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Chester Harding’s My Egotistigraphy (1866)

Sep 10, 2019

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


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John Reynolds’ Book of Murder Tales (1621–1635)

Nov 4, 2019

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

source: public-domain-review

type: collection

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


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Buffon and de Sève’s Quadrupeds (1754)

Sep 17, 2019

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


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The Human Pyramids of Juste De Juste (ca. 1540)

Nov 21, 2019

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


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The Cubies’ ABC (1913)

Dec 3, 2019

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


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Photographs of Japanese Sword Guards (1916)

Sep 24, 2019

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


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The Narrative of Henry Box Brown (1849)

Sep 26, 2019

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


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The Geometric Landscapes of Lorenz Stoer (1567)

Nov 5, 2019

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


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Yggdrasil: The Sacred Ash Tree of Norse Mythology

Nov 26, 2019

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


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Persian Demons from a Book of Magic and Astrology (1921)

Oct 24, 2019

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


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Eskimo Folktales (1913)

Dec 10, 2019

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


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Augustus Jansson’s Queen City Ink Adverts (1903–1907)

Oct 1, 2019

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


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The History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (1884)

Aug 28, 2019

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


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John Margolies’ Photographs of Roadside America

Aug 29, 2019

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


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Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894)

Sep 2, 2019

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


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First Paper to Link CO2 and Global Warming, by Eunice Foote (1856)

Oct 3, 2019

In a series of experiments conducted in 1856, Eunice Newton Foote — a scientist and women's rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York — became the first person to discover that altering the proportion of carbon dioxide (then called "carbonic acid gas") in the atmosphere would change its temperature. This relationship between carbon dioxide and the earth's climate has since become one of the key principles of modern meteorology, the greenhouse effect, and climate science. However, no one acknowledged Foote was the first to make this discovery for more than a century, in large part because she was a woman.
Entirely because she was a woman, Foote was barred from reading the paper describing her findings at the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Albany, New York. Instead, Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian had the honor of introducing her, announcing that science was “of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.” Perhaps this was Henry’s attempt to shield Foote and her findings from sexist criticism or, worse, indifference. Unfortunately, “indifference” would be the best word to describe how her findings were received.
Not only was Foote not permitted to read her groundbreaking paper, she was passed over for publication in the Association’s annual Proceedings. “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays” was published in its entirety in The American Journal of Science (September 1856) — but even then it went unremarked.
The Irish physicist John Tyndall, who is still usually credited with founding climate science, three years later made a very similar though more detailed investigation into the effect of gases (and carbon dioxide in particular) on trapping the sun's heat, but he failed to cite Foote’s work. According to Roland Jackson, this was probably because he hadn’t read it. “Direct communication about science across the Atlantic was sparse in the 1850s,” Jackson writes, “and, as American scientific institutions carried relatively little weight in Europe, personal relationships were particularly important”.
It was unlikely that an amateur American woman scientist living in the environs of Albany during the mid-nineteenth century would have connections overseas. Indeed, Foote’s education was eccentric even for her era. In the words of John Perlin, who’s been campaigning for years now to reinstate Foote in the history of climate science:
While in her teens, Foote attended Troy Female Seminary, whose students were invited to attend science lectures at a school that later became Rensselaer Technological University. An ex-con named Amos Eaton, who had been sentenced to life in prison for fraud but was released after four years so he could pursue his life calling as an evangelist of scientific education, had started the university.
Eaton believed that men and women should have equal access to education in the sciences; definitely a wild idea back in the early nineteenth century. To fulfill his goal, he mentored a teacher at the Female Seminary, who established the first all- encompassing science curriculum for women, one that was equal to or better than any offered to men. Eaton also oversaw the construction of chemistry labs at both schools, the first in the world built solely for students. It was here where Eunice developed her experimental scientific skills.
Foote’s seminal experiment was ingeniously homemade. Using four thermometers, two glass cylinders, and an air pump, she isolated the component gases that make up the atmosphere and exposed them to the sun’s rays, both in sunlight and in shade. Measuring the change in their temperatures, she discovered that carbon dioxide and water vapor absorbed enough heat that this absorption could affect climate:
An atmosphere of [carbon dioxide] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted.


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John O. Westwood’s Facsimiles of Anglo-Saxon and Irish Manuscripts (1868)

Sep 4, 2019

John Obadiah Westwood (1805–1893) was a bona fide polymath. An archaeologist, entomologist, editor, artist, and art historian, he was a regular contributor to the Gardner’s Chronicle, a founder of the Entomological Society of London, and the author of books about everything from sessile-eyed crustaceans to the early sculptured stones of Wales.
Westwood’s fascination with Anglo-Saxon and Hiberno-Saxon illuminated manuscripts — created in Britain and Ireland between 500 and about 1066 CE — derived in part from a distinctly Victorian national pride. He is insistent in his introduction to Fac-similes of the Miniatures & Ornaments of Anglo-Saxon & Irish Manuscripts (1868) that by publishing these chromolithographic plates, he is giving readers access to “the first chapter of a History of the Fine Arts in this kingdom, extending from the Roman occupation of Great Britain to the Norman conquest.”
But Westwood also brought to these bright, dark age illustrations an entomologist’s intensity of attention. The lithographs, made by W. R. Tymms based on Westwood’s paintings, are intended to highlight a defining characteristic of these anonymous masterpieces:
the excessive elaboration of ornamental details, often exceedingly minute, but nevertheless frequently so arranged as to afford fine broad effects in a manner which might scarcely be supposed possible, and which often, indeed, seem to be the result of accident rather than of design.
It is precisely this “peculiarity”, Westwood adds, “which renders the study of the Manuscripts and other relics of the early Anglo-Saxon and Irish schools so interesting to the Art-student.” (Whether art students would be able to spare the price of £21 — around £1300 in today's money — is doubtful, though Westwood himself was at least hoping to make an affordable volume — “a humble rival of the grand but enormously expensive work of Count Bastard on the Miniatures and Ornaments of early French MSS.”)
The lithographs themselves reproduce details, and sometimes whole pages, from manuscripts held at museums, libraries, and churches all around the British Isles. These reproductions, in the words of Incunabula on Twitter, “did much to fix the visual appearance of manuscripts like the Book of Kells in the Victorian imagination”.
While the style of the Book of Kells has by now grown relatively familiar, the lithographs of the many lesser-known manuscripts reveal the astonishing variety of styles available to these artists, over a thousand years ago. Westwood’s reproductions show us not only the artists’ ornate Celtic knots and squiggles but also their bold use of color and inventive integration of images and letters. Consider the almost American Southwestern color scheme of the seventh-century Royal Manuscript VI’s illustration of the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the beautiful interplay of text, ornamentation, and human figures in the ninth-century St. Gall Manuscript, or the lithe trees on either side of the crucified Jesus in the eleventh-century Arundel Psalter. It’s easy to understand how these prints could capture — and continue to capture — people’s imaginations.
You can scroll through our highlights below.


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The Unicorn Tapestries (1495–1505)

Jul 23, 2019

Lavishly woven in fine wool and silk with silver and gilded threads, the seven wall hangings collectively known as “The Unicorn Tapestries” are certainly amongst the most spectacular surviving artworks of the late Middle Ages. They are also amongst the most enigmatic, in both meaning and origin. They appear to have been designed in Paris, produced in Brussels or Liège, and for centuries were owned by the La Rochefoucauld family before being purchased by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who donated them to The Met Cloisters in 1937. For a long time now, scholars have noted that the letters “A” and “E” are in several places woven into these pictures, but despite a string of theories — such as the debunked idea that Anne of Brittany commissioned them to celebrate her marriage — no one knows what these letters stand for.
The tapestries themselves tell a story, which is likewise mysterious. “The unicorn was a symbol of many things in the Middle Ages,” as Richard Preston writes, including Christianity, immortality, wisdom, love, and marriage. Add to this that every least element in the tapestries — from flora and fauna to clothes and gestures — had a particular medieval meaning, and it’s little wonder that their significance is unclear to us. Certainly, the unicorn is a proxy for Christ. But he is also an image of the lover brought down like a stag in the allegorical hunts evoked in medieval works like Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess and Gottfried von Straussburg’s Tristan and Isolde. He is both a creature of flesh and spirit, earthly longing and eternal life.
In the first tapestry, we see a group of noblemen and hunters leading their dogs into a lusciously forested landscape, represented by a millefleurs background. A page — apparently posted up in a tree (though to medieval eyes, he would have been understood to be standing in a grove) — is here to signal that the unicorn these men are hunting has been sighted.
The second tapestry gives us our first glimpse of the unicorn himself. He is, as Magaret B. Freeman (a former curator of the Cloisters) says, “extremely handsome — from the tip of his spiraled horn to his curly beard and exquisitely plumed tail.” All around the unicorn, the hunting party stands and talks, watching their quarry as he dips his purifying horn into the water that pours forth from a fountain into a stream. (It was, in the Middle Ages, considered unsportsmanlike for huntsmen to pursue their prey until it had begun to run.) The image is notable especially for its many animals — above all the pairs of goldfinches and pheasants perched on the lip of the fountain. So fine was the textile-makers’ art, it is possible to make out the male pheasant’s reflection in the water.
The third tapestry is the most gruesome. It shows the hunters plunging their pikes into the unicorn at full gallop, struggling to escape the men and dogs just as a stag would — by cooling off and obscuring his tracks in a stream.
In the fourth, the unicorn defends himself. He gores a greyhound with his horn and kicks at one of the huntsmen.
The two remaining fragments of the fifth tapestry reveal a surprising turn of events. A maiden has beguiled the unicorn, who is now so docile he doesn’t even seem to mind the dog licking at the wound on his back. However, the presence of one of the hunters blowing his horn does not bode well.
And indeed, in the sixth tapestry two separate scenes are depicted — the brutal killing of the unicorn (in the upper left-hand corner) and the transportation of the dead unicorn on a horse’s back (front and center). Here the unicorn’s wound is clearly Christ-like, and the expressions on the faces of those gathered round suggest they are at the very least ambivalent about the success of this hunt.
The seventh tapestry shows the unicorn alive and well, and entirely tamed. He is fenced in and chained to a tree, but the chain is less than secure and the fence is low. He has submitted to his captivity. The red stains on his flank, in the words of the Met’s catalog, “do not appear to be blood, as there are no visible wounds like those in the hunting series; rather, they represent juice dripping from bursting pomegranates” — a medieval symbol of marriage and fertility.
The Cloisters’ current curator posits this last tapestry “may have been created as a single image rather than part of the series.” But a former curator, Margaret B. Freeman thought like many others that it may have been the mystical conclusion of the series, in which the “unicorn, miraculously come to life again,” stands for both the risen Christ and the “lover-bridegroom, at last secured by his adored lady.”
Whatever their meaning, the Unicorn Tapestries are among the most impressive medieval artworks in existence. The work of several (if not several dozen) designers, painters, and weavers, their rich beauty startles us into attention even today.
Learn more about the tapestries in this great book from The Met, and also this fascinating article "The Fruits and Nuts of the Unicorn Tapestries".


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Tlingit Myths and Texts (1909)

Oct 16, 2019

“No one knows just how the story of Raven really begins,” says Dekinā’k of the Box House people in Sitka, Alaska, “so each starts from the point where he does know it.” Could there be a more perfect way of introducing a creation myth than this?
The importance of Raven to the stories of the Tlingit — who settled in southeastern Alaska around 10,000 years ago — would be hard to overestimate. Raven is a culture hero and trickster (like Prometheus), a shape-shifter (like Proteus), but he is also the creator of the earth. Back when there was no light in the world because a rich old man on the Nass River kept it all to himself, Raven “thought over all kinds of plans for getting this light into the world and finally he hit on a good one.” The rich old man who kept all the light to himself had a daughter, whom Raven impregnated by transforming himself into a small piece of dirt in a drop of water, which she swallowed. When Raven was born a human boy, he cried incessantly until his grandfather, the rich old man, consented to let him have the three bags he so noisily desired. The first contained the stars and the second the moon, which he threw up into the sky. Taking the third bag (which contained the sun), the boy “uttered the raven cry, ‘Gā,’ and flew out through the smoke hole.” The old man, tricked out of his treasure, could only complain: “That old manuring raven has gotten all of my things.” Meanwhile, the world as we know it had begun.
Tlingit Myths and Texts is a report on Tlingit culture made for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC in 1908. These reports are not always thrilling to read. Yet in this case the reporter — American ethnologist, folklorist, and linguist John Reed Swanton (1873–1958) — approached his task with such respect for the beauty of the tales told to him by the people he encountered in Sitka and Wrangell, Alaska, the book remains enlightening and delightful.
Raven is the chief protagonist in Tlingit Myths and Texts. Always on the move, always scheming, always stirring up trouble wherever he goes, Raven dives into a whale’s mouth and builds a fire; he travels to a town of ghosts, who rob him blind; he teaches a perpetual loser to be the Greatest Gambler in the World; he steals salmon from men and herring from gulls — then he flies away, crying Gā.
In addition to the many Raven tales, there are some wonderful origin stories. We learn, for example, how the killing of a giant clam in a little bay on the Tenakee inlet caused the place to smell horrible and allowed many things to grow there, how the seal people created killer whales out of wood and chalk, and how a cruel woman who burnt her mother-in-law with hot coals was transformed into the first screech owl. ※※Indexed under…OdourOrigin of life due to rotting clam's terrible
Metamorphoses abound in the Tlingit’s stories. One of the most terrifying of these is “The Woman Taken Away by the Frog People,” in which a girl is coaxed away from her village by a frog disguised as a handsome young man:
Pointing toward the lake he said, “My father’s house is right up there,” and the girl replied, “How fine it looks!” When they went up to it, it seemed as though a door was opened for them, but in reality the edge of the lake had been raised. They walked under. So many young people were there that she did not think of home again.
When eventually, after much effort, the people of the village liberate the girl from the frog people, she is listless and unable to eat. “After a while they hung her over a pole, and the black mud she had eaten when she was among the frogs came out of her, but, as soon as it was all out, she died.”
Although primarily a collection of tales whose origins predate the Tlingit’s first contact with Europeans (in the eighteenth century), Tlingit Myths and Texts also records the catastrophic results of this contact.
The very short tale that Swanton titles “How Protestant Christianity Was First Heard of at Sitka” is particularly haunting, because of all that it leaves unsaid. The teller of the tale — who is again Dekinā’k of the Box People — recounts how a man traveled south from Sitka and returned after two months:
When he came ashore he called all the people to a dance and told them that God (Deki’-anqā’wo, Distant-chief) had come down from heaven to help them. Then all the women made beadwork for their hair and ears. One evening, when they were through with that, they again began dancing. While the women danced they would fall flat on their backs. When this happened, in accordance with directions the man had received below, they brought up salt water, wet part of each woman’s blanket and flapped it against her breast to make her come to. This prevented the smallpox from having any effect upon her. They kept on dancing a whole year.


text:
Fabre’s Book of Insects (1921)

Jul 4, 2019

In the first chapter of this condensed and beautifully illustrated English version of his ten-volume series on insects, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915) introduces the reader to his workshop — which is to say his home — located on a pebbly expanse of land near the Provençal village of Sérignan du Comtat, “where hardly any plant but thyme can grow”. This might seem an unpromising setting for a naturalist, but for Fabre nothing could have been more suitable than this “happy hunting-ground of countless Bees and Wasps”.
Never have I seen so large a population of insects at a single spot. All the traders have made it their centre. Here come hunters of every kind of game, builders in clay, cotton-weavers, leaf-cutters, architects in pasteboard, plasterers mixing mortar, carpenters boring wood, miners digging underground galleries, workers in gold-beaters’ skin, and many more.
If you have already lost track of whether Fabre is talking about insects or people here, you are not alone. His ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques, or Entomological Memoirs, made Fabre famous in France and abroad not only as a populariser but as a humaniser of insect life. He was respected as an ethologist (one who studies animal behaviour) by his fellow scientists: Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution Fabre would vociferously oppose, cited him as an “inimitable observer” in both The Origin of the Species and The Descent of Man. But he was beloved by readers and writers: Victor Hugo dubbed him the Homer of the Insect World.
Like Jacques Cousteau in the twentieth century, Fabre’s greatest accomplishment was perhaps to have brought out the beauty and drama in the lives of creatures that had hitherto been regarded with horror, if regarded at all. He turned his attention not just to bees, whose praises have of course been sung since the classical era, but to wasps, weevils, ants, glow-worms, caterpillars, and cicadas. He also sometimes wrote about wild flora and fauna, and in one rare chapter about his cats — all in prose characterized, a little like Cousteau’s, by a well-informed wonder at the natural world, appealing to both children and adults:
Few insects enjoy more fame than the Glow-worm, the curious little animal who celebrates the joy of life by lighting a lantern at its tail-end. We all know it, at least by name, even if we have not seen it roaming through the grass, like a spark fallen from the full moon. The Greeks of old called it the Bright-tailed, and modern science gives it the name Lampyris.
Fabre’s Book of Insects, however, is geared specifically toward children. The texts here have been taken from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’s unabridged translations of the Entomological Memoirs and “retold” (abridged and significantly revised, if not outright bowdlerized) for a young readership by Mrs Rodolph Stawell — the author of, among other things, Fairies I Have Met.
The illustrations by E. J. Detmold (who also provided pictures for Maeterlinck’s The Life of the Bee and W. H. Hudson’s Birds in Town and Village) likewise emphasize the whimsy in Fabre’s accounts of our six-legged neighbours. The “Sacred Beetle” is shown working “in partnership with a friend”; the praying mantis is depicted in the middle of her deathly dance; and an Italian locust, with very long legs, appears to be enjoying herself enormously as she buries her eggs in the dirt. ※※Indexed under…BeetleSacred
You can find more of Detmold’s illustrations below, and discover all of Texeira de Mattos’s (unabridged) translations of Fabre’s Entomogical Memoirs here.


text:
Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1814)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Apr 2, 2019

Go to your local DIY store and the paints will no doubt carry strange names: Tawny Day Lily, Meadow Mist, Candied Yam, Marshmallow Bunny, to name but a few. As Daniel Harris points out in Cabinet magazine, paint names developed their own poetic style and, like a certain tradition of lyric poetry they make reference to nature to express mood or atmosphere. Likewise, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colour (first published in 1814) constructs a system or taxonomy for the classification of colour with reference to things in the natural world, (rather than to objects of everyday artifice, as with the work of Emily Noyes Vanderpoel). And though the goal is to primarily enable a scientific structure of identification, rather than evoke mood, the end product can't help but veer to the poetic.
The book is based on the work of the German geologist Abraham Gottlob Werner who, in his 1774 book Treatise on the External Characters of Fossils (translated into English in 1805), developed a nomenclature of colours so as to offer a standard with which to describe the visual characteristics of minerals. Clearly taken by the idea, some three decades later the Scottish painter of flowers Patrick Syme amended and extended Werner's system. In addition to the mineral referent, for each of Werner's colours Syme added an example from the animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as providing an actual patch of colour on the page to accompany the words. While Werner found a suite of 79 tints enough for his geological purpose, now opened up to other realms of nature, Syme added 31 extra colours to bring the total to 110.
With Syme's new reference categories there's born a whole new world of relationships between disparate aspects of nature, encounters dictated solely by colour. For example, for "skimmed-milk white" we have the white of the human eyeballs (animal), the back of the petals of blue hepatica (vegetable), and common opal (mineral); for "lavender purple" we have "the light parts of spots of on the under wings of Peacock Butterfly" (animal), "dried lavender flowers" (vegetable), and "porcelain jasper" (mineral). Wonderfully odd monochrome tableaux are conjured: upon a crop of calamine a bed of straw in which sits a polar bear; or the style of an Orange Lily encrusted with Brazilian topaz and the eyes of the largest flesh fly.
Syme’s confidence in obscure references to the natural world came from an obsession with taxonomies at the time, a line developed from Carl Linnaeus to Charles Darwin (who made use of  Werner’s Nomenclature on the Beagle). Such people often relied on a network of collectors and explorers, those obsessed with ordering and categorizing, pinning down butterflies and stuffing birds. In an age of mass digital reproduction, the pinning down of colour is perhaps as difficult as ever. It might be easier to turn to Pantone though, rather than Abraham Gottlob Werner.

author: Sam Dolbear


text:
The Notre-Dame Cathedral in Art (1460–1921)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 16, 2019

“Its architecture... possesses something so singular, so bold, and at the same time so delicate, that it has ever been esteemed one of the handsomest structures.”  (From vol. 18 of the 1810 Encyclopaedia Londinensis)
"Notre-Dame Cathedral is the very soul of Paris but so much more—it is a touchstone for all that is the best about the world, and a monument to the highest aspirations of artistic achievement that transcends religion and time. It has survived so much—from the French Revolution to Nazi occupation—to watch its devastation is excruciating.” – Barbara Drake Boehm, Paul and Jill Ruddock, Senior Curator for The Met Cloisters.
Like many around the world, we were so sad and shocked to see the Notre-Dame burning — to witness such history in flames. But also relieved to learn now that so much was saved, including the main structure and many of its stunning stained-glass windows. We spent the day yesterday picking out highlights from the many centuries of artworks to feature the iconic building — from its illuminated punctuation of medieval skylines to grainy detailed studies at the birth of photography. We are presenting them here in rough chronological order, which we hope gives a sense of how this magnificent building — more than eight centuries old — has inspired and outlasted so many epochs and lives and, thanks to the dedication of another generation of craftspeople, will continue to do so.

author: Adam Green


text:
Abide With Me (1914)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 30, 2019

As the RMS Titanic sank, and thousands met their death, it is said the ship’s band played Abide with Me, a hymn written some 65 years earlier by Reverend Henry Francis Lyte. If true it would be an appropriate soundtrack, not only for the poignant content of the lyrics, speaking as they do of life's end, but also because it was finished as Lyte himself was meeting death, not in the icy waters of the north Atlantic ocean but from tuberculosis whilst holidaying in France.
There's some debate about when exactly the hymn was first begun. Some accounts say it was written in 1847, shortly after Lyte delivered his final sermon, before setting out for a therapeutic holiday in Europe in an attempt to cure his, by then, acute tuberculosis; others that it was written a quarter of a century earlier, and only rediscovered in a drawer as Lyte was packing for his trip. Likely is that it was a mixture of the two, the hymn's beginnings found in the drawer and substantially reworked that night and as he made his way through France (trying to get to Italy, which he'd never reach). Sending home to his wife his final revisions for the hymn while passing through Avignon, he died in Nice just three weeks later, in the Hotel d’Angleterre, and was buried in the nearby English Cemetery.
There was on odd symmetry perhaps to Lyte passing away on the French Riviera and in the rooms of a hotel with such a name. For the last 23 years of his life he had lived and preached in Brixham, one of the three small towns that together make up a stretch of the southern English coast known as the "English Riviera". His home was Berry Head House, a former military hospital (now hotel) situated a short distance from the Napoleonic fortifications which dot the promontory (overlooking the waters where the HMS Bellephron anchored in 1815 on its way to delivering Napoleon to St Helena). Curiously, in another fact of strange association, in the same notebook containing Lyte's final revision for Abide with Me was found a poem addressed to the French government protesting against the repatriation of Napoleon’s remains.
Although it was originally written to its own tune, the hymn is now almost exclusively sung to "Eventide", a melody composed in 1861 in just ten minutes by the organist William Monk, during what his widow recalled as “a time of great sorrow". "Hand in hand", she wrote, "we were silently watching the glory of the setting sun (our daily habit) until the golden hue had faded… Then he took paper and pencilled the tune which has gone all over the world.”
In this form — Lyte's words to Monk's music — the hymn has since become one of the most popular in the world, commonly sung in the trenches of the First World War, and by Nurse Edith Cavell the night before the Germans shot her for aiding British soldiers in their escape from Belgium. Since 1927 it has been played at every FA Cup Final, and just ten days after the 9/11 attacks in New York it was memorably played by a Salvation Army band at Ground Zero.
Of the many versions recorded over the decades we are featuring one from 1914 sung by Olive Kline and Elsie Baker for Victor records.


text:
The Book of Dreams and Ghosts (1897)
Text by Ned Pennant-Rea
Apr 10, 2019

Seventy eight weird happenings are contained in this volume, from a demon strangling Devonian farmers in 1682 to a poltergeist terrorising a contemporary Chinese couple. With it the author Andrew Lang continues his mission to imbue the modern mind with some of the mystery he feels an obsession with empiricism had squeezed out.
Lang was an astonishingly versatile writer of short stories, novels, histories, anthropology, literary criticism and, most famously, twelve books of fairy tales. Though he loved to lose himself in an outlandish mystery he had a naturally sceptical turn of mind. One moment he would be criticising eyewitness accounts of a haunting, the next modern scientists who dismiss such accounts out of hand. The preface to The Book of Dreams and Ghosts poses the fundamental question:
"Do you believe in ghosts?" One can only answer: "How do you define a ghost?" I do believe in hallucinations… But as to whether they are ever caused by psychical influences from the minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt.
As he explained in an earlier work, Books and Bookmen (1886), that mind was long ago primed to ponder such matters:
At the age of ten I had the tales of the ingenious Mr. Edgar Poe and of Charlotte Brontë "put into my hands" by a cousin who had served as a Bashi Bazouk [mercenary in the Ottoman army] and knew not the meaning of fear. But I did… Every night I expected to see a lady all in a white shroud stained with blood and clay stagger into my room, the victim of too rapid interment.
In 1894, Lang had written Cock Lane and Common-Sense, his book most centrally concerned with psychical research, exploring clairvoyance, death-wraiths, spectral lights, phantom hands, possession, trance, bilocation and out-of-body experience among other phenomena. But The Book of Dreams and Ghosts was perhaps more about entertainment than research. It recounts a variety of phantasmic experiences either in Lang’s own words or through direct quotation. He titles the stories in a tantalising, Poe-esque manner – “The Dream that Knocked at the Door”, “The Scar in the Moustache”, “The Hand of the Ghost that Bit” – and tops  and tails them with commentarial glue.
There is something dreamlike about the way the narration jumps blithely between time and place, from a fin-de-siècle Norfolk country house, to 1700 BC Assyria, and on to the Scottish archipelago of St Kilda where cows share the visions of their clairvoyant milk-maids. There is a kind of order to the arrangement of the cases, however, as it advances “from the normal and familiar to the undeniably startling”. The committed reader may experience the book as a dream intensifying. Indeed what Lang says of dreaming could equally be said of reading:
In dreams, time and space are annihilated, and two severed lovers may be made happy. In dreams, amidst a grotesque confusion of things remembered and things forgot, we see the events of the past… we are present in places remote; we behold the absent; we converse with the dead, and we may even forecast the future… Now, the ghostly is nothing but the experience when awake of the every-night phenomena of dreaming.

author: Ned Pennant-Rea


text:
Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany (1871–77)

Jul 16, 2019

With his Nonsense Botany series the Victorian artist and writer Edward Lear turned his peculiar brand of verbal and visual invention to the world of plant taxonomy. A little over a century earlier the Swedish natural scientist Carl Linnaeus had laid the foundations for the binomial nomenclature system, in which a species is given a two-part name: the first part identifying the species' genus, the second part identifying the species within the genus. The system, with its usage of Latin grammatical forms, proves fertile ground for Lear's imagination. Originally the series was put out in three instalments — in Lear's nonsense collections of 1871, 1872, and 1877 — and all three featured in a posthumous collection published in 1888 from whose pages we have taken the following highlights.


text:
August Strindberg’s Celestographs (1893–4)
Text by Sam Dolbear
Apr 24, 2019

In the village of Dornach in Austria, during the winter of 1893-4, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg laid out a series of photographic plates on the ground. Removing the "middle-man" of a camera (and even lens), using the light-sensitive plates directly, he was attempting to capture images of the night sky above. He named the technique "celestography", literally to record or write (-graph) the stars or sky (celesto-). At first glance, the images appear to have been successful: galaxies take shape, speckled with clouds and other astronomical and meteorological phenomena. As the plates developed, one can imagine Strindberg gazing upon them in wonder, wondering if he had truly managed to reveal something previously invisible to the naked eye or even the most up-to-date telescope: a form of celestial light hitherto unrecorded.  It seems Strindberg believed this to be true, or at least very much wanted to believe. Right after the experiments were finished, according to Douglas Feuk writing in Cabinet, he sent a number to the famous astronomer (and writer) Camille Flammarion in Paris. Flammarion, however, rejected them and Strindberg never received a reply. The astronomer perhaps knew what they were: not "celestographs" at all, but "chemigrams"; images that resulted from chemicals mixing with photosensitive emulsions and other particles, such as drops of dirt and dust. At this point, the cosmos falls to the dirt of the earth, the sacred is profaned, the minutiae of the universe become confused with the largest of forms and vice versa. Interestingly, for Strindberg, the earthly cause of these cosmos-like images may not have necessarily indicated a failure as such, but rather affirmation of his mystic philosophy that “everything is created in analogies, the inferior with the superior”. As David Campany writes:
For Strindberg they were perhaps all these things at once, indivisibly: the infinite heavens and the earth, base material and the lofty representation, fact and  wish. Worldly matter and the stars could resemble each other and be thought as part of the same whole. This certainly went well with Strindberg’s interest in the latest scientific accounts of the universe, which suggested a common origin of all the planets and stars.
This mystical interplay, and the role played by chance, also fed into his ideas on painting. Strindberg's approach to painting was based in a response to the materiality of the paint, letting forms emerge from his interaction with it. This is what he called “chance in artistic creation”, as expressed in his so-titled 1894 essay. This description of modernist painting seems it could equally be applied to the celestographs:
At first you see nothing but a chaos of colors; then it begins to look like something, it resembles — no, it does not look like anything. All of a sudden, a point detaches itself; like the nucleus of a cell, it grows, the colors are clustered around it, heaped; rays develop, shooting forth branches and twigs like ice crystals on the window panes… and the picture reveals itself to the viewer, who has assisted at the birth of the painting.
Even after Stringberg’s death, the celestograph plates continued to develop. As Feuk so elegantly puts it: “Thumbprints have left traces, and grease or ink stains on the back have in time wandered through the paper”. In his opinion, “this has not ruined, but rather perfected these images of night — sometimes with light veils of bluish precipitates, sometimes with rusty brown oxidized spots that could possibly be interstellar dust clouds or just ordinary earthly skies lit up from below”. Whereas a photograph freezes a moment in time, a fleeting configuration of light, these images live on, they perfect further an image of nature, if one not entirely intended by Strindberg. Nature here appears more mysterious, even more modern, than art itself.


text:
The Language of Flowers: An Alphabet of Floral Emblems (1857)

Jun 26, 2019

The Victorian interest in botany went hand in hand with the Victorian interest in the “language of flowers”. At a time when many feelings were discouraged and repressed, flowers, whether sent singly or in complicated arrangements, communicated the incommunicable.
As we learn in this sumptuously illustrated Alphabet of Floral Emblems, the carnation represents fascination, the geranium gentility, and the dahlia instability. Some of the associations between feelings and flowers persist today. The rose, of course, represents love. But were you aware that a deep red rose represents “bashful shame”? Or that a gum cistus — or gum rockrose, as it’s more often called today — says to the recipient “I shall die to-morrow” (a line from the lovelorn ballad “Barbara Allen”)?
The book contains a kind of dual-language dictionary of flowers and their meanings, alphabetically arranged first by floral name and then by the emotion or message they convey. It also offers up a selection of poems — mostly by long-forgotten poets such as C. A. Fillebrown, Miss J. A. Fletcher, and John Kenyon — which supplement these more straightforward meanings and hint at the level of complexity the floral language can achieve. “For example”, says the writer of the book’s introduction:
if a flower be given reversed, it implies the opposite of that thought or sentiment which it is ordinarily understood to express: again, a rosebud from which the thorns have been removed, but which has still its leaves, conveys the sentiment, ‘I fear, but I hope,’—the thorns implying fear, as the leaves hope; remove the leaves and thorns, and then it signifies that ‘There may be neither hope nor fear’; while again, a single flower may be made emblematical of a variety of ideas; a rosebud that has been already used and deprived of its thorns, says, ‘There is much to hope,’ but stript of its leaves also, it tells, ‘There is everything to fear.’
Imagine how a simple walk in a garden might be transformed by this sensitivity to every flower’s every meaning. One can almost see how, not so long ago, the nosegay might “be made to take the place of more formal epistles”.
There were, of course, other books dedicated to the theme, with some variations on flower meanings but many remaining the same. The earliest we have found is this published in New York in 1834, which, alongside the flower meanings, offers up relevant couplets.
In 1858, just a year after the main book featured in the post came this The Illustrated Language of Flowers, compiled and edited by Mrs L. Burke.
And some decades later, in 1884, the illustrator Kate Greenaway published Language of Flowers.


text:
Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water (1851)

Jun 4, 2019

In the 1850s, the British were mad for microscopes. It was not the first time. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, published in 1665, had been tremendously popular with readers, including Samuel Pepys, who once stayed up until two in the morning marvelling at the giant fleas and minuscule cells that the book revealed to him. The wealthy Pepys was in the unusual position of being able to afford a microscope of his own. In general, though, these devices remained out of reach for amateurs until the Victorian era, when enthusiasm for nonspecialist study of the natural world made microscopes, like stereoscopes, a regular feature in middle-class parlours. The unseen world first described in the seventeenth century could now be seen.
Agnes Catlow’s Drops of Water; Their Marvellous and Beautiful Inhabitants Displayed by The Microscope (1851), was published toward the beginning of miscroscopy’s second wave. Focusing on animalcules, or Infusoria (the “little animals” that infuse stagnant water, undetectable to the naked eye), Catlow acts as a friendly guide to any amateur in possession of a good microscope — an inexpensive instrument that not only provides entertainment “at all seasons of the year” but permits us to enter an ocular wonderland.
Indeed, Catlow in her preface seems to anticipate the tiny little door through which Alice, on the cusp of her adventures, longs to go:
My readers must fancy themselves spirits, capable of living in a medium different from our atmosphere, and so pass with me through a wonderful brazen tunnel, with crystal doors at the entrance. These doors are bright, circular and thick, of very peculiar construction, having taken much time and labour to bring to perfection. A spirit named Science opens them to all who seek her, and feel induced to enter her domains. At the end of the tunnel we find other portals, much smaller, and more carefully constructed, and two or three in number; when these are opened, we are in the new world spoken of. And now I see your astonishment; your minds are bewildered with the variety of new beings and forms you behold, all gliding and moving about without noise and at perfect ease.
Instead of the hookah-smoking Caterpillar and Cheshire Cat, however, the new beings in Catlow’s enchanted realm are varicoloured blobs with proboscises and “hairs in constant motion”. The accompanying lithographs, by A. Achilles, are captivating, but the real drama of the book lies in Catlow’s accounts of the animalcules, enlivened by a scientist’s precision and a storyteller’s knack for detail:
A great portion of the green matter found on stagnant water is formed by individuals of the genus Glenomorum; they cluster occasionally, and possess a single red eye, and a double hair-like proboscis.
The family Cryptomonadina is distinguished by the individuals having a lorica, or shell, which in some is found to be inexhaustible by fire.
Throughout Catlow is careful to emphasize the cheerful novelty of what can be seen in these “minute portions” of the Creator’s work. She calls herself an amateur and addresses herself to amateurs — most of whom she assumes to be children, new to science. Her intention is to keep things light. Yet, even acknowledging the beauty of her descriptions, there is more than a hint of the monstrous in the shifting, aqueous shapes of these invisible creatures.