three-year research project to fully explore the intricacies of the Stammbuch, a book the library's founder had, in fact, attempted to buy in 1648, a year after Hainhofer's death. Subsequently disappearing into private collections for nearly three centuries, it resurfaced at a London auction in 1931, and in 2020, for a princely sum of $3.1 million, the Große Stammbuch finally arrived at the library in Wolfenbüttel.
You can browse the whole book in the embedded reader above and find our highlights from its pages in the gallery below. For more on seventeenth-century friendship books check out our Curator's Choice essay “Boys will be Boys” by Lynley Anne Herbert, and for a later example see our post on the album amicorum of Anne Wagner.


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Filippo Balbi’s Testa Anatomica (1854)
Text by Adam Green
May 17, 2022

Of all the objects of daily sixteenth-century life — fruit, flora, fish and more — from which the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo made faces appear, the human body itself was not seemingly among them. The Pompidou houses a pair of late Rennaisance works in which the heads of Adam and Eve are formed from a wriggle of youths, but it is attributed to Arcimboldo's studio rather than the master himself. It’s not until Arcimboldo-esque works of the nineteenth century that we see the human figure used frequently in composite heads, and perhaps nowhere so strikingly as in fellow Italian artist Filippo Balbi’s Testa Anatomica (1854). If the tussle of youthful bodies that form the Pompidou’s Edenic duo points somehow to an innocence lost, in Balbi’s tortuous arrangement of older figures we can see, perhaps, the mortal effects of the Fall bear fruit. While these strained, almost écorché figures could be seen as the best vehicle to display anatomy, they might also writhe with the feelings of a man, soon to be fifty, entering the latter half of life. It’s an interpretation that emerges more forcefully after viewing Balbi’s self-portrait from some twenty years later — the artist posing, grey beard to his breast, with Testa Anatomica to one side and to the other a skull.
You can see more Arcimboldo-inspired portraits in our survey of faces made from landscapes, and a wonderful series of aquatint prints (ca. 1800) depicting composite heads for popular professions comprised entirely from the tools of their trades.

author: Adam Green


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Knowledge by the Pound: The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread (1768)
Text by Kevin Dann
Apr 5, 2022

This stepwise saga of a rowdy youth’s progress toward Georgian bourgeois gentility is widely hailed as the paragon exemplar of Delectando monemus (instruction with delight): the motto of John Newbery, the pioneering children’s literature publisher. Seeing his son Giles hitching a ride on the back of Sir Toby Thomson’s fine coach, old Gaffer Gingerbread exhorts the lad with a tale. Sir Toby had, like Giles, begun his life in poverty, but rose to riches through a mastery of letters. When Giles begs his father to give him reading instruction, Gaffer bakes up a gingerbread alphabet, so that Giles literally becomes — as the book’s subtitle declares — “A little Boy who lived upon Learning”. The heart of Giles Gingerbread sees an alliterative alphabetic cascade, each of the letters redoubled (and sometimes tripled) — creating other scrumptious delicacies, like “Hogs-puddings and hot Cockles” — as Giles consumes the sweet letters with which he learns to read and write.
This past January, when the American Library Association celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American children’s literature, scholars re-evaluated the century of selections as having constructed a cock-eyed Eurocentric canon. John Newbery himself escaped critical scrutiny, though the “old friend of children” was a calculating proto-capitalist whose fortune had been built as much upon the sale of patent medicines as books, which routinely featured “puff” product placement for Dr. James’s Fever Powder, Dr. Hooper’s Female Pills, and other concoctions.
Giles Gingerbread’s author remains uncertain, as Newbery made a career publishing the works of uncredited writers, who he sometimes treated like indentured laborers. Oliver Goldsmith was deemed a likely candidate by John Forster in the late-nineteenth century, a judgment that has been reproduced with thin proof (and challenged by Goldsmith biographers). A close reader might detect the linguistic fingerprints of another writer on Giles Gingerbread: the most gifted poet, fabulist, translator, and rhetorician in Newbery’s stable of talent, Christopher “Kit” Smart (1722–1771). “Tom Trip’s” rhyming frontispiece, pugnacious democratic Preface, and fascination with alliterative character names do sound like Smart, who suffered seven years of itinerant incarceration in mental asylums, an internment that may have been engineered by Newbery, the stepfather of Smart’s wife, Anna Maria Carnan.
The Gingerbread family lives on in another Newbery production, The Fairing: or, a Golden Toy for Children of All Sizes and Denominations (1765), where Sam Gooseberry meets Gaffer and Giles at a fair, leading to a tour de force satire about the selling short of divine Eternity for mere human Time. Because the story alludes to Smart’s past literary successes, some scholars believe he wrote this wild borderland tale. And if, indeed, Smart authored The Fairing, did he also bake up Giles Gingerbread too?