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Geographical Fun: Being Humourous Outlines of Various Countries (1868)
Text by Adam Green
Jun 6, 2017

This series of fantastic anthropomorphic maps of European countries, each footnoted by a witty quatrain, was produced by London publisher Hodder and Stoughton in the 1860s. The images here are separate prints from the Library of Congress, but they also can be found on the Internet Archive in book form, the title page of which credits the introduction and descriptive lines to a certain "Aleph", the alias of London surgeon and "frequent contributor to periodical literature" William Harvey. Although in the few recent mentions we can find of Geographical Fun Harvey is credited as the artist behind these wonderful maps, we wonder if this is really true. The most convincing case against this is that in the very first line of his introduction Harvey states the following:
The young lady who is responsible for these Sketches is now in her fifteenth year, and her first idea of Map Drawing is traceable to her meeting with a small figure of Punch riding on a Dolphin, and contrived to represent England. The thought occurred to her when seeking to amuse a brother confined to his bed by illness.
Given that he goes on to give the book's purpose as "educational" and hopes it might "prove of service to young scholars", I suppose it is conceivable that the teenage sketcher could be a ruse to encourage closer connection to his youthful audience, but it seems maybe a little far-fetched. And perhaps it is better to take Harvey by his word, and imagine these excellently executed figures as the creation of a teenage girl, perhaps a family friend, or even his own daughter, too shy to have her name in lights. The Library of Congress offers this description of the twelve plates that follow:
The resulting fanciful caricatures include England in the form of Queen Victoria; Scotland as a gallant Piper struggling through the bogs; Wales in the form of Owen Glendowr; Ireland as a Peasant, happy in her baby's smile; France as an Empress of cooks, fashions, and the dance; Spain and Portugal joined in lasting amity; Italy as a revolutionary figure complete with liberty cap; Prussia in the personages of Friedrich Wilhelm and Prime Minister Bismarck; Holland and Belgium as female figures who represent a land . . . and perfect art made grand; Denmark as a female figure with ice skates; and Russia as the classic bear.


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The Spinning Sow (1673)

Apr 13, 2017

In this 17th-century Dutch engraving a team of pigs are shown spinning flax, while in the corner a woman — who'd normally be associated with the work — sleeps. Across the top runs the rhyme "Die met gemack sijn kost wil winnen // Die set sijn Varcken aen het spinnen", which can be roughly translated as "He who easily wants to make a living / should put his pig to spinning". Rather than a serious suggestion for female empowerment through porcine labour, we can almost certainly take this to be satirical in tone. The artist here seems most likely to be referencing, at least to some level of remove, a popular medieval motif of the "spinning sow", an image with often distinct misogynist associations. As Malcolm Jones explains in his (excellent) article "Folklore Motifs in Late Medieval Art III: Erotic Animal Imagery" (in Folklore journal, 1991).
'La Truie qui file' was a very popular motif in Northern Europe during the later Middle Ages, especially with the carvers of misericords, but it appears also in manuscript margins, as a house/inn-sign, as well as in early prints, e.g. a South German example dated 1488 which is untypically-provided with a text which reveals that — in this instance at least — the application is misogynist: nowadays men have no decent shirts or trousers to put on as women no longer, as in former times, work at their spindles. This sloth brings immorality with it, and men, both married and single, are warned against prostitutes and bawds. Instead of looking for any good at their hands, one should observe these swine and learn from them. The spinning sow herself complains that flax has become dear as women no longer pursue their work but want to be men and masters. ... With women on top, the world is turned upside down, in these wicked times in which we live, we should hardly be surprised to see a sow spinning and urging on her piglets!
In this way the print could be seen as a misogynist take on the popular "World Turned Upside Down" theme. However, we imagine the text at the bottom of the image might perhaps illuminate more, so if any Dutch speakers want to enlighten us in the comments it would be very welcome! Likewise for the related image below from the following year. There is almost certainly something going on regarding the Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-bishop of Münster, who was (be it coincidence or not) nicknamed Zwijnenbisschop (the Swine Bishop), on account of the famous export product of his principality, and also, perhaps, because it wasn't too far a leap from the name of Bernhard to Berend to "beer" (i.e. boar / male pig). More on this and an ingenious "hidden pig portrait" of the Bishop here.
Anyhow, this was actually meant to be a relatively quick post on a striking image but we've ended (as is so often the case) being dragged down some unexpected rabbit holes, made the more long and winding perhaps by lack of Dutch skills (not to mention Medieval / Early Modern iconography) — so any help would be appreciated!

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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The War Art of Paul Nash (1917–1944)

May 11, 2017

The work of the English artist Paul Nash (1889–1946) — one of the most important landscape artists of the twentieth century — entered the public domain this year in many countries around the world. It is in his depictions of the destroyed and broken landscapes of the First and Second World War, which we are celebrating in this post, that perhaps we see Nash's talent and his engagement with modernity most acutely visible. As the art historian T. J. Clark comments, "it seems that the 20th century only came to Nash, as something paintable, in the form of total war".
Nash spent the few years preceding the war studying art in London — including a curtailed stint at the Slade, with Ben Nicholson and Dora Carrington among others — followed by a few exhibitions, on occasion with his also very talented brother John. With the outbreak of the First World War Nash enlisted, albeit reluctantly, as a private for home service in the Second Battalion, a position which allowed him time to continue making art without too much interruption. In the summer of 1916, however, Nash began officer training and by February the following year was on the Western Front at the Ypres Salient as a second lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment. A relatively quiet few months in the region spared him the full intensity of the Front, before he had to be airlifted back to London an invalid after falling into a trench. A few days later, in an assault on their position known as Hill 60, most of his unit was killed. While recuperating for his injuries, Nash produced a series of drawings, working from sketches made at the Front, and exhibited them in June to a positive reception. Encouraged by the response he succesfully applied to become an official war artist, and in November 1917 returned to the Ypres Salient as a uniformed observer complete with batman and driver. After six weeks at the Front, working at a frantic pace and taking frequent risks to get as close as possible to the action, Nash emerged with what he described as "fifty drawings of muddy places". Over the next years he would use these drawings to create many of the iconic paintings featured below.
The interwar period saw Nash continue to push boundaries with his work, taking it into ever more surreal and experimental realms — his "love of the monstrous and magical", as he described it, leading him "beyond the confines of natural appearances into unreal worlds”. With the outbreak of World War Two the War Artists' Advisory Committee appointed Nash as a full-time salaried war artist post attached to the Royal Air Force and the Air Ministry. The works he produced, not without controversy, would become ever-more abstract, culminating in his final piece for the WAAC entitled Battle of Germany in September 1944. Eighteen months later, on 11 July 1946, he died in his sleep from heart failure brought on by the severity of his long-term asthma.


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The Hawaiian Quintette (1913)

Jun 27, 2017

Selection of tracks recorded by The Hawaiian Quintette for Victor in 1913, a series of recordings which went a long way toward establishing Hawaiian music as a significant genre on mainland US. More songs of the group can be streamed from the Library of Congress National Jukebox site


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Aratea: Making Pictures with Words in the 9th Century

Mar 14, 2017

While popularised by Guillaume Apollinaire’s wonderful Calligrammes from 1918, the art of making images through the novel arrangement of words upon the page can be traced back many centuries. Some of the earliest examples of these “calligrams” are to be found in a marvellous 9th-century manuscript known as the Aratea.
Each page of the Aratea has a poem on the bottom half — written by the 3rd-century BC Greek poet Aratus and translated into Latin by a young Cicero — describing an astronomical constellation. This constellation is then beautifully drawn above the poetry; the drawings however are themselves made up of words taken from Hyginus’ Astronomica. The passages used to form the images describe the constellation which they create on the page, and in this way they become tied to one another: neither the words or images would make full sense without the other there to complete the scene. Also, note the red dots on each picture: these show where the stars appear in the sky.
This remarkable object brings together nearly 2000 years of cultural history. Making use of two Roman texts on astronomy written in the 1st century BC, the manuscript was created in Northern France in about 820. It then found its way into the library of the Harley family in England, before being sold to the nation in 1752 under the same Act of Parliament which created the British Museum.


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Yellow Journalism: The “Fake News” of the 19th Century
Text by Adam Green
Feb 21, 2017

It is perhaps not so surprising to hear that the problem of "fake news" — media outlets adopting sensationalism to the point of fantasy — is nothing new. Although, as Robert Darnton explained in the NYRB recently, the peddling of public lies for political gain (or simply financial profit) can be found in most periods of history dating back to antiquity, it is in the late 19th-century phenomenon of "Yellow Journalism" that it first seems to reach the widespread outcry and fever pitch of scandal familiar today. Why yellow? The reasons are not totally clear. Some sources point to the yellow ink the publications would sometimes use, though it more likely stems from the popular Yellow Kid cartoon that first ran in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, and later William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, the two newspapers engaged in the circulation war at the heart of the furore.
Although these days his name is somewhat synonymous with journalism of the highest standards, through association with the Pulitzer Prize established by provisions in his will, Joseph Pulitzer had a very different reputation while alive. After purchasing The New York World in 1884 and rapidly increasing circulation through the publication of sensationalist stories he earned the dubious honour of being the pioneer of tabloid journalism. He soon had a competitor in the field when his rival William Randolph Hearst acquired the The New York Journal in 1885 (originally begun by Joseph's brother Albert). The rivalry was fierce, each trying to out do each other with ever more sensational and salacious stories. At a meeting of prominent journalists in 1889 Florida Daily Citizen editor Lorettus Metcalf claimed that due to their competition “the evil grew until publishers all over the country began to think that perhaps at heart the public might really prefer vulgarity”.
The phenomenon can be seen to reach its most rampant heights, and most exemplary period, in the lead up to the Spanish-American War — a conflict that some dubbed "The Journal's War" due to Hearst's immense influence in stoking the fires of anti-Spanish sentiment in the U.S. Much of the coverage by both The New York World and The New York Journal was tainted by unsubstantiated claims, sensationalist propaganda, and outright factual errors. When the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor on the evening of 15 February 1898, huge headlines in the Journal blamed Spain with no evidence at all. The phrase, "remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain", became a populist rousing call to action. The Spanish–American War began later that year.
As we've witnessed over recent weeks, from certain mouths the use of the term "fake news" has strayed from simply describing factually incorrect reporting. Likewise would those in power paste the label of "yellow journalism" on factually correct reporting which didn't quite paint the picture they'd like? Yes, indeed. As Timeline reports, in 1925 a certain Benito Mussolini derided reports of his ill health as being lies by the "yellow press", saying the papers were "ready to stop at nothing to increase circulation and to make more money". The reports, however, turned out to be factually accurate. He'd go onto rule the country for another eighteen years.
Featured below are a selection of illustrations from the wonderful Puck magazine commenting on the phenomenon, all found in the collection of the Library of Congress.

author: Adam Green


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Miniatures from a 12th-century Medical and Herbal Collection

Jan 26, 2017

Wonderful series of miniatures from a late 12th-century manuscript thought to hail from England or Northern France, once owned by the monastery at Ourscamps just north of Paris, and now in the collection at the British Library (BL Sloane 1975). As well as the delightfully abstract depictions of herbal plants (including Cannabis), a variety of medieval medical procedures are also shown, such as cauterization and the removal of haemorrhoids. The manuscript is home to more than two-hundred of these images, below is a selection of some of our favourites.


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A Journey Round my Room (1794 / 1871)

Mar 2, 2017

In 1790, Xavier de Maistre was 27 years old, and a soldier in the army of the Sardinian Kingdom, which covered swathes of modern-day Northern Italy and Southern France. An impetuous young soldier, he was placed under house-arrest in Turin for fighting an illegal duel; there is no record of what happened to the other guy. It was during the 42 days of his confinement here that he wrote the manuscript that would become Voyage autour de ma chambre.
Inspired by the works of Laurence Sterne, with their digressive and colloquial style, de Maistre decided to make the most of his sentence by recording an exploration of the room as a travel journal. Like a modern teenager cataloguing their daily routine in a series of finely-tuned Instagram posts, de Maistre’s book imbues the tour of his chamber with great mythology and grand scale. As he wanders the few steps that it takes to circumnavigate the space, his mind spins off into the ether. It parodies the travel journals of the eighteenth-century (such as A Voyage Around the World by Louis de Bougainville, 1771), and could be read today as an early take on the modern vogue for "psychogeography" — each tiny thing that he encounters sends de Maistre into rhapsodies, and mundane journeys become magnificent voyages:
But you must not let yourself think that instead of keeping my promise to describe my journey around my room, I am beating the bush to see how I can evade the difficulty. This would be a great mistake on your part. For our journey is really going: and, while my soul, falling back on her own resources, was in the last chapter threading the mazy paths of metaphysics, I had so placed myself in my arm-chair…
De Maistre reportedly did not think much of the work, but his elder brother Joseph, the renowned philosopher and counter-revolutionary, was so impressed with what he read that he arranged for it to be published, much to his younger brother's surprise. By the time of its publication in 1794 Xavier had left the service, after his home region of Savoy had been annexed by the French Revolutionary Army. He went on to join the Russian army, and moved to Saint Petersburg, where he wrote a sequel, Night Voyage Around my Room. It was clearly a difficult follow-up: he began writing it in 1799, but didn’t finish it for another twenty-five years.
The edition featured here is an 1871 translation into English, we believe the first, by someone named Henry Attwell who also provides a "notice of the author's life". A few more English editions have appeared of late, most recently as a 2016 reissue by New Directions, who published it as Voyage Around My Room with a translation by the poet Stephen Sartarelli.


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The Pioneer ov Simplified Speling, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1912)
Text by Adam Green
Jan 31, 2017

Most of us at some time or other have likely been frustrated by the inconsistencies of the English language, though perhaps not so much as to dedicate our lives to reforming it. Some people, however, have (and, indeed, still do). Enter the "Simplified Speling Soesiety", a group of passionate spelling reformists active in early 20th-century Britain, who boasted George Bernard Shaw among their members. If language can be likened to an ancient city, as Wittgenstein suggested, then the "Simplfied Speling Sosiety" came armed with a fleet of bulldozers and a set of fairly radical architectural plans. Their ideas were laid out in the 1911 treatise Simplified Spelling: An Appeal to Common Sense (see below), and given a regular outlet in the form of their journal The Pioneer, the inaugural edition of which is featured above. The journal, which ran into excess of thirty issues and was written entirely in the new spelling system, featured a regular "Esai Competishun", a "Noets and Nyuez" section, as well as a roundup of "Praiz and Prejoodis" in which they detailed both their positive and negative press.
Founded in 1908, the "Simplfied Speling Soesiety" were certainly not the first such group (despite the title of their journal). The desire to whip the oddities of English spelling into some kind of more logical order can be traced back to the 16th and 17th centuries, and gathered particular pace in the late 19th century with the efforts, for example, of the American Philological Society who, in 1876, recommended the adoption of eleven reformed spellings for immediate use — are→ar, give→giv, have→hav, live→liv, though→tho, through→thru, guard→gard, catalogue→catalog, (in)definite→(in)definit, wished→wisht. One major American newspaper, the Chicago Tribune — whose editor and owner, Joseph Medill, sat on the Council of the Spelling Reform Association — actually began to use these new spellings. In 1906, the Simplified Spelling Board was established, Andrew Carnegie being a founding member and substantial donor. In April that year they published a list of 300 "simplified" words which caught the attention and approval of Theodore Roosevelt, who ordered the Government Printing Office to start using them immediately. Sadly for the reformists, later that year Congress intervened and the old spellings were reintroduced, though some of the new suggestions did survive and are used today, such as anaemia/anæmia→anemia and mould→mold.


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A Selection from The MET’s Public Domain Collection, Now Free from All Restrictions

Feb 16, 2017

Ever since The Public Domain Review began we've long harboured fantasies about the Metropolitan Museum joining the growing ranks of those institutions (The Getty, New York Public Library, and Rijksmuseum, among others) who have opened up their digital copies of public domain works, making them free from all restrictions on use. Now, after a statement made last week, The MET have done just that — making all digital copies of their incredible public domain collection available under a CC0 license and in high resolution. While included in the vast lot of more than 200,000 images is a wonderful selection of the well known — Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Monet, etc. — we present here our highlights from the perhaps lesser known corners (though we couldn't resist sneaking in a Paul Klee). This is the product of a casual morning's browse in which we could only get through the first 6,000 — that's not even 3% — so we highly encourage you to jump in yourselves and make use of their slick and very comprehensive filtering system. And if that wasn't enough, many of the pieces are accompanied by curatorial commentary offering the stories behind the works. Treasures await!


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Rainbows in Art

Nov 15, 2016

Or, since that hope denied in worlds of strife,Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life!The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray!(Lord Byron, The Bride of Abydos)
Depictions spanning more than 800 years – in chronological order – of that most enigmatic of weather phenomena, the rainbow: from Noah's sign and the Book of Revelation, through to 18th-century optics, the epic landscapes of Romanticism, and modernist abstraction.


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Within Our Gates (1920)
Text by Adam Green
Nov 17, 2016

The oldest known surviving film made by an African-American director, Within Our Gates is a searing account of the US racial situation during the early twentieth century, including the years of Jim Crow, the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, the Great Migration of Southern blacks to cities in the North, and the emergence of the "New Negro". Directed by Oscar Micheaux, the film is one of the earliest and finest examples in the genre of "race films". Produced outside the main Hollywood machine, these films were purposefully made for an all-black audience, featured black actors, and became important arenas through which representations of African-Americans in mass culture were contested.
The plot of Within Our Gates centres around a a mixed-race school teacher named Sylvia Landry who travels North to seek funds for a rural school in the Deep South for poor black children. Falling in love with a black doctor (who is “passionately engaged in social questions”), she reveals her family's past, including the lynchings of her parents and the story behind her own European ancestry.
From the American Historical Association: "Despite the rickety plot turns ... Micheaux offers a searing portrait of the ideology of white supremacy. Overturning prevailing wisdom, portrayed notably in D. W. Griffith’s film epic Birth of a Nation (1915), Within Our Gates underscores that racism is fueled by ignorance and hinders national unity. Whereas Griffith’s film suggests that the revelation of blacks’ true capacities and natures would restore racial unity and fraternity among northern and southern whites, Micheaux counters that if northern whites could see through the fog of white southern bigotry they would recognize that blacks were citizens worthy of both rights and respect."


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The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings (1882)
Text by Adam Green
Dec 14, 2016

The French artist, astronomer and amateur entomologist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot is noted for two major contributions in his lifetime. The first, and the one we are celebrating in this post, is the 7000 or so illustrations he created from his astronomical observations, the quality of which reached their zenith in the 15 exquisite pastel works which were published as The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings in 1882 (and reproduced in this post). Trouvelot was invited onto the staff of the Harvard College Observatory when the then director Joseph Winlock saw the quality of his illustrations, and in 1875 he was invited to use the U. S. Naval Observatory's 26-inch refractor for a year. As well as his illustrations, Trouvelot also published some 50 scientific papers, and was credited with discovering "veiled spots" on the Sun in 1875.
The second and rather more unfortunate legacy Trouvelot left the world was the accidental widespread introduction of the highly destructive European Gyspy moth onto North American soil. With the intention of interbreeding Gypsy moths with silk worms to develop a silkworm industry, he'd brought some egg masses over from Europe in the mid-1860s and began raising gypsy moth larvae in the forest behind his house. It is unclear what exactly happened, but some of the larvae ended up escaping into the nearby woods. Although he reportedly notified some nearby entomologists and relevant officials no action was taken. A few decades later the species was rife.


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The Confidence-Man (1857)

Jan 24, 2017

"The relevant book about Trump’s American forebear is Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man,’ the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel — Melville’s last — that could just as well have been called ‘The Art of the Scam’”. So wrote the author Philip Roth in a recent email exchange with the New Yorker. Published on the day it is set, April Fool's Day 1857, The Confidence-Man concerns a group of passengers travelling the Mississippi by steamboat (aptly named the Fidèle) and their various onboard encounters with an enigmatic conman figure (who appears throughout in a variety of disguises). Poorly received at the time of its first publication, The Confidence-Man was indeed Melville's last novel — he would thereafter turn to poetry and resumed prose fiction only much later in 1885 with the commencement of the unfinished Billy Budd, Sailor. Though largely misunderstood in the mid-19th century, the novel and its central message — that the art of the con lies at the heart of American society — began to garner more appreciation and salience as the decades rolled on. Orson Welles was said to have wanted to make it his first film, before eventually settling for Citizen Kane (another story relevant for Trump perhaps). With recent developments in politics in the US and beyond, Melville's tale is overdue a revisit.


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The City of Truth, or, Ethics (1609)

Feb 1, 2017

Published in Paris at the beginning of the 17th century by Ambroise and Jérôme Drouart, Civitas Veri sive Morum (The City of Truth; or, Ethics) presents an allegorical poem by Bartolomeo Del Bene (1515-1595) — a reworking of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics — adorned with a series of wonderful emblem illustrations (most of which we feature below). The excellent Spamula blog sums up Del Bene's poem thus:
It describes a month-long spiritual journey undertaken by his patroness, Marguerite, Duchess of Savoy, who travels through the City of Truth, from its five portals (one for each of the senses) through its various palaces, gardens, etc., to the five temples at its heart, culminating in visits to the Temple of Intelligence (where she meets and converses with Aristotle himself) and the Temple of Wisdom.
As for the engravings, it is not certain whether they were an original addition by the publisher or whether they were copied from Del Bene's manuscript itself. Likewise the identity of the artist behind them is also unknown. Spamula notes the title page to be designed by Dutch artist Thomas de Leu so it is possible he could be behind the images too, though a certain Théodore Galle is also touted as a possibility. Riffing off Aristotle's ideas, the detailed images present "huge imaginary utopias and dystopias", each designed to generate moral allegories in the emblem tradition.


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Chirologia, or The Natural Language of the Hand (1644)

Nov 23, 2016

Is gesture a universal language? When lost for words, we point, wave, motion and otherwise use our hands to attempt to indicate meaning. However, much of this form of communication is intuitive and is not generally seen to be, by itself, an effective substitution for speech.
John Bulwer (1606 – 1656), an English doctor and philosopher, attempted to record the vocabulary contained in hand gestures and bodily motions and, in 1644, published Chirologia, or the Naturall Language of the Hand alongside a companion text Chironomia, or the Art of Manual Rhetoric, an illustrated collection of hand and finger gestures that were intended for an orator to memorise and perform whilst speaking.
For Bulwer, gesture was the only from of speech that was inherently natural to mankind, and he saw it as a language with expressions as definable as written words. He describes some recognisable hand gestures, such as stretching out hands as an expression of entreaty or wringing them to convey grief, alongside more unusual movements, including pretending to wash your hands as a way to protest innocence, and to clasp the right fist in the left palm as a way to insult your opponent during an argument.  Although Bulwer’s theory has its roots in classical civilisation, from the works of Aristotle, he was inspired by hundreds of different works, including biblical verses, medical texts, histories, poems and orations, in order to demonstrate his conclusions.
The language of gesture proved a popular subject in the age of eloquence, and inspired many similar works. Bulwer’s work was primarily meant for the pulpit, but also had applications for the stage. Although we do not know if these hand gestures were ever used by public speakers as they were intended, there is some evidence of the book’s impact on popular culture. Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (completed in 1767) features characters who clasp their hands together in the heat of argument, one who dramatically holds his left index finger between his right thumb and forefinger to signal a dispute, and another who folds his hands as a gesture of idleness.
This was not the end for the Chirologia, however. Some years after publishing the book, Bulwer became one of the first people in England to propose educating deaf people. Although the link to deaf studies seems evident, the Chirologia only makes passing reference to deafness, but this nevertheless may have inspired Bulwer’s further research in the area, and how fingerspelling and gesture can be used as a form of communication in themselves.


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Class of 2017

Dec 6, 2016

Pictured above is our top pick of those whose works will, on 1st January 2017, enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Of the eleven featured, five will be entering the public domain in countries with a "life plus 70 years" copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.) and six in countries with a "life plus 50 years" copyright term (e.g. Canada, New Zealand, and many countries in Asia and Africa) — those that died in the year 1946 and 1966 respectively. As always it's a varied gaggle who've assembled for our graduation photo, including the founder of the Surrealist movement, a star of the silent film era, the Japanese author behind the popularisation of Buddhism in the West, two female writers at the heart of the Modernist scene, and one of the "fathers of science fiction".
Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, from which each text has been based).
H. G. Wells

(1866–1946)
Although prolific in many literary fields, Wells is now best remembered for his groundbreaking science fiction novels (what he termed "scientific romances") and is often cited as one of the key founding fathers of the genre. Some of his most famous works include The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). With their radical future visions and alternative realities made plausible by their rooting in science, Wells' books have had a huge impact on the way we envisage (and indeed perhaps shape) our future. As well as the excitement of the fantastical elements, Wells' writing contained also often a moral dimension, and from an early stage in his career he was an outspoken advocate of socialism, his later works becoming increasingly political.
Gertrude Stein
(1874–1946)
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Stein moved to Paris in 1903 where she became an influential cultural figure at the heart of the Modernist movement -- through her experimental writings, her impressive art collection, and her salons which hosted the leading cultural lights of the early twentieth century, including the likes of Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Henri Matisse. Although the main body of her literary output was deemed too radical for popular success, her "memoir" of the Paris years, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written in the voice of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, was a bestseller and propelled Stein from the obscurity of a cult literary scene into the limelight of mainstream attention. A lesbian, Stein was the author of one of the earliest coming out stories "Q.E.D", originally written in 1903, and her essay "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene" is often considered to contain the first published use of the word "gay" (which it uses over one hundred times) in reference to same-sex relationships and those who have them.
André Breton
(1896–1966)
A writer, poet, anarchist and anti-fascist, Breton is perhaps best known for his role in founding the Surrealist movement, being the author of the first Surrealist Manifesto (Manifeste du surréalisme) of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism". In addition to his important literary output, Breton was an avid collector of art, ethnographic material, and varied curios. Particularly drawn to objects from the northwest coast of North America, Breton's collection grew to more than 5,000 items: modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, books, art catalogs, journals, manuscripts, and works of popular and Oceanic art.
Buster Keaton
(1895–1966)
Born into a vaudeville family in Piqua, Kansas, Keaton became one of the most important figures of the silent film era. An actor, director, producer, writer, and stunt performer, he is best known for his peculiar brand of physical comedy, with his consistently stoic, deadpan expression, which earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face". Of all his films The General (1926) has won the highest praise, Orson Welles stating that it was cinema's highest achievement in comedy, and perhaps the greatest film ever made. Critic Roger Ebert called Keaton "arguably, the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies".
Frank O'Hara
(1926–1966)
A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world, and a leading figure in the "New York School" — an informal group of artists, writers and musicians who drew inspiration from jazz, surrealism, abstract expressionism, action painting and contemporary avant-garde art movements. A prolific poet, O'Hara's approach veered away from the overly academic and overwrought forms of more traditional poetry, celebrating instead a more immediate and spontaneous orientation. In 1959, in Personism: A Manifesto, he explained his position on formal structure: "I don't ... like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, 'Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.'" In the early morning hours of July 24th 1966, O'Hara was struck by a jeep on Fire Island beach, after the taxi in which he had been riding broke down in the dark. He died the next day of a ruptured liver.
Paul Nash
(1889–1946)
Among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century, Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist who played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art. His distinctive renderings of the frontline during the First World War remain some of the period's most iconic images, and after the war Nash continued to focus on landscape painting. Originally continuing his formalized, decorative style, as the 30s progressed, he became increasingly abstract and surreal.
László Moholy-Nagy
(1895–1946)
Born as László Weisz to a Jewish family in Hungary, Moholy-Nagy was an artist of diverse interests — becoming proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and industrial design — as well as an influential professor in the Bauhaus school. Highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts, perhaps his most enduring achievement was the construction of the "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne" (Light Prop for an Electric Stage), completed in 1930 — a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to create mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces.
Mina Loy
(1882–1966)
Born Mina Gertrude Löwy, Loy was a British artist, poet, playwright, novelist, futurist, feminist, and general all-round bohemian — perhaps best known today for penning the Feminist Manifesto, written in 1914 while living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy. Her poetic output drew a whole host of famous admirers including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, and Francis Picabia.
D. T. Suzuki
(1870–1966)
The author of some of the most celebrated introductions and overall examinations of Buddhism, particularly of the Zen school, Suzuki was instrumental in spreading interest in Zen (and Far Eastern philosophy in general) to the West. He spent several lengthy stretches teaching or lecturing at Western universities — including Columbia University from 1952 to 1957 — and was also a prolific translator of Chinese, Japanese, and Sanskrit literature. His work in this field earned him a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1963, although it has been later revealed that he may have expressed Nazi sympathies during the 30s.
Alfred Stieglitz
(1864–1946)
Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the twentieth century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S, as well as being the husband to painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Evelyn Waugh
(1903–1966)
Primarily known as a writer of novels, biographies and travel books, Waugh was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the twentieth century, the critic Clive James commenting that "Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English... its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him".
And a few others that didn't make it to the class photo....

Walt Disney
W. C. Fields
Lenny Bruce
C. S. Forester
Pauline Boty

Some people you think we've missed? Please let us know in the comments!
To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org. For more names whose works will be going into the public domain in 2017 see the Wikipedia pages on 1946 and 1966 deaths (which you can fine-tune down to writers and artists), and also this dedicated page.
Wondering what will enter the public domain through copyright expiration in the U.S.? Like last year, and the year before...Nothing (apart from unpublished works whose authors died in 1946).
Wondering if "bad things happen to works when they enter the public domain"? Wonder no more.
(Learn more about the situation in the U.S. and why the public domain is important in this article in Huff Post Books and this from the Duke Law School's Centre for the Study of the Public Domain).


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Forty-Four Turkish Fairy Tales (1913)

Dec 13, 2016

The most famous collectors of folk stories remain, at least in the West, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, but many others followed in their influential wake. Among them was Ignác Kúnos (1860-1945), who compiled this volume of Turkish fairytales in the same tradition. A Hungarian-born linguist, Kúnos also had an interest in the Turkish dialect and folk tradition, and collected several volumes of oral fairytales, not through reading and study, but by travelling around the Turkish country and listening to storytellers.
In this elaborately produced volume, beautifully illustrated by Willy Pogany, Kúnos describes the stories as being closer to the fairytales of European tradition than those in Arabian Nights, seeking to dissuade his readers of any notion of Orientalism. However, the fact that these tales are thematically similar to their Western counterparts — containing stories of princesses and dragons, witches and white horses, heroes and villains — should not be surprising to any frequent reader of fairytales. They are so often, in some way, international.
One striking element of these tales from Turkey is the frequent presence of the over-sized supernatural beings referred to as "Dews" (or on occasion simply "Arabs"!) — known elsewhere in Islamic folklore as "Devis" or "Jin" (Europeanized as "Genie"). With their towering form their closest cognate in the European tradition would be the figure of the giant, with some fairy-like elements thrown in for good measure. Like giants they are normally malevolent towards humans, but are sometimes friendly and helpful.
From the Preface:
The fairyland of the Turks is approached by a threefold road, in most cases the realm can be reached only on the back of a Pegasus, or by the aid of the peris. One must either ascend to the seventh sphere above the earth by the help of the anka-bird, or descend to the seventh sphere below the earth by the help of a dew. A multitude of serais and kiosks are at the disposal of the heroes of the tales ,- thousands of birds of gayest plumage warble their tuneful lays, and in the flower-gardens the most wonderful odours intoxicate the senses.


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Despotism (1946)

Feb 2, 2017

"You can roughly locate any community in the world somewhere along a scale running all the way from democracy to despotism", so begins this short from Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, published a year after the end of the Second World War. The film goes on to illustrate (with some wonderful graphics, archive clips, and reconstructions) the idea that despotism has two chief characteristics — restricted respect and concentrated power.
A community is low on a respect scale if common courtesy is withheld from large groups of people on account of their political attitudes; if people are rude to others because they think their wealth and position gives them that right, or because they don't like a man's race or his religion.
It also identifies two of the conditions which have historically promoted the growth of despotism — a slanted economic distribution and a strict control of the agencies of communication.
One commenter on the Internet Archive has this quite salient point to make:
A very interesting film that has one major flaw. Distraction rather than control is the key to the Despotism of Huxley's "Brave New World". The information scale is pushed through the roof to the point of trivialization which paradoxically results in the *quality* of the information going through the floor. Critical thinking is crippled not so much by control but by overload.
See its companion film Democracy, released a year earlier, here. And here's some further reading in the form of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.


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The “Living Photographs” of Mole and Thomas

Jan 5, 2017

In search of some eye-catching imagery to boost morale surrounding US involvement in WWI, the US military commissioned the English-born photographer Arthur Mole and his assistant John Thomas to make a series of extraordinary group portraits. Between 1915 and 1921, with the dutiful help of thousands of servicemen and staff from various US military camps, the duo produced around thirty of the highly patriotic images, which Mole labelled "living photographs".
As one might imagine, the creation of each photograph was somewhat of a military exercise in itself, taking a week or more to prepare. Firstly, the desired image would be traced with wire onto a glass plate mounted to Mole's camera, which he would then take to the top of an 80 foot high viewing tower. Looking through the template, armed with a megaphone and large pointing stick, Mole would then oversee the laborious nailing down of miles and miles of lace edging, tracing out the pattern. The next stage was fairly straight forward, the servicemen would then simply need to fill the design.
Making use of anamorphic perspective, the images would not make much sense from overhead or on the ground, but only become intelligible at one particular vantage point — where Mole would be positioned atop his tower with his 11 x 14-inch view camera. This would make for some wonderful skewing of numbers, and itself, acts as a great example of perspective at work. The Statue of Liberty image, for example, required a total of 18,000 men: just 17 at the base but, more than half a mile away, 12,000 in the torch. Sadly it seems no one thought to fly a photographer overhead and capture what would have been a wonderfully skewed vision of Liberty, with enormous bulging torch and minuscule feet.
While the logic in Mole calling them "living photographs" is self-evident, in another important sense it's also somewhat of a misnomer, as Louis Kaplan notes in an article for Cabinet:
From the photographer’s perspective, the emblems are brought to life by means of the living soldiers who embody them. But one can also look at these images from the opposite perspective: we deaden the human beings into form and formation by making them into emblems. The emblem only comes into focus when the living element drops out of the group portrait in these spectacular optical illusions. This total subjection of the individual to the symbolic order also exposes the fascistic tendency inherent in such images. Mole’s “living photographs” thinly disguise the forces of death that in fact adhere to all community.


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Walter Crane’s Painting Book (1889)

Nov 16, 2016

Long before the current craze for adult colouring books came this 19th-century "painting book" from one of the finest contributors to the Golden Age of illustration: Walter Crane (1845 -1915). Although remembered chiefly as an influential children’s book illustrator, Crane resisted this reputation throughout his life. A member of the Arts and Crafts movement, he also designed textiles, stained glass, wallpaper and ceramics, alongside several large allegorical paintings. Although his work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1862, many other paintings he submitted were poorly received or never displayed, possibly because of his socialist leanings. He gave up sending his paintings to the Academy in 1877. Instead, he turned his attention to children’s books, although was never quite able resist his higher artistic calling — as his designs and book illustrations attest.
Teasingly referred to as the "academician of the nursery", Crane began illustrating fairy tales with the same attention to detail as the paintings he had formally sent to the Academy. His efforts changed public attitudes towards children’s books, which had previously been simple, inexpensive paperbacks before Crane turned his attention to them. His illustrations incorporated carefully rendered textiles, clothing, furniture designs, and patterns inspired by Japanese art and printmaking. Crane himself acknowledged that he used these picture books as a vehicle for his other ideas about furniture and decoration.
Crane achieved further commercial success through adapting his illustrations in a painting book. Originally published in 1880, the outline illustrations were accompanied by a full colour rendering on the opposite page. Although he had to sacrifice some of the intricacies of his original illustrations, the painting books Crane produced still offered a challenge to the budding young artist, with his own colour plates acting as a guide. (See a coloured in copy here.) The elaborate and complex designs Crane created are strikingly similar to the colouring books that are designed for adults today.
Although Crane achieved fame and recognition as a children’s illustrator, he continued to devote himself to his other artistic interests throughout his life. A photograph of his studio from 1885 (see below) depicts watercolours, oil paintings, sculpture and other design work, revealing a polymath who poured his varying talents into illustrations, which had a transformative effect on the art in children’s books.


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The Frog (1908)

Dec 1, 2016

A film by the pioneering Spanish film director and cinematographer Segundo Chomón. With his innovative use of early splice-based tricks and a penchant for optical illusions he is often compared to the slightly earlier Georges Méliès, and indeed has been dubbed "The Spanish Méliès" by some. Though the similarities are clear, Chomón departs from Méliès in his variety of subjects and his use of animation, an art form he played a key role in developing. In this surreal short a sprightly frog circles various come-to-life fountain tableaux, as well as a giant version of itself, an enormous head being drenched by water, and some multicoloured fire thrown in for good measure.


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The Strange Adventures of a Pebble (1921)

Feb 28, 2017

I’ve been through fire and water, I tell you! From my earliest pebblehood the wildest things you could imagine have been happening to this world of ours, and I have been right in the midst of them.
So begins Hallam Hawksworth’s The Strange Adventures of a Pebble. Written in the 1920s, the book was part of a series which also included The Adventures of a Grain of Dust and A Year in the Wonderland of Trees, all of which were supposed to introduce children to the world of Natural Sciences. In each of them, Hawksworth personifies the natural object he is exploring, and using a mixture of folk tales, scientific facts and colloquial, friendly explanations guides the reader through the history of the natural world. It’s a real thrill of a ride, dramatizing the life cycle of supposedly dull things. The Adventures of a Grain of Dust begins even more loudly than Pebble:
I don't want you to think that I'm boasting, but I do believe I'm one of the greatest travellers that ever was; and if anybody, living or dead, has ever gone through with more than I have I'd like to hear about it.
Hallam Hawksworth was the pen-name of teacher Francis Blake Atkinson. He was  married to the author Eleanor Stackhouse Atkinson, author of the children’s classic Greyfriars Bobby, which was based on the (supposedly) true story of a Scottish dog who spent fourteen years guarding his masters grave. The couple were both committed to education and published a weekly magazine for Chicago high school students called The Little Chronicle, as well as working for Encyclopaedia companies later in life.


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Marcus Selmer’s Photographs of 19th-Century Norwegians

Mar 1, 2017

It is not immediately clear what drew Marcus Selmer (1819 – 1900), a Danish portrait photographer, to spend most of his life working in Norway. He trained as a pharmacist in his native Denmark, and was working in a chemist owned by his uncle when he discovered daguerreotype photography. He experimented with this new technology in his spare time and began sending his pictures in to local exhibitions. In 1852, Selmer travelled to Norway, to visit some of his uncle’s family in the city of Bergen. He never returned.
He soon found work as a photographer in Bergen and, within a year, was able to establish his own studio. This became the first permanent photographic studio in Bergen, as few photographers who visited would stay all year round. Photographers often visited Bergen in the summer, hoping to capture the fjords and mountains that surround the area, but, as they needed good light for their work, the dark and cold weather had driven most of them away by the time winter rolled around. Selmer ingeniously built his studio almost entirely out of glass, allowing enough light into the space, which enabled him to continue working throughout the year.
Selmer’s work quickly became well-known throughout Norway. He sold many books of his photographs, and sold individual images to the press and the burgeoning tourist industry, before eventually being appointed the royal photographer in 1880. Although his career was varied, Selmer is primarily remembered today for his portraits of local people in national folk costume, as shown here. These photographs depict the customs, traditions and culture of the Norwegian people, and reflect Selmer’s interest in his adopted home. One of Selmer’s most notable portraits is of a local folk hero named Ole Storviken.
Storviken had once been a prosperous fisherman who fell into drunkenness and despair and spent decades wandering the Norwegian countryside. In the popular imagination, he became associated with the trolls and fairies of Norwegian legend, and tales that surround him refer to him as the strongest man in Norway. Storviken died just outside of Bergen in 1863, just a few years after Selmer took his photograph.
Selmer’s long career spanned almost half a century, and it can be assumed he took many thousands of photographs during this time. However, as much of his negative archive was destroyed after his death, only a handful of his daguerreotypes remain. Below we feature some of the most striking of these, beautifully coloured by hand, now in the collection of the National Library of Norway.


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Maniac Chase (1904)

Mar 9, 2017

This 1904 short from Edison Studios, directed by Edwin S. Porter, is a near shot-by-shot remake of Biograph's The Escaped Lunatic released earlier that year (Edison resorted to pretty desperate measures to try and keep the competition at bay). Biograph's film was most likely the very first time the "Napoleon delusion" trope — in which a mentally ill person believes themself to be Napoleon Bonaparte — is seen on the screen. This comedic stereotype has its roots in real life cases of the 19th century, including that recounted in the 2014 book The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon, which tells of how a day after Napoleon's body was returned to Paris for burial in December 1840, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men claiming to be the famous Emperor.


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Airopaidia (1786) — the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion

Nov 29, 2016

Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) is a remarkable insight into the early days of ballooning. Coming in at almost 400 pages the book is a wonderfully detailed account of Baldwin's one day in the air over Chester in 1785. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempts to describe his experience not only verbally but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape (see images below). Together these illustrative plates can be seen as the first ever "real" overhead aerial views.


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W. E. B. Du Bois’ Hand-Drawn Infographics of African-American Life (1900)
Text by Adam Green
Feb 7, 2017

William Edward Burghardt "W. E. B." Du Bois — sociologist, historian, activist, Pan-Africanist, and prolific author — had also, it turns out, a mighty fine eye for graphic design. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois studied at Fisk University, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Harvard (where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate), and in 1897 he became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University. Two years later he published his first major academic work The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a detailed and comprehensive sociological study of the African-American people of Philadelphia, based on his earlier field work. The following year, along with collaborators Thomas J. Calloway and Daniel Murray, Du Bois travelled to Europe, firstly to the First Pan-African Conference held in London, and then to the Paris Exposition to present a groundbreaking exhibition on the state of African-American life — "The Exhibit of American Negroes" — which, according to Du Bois, attempted to show "(a) The history of the American Negro. (b) His present condition. (c) His education. (d) His literature."
In addition to an extensive collection of photographs, four volumes containing 400 official patents by African Americans, more than 200 books penned by African-American authors, various maps, and a statuette of Frederick Douglass, the exhibition featured a total of fifty-eight stunning hand-drawn charts (a selection of which we present below). Created by Du Bois and his students at Atlanta, the charts, many of which focus on economic life in Georgia, managed to condense an enormous amount of data into a set of aesthetically daring and easily digestible visualisations. As Alison Meier notes in Hyperallergic, "they’re strikingly vibrant and modern, almost anticipating the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky".
While the exhibition was pretty much ignored by the mainstream US press, it can be seen as very much a milestone in the fight for equal rights. Although separate from the main United States national building of the Paris Exposition, "The Exhibit of American Negroes" occupied one fourth of the total exhibition space allocated to the US in the multinational Palace of Social Economy and Congresses, and an estimated 50 million people passed through during the 7 months it was up. Back home Black periodicals like The Colored American wrote extensively about the project, and no doubt galvanised a new generation of activists. Du Bois himself would go on to rise to national prominence as leader of the Niagara Movement, a group of African-American activists campaigning for equal rights, and as co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.


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Francesco Tamagno sings Verdi’s Otello, Death Scene (1903)

Feb 9, 2017

When Giuseppe Verdi's opera Otello first opened on 5th February 1887, it was the great tenor Francesco Tamagno who took the lead role. Here he is in 1903, two years after Verdi's death and two years before his own, singing the death scene of Othello, "Niun Mi Tema". It is worth listening to the very end to catch the strange groan, which we can only assume is Tamagno bringing some theatrical drama of a death throe to the recording (made at Thomas Edison's Menlo Park). That, or he's just remembered something rather terribly important he forgot to do.


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Images from Johann Zahn’s Oculus Artificialis (1685)

Mar 7, 2017

In 1685, the Würzburg cleric Johann Zahn published his Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium (The Long-Distance Artificial Eye, or Telescope). In the work he provides an early and comprehensive account of the function and usage of a number of optical instruments, including the camera obscura and magic lantern (whose invention he credits to Athanasius Kircher), and various other lanterns, slides, peepshow boxes, telescopes, microscopes, lenses, and reflectors. Among the studies is an envisaging, for the very first time, of a portable hand-held version of the camera obscura. At the heart of the imagined device is a mirror reflex mechanism, technology that would not see realisation until a century and a half later with the birth of the photographic camera. Zahn's ideas and explanations are furnished by a plethora of innovative, and, at times, wonderfully surreal engravings, highlights of which we feature below.


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Just Imagine (1947)

May 28, 2013

Film using stop animation shows the character "Tommy Telephone" (the AT&T advertising "spokescreature" at the time) making a telephone by assembling 433 separate parts.


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The Wisdom of Robert Louis Stevenson (1904)

Aug 15, 2013

A book of posthumously collected extracts from the writings of Robert Louis Stevenson, the Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer, most famous for his books Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.


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The Knife Throwing Mother (1950)

Jul 7, 2013

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from a short Universal Newsreel from 1950, in which the knife thrower Louella Gallagher performs with her two daughters: Connie Ann of 5 years and Colleena Sue 2 and 1/2.
You can see the full film featured on The Public Domain Review here and also on the Internet Archive as part of the Prelinger Archives collection.
See more creations from Okkult Motion Pictures here in our Animated GIFs Collection.
Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website:   / Facebook  / Twitter
All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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Nursery Lessons in Words of One Syllable (1838)

Aug 1, 2013

A charming little illustrated book for young readers, consisting entirely of words of one syllable.


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Remmelin's Anatomical ‘Flap’ Book (1667)

Jun 11, 2013

This volume is a rare edition in Dutch of the greatest of the anatomical 'flap' books. The work features three full-page plates with dozens of detailed anatomical illustrations superimposed so that lifting the layers shows the anatomy as it would appear during dissection. Although flaps had been used in printing before, Remmelin was the first to use them on this scale. Eight prints of the plates were produced then cut apart and pasted together to form the layers. The first authorized edition was printed in Latin in 1619 with the title Catoptrum Microcosmicum. The plates were printed in 1613, and the text without the plates was printed the following year, both without the consent of the author. Although Remmelin's work was very popular and went through a number of editions, the format of the flaps was very delicate and not practical for the dissection room. Copies such as this one with all of the flaps intact are very rare. (Text from the NLM website)


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The Corset X-Rays of Dr Ludovic O’Followell (1908)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 18, 2013

The x-rays collected below come from Dr. Ludovic O’Followell’s Le Corset (1905–1908), the first volume of which contains an abridged history of the garment, the second, a medical evaluation of its safety. A columnist for the deluxe corsetier’s magazine Les Dessous Elégance, the French doctor was responding to a nineteenth-century backlash against bound support, the most extreme elements of which castigated women seeking a “wisp waist” as criminals with perverted taste, who intentionally harmed their childbearing abilities for the sake of vanity.
The birth of the modern corset tracks the rise of courtly manners in Europe. But the advent of metal eyelets in the 1820s and 30s, which allowed for tighter cinching, unleashed a social panic that led to the garment’s decline. From the late 1860s through the early 1890s, The Lancet published scores of articles decrying the corset’s effects on organ health, costal breathing, and rib structure. Moralizing fiction writers found a new cause. Guy de Maupassant’s short stories, for example, are full of attacks on women wearing deforming corsets: Madame Dufour of “A Country Excursion” can “hardly breathe”, her corset forcing “her superabundant bosom up to her double chin”, while the titular “Mother of Monsters” of 1883’s “La Mère aux monstres”, pregnant and bound in “a corset of her own invention, made of boards and cord”, “maimed the little unborn being, cramping it with that frightful corset”. Of course, there were real physical consequences to overtightening, especially for those forced into corsets before adulthood. Yet, as Valerie Steele has argued, some of the social reformers against the corset had alternative agendas, masking an attack on female self-expression as a public health initiative. “By simultaneously constructing an image of irreproachable propriety and one of blatant sexual allure”, writes Steele, “the corset allowed women to articulate sexual subjectivity in a socially acceptable way”.
In 1902, shortly before Dr. Ludovic O’Followell published the first volume of Le Corset, Dr. Phillippe Maréchal, “one of the best known ladies’ doctors in Paris”, proposed a law banning women under the age of thirty from wearing corsets — punishable by three months imprisonment — that would force corset vendors to track the name, age, and address of all customers. As a skeptical Los Angeles Herald reporter summed up: “In short, he claims that women’s dress has caused a frightful physical deterioration in the human species.” In response to these debates, Dr. O’Followell first modified the materials of various corsets, so that their features would be expressed through radiography, and then imaged both the bodies of the healthy and those who “abused” the garb. His conclusion, distilled in the second volume’s preface, is that a “harmless corset, the ideal corset, at least medically speaking, can exist”. Yet O’Followell’s treatise also reveals the garment’s potential effects on the thorax, liver, intestines, and other organs vital to life if worn to extremes or from childhood. In a curious detail, it seems x-rays were penetrating corsets within two years of their discovery, with the Queen of Portugal supposedly asking for images of how her organs were arranged while wearing one.

author: Hunter Dukes


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The First Tour de France (1903)

Jul 18, 2013

The 2013 Tour de France marks the 100th of the event's history, which began in 1903 (the competition was put on hold during the two world wars). Strangely, this inaugural event of 1903 had it's origins in one of France's greatest political scandals - the Dreyfuss Affair. In 1894 a young French artillery officer of Jewish descent, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of high treason but then, years later, was proven to be innocent in the light of new evidence, evidence which the military attempted to suppress. The ensuing debate over Dreyfuss' innocence, and the wider issues of anti-semitism in which it was embedded, divided the nation. One such division occurred within France's most popular cycling magazine L'Velo, causing it to split into two when an anti-Dreyfuss contingent broke away to form L'Auto-Velo. L'Velo's owner won a court case forcing L'Auto-Velo to change their name, which they did, to L'Auto, a move which saw their sales subsequently plummet. In an effort to boost their waning popularity, and win back their cycling fans, L'Auto set up the Tour de France in 1903. It was a hugely successful campaign which caused their sales to increase 6-fold during and after the race and, eventually, pushed L'Velo into bankruptcy.
The 1903 competition was run only in six fairly flat stages, unlike the mountainous 21 stage event it would grow to become, however, each of these 1903 stages were extraordinarily long, with an average distance of over 400 km (250 mi), more than double the distance of today's. 60 cyclists, all professionals or semi-professionals, started the race, of whom 49 were French, 4 Belgian, 4 Swiss, 2 German, and one was Italian, Maurice Garin, the pre-race favourite who eventually went on to win the event. Garin would go onto also win the next year's race only to then be disqualified along with eight other riders for cheating including the illegal use of cars and trains.


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Frank Desprez’s “Lasca” read by Harry E. Humphrey (1920)

Aug 22, 2013

Edison recording of Harry E. Humphrey reading the English writer Frank Desprez's most famous poem "Lasca". This ballad-like piece, first published in a London magazine in 1882, tells the story of a Mexican girl and her cowboy sweetheart caught in a cattle stampede "in Texas down by the Rio Grande".


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Women having tea in Napier, New Zealand (ca.1890)

Aug 9, 2013

An animated GIF created by Okkult Motion Pictures from a stereoscopic photograph featured in the collection of the National Library of New Zealand. The photograph taken by William Williams shows his wife Lydia (dressed in black, second from left) and other women seated for tea outside their house in Napier, New Zealand.
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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter
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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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The Belly of a Horse (1820)

Jul 31, 2013

Anatomical diagram from William Carver's Practical horse farrier, or, The traveller's pocket companion: shewing the best method to preserve the horse in health; and likewise the cure of the most prominent diseases to which this noble animal is subject, in the United States of America : the whole being the result of nearly forty years' experience, with an extensive practice, published in 1820.


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Perversion for Profit (1965)

Jun 19, 2013

Perversion for Profit is a 1965 propaganda film financed by Charles Keating and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. A vehement diatribe against pornography, the film argues that sexually explicit materials corrupt young viewers and readers, leading to acts of violence and "perverted" attitudes regarding sex - including inclination toward homosexuality. Pornography is also painted as part of the Communist conspiracy and the motor behind the decline of Western civilization:
This same type of rot and decay caused sixteen of the nineteen major civilizations to vanish from the Earth. Magnificent Egypt, classical Greece, imperial Rome, all crumbled away not because of the strength of the aggressor, but because of moral decay from within. But we are in a unique position to cure our own ills: our Constitution was written by men who put their trust in God and founded a government based in His laws. These laws are on our side. We have a constitutional guarantee of protection against obscenity. And, in this day especially, we must seek to deliver ourselves from this twisting, torturing evil. We must save our nation from decay and deliver our children from the horrors of perversion. We must make our land, 'the land of the free', a safe home. Oh, God, deliver us, Americans, from evil.
(Wikipedia)


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The Kiss (1896)

Jul 9, 2013

An animated GIF excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from a 19th century Edison film. "An osculatory performance by May Irwin and John Rice".... Scene from the New York stage comedy, The Widow Jones, in which Irwin and Rice starred. According to Edison film historian C. Musser, the actors staged their kiss for the camera at the request of the New York world newspaper, and the resulting film was the most popular Edison Vitascope film in 1896. The first ever kiss to be caught on film.
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Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website / Twitter
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All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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Pollen Up Close (1837)

Jul 16, 2013

Illustrations of various strains of pollen in extreme magnification, as featured in Ueber den Pollen (1837), a book by St. Petersburg based German pharmacist and chemist Carl Julius Fritzsche.
For a key identifying each pollen type pictured see these descriptions (in German)


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The Baby’s Own Aesop (1908)

May 30, 2013

Walter Crane's beautifully illustrated version of Aesop's fables, shortened and put into limericks for the younger reader and first published in 1887. Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica is a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. Apollonius of Tyana, a 1st-century CE philosopher, is recorded as having said about Aesop:
... like those who dine well off the plainest dishes, he made use of humble incidents to teach great truths, and after serving up a story he adds to it the advice to do a thing or not to do it. Then, too, he was really more attached to truth than the poets are; for the latter do violence to their own stories in order to make them probable; but he by announcing a story which everyone knows not to be true, told the truth by the very fact that he did not claim to be relating real events.
(Wikipedia)


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The Life and Adventures of James F. O’Connell, the Tattooed Man (1845)

Jul 30, 2013

One of the main attractions at P.T. Barnum's 1842 'freakshow' American Museum was a man named James F. O'Connell, notable for his head to toe covering in tattoos, the U.S.'s first tattooed showman. To accompany his unusual appearance, the show featured O'Connell telling of how he received his tattoo during his years of captivity in the South Pacific. According to his account he became shipwrecked on the Caroline Islands and saved himself from death at the hands of the Ponapeans natives by performing a series of Irish jigs for their amusement. Though his life was spared he tells of how he was subject to a compulsory tattooing at the hands of a series of "voluptuous virgins" and how he was forced to marry the last of his tattooers. When a ship landed on the island in 1833 (some 5 years or so since his shipwreck there in the late 1820s) O'Connell left, making his way to the U.S. where he eventually ended up working in P.T.Barnum's 'freakshow', telling tales of the eight day long process of tattooing he underwent and performing the Irish jigs which saved him and endeared him to the Ponapean people.


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Salome with John The Baptist’s Head at the Rijksmuseum

Jun 6, 2013

And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb.
(Mark 6:21-29, King James Version)


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A Midsummer Schottische

Jun 21, 2013

Traditional music for the midsummer "Schottische" dance, known as "Schottis" in Scandinavia where this score  is thought to have originated from. The dance is considered by The Oxford Companion to Music to be a kind of slower polka, with continental-European origin (possibly Bohemia). The recording might possibly be of accordion duo Arvid Franzen and Einar Holt recorded in the mid 1920s in New York.


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Engravings from a French Ice-Skating Manual (1813)

Aug 20, 2013

Coloured engravings from France's first ice-skating manual Le Vrai Patineur (The True Skater) written by Jean Garcin, a book praised in Honoré de Balzac's Illusions Perdues. As well as the aide of eight engraved plates, four of which are featured here, the manual details many movements and poses, putting an emphasis on artistry and grace in contrast to the more straightforward technical approach usually practised in England. The book is considered to be one of the earliest works in any language devoted entirely to ice-skating.


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The Book of Wonderful Characters (1869)

Jul 17, 2013

Printmaker James Caulfield (1764–1826) spent much of his career publishing illustrated books about "remarkable persons". He began his first series around 1788 and continued it sporadically from 1790 to 1795, with books on a similar theme continuing to appear in the first decades of the nineteenth century. More than forty years after his death, this collection of biographies (produced in collaboration with Henry Wilson (fl. 1820–30)) was republished in 1869. The vignettes, accompanied by engravings of each individual, describe a wide-ranging group – from the man who died aged 152 to a "remarkable glutton" to a woman who lived on the smell of flowers — their only common factor being that they were in some way "wonderful". (Text via Cambridge University Press, through which you can buy a 2012 reprint edition).


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A Selection from The Getty’s Open Content Program

Aug 14, 2013

In August of this year The Getty announced the launch of their Open Content Program which sees more than 4500 images from their collection made available under an open license, meaning anyone can share the images freely and without restriction. We've spent the day trawling the thousands of images to bring you a small selection of highlights from their wonderful collection. Visit their site to get exploring yourself.


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The Blossoms of Morality (1806)

Jun 13, 2013

As the subtitle proclaims, this book originally published in the late 18th century is "intended for the amusement and instruction of young ladies and gentlemen". The introduction is presumably one into the moral ridden world of adults. A vast array of different little stories are told for the purpose, including the excellently titled "Juvenile tyranny conquered" and "The melancholy effects of pride". Each is told in a brilliantly earnest yet flowery style, for example, the first sentence of the first story, "Ernestus and Fragilus", reads: The faint glimmerings of the pale-faced moon on the troubled billows of the ocean are not so fleeting and inconstant as the fortune and condition of human life. 47 beautiful illustrations by I. Bewick adorn it throughout.


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The Somersault Man (1923)

Jul 26, 2013

A short silent clip from a Dutch newsreel showing a man somersaulting through the streets.


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Coughs and Sneezes (1945)

Jul 9, 2013

A series of animated GIFs excerpted by Okkult Motion Pictures from Coughs and Sneezes, a curious and amusing propaganda film from post war era on the dangers presented by... sneezing!
You can see the full film featured on the Internet Archive as part of the British Government Public Information Films collection.
See more creations from Okkult Motion Pictures here in our Animated GIFs Collection.
Okkult Motion Pictures is the brainchild of Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali from Turin, Italy. With the Excerpts project, Okkult Motion Pictures aims to bring to light the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright moving images occulted in Internet archives, through a series of animated gifs. A digital archivalism project for the diffusion of open knowledge. Okkult Motion Pictures official website:   / Facebook  / Twitter
All Okkult animated GIFs published here under a CC-BY-SA license.


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With Lord Byron at the Sandwich Islands in 1825

Aug 4, 2016

The Lord Byron of the title is not the famous poet, but rather his cousin and successor of the peerage, the naval commander George Gordon Byron. He was commander of the HMS Blonde on its 1824/1825 voyage to Hawaii, undertaken primarily with the solemn mission of returning the bodies of King Kamehameha II (Liholiho) and Queen Kamamalu, both of whom had died of measles in England while trying to visit King George IV. In addition to the artist Robert Dampier, the crew also consisted of the Scottish botanist James McCrae of the Royal Horticultural Society, whose diary of the voyage, published in 1922, is featured here.


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Pages From an Illustrated Catalogue of Period Ornaments (ca. 1919)

Sep 29, 2016

The Illustrated Catalogue of Period Ornaments Cast in Composition and Wood Fibre for Woodwork-Furniture features samples of wood carvings offered by the Decorators Supply Company of Chicago at the beginning of the 20th century. These decorative elements — so pleasingly presented in the catalogue — could be glued or nailed to furniture, ceilings, and other architectural surfaces. The catalogue would have been used not only to display the Company’s selection of ornaments, but also to allow customers to request personalised designs. The Decorators Supply Corporation of Chicago is still operative to this day and it specializes in the production of “composition carvings”, also present in the catalogue. These are ornaments which are cast from mixtures containing, among other materials, pitch, oil, and clay.


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Ernst Haeckel’s Bats (1904)

Oct 25, 2016

Plate 67 from Ernst Haeckel’s visually dazzling Kunstformen der Natur, (Art Forms of Nature), published in 1904. With the assistance of Jena artist-lithographer Adolf Giltsch, Haeckel produced one hundred plates depicting the forms of animal life. With this book Haeckel wanted to create an “aesthetics of nature” and to show how the incessant struggle for existence he had learnt from Darwin was in fact producing an endless beauty and variety of forms – Darwin and Humboldt combined together. Focusing mainly on marine animals, the bat is one of the only mammals featured in the book, but the page of surprisingly cute "chiroptera" is certainly one of the book's most striking offerings. The full line up is:
1-2: Brown Long-eared Bat
3: Lesser Long-eared Bat
4: Lesser False Vampire Bat
5: Big-eared Woolly Bat
6-7: Tomes's Sword-nosed Bat
8: Mexican Funnel-eared Bat
9: Antillean Ghost-faced Bat
10: Flower-faced Bat
11: Greater Spear-nosed Bat
12: Thumbless Bat
13: Greater Horseshoe Bat
14: Wrinkle-faced Bat
15: Spectral Bat
1-2: Brown Long-eared Bat
3: Lesser Long-eared Bat
4: Lesser False Vampire Bat
5: Big-eared Woolly Bat
6-7: Tomes's Sword-nosed Bat
8: Mexican Funnel-eared Bat
9: Antillean Ghost-faced Bat
10: Flower-faced Bat
11: Greater Spear-nosed Bat
12: Thumbless Bat
13: Greater Horseshoe Bat
14: Wrinkle-faced Bat
15: Spectral Bat

In addition to creating beautiful art, Haeckel held and promoted disturbing theories on race and eugenics. You can read more about this darker side to Haeckel in Bernd Brunner's essay "Human Forms in Nature". Also read about Haeckel's role in one of science's great controversies in Nick Hopwood's "Copying Pictures, Evidencing Evolution".


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Painted Photograph of an Unknown Man (ca. 1855–70)

Oct 11, 2016

In 1839, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre announced that he'd developed a way of making a lasting image using, not the artist's brush or pen, but the rays of the sun. And so the revolutionary art of photography was born. It would be some decades though before colour could be captured, and so, with demand for colourful images high, photographic studios soon began to hand-colour their monochrome prints. Only three years after Daguerre’s announcement, came the first American patent for hand-colouring daguerreotypes, with a second patent following soon after. There were two ways to steer a photograph from its monochrome existence into the world of colour: hand tinting, which involved subtley painting the image so that it was still identifiable as a photograph, and "over-painting", painting over a photograph so completely so as to entirely obscure its technological origins. The wonderful example featured above, found in the collection of the Rijksmuseum and of unknown provenance, is unusual in that it seems to be neither of these. The bold, almost Van Gogh-esque, application of the paint seems to imply a desire to pass the image off as a painting, but there are sections of the photograph left entirely untouched. It could, of course, be that the job simply, for whatever reason, went unfinished. Though it is perhaps nice to think that this hybrid effect was deliberate — a conscious reflection of a radical period in art history, where the centuries old tradition of painting was meeting a quite different method of capturing a moment in time.


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The Human Alphabet

Nov 3, 2016

There is arguably nothing more human than the alphabet, given that language, and particularly written language, often tops the list of qualities which distinguish our dear species most distinctly from others. To form the letters of these alphabets using the human body is then, perhaps, not so strange a leap, and, in fact, seems to be rather appropriate. In their own varied ways artists and scribes have been doing it for centuries. Below we've collected some highlights of the many twists and turns of the human font.


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Phenakistoscopes (1833)

Aug 30, 2016

The Phenakistoscope — a popular Victorian parlour toy, generally marketed for children — is widely considered to be among the earliest forms of animation and the precursor to modern cinema. The device was operated by spinning the cardboard disc, and viewing the reflection of the image in a mirror through a series of moving slits. Through the distortion and flicker, the disc created the illusion that the image was moving. Women danced, men bowed, and animals leapt in short, repeating animations.
Many scientists of the era had been experimenting with optical illusions, photography, and image projections, and there was something inevitable about the creation of this device, having been simultaneously invented in 1832, by Joseph Plateau in Brussels and by Simon von Stampfer in Berlin. Plateau was a physicist, but his father had been a painter and illustrator who had enrolled his son at the Academy of Design in Brussels. Although Plateau eventually ended up pursuing science instead, he retained an interest in art and design that proved useful when creating the prototype Phenakistoscope. Plateau’s original designs were hand-painted by himself, an example of the frequent intersection of Victorian artistry with experimental scientific media that defined the period. Only weeks later, unaware of Plateau’s creation, von Stampfer, a mathematician, developed a near-identical device that he named the Stroboscope.
The device proved popular, and was soon mass-produced and marketed under some more easily-pronounceable names, including Phantasmascope, Fantoscope, and even the prosaic "Magic Wheel". The series featured here are from a competing product, Mclean’s Optical Illusions or Magic Panorama, which, published in 1833, ranks among the earliest mass-produced Phenakistoscopes. The illustrations we see here are simple moving figures but, over the following years, designs would become more and more complicated, depicting intricate, phantasmagoric scenes in high colour.
The Phenakistoscope was eventually supplanted in the popular imagination: firstly by the similar Zoetrope, and then — via  Eadweard Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope (which projected the animation) — by film itself. The toy was largely forgotten, relegated to a pre-cinema curiosity. And yet strangely, in the internet age, the concept has come full circle — we find we have returned to producing and sharing similar short, looping animations, reminiscent of a device that preceded the animated GIF by over 155 years.


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Barnard’s Universal Criminal Cipher Code (1895)

Sep 6, 2016

Barnard’s Universal Criminal Cipher Code for Telegraphic Communication between Chiefs of Police, Sheriffs, Marshals and other Peace Officers of the United States and Canada (1895)  was a book of codes to help disguise internal police telegrams in what amounted to some kind of 19th-century version of the encrypted email. Despite first appearances the “cipher” of the book has some sense of order in its "self-indexing" system, as the Preface explains:
Any word beginning with “O” relates to the offense for which the individual is wanted. Any word beginning with “Hi,” relates to height. Any word beginning with “Ag” relates to Age. Any word beginning with “We,” relates to weight. Any word beginning with “Ha” relates to hair. Any word beginning with “E” relates to eyes, ears, eyebrows, etc.
As well as the purpose of disguise, the use of the cipher also had a more practical consequence, it made telegrams shorter and so cheaper to send. The example below, with a saving of $5.35, is given in the Preface:
Encryption and cost-cutting aside, the use of these ciphers must have made for some strange reading experiences. Amid the gibberish and nonsense one wonders if there was not the occasional accidental gem of experimental prose, strange litanies proclaiming some greater truth, or even perhaps — amongst all the Oblongs and Maidens and Eagles Aghast — unintended clues to the solving of a case.
The microfilm above is a little hard to read so we've made some crops on selected pages and included them below.


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The Rowing-Bath (1916)

Sep 14, 2016

Touted as the "newest contribution to the enjoyment of living", news of the ingenious "rowing-bath" comes to us from the pages of a 1916 edition of The Popular Science Monthly. Consisting of what amounts to some sort of a metal dustpan tied by a rubber cord to the taps, the device promises to secure "the zest which accompanies the pleasant pastime of buffeting surf". It seems, however, that the general public did not quite share the excitement of the article, or the ecstatic model it depicts, as nothing much more is heard of the invention again (although we did find mention of a similarly named device from 1904).


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The Infernal Cauldron (1903)

Oct 27, 2016

Short film by Georges Méliès, released through his Star Film Company, featuring demons, flames, spectres, and a brilliant array of the film-maker's usual arsenal of tricks. As Wikipdia sums up: "In a Renaissance chamber decorated with devilish faces and a warped coat of arms, a gleeful Satan throws three human victims into a cauldron, which spews out flames. The victims rise from the cauldron as nebulous ghosts, and then turn into fireballs. The fireballs multiply and pursue Satan around the chamber. Finally Satan himself leaps into the infernal cauldron, which gives off a final burst of flame." Enjoy!


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Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Cartoons of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–5)

Aug 16, 2016

This series of prints, from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, depict scenes fairly typical of Japanese propaganda for the period. The victorious Japanese forces are shown as valiant heroes; the invading Russians are thin, foolish and effeminate. Many similar prints were produced over the course of the war by other artists, but this series stands out as their creator, Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847–1915), was not only an extremely accomplished and versatile artist, but also an unlikely propagandist.
How Kiyochika learnt to paint is unknown. There is little evidence that he ever trained in the Japanese style, but seems to have had some rudimentary training in Western painting under Charles Wirgman, an English artist and cartoonist — although there are reports that he hated the smell of oil paints so much that he abandoned the medium almost immediately. He was, however, inspired by Western realism and impressionism, and this filtered through into his work.
This modern take on painting reflected the fast-modernising world Kiyochika experienced around him. His family were wealthy and respected under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogun, however when the shogun was deposed during the Meiji Restoration, they lost everything and went into exile. When Kiyochika eventually returned to Tokyo, the place of his birth, in 1874, he found it had entirely transformed. The Meiji government had opened Japan’s borders and, after years of isolationist rule, engineers, scientists and architects from the West began to pour in. Tokyo was now filled with brick buildings, trains and railways lines, telegraph poles and steamships.
Kioychika began painting the cityscape in the ukiyo-e woodblock tradition, but with shading and perspective influenced by Western art, juxtaposing the elements of the traditional Japanese past with the modernising West. This choice of subject matter makes Kiyochika’s work stand apart from other practitioners of the style, which traditionally depicted ghosts and demons, legends from Kabuki, or samurai and historical figures. After the Tokyo Fire of 1881, Kiyochika stopped producing these landscapes — although the images he painted of the fire would come to inspire his depiction of bombshell blasts and explosions in his war prints.
Perhaps influenced by Wirgman, Kiyochika moved into producing satirical cartoons for newspapers. Cartoons, as a medium that could easily be understood by both Japanese readers and those in the West, appealed to Kiyochika and he soon became the main illustrator for Marumaru Chinbun, a satirical newspaper sometimes compared to Punch. A talented caricaturist, his depictions of politicians and military figures were so recognisable that they did not need to be labelled. Due, in part, to his family’s loss of stature following the Meiji Restoration, Kiyochika was powerfully anti-government in his stance, and often was subject to legal action and prosecution for his cartoons — even serving several stints in prison for his controversial rendering of high-profile government figures.
Given this long-held opposition to the government, it is perhaps surprising that he turned his hand to government propaganda — first with a set of 1895 prints depicting scenes from the First Sino-Japanese War, and then almost ten years later, with the scenes featured here. His satirical cartoons were far removed from the patriotic war prints he produced during this time, although we plainly see his skill as a caricaturist in his images of the Russian soldiers, his interest in modern technological developments, and his continued affinity for Western realism. It is possible that he discovering a nationalistic streak during wartime, but it is also true that cartoonists can be efficient instruments of propaganda, and these prints proved very popular at the time.
After the end of the war, Kiyochika never again achieved the same level of popularity, and returned to painting landscapes.


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The Surreal Art of Alchemical Diagrams

Aug 2, 2016

Derived from the Arabic root "kimia", from the Coptic "khem" (referring to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta), the word "alchemy" alludes to the dark mystery of the primordial or First Matter (the Khem). The discovery of this elusive original matter, from which all others are deemed simply polluted variants (the purist being Gold), is considered the alchemist's central goal — along with the discovery of the Stone of Knowledge (The Philosophers' Stone) and the key to Eternal Youth. As you can imagine, not the simplest of day jobs. As well as reams of text, the ins and outs of the alchemist's task, steeped as it is in a dizzyingly complex symbology, has given birth to a whole host of strange and wondrous imagery over the centuries. Here we pick out some favourites, many found on Wellcome Images and the brilliant Manly Palmer Hall collection at the Internet Archive.


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The Death and Burial of Cock Robin

Aug 11, 2016

The “Death of Cock Robin”, also known as “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin” is a somewhat macabre English nursery rhyme describing the murder and the funeral of a robin. When Cock Robin is shot dead by a sparrow, the birds organise his funeral: depending on the version, the Owl will dig his grave, the Rook will read the service, the Kite will carry him to the grave, and the Dove will be the chief mourner.
The origins of the tale are uncertain, but a stained window depicting a robin killed by an arrow could already be found in the fifteenth century at Buckland Rectory (Gloucestershire). The earliest known English record of the rhyme, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, dates back to 1744 when it appeared in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book. The proximity of this date to the political decline of Robert Walpole has led some to suggest that the tale may be describing Walpole’s fall from power, or that an ancient nursery rhyme might have been “resurrected” for the occasion.
The popular tale has generated a variety of parodies and spinoffs: Byron recalled the verses in “Who killed John Keats?”, written on the occasion of Keats’ death, while “The Trial and Execution of the Sparrow for Killing Cock Robin” described the aftermath of Cock Robin’s funeral. In this version, the Sparrow is brought to court and interrogated. The accounts of the witnesses get increasingly complex: was Sparrow really the murderer? Or was it a cat? In the end Judge Hawke, deciding the sparrow to still be guilty, takes the metering out of punishment into his own hands, or, perhaps more accurately, beak:
So he eat up the SparrowThe rest got away,They thought it not safeNear such Justice to stay.
In 1861, taxidermist Walter Potter staged the Death of Cock Robin with 98 different species of embalmed birds. The tableau accurately recreated each stanza of the rhyme. In the tableau, like in other illustrated versions, a bull can be seen pulling the bells for the service. It is very likely that the bull was originally supposed to be a “bullfinch”, and therefore a bird like the rest of the mourners.
Below we show some of our favourites from the many many editions produced over the centuries. Also definitely worth checking out the wonderful illustrations from the 1865 version by H. L. Stephens, featured over at the 50  Watts blog.