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The Comet Book (1587)

May 28, 2020

This stunning set of images come from a 16th-century treatise on comets, created anonymously in Flanders (now northern France) and now held at the Universitätsbibliothek Kassel. Commonly known as The Comet Book (or Kometenbuch in German), its full title translates as “Comets and their General and Particular Meanings, According to Ptolomeé, Albumasar, Haly, Aliquind and other Astrologers”. As the title (and indeed medieval origins of the book) suggests the focus is on the meaning of comets, the associated folklore and superstitions as played out on Earth, as opposed to an exploration from a scientific standpoint (the telescope would not be invented until the following century). Comets then are seen in terms of their mysterious terrestrial effects, which as a rule firmly occupy the disastrous category ("disaster" being Latin for "bad star") — devastating fires, wrecking winds, bloodshed, pestilence, famines, and a fair few celebrity deaths. As any dinosaur would tell you, the association of comets and meteors with calamitous events are not entirely unfounded — one comet, named here “Veru” (depicted as a fiery lance) and now known as Swift-Tuttle, has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity" (though the chances of it hitting Earth are still extremely small).
According to a 1977 article by Jean-Michel Massing, most of The Comet Book's chapters have their origins in an anonymously authored treatise Liber de significatione cometarum [A book on the meaning of comets] made in Spain around 1238. In the fifteenth century this was translated into French, a translation which itself spawned various illustrated abridged versions that same century. It is one of these abridged versions which, a century on, would have provided the basis for The Comet Book, not just for the text but also imagery. The latter however have been spectacularly upgraded. While, according to Massing, the formal depiction of the comets themselves don't change so much, in this 16th-century version they have been pulled from their positions inline with the text and flung into the skies of a series of stunningly coloured full-page landscapes.
The stylised depictions of the comets echo the fantastical bent of the text — "Veru" as a lance, "Domina capillorum" as burning wheel, "Rosa" with beaming face, and "Scutella" as some kind of  heavenly Asclepius’s staff. In the landscapes below which the comet's stream we see some evidence also of their perceived effects — for example, in the print for "Aurora", which was thought to be an omen of impending conflagrations, a city rages with fire. As the keen observer will note, fiery emissions are not limited only to the skies or burning cities. In the image for "Miles" — whose effects include an upset of social norms — a Bruegel-esque character can be spied defecating in the bottom right corner.
This Comet Book is in fact one of two near identical treatises. The second version (now in the Warburg Library in London) is very likely the work of the same scribe and artist, the main difference being that the Warburg copy sports an additional chapter and a slightly different running order for the comets (the result of a mistake when the Kassel copy was bound in 1969).
Lastly, for a book about fiery apparitions, it is perhaps not entirely inappropriate to learn that this Kassel copy comes to us today with some heat damage — not from comets but bombs. In September 1941, a hundred allied planes flattened Kassel in a raid in which 350,000 or so (almost 90%) of the State Library’s books and printed materials were destroyed. Thankfully the glorious Comet Book survived.
(For more historical depictions of comets — as well as meteors, meteorites, and shooting stars — check out our post "Flowers of the Sky".)
Universitätsbibliothek Kassel have made the digitisations of this work available under a CC-BY SA 4.0 license.


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Early Photographs of Juneteenth Celebrations
Text by Adam Green
Jun 18, 2020

Although Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, the Civil War then raging prevented it being enacted in much of the American South until months or even years later. Emancipation Day, or Juneteenth, is a celebration to mark the eventual country-wide realization of the decree — on June 19, 1865, when around 250,000 enslaved people were finally declared free in Texas — the last state in the US to be reached by the Union Army, commanded by General Gordon Granger, meaningfully accompanied, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner notes, by “two transports of colored troops”. Although Granger did not read out the Emancipation Proclamation itself on that day in Galveston, he did read out “General Order No. 3”, which began:
The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection therefore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.
One year later, the first anniversary of Juneteenth — or “Jubilee Day” as it was then called — was celebrated in several places in Texas. The tradition soon took hold throughout the state. Communal barbecues, concerts, prayer services, parades, as well as baseball games, fishing, and rodeos, all featured in the festivities. Some former enslaved people and their descendants living in far-flung parts of Texas made a pilgrimage to Galveston, and many dressed in their finest clothes — partly in response to the pre–1865 statewide laws that had prevented enslaved people from dressing in any clothing not given to them by those who held them in slavery.
Many of the photographs that survive from these early decades of the celebration — including sets from Houston and Corpus Christi — depict elegantly dressed groups in horse-drawn carriages elaborately decorated with flowers down to the wheels. Another set from Austin — taken in 1900 by Grace Murray Stephenson — shows a group of older people, many or all of whom would have been born into slavery, dressed up for the day, as well as a very well-posed six-piece band, and a group of men decked out in Civil War uniforms (perhaps reenacting the Union’s entry into Galveston).
Of course, violence toward Black Americans did not magically evaporate with emancipation, and racial segregation and prejudice in some places made Juneteenth celebrations very difficult. Often forbidden from celebrating on public land, many gatherings had to be disparately held in remote rural areas or small church grounds, leading some Black Texan communities to band together and buy land specifically for celebrating Juneteenth (and other community occasions). The first such communally-bought land was Houston's Emancipation Park, a ten-acre lot purchased in 1872 by the Colored People’s Festival and Emancipation Park Association led by the Baptist minister and formerly enslaved Jack Yates. You can see Reverend Yates pictured (far left) in the Juneteenth group shot below (and in the featured image above, two of his daughters in a decorated carriage).
Following Houston's example, in 1898, Mexia's Nineteenth of June Organization bought an area of land on the banks of the Navasota River, now known as Booker T. Washington Park, which was said to draw up to 30,000 for the celebration. Another dedicated community-bought land was in Austin. The photographs we've featured of the city's Juneteenth celebrations of 1900 took place in what was then called Wheeler's Grove (now Eastwoods Park) but a few years later an association, led by the formerly enslaved Thomas J. White, purchased a plot for the purpose, also named Emancipation Park (although 30 years later the city of Austin seized it to build housing).
Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Juneteenth festivities became increasingly common outside of Texas — often brought to new places throughout the country by Black Americans who’d moved away from the state. In the 1950s, the holiday temporarily faded in popularity. This was to some extent due to the Great Migration, when many Black Americans found themselves in northern cities, working for bosses who did not recognize Juneteenth. (The US Congress has still not recognized it as a national holiday, although forty-seven states do at least acknowledge its existence.) It was also to some extent due to the changing political attitudes of the mid–twentieth century, when celebration of difference was sometimes seen as antithetical to integration.
During the last half century, however, Juneteenth has grown more and more popular again. In addition to the old traditions of parades, cookouts, and music, new traditions have sprung up — including readings of work by Black American writers such as Maya Angelou and Ralph Ellison (whose second, long, and long-unfinished novel was titled Juneteenth). The celebration of difference and the commemoration of the ongoing struggle for freedom, equality, and respect have become central to this second American independence day.
You can read more about Juneteenth —past, present, and future — here and browse our selection of historical photographs of Juneteenth celebrations from across the US below.

source: public-domain-review

author: Adam Green

type: collection

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


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Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)

Aug 26, 2020

Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum — compiled and edited by antiquary extraordinaire Elias Ashmole (1617–1692) — is perhaps the seminal volume of English alchemical literature. Most significantly, it brings together a number of hermetic works previously only available in privately held manuscripts, including, as the subtitle has it, “severall poeticall pieces of our famous English philosophers, who have written the hermetique mysteries in their owne ancient language”. Among these famous English philosophers were John Gower, George Ripley, Thomas Norton, and Geoffrey Chaucer — whose alchemically themed “Tale of the Canans Yeoman” is excerpted from The Canterbury Tales.
By collecting these hard-to-find texts between covers, Ashmole first of all wanted to give a greater number of English readers a glimpse into the “Profound and Misterious” learning of the alchemists — who were not all, it should be said, completely benighted pseudoscientists. Some of them accidentally made discoveries about interactions between chemical compounds in their quest to transmute base metals into precious ones. And many, like Chaucer (whose alchemist ended up with lead poisoning), were more interested in transmutation as a metaphor for the elevation of the human soul than in striking it rich by means of hocus pocus.
It was also Ashmole’s intention, in publishing Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, to repair some of the damage done by the Dissolution of Monasteries during the 1530s — when many books were destroyed simply because they contained red letters or a mathematical diagram. These things alone were then considered “sufficient”, as Ashmole writes in his preface, “to intitle the Booke to be Popish or Diabolicall”.
Even at the time it was published — the year after Charles II had been dethroned by Cromwell — Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum was not only arcane but antique. Ashmole anticipated mockery and skepticism on the part of many of his contemporaries, saying he did not
expect that all my Readers should come with an Engagement, to believe what I here write, or that there was ever any such thing in rerum natura as what we call A Philosophers Stone, nor will I perswade them to it, (though I must tell them I have not the vanity to publish these Sacred and Serious Mysteries and Arcana, as Romances)
As for Ashmole’s own belief or disbelief in alchemy? He said only: “I must professe I know enough to hold my Tongue, but not enough to Speake.”
With all their talk of Elixirs of Life and the Philosopher’s Stone and magic mirrors, the texts of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum remain fascinating. But it’s the illustrations that really steal the show. The circular diagram “conveying all the secrets of” George Ripley’s “The Compound of Alchimie”, the images of monks and dragons, butterflies and dogs, ibises and angels — all of these testify to the rich imagery of the late medieval and early modern eras even as they point to the hunger for transformative knowledge that would lead (following many twists and turns) to the discoveries of such thinkers as Isaac Newton and the experimental methods of modern science. (In fact, a typed note inserted in the scanned copy above tells us that Newton's copy of Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, bought in 1669 for £1.80 and subsequently covered with annotations, was one of his "favorite books".)
You can page through Ashmole’s book above — and browse some of its most memorable images below. For more illustrations from the history of the alchemical tradition see our dedicated post here.


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Joseph Ducreux’s Self-Portraits (ca. 1790)

Aug 27, 2020

The painter Joseph Ducreux, born in Nancy, France, in 1735, was a minor aristocrat who began to paint during the final decades of the Ancien Régime. (In fact, he drew the last portrait of Louis XVI before the king was guillotined.) In 1789 or ’90, he emigrated to London with many other aristocrats, before returning to Paris in 1793. For the last ten years of his life, he continued his career with the assistance of Jacques-Louis David (a friend and younger painter in favor with the revolutionaries) and became the host of an informal salon for artists and musicians.
Ducreux specialized in portraits, including those of Choderlos de Laclos (author of Liaisons dangeureuses) and Maria Theresa of Austria, but he is perhaps best remembered today for his strikingly modern self-portraits, which depict him in exaggerated, mime-like postures not at all common in either portraits or self-portraits at the time.
These postures included “surprise in terror”, in which Ducreux raises his hand up defensively with mouth agape, and “the silence”, in which he puts a finger to his pursed lips (in the suspected later version his shoulder's covered in a white dusting from powdered wig). Other self-portraits show him yawning in decidedly unsexy dishabille, with a white nightcap crowning his head, or pointing directly at the viewer and grinning. The latter, so the title tells us, is meant to depict an expression of mocking, but, at least nowadays, more readily presents itself as depicting a friendlier encounter with the viewer (though retaining the smugness), like a man catching sight of an old friend across a crowded room, or a politician trying to charm a voter.  ※※Indexed under…Quietas expressed in portraiture
These unorthodox self-portraits were remarkable artworks for their time — evidence of Ducreux’s disregard for the classical styles of portraiture dominant in his day and enthusiasm for the study of physiognomy and the expressive capacities of the human body and face. With their unusual combination of directness. ambiguity, and exaggerated expression they earned Ducreux a mixed reception in his lifetime but a strong and curious rebirth in the age of social media and the all-powerful "meme". Indeed, they seem to have been virtually waiting, through the centuries, to be adorned with witty captions. Since, 2009, "Self-portrait of the Artist in the Guise of a Mocker", in particular, has appealed to meme-makers — its anachronistic aspect, of such a modern-seeming expression from so many centuries ago, providing the perfect impetus to get playful with rap lyrics, translating them into what Know Your Meme calls "archaic rap". In 2011, Steve Buscemi's face got involved, the now-photoshopped figure spouting similar faux-old translations of lines from Buscemi's films such as The Big Lebowski.
For more on old art and memes check out our essay "Early Modern Memes: The Reuse and Recycling of Woodcuts in 17th-Century English Popular Print" by Katie Sisneros; and for more on the expression of emotions and painted portraits see our essay "The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture" by Nicholas Jeeves.


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The Tours of Dr Syntax (1809–1821)

Oct 20, 2020

The word “picturesque” has long been a rather vague way of describing a certain ramshackle beauty — in particular the beauty of a rural landscape, or a country house, or some other old structure gone to attractive ruin. But the word has its origins in late eighteenth-century Britain, where the artist, Anglican cleric, and schoolmaster William Gilpin (1724–1804) was its foremost promoter. While Gilpin was very skilled at describing a post-Enlightenment preference for “the rough, varied and irregular forms of nature” instead of the strict lines and right angles of the earlier eighteenth century, he was also very often ridiculous. In his Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales... Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (1770), Gilpin famously suggested that some of the straighter and more regular “gabel-ends” of Tintern Abbey could benefit from some aesthetic alteration: “A mallet judiciously used (but who durst use it?) might be of service in fracturing some of them”.
By 1809, when the artist Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) and the writer William Combe (1742–1823) co-created the character of Doctor Syntax, the concept of the picturesque was ripe for satire. Syntax, like Gilpin, is an artist, cleric, and schoolmaster who decides to make his fortune by traveling to quaint locales and then drawing and describing them for publication — a sort of aesthete Quixote who rides around on an old mare called Grizzle.
The first of the books, The Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (1809–1812), follows the good doctor’s adventures about the countryside in search of the perfect scenery. Like many a traveler before and after him, he suffers his fair share of mishaps — falls in a lake, is pursued by a bull, loses all his money at the racetrack in York. The comic nature of these mishaps is clear enough in Rowlandson’s pictures, reinforced by Combe’s satirical verse:
Nature, dear Nature, is my goddess,Whether arrayed in rustic bodice,Or when the nicest touch of ArtDoth to her charms new charms impart:But still I, somehow, love her best,When she’s in ruder mantle drest:I do not mean in shape grotesque,But when she’s truly picturesque.
Two more books followed — The Second Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of Consolation (1820) and The Third Tour of Dr Syntax in Search of a Wife (1821). They were all hugely popular, above all in Britain (where figurines, prints, and fabric patterns of Dr Syntax can still be found in museums and antiques shops) but also in France, Germany, and Denmark, where translations of the books appeared.
Combe’s verse is certainly entertaining, but Rowlandson’s art comes first in every sense: Combe wrote his poems to illustrate Rowlandson’s pictures, which are often cited as forerunners to the comic strips of later years such as Rodolphe Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837).
You can read all three Dr Syntax books above, in 1903 reprints of the seventh edition (originally published 1820–21), and included below a selection of Rowlandson's images from an 1813 edition of the first Tour (digitised by The British Library). And we've also one of the images (though in the form of a higher quality stand-alone print from 1812) available in our online shop.


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Der Naturen Bloeme: The Flower of Nature (ca. 1350)

Sep 10, 2020

Nowadays, when we seek a holistic picture of our world, many of us might look to the internet. It’s debatable whether this crowd-sourced glut of information provides us a more extensive or more accurate version of things than the encyclopedias and natural histories of old provided their readers. A great deal, after all, depends on the interpreter. But one thing is clear: everyone, no matter when or where they have lived on this earth, has always loved drawing and looking at pictures of animals.
The wonderful illuminated manuscript featured here, produced in Utrecht or Flanders sometime in the mid-fourteenth-century, contains quite a number of memorably rendered creatures, some real and some imaginary, and would have acted, in its day, like a kind of Wikipedia of the natural world. There is an elephant with a funnel-like trunk in a landscape of mushroomesque trees. There are several bipedal, winged, or horned fish. And a rather mean looking oyster. Indeed, a compendium of cute animals this is not — most of the beasts are found sporting the same grisly grin, though often to the point of comedy (and one might argue, cuteness).
The manuscript is an illustrated version of the poet Jacob van Maerlant's Der naturen bloeme (ca. 1270), which is itself a shortened adaptation (and translation into Dutch) of De natura rerum (ca. 1230–45) by the philosopher and theologian Thomas of Cantimpré.  The tradition of such encyclopaedic studies of natural things stretches back nearly two millennia, to the publication of Pliny the Elder’s Latin Naturalis historia (c. 77–79 CE), which purported to include all knowledge of life on earth, and the anonymous second century Greek Physiologus, which more modestly limited itself to flora and fauna.
The thirteen books of van Maerlant’s Der naturen bloeme (The Flower of Nature) focus on man, quadrupeds, birds, fish and other sea creatures, reptiles and insects, trees, medicinal herbs, springs, and gems and metals, proceeding in roughly alphabetical order according to the Latin names.
To historians, Der naturen bloeme is especially remarkable because it is a scholarly text written in Dutch, not the expected Latin. To all of us, it’s remarkable for the indelible illuminations it spawned, including not only animals but homines monstruosi (monster humans) rumored to live outside the bounds of Europe. These comprise cannibals, Cyclopes, and — in the words of the National Library of the Netherlands where the manuscript is housed — “people with only one leg and feet so large that they could be used as a parasol”.
Find below some of our favourites from the 460 or so miniatures featured in the manuscript.


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“A Slight Freshness on the Neck”: Prints Depicting the Execution of Louis XVI (ca. 1793)

Jul 14, 2020

It was an execution that defined an era. On January 21, 1793, four days after he had been convicted of high treason and crimes against the state by 693 of the 721 deputies of the National Convention, King Louis XVI was guillotined. The gruesome event took place on the Place de la Révolution (formerly the Place Louis XV, soon to be the Place de la Concorde) and came to represent, both in France and abroad, the changing nature of the French Revolution.
Of course, the way artists at the time depicted Louis XVI’s execution depended on their own political convictions — or, lacking those, the political convictions of their patrons or audience. The primary sentiment many throughout Europe felt was fear that this act of violence was a prelude to others. This is clearly evident in the English print Hell Broke Loose, where a swarm of devils beat drums and blow trumpets among the free-floating words Ça ira (“It’ll be fine”, an emblematic song of the French Revolution) and Vive la Nation (“Long live the nation”).
The English cartoonist Isaac Cruikshank emphasized the brutality of the execution by first portraying it inaccurately but symbolically, in a picture that has the Duke of Orleans (who, though he supported the Revolution, would be guillotined ten months later) holding an axe over Louis’ head while Marie Antoinette (who would be guillotined nine months later) pleads for mercy. Within a few days, another Cruikshank cartoon was published in which Louis is depicted as a martyr standing beside the guillotine, whose newfangled workings (the beheading machine had only been invented the year before, in 1792) are explained.
Horror at Louis’ execution was in fact frequently mixed with horror at the efficient modern machine by which the execution was carried out. This double horror often took straightforward form, especially in English prints of the 1790s:
Certain French artists took a more sardonic view — for example, in this cartoon where below the crown it says “I am losing a head” and below the guillotine “I am getting one”:
The view of Louis as a martyr was shored up by many French engravings — and by the English painter Charles Bezanech, whose images of Louis on his way to the scaffold quickly became iconic for the royalist cause. While Louis is portrayed as a Christian family man bathed in celestial light, his executioners are shown in rigid poses with eyes averted from the viewer. The even more rigid guillotine looms large — albeit discreetly, so as not to distract the viewer from the king — in the background.
Pro-revolutionary depictures of Louis’ execution were, if anything, more gruesome than anti-revolutionary ones. Only the rhetoric of the captions distinguished them, as in this image from a Montagnard pamphlet, which is labeled “Food for thought for crowned mountebanks: may an impure blood water our soil. Monday, January 21, 1793, at a quarter past ten in the morning, on the Place de la Révolution, the tyrant who used to be called Louis XVI fell beneath the sword of Law”:
There was no “sword” involved, of course — only the guillotine, which, ironically enough, Louis XVI had helped design. An amateur locksmith generally fascinated by mechanical things, Louis had suggested that the device use an oblique blade rather than a crescent one to make certain that the head would come off at the first blow, no matter the shape of the neck. At any rate, Louis’ own head was apparently severed without any (mechanical) trouble at all.
You can browse a selection of other images of Louis XVI’s beheading below. These range from the wholly imagined rendering by the German Georg Heinrich Sieveking — who had been in sympathy with the Revolution until the king was killed — to some of the many anonymous popular engravings that circulated widely in 1793. In these, the same details are repeated again and again (not least of all the towering symbol of the guillotine), as though artists and audience alike were trying to find a place for this shocking event, which shaped history and reshaped reality.


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The Four Elements and Temperaments from an Album of Prints after Maerten de Vos (ca. 1583)

Jun 30, 2020

In the collection of the Rijksmuseum is an early-modern album of prints from the library of (and likely compiled by) a man named Jean de Poligny, whose stony-faced portrait is pasted toward the end of the volume, but about whom nothing else appears to be known. Among the highlights of the album — a mixed bag of Ortelius maps, an infographic-esque history of the world, and various allegorical and biblical scenes — is a pair of beautiful sets engraved by the Flemish artists Adriaen Collaert (1560–1619) and Raphaël Sadeler (1560–1632), both modeled on paintings by their fellow Fleming Maerten de Vos (1532–1603).
The Collaert series depicts personifications of the four classical elements —  Earth, Water, Air, and Fire — which since Empeclodes and Aristotle had been key to how Western traditions, prior to modern atomic theory, conceptualised the material make up of our world.  Earth is personified by the goddess Cybele, holding flowers in one hand and a city in the other; a skeleton and a newborn symbolize life and death, as a bestiary frolics on the hills and dales behind her. Water, embodied by Venus, sits in an almost drapery-like swirl and welter of aquatic creatures, in one hand a compass and in the other a ship. Air, a well-muscled man in the clouds, is surrounded by birds and flying insects and holds aloft a chameleon — the mascot of all that's ethereal. Fire, Helios, is seen encircled by flames, a Phoenix rising towards him and in his hand a salamander. Although the latter is amphibious, it has long been associated with fire in legend, most likely due to its habit of hibernating in logs, which when used as fuel would result in salamanders mysteriously escaping from the flames.
The set engraved by Raphaël Sadeler depicts the four temperaments — Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, and Phlegmatic — a spin-off theory from humourism which relates to essential personality types (often considered in parallel to the four elements). The picture for the Sanguine temperament (associated with the Air element) depicts Flora sitting next to a young man in a beautiful arbor-like structure, behind which plays out bucolic scenes of lovers, music-making, and general frivolity. The Choleric temperament (associated with Fire) is represented by the war god Mars and the wheat goddess Ceres, with soldiers marauding in the background. The Melancholic (associated with Earth) shows a troubled woman sitting over a man lying on the ground before her: around them, all is broken, abandoned, or otherwise depressing. (The performance going on in the background is apparently a charlatan exhibiting false cures and miracles.) Finally, in the image for the Phlegmatic temperament (associated with Water) we are treated to a somewhat simpler scene wholly dominated by fish and fish-based activities (including the act of gazing peacefully into a fish's face).


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William Elliot Griffis’ Korean Fairy Tales (1922)

Sep 22, 2020

Many of the Korean fairy tales told by William Elliot Griffis begin rather pedagogically. “Korea is the land of beautiful scenery and lovely flowers”, begins “The King of Flowers”. “No bird is more common in Korea than the magpie”, we are told at the outset of “The Sky Bridge of Birds”. Yet Griffis has a talent for transitioning quickly from these educational openings to quite striking narratives shot through with images that are hard to forget. Here, for example, is how “The Sky Bridge of Birds” continues:
They [the magpies] are numbered by millions. Every day in the year, except the seventh day of the seventh month, the air is full of them. On that date, however, they have a standing engagement every year. They are all expected to be away from streets and houses, for every well-bred magpie is then far up in the sky building a bridge across the River of Stars, called the Milky Way. With their wings for the cables, and their heads to form the floor of the bridge, they make a pathway for lovers on either side of the silver stream.
The two lovers, separated from each other by an edict of the King of Stars, cross over the magpies’ heads and wear away the poor birds’ feathers. This is an explanation for magpies’ partial baldness during their late summer molting, but it also lends an aura of romance to the birds — and to the seventh day of the seven month — that is genuinely enchanting.
The author (or rather adapter) of Korean Fairy Tales, Griffis, was born in Philadelphia in 1843. After fighting in the Civil War, attending Rutgers University, and briefly studying at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, he was invited to Fukui, Japan, in 1870 — partly to help develop a modern school curriculum. The next year, he moved to Tokyo and began teaching at the institution that would later become Tokyo University. Although Griffis returned to the United States in 1874, he continued to take an interest in East Asian culture for the rest of his life. Throughout the final quarter of the nineteenth century, he kept busy as a minister in New York State and Boston, but also as the author of more than fifty books — including The Mikado’s Empire (1876), considered for many years the authoritative text in English on Japanese culture, and several books of folklore and fairy tales from Wales, Belgium, Switzerland, Japan, and Korea. He also wrote two volumes on Korean history, Korea: Within and Without (1885) and Korea: The Hermit Nation (1882).
Perhaps the pedagogical tone that sneaks into Griffis’ versions of these traditional Korean stories can be attributed to his career in the ministry. He shows a tendency to moralize, and to romanticize, which mark his productions as true “fairy tales”, as opposed to the more authentic transcriptions of the stories told by cultural insiders and typically called “folktales”.
This is not to say all is light and beautiful in Griffis’ tales.  In “The Unmannerly Tiger”, the unfortunate animal of the title is outwitted by a priest and a toad before ending up so hungry and frustrated he dashes his own brains out on a rock — to the profit of a wandering hunter who happens on the corpse. A number of other stories introduce readers unfamiliar with Korean folklore to the sprite Tokgabi, a mischievous trickster. In “Tokgabi’s Menagerie”, we are told why there are so few housecats in Korea — and more particularly why they end up classed among the “bad” animals in Tokgabi’s menagerie. The blame falls on a tabby named Mee Yow, whose conceited nature, after an adventure involving a bargain with rats, causes her to lose her master's magic stone (much prized as it had caused the wine-merchant's bottles to forever be renewed).
The text of Korean Fairy Tales is accompanied by some delightful illustrations (artist unknown), which you can browse below.


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Kawanable Kyōsai’s Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (1890)

Jun 16, 2020

Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889), aka “The Demon of Painting”, composed this book of woodblock illustrations toward the end of a life that had begun during the Edo period, when Japan was still a feudal country, and ended in the midst of the Meiji period, when the country was transforming into a modern state.
Kyōsai was by all accounts the bad boy artist of his era. Considered both Japan’s first political caricaturist and one of the first authors of a manga magazine (Eshunbun Nipponchi), Kyōsai was arrested by the shogunate three times for his commitment to free expression. Also, he made no secret of his love for sake.
The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons (Hyakki Yagyō) is a thousand-plus-year-old Japanese folkloric tradition, in which a series of demons parades — or explodes — into the ordinary human world.
Kyōsai’s version was, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art which houses the book, one of the artist’s most popular volumes, offering “a spectacular visual encyclopedia of supernatural creatures of premodern Japanese folklore”. (To see more examples of such supernatural creatures, also see our post on this Edo-era scroll.)
One can see why it was so popular. Narratively, it paves the way for the fantastic parade with two woodblocks: the first depicts a group of adults and children gathered around a coal fire to hear ghosts stories, the second a man (probably Kyōsai) setting down his calligraphy brush and extinguishing the lamp in preparation for the night in which the demons will appear.
The illustrations of the demons themselves are appropriately terrifying. Skeletal soldiers riding a human-headed horse; a frog-like demon dominating a badger; furry-headed demons and naked demons that look like the stuff of Jim Henson’s darkest nightmares — all parade across Kyōsai’s pages.
Each double-page of the book is arranged in such a way as to join up with the next, as though a continuous scroll is divided over the pages of a book. Though be aware that, of course, the book is bound on the right and so runs counter to the usual left-to-right of English-language books, and so also counter to how our gallery below is set up to display!


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Scott Joplin

May 25, 2012

Scott Joplin (1867? – 1917), "The King of Ragtime", wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. He was born into a musical African American family of laborers in Northeast Texas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers, most notably Julius Weiss. While growing up in Texarkana he formed a vocal quartet, and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s he left his job as a laborer with the railroad, and travelled around the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. In 1894 he moved to Sedalia, Missouri, and earned a living teaching piano and going on tour across the Southern US. During this period he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. Joplin began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 brought him fame and had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life. During his lifetime, Joplin did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems. In 1901 he moved to St. Louis where he continued to compose and publish music, and regularly performed in brothels and bars in the city's red-light district. By the time he had moved to St. Louis, Joplin may have been experiencing discoordination of the fingers, tremors, and an inability to speak clearly, as a result of having contracted syphilis. The score to his first opera, A Guest of Honor, was confiscated in 1903 with his belongings due to his non-payment of bills, and is considered lost. He continued to compose and publish music, and in 1907 moved to New York City, seeking to find a producer for a new opera. He attempted to go beyond the limitations of the musical form which made him famous, without much monetary success. His second opera, Treemonisha, was not received well at its partially staged performance in 1915. In 1916, suffering from tertiary syphilis and by consequence rapidly deteriorating health, Joplin descended into dementia. He was admitted to a mental institution in January 1917, and died there three months later at the age of 49. (Wikipedia)


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William Cheselden’s Osteographia (1733)

Jun 11, 2012

With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s lavishly illustrated Osteographia or the Anatomy of the Bones, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration.


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Transit of Venus (1882)

Jun 5, 2012

The etching above shows William Crabtree in 1639 making what is thought to be one of the very first observations of the 'Transit of Venus', when the planet Venus crosses the face of the Sun. There would be three more such occurrences before the event of 1882 shown in the images below. Rather than using wet bromo-iodide plates to capture the image as was done for the Transit of Venus in 1874 only 14 years earlier, these images from 1882 were made on dry collodion emulsion plates - a much more practical method. The Naval Observatory and Transit of Venus Commission sent 8 parties around the world to observe each of the transits; the results of which were important for determining the scale of the solar system. Of the hundreds of images created during the 1882 American expeditions only 11 plates still survive.


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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Interview (1927)

Jun 29, 2012

A 1927 Fox newsreel interview with the author and spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He speaks about his greatest literary creation, Sherlock Holmes, and his work in spiritualism.


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James Joyce reading his work (1924/1929)

Jun 15, 2012

FROM THE “AEOLUS” EPISODE OF ULYSSES (1924)
MP3 Download / Internet Archive Link
Joyce made this recording in Paris at the HMV studios at the insistence of Sylvia Beach (the woman behind Shakespeare and Company, the publisher's of Ulysses), although HMV would only loan out their equipment at a cost and would have as little to do with the recording as possible. Beach recounts:
Joyce himself was anxious to have this record made, but the day I took him in a taxi to the factory in Billancourt, quite a distance from town, he was suffering with his eyes and very nervous. Luckily, he and Coppola were soon quite at home with each other, bursting into Italian to discuss music. But the recording was an ordeal for Joyce, and the first attempt was a failure. We went back and began again, and I think the Ulysses record is a wonderful performance. I never hear it without being deeply moved. Joyce had chosen the speech in the Aeolus episode, the only passage that could be lifted out of Ulysses, he said, and the only one that was "declamatory" and therefore suitable for recital. I have an idea that it was not for declamatory reasons alone that he chose this passage from Aeolus. I believe that it expressed something he wanted said and preserved in his own voice. As it rings out - 'he lifted his voice above it boldly' - it is more, one feels, than mere oratory.
THE "ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE" SECTION FROM FINNEGANS WAKE (1929)
MP3 Download / Internet Archive Link
This recording of Joyce reading was made in 1929 by C.K. Ogden (the linguist, philosopher, and inventor of Basic English) in the studio of the Orthological Society in Cambridge. Ogden boasted of the two biggest recording machines in the world and wanted to do a better recording of Joyce than the Ulysses recording of 5 years earlier which he regarded as being of very poor quality. Sylvia Beach again:
How beautiful the "Anna Livia" recording is, and how amusing Joyce's rendering of an Irish washerwoman's brogue! This is a treasure we owe to C. K. Ogden and Basic English. Joyce, with his famous memory, must have known "Anna Livia" by heart. Nevertheless, he faltered at one place and, as in the Ulysses recording, they had to begin again. Ogden gave me both the first and second versions. Joyce gave me the immense sheets on which Ogden had had "Anna Livia" printed in huge type so that the author-his sight was growing dimmer-could read it without effort. I wondered where Mr. Ogden had got hold of such big type, until my friend Maurice Saillet, examining it, told me that the corresponding pages in the book had been photographed and much enlarged.
Below are the texts themselves:
FROM THE “AEOLUS” EPISODE OF ULYSSES (1924)
He began:
—Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Great was my admiration in listening to the remarks addressed to the youth of Ireland a moment since by my learned friend. It seemed to me that I had been transported into a country far away from this country, into an age remote from this age, that I stood in ancient Egypt and that I was listening to the speech of some highpriest of that land addressed to the youthful Moses.

His listeners held their cigarettes poised to hear, their smokes ascending in frail stalks that flowered with his speech. And let our crooked smokes. Noble words coming. Look out. Could you try your hand at it yourself?

—And it seemed to me that I heard the voice of that Egyptian highpriest raised in a tone of like haughtiness and like pride. I heard his words and their meaning was revealed to me.
FROM THE FATHERS
It was revealed to me that those things are good which yet are corrupted which neither if they were supremely good nor unless they were good could be corrupted. Ah, curse you! That’s saint Augustine.

—Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsmen: we are a mighty people. You have no cities nor no wealth: our cities are hives of humanity and our galleys, trireme and quadrireme, laden with all manner merchandise furrow the waters of the known globe. You have but emerged from primitive conditions: we have a literature, a priesthood, an agelong history and a polity.

Nile.

Child, man, effigy. By the Nilebank the babemaries kneel, cradle of bulrushes: a man supple in combat: stonehorned, stonebearded, heart of stone.

—You pray to a local and obscure idol: our temples, majestic and mysterious, are the abodes of Isis and Osiris, of Horus and Ammon Ra. Yours serfdom, awe and humbleness: ours thunder and the seas. Israel is weak and few are her children: Egypt is an host and terrible are her arms. Vagrants and daylabourers are you called: the world trembles at our name.

A dumb belch of hunger cleft his speech. He lifted his voice above it boldly:

—But, ladies and gentlemen, had the youthful Moses listened to and accepted that view of life, had he bowed his head and bowed his will and bowed his spirit before that arrogant admonition he would never have brought the chosen people out of their house of bondage, nor followed the pillar of the cloud by day. He would never have spoken with the Eternal amid lightnings on Sinai’s mountaintop nor ever have come down with the light of inspiration shining in his countenance and bearing in his arms the tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.
THE "ANNA LIVIA PLURABELLE" SECTION FROM FINNEGANS WAKE (1929)
Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every telling has a tailing and that’s the he and the she of it.  Look, look, the dusk is growing. My branches lofty are taking root.  And my cold cher’s gone ashley.  Fielhur? Filou! What age is at?  Its saon is late.  ‘Tis endless now senne eye or erewone last saw Waterhouse’s clogh. They took it asunder, I hurd thum sigh.  When will they reassemble it?  O, my back, my back, my bach!  I’d want to go to Aches-les-Pains.  Pingpong!  There’s the Belle for Sexaloitez!  And Concepta de Send-us-pray!  Pang!  Wring out the clothes!  Wring in the dew!  Godavari, vert the showers!  And grant thaya grace!  Aman.  Will we spread them here now?  Ay, we will.  Flip!  Spread on your bank and I’ll spread mine on mine.  Flep!  It’s what I’m doing.  Spread!  It’s churning chill.  Der went is rising.  I’ll lay a few stones on the hostel sheets.  A man and his bride embraced between them.  Else I’d have sprinkled and folded them only.  And I’ll tie my butcher’s apron here.  It’s suety yet.  The strollers will pass it by.  Six shifts, ten kerchiefs, nine to hold to the fire and this for the code, the convent napkins twelve, one baby’s shawl.  Good mother Jossiph knows, she said.  Whose had?  Mutter snores?  Deataceas!  Wharnow are alle her childer, say?  In kingdome gone or power to come or gloria be to them farther?  Allalivial, allalluvial!  Some here, more no more, more again lost alla stranger.  I’ve heard tell that same brooch of the Shannons was married into a family in Spain.  And all the Dunders de Dunnes in Markland’s Vineland beyond Brendan’s herring pool takes number nine in yangsee’s hats.  And one of Biddy’s beads went bobbling till she rounded up lost histereve with a marigold and a cobbler’s candle in a side strain of a main drain of a manzinahurries off Bachelor’s Walk.  But all that’s left to the last of the Meaghers in the loup of the years prefixed and between is one kneebuckle and two hooks in the front.  Do you tell me that now?  I do in troth.  Orara por Orbe and poor Las Animas!  Ussa, Ulla, we’re umbas all!  Mezha, didn’t you hear it a deluge of times, ufer and ufer, respund to spond?  You deed, you deed!  I need, I need!  It’s that irrawaddyng I’ve stoke in my aars.  It all but husheth the lethest zswound.  Oronoko!  What’s your trouble?  Is that the great Finnleader himself in his joakimono on his statue riding the high horse there forehengist?  Father of Otters, it is himself!  Yonne there!  Isset that?  On Fallareen Common?  You’re thinking of Astley’s Amiptheayter where the bobby restrained you making sugarstuck pouts to the ghostwhite horse of the Peppers.  Throw the cobwebs from your eyes, woman, and spread your washing proper. It’s well I know your sort of slop.  Flap!  Ireland sober is Ireland stiff.  Lord help you, Maria, full of grease, the load is with me!  Your prayers, I sonht zo!  Madammangut!  Were you lifting your elbow, tell us, glazy cheeks, in Conway’s Carrigacurra canteen?  Was I what, hobbledyhips?  Flop!  Your rere gait’s creakorhueman bitts your butts disagrees.  Amn’t I up since the damp dawn, marthared mary allacook, with Corrigan’s pulse and varicoarse veins, my pramaxle smashed, Alice Jane in decline and my oneeyed mongrel twice run over, soaking and bleaching boiler rags, and sweating cold, a widow like me, for to deck my tennis champion son, the laundryman with the lavandier flannerls?  You won your limpopo limp from the husky hussars when Collars and Cuffs was heir to the town and your slur gave the stink to Carlow.  Holy Scamander, I sar it again!  Near the golden falls.  Icis on us!  Seints of light!  Zezere!  Subdue your noise, you hamble creature! What is it but a blackburry growth on the dwyergray ass them four old coldgers owns.  Are you meanem Tarpey and Lyons and Gregory?  I meyne now, thank all, the four of them, and the roar of them, that draves that stray in the mist and old Johnny MacDougal along with them.  Is that the Poolbeg flasher beyant, pharphar, or a fireboat coasting nyar the Kishtna or a glow I behold within a hedge or my Garry come back from the Indies?  Wait till the honeying of the lune, love!  Die eve, little eve, die!  We see that wonder in your eye.  We’ll meet again, we’ll part once more.  The spot I’ll seek if the hour you’ll find.  My chart shines high where the blue milk’s upset.  Forgivemequick, I’m going!  Bubye!  And you, pluck your watch, forgetmenot.  Your evenlode.  So save to jurna’s end!  My sights are swimming thicker on me by the shadows to this place.  I sow home slowly now by own way, moyvalley way.  Towy I too, rathmine.
Ah, but she was the queer old skeowsha anyhow, Anna Livia, trinkettoes!  And sure he was the quare old buntz too, Dear Dirty Dumpling, foostherfather of fingalls and dotthergills.  Gammer and gaffer we’re all their gangsters.  Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him?  And every dam had her seven crutches.  And every crutch had its seven hues.  And each hue had a differing cry.  Sudds for me and supper for you and the doctor’s bill for Joe John.  Befor!  Bifur!  He married his markets, cheap by foul, I know, like any Etrurian Catholic Heathen, in their plinky lemony creamy birnies and their turkiss indienne mauves.  But at milkidmass who was the spouse?  Then all that was was fair.  Tys Elvenland!  Teems of times and happy returns.  The seim anew.  Ordovico or viricordo.  Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.  Northmen’s thing made southfolk’s place but howmulty plurators made eachone in person?  Latin me that, my trinity scholard, out of eure sanscreed into oure eryan.  Hircus Civis Eblanensis!  He had buckgoat paps on him, soft ones for orphans.  Ho, Lord!  Twins of his bosom.  Lord save us!  And ho!  Hey?  What all men?  Hot?  His tittering daughters of.  Whawk?
Can’t hear with the waters of.  The chittering waters of.  Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk.  Ho!  Are you not gone ahome?  What Thom Malone?  Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us!  My foos won’t moos.  I feel as old as yonder elm.  A tale told of Shaun or Shem?  All Livia’s daughtersons.  Dark hawks hear us.  Night!  Night!  My ho head halls.  I feel as heavy as yonder stone.  Tell me of John or Shaun?  Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of?  Night now!  Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm!   Night night!  Telmetale of stem or stone.  Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of.  Night!


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Lost Futures: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

Jun 30, 2012

What did the year 2000 look like in 1900? Originally commissioned by Armand Gervais, a French toy manufacturer in Lyon, for the 1900 World exhibition in Paris, the first fifty of these paper cards were produced by Jean-Marc Côté, designed to be enclosed in cigarette boxes and, later, sent as postcards. All in all, at least seventy-eight cards were made by Côté and other artists, although the exact number is not known, and some may still remain undiscovered. Each tries to imagine what it would be like to live in the then-distant year of 2000.
Some technologies are wonderfully prescient. Chicken eggs are incubated with machines. Tailoring is partially automated. Crowds assemble at the symphony for electronic music. The most accurate depictions are in the theaters of warfare and industrial agriculture — testament to the driving economic forces of technological development across the twentieth century: gatling guns affixed to automobiles, blimp-like battleships, fields cut with combine harvesters. As is so often the case, other predictions fall some way off the mark, failing to go far enough in thinking outside the confines of their current technological milieu (hence the ubiquity of propellers, a radium fireplace, not to mention the distinctly nineteenth-century dress). Still other predictions remain bizarre, mainly those that anticipated rapid nautical conquest: submarine divers trawling the sea’s surface for seagulls, underwater croquet, a whale bus (exactly as it sounds).
These somewhat prescient scenes did not see the light of day until their future was nearly at hand. A few sets of cards were printed by Gervais in 1899 but he died during production. For the next quarter century, the cards sat idle in his defunct toy plant — future visions shelved in a basement like forgotten relics from the past. An antiquarian bought the archive, transferring it to his own crypt for fifty more years, until the Canadian writer Christopher Hyde stumbled across them at his Parisian shop. Hyde in turn lent the cards to science-fiction author Isaac Asimov, who republished them in 1986, with accompanying commentary, in the book Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000.


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Tennis with Muybridge (1887)

Jul 2, 2012

Plates 294 to 299 of Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking collection from 1887 titled Animal Locomotion: an Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements, a massive portfolio with 781 plates comprising of 20,000 photographs. In the preceding four years Muybridge made more than 100,000 images, working obsessively in Philadelphia under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of Muybridge's work at this time was done in a special sunlit outdoor studio, due to the bulky cameras and slow photographic emulsion speeds then available. One of his favoured subjects to show the human form in locomotion was the tennis player. (Wikipedia). Learn more about Muybridge's pioneering research into human and animal locomotion, and see the wonderful photographs, in Taschen's epic 2014 tome Muybridge: The Human and Animal Locomotion Photographs.


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Hawaiian Ciribiribin (1919)

Jul 3, 2012

Instrumental Hawaiian guitar version by the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe of Alberto Pestalozza's oft recorded classic "Ciribiribin" originally composed in 1898. Frank Ferera is considered to be the first great star of Hawaiian music. Ferera first visited the mainland United States as part of the Keoki E Awai troupe, and gained fame with the troupe by performing to an estimated 17 million people in a seven-month period at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915. He married Helen Louise Greenus, daughter of Seattle businessman Albert E. Greenus, and as the Louise and Ferera Hawaiian troupe toured with her throughout the USA, in 1915 signing up to Columbia Records. "Ciribiribin" was to be one of the very last songs they recorded together. In December 12, 1919, Helen Louise mysteriously disappeared while the couple were on board the steamship SS President, from Los Angeles back to their home in Seattle. She had apparently gone on deck for a walk at 4 a.m. and never returned.


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The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid (1847)

Jun 21, 2012

Oliver Byrne (1810–1890) was a civil engineer and prolific author of works on subjects including mathematics, geometry, and engineering. His most well known book was this version of 'Euclid's Elements', published by Pickering in 1847, which used coloured graphic explanations of each geometric principle. The book has become the subject of renewed interest in recent years for its innovative graphic conception and its style which prefigures the modernist experiments of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements. Information design writer Edward Tufte refers to the book in his work on graphic design and McLean in his Victorian book design of 1963. In 2010 Taschen republished the work in a wonderful facsimile edition. (Wikipedia)


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Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style (1942)

Jun 20, 2012

In 1942, Charles A. Ridley of the British Ministry of Information made a short propaganda film, "Lambeth Walk - Nazi Style", which edited footage of Hitler and German soldiers from Leni Riefenstahl's classic Triumph of the Will to make it appear as if they were marching and dancing to the song "The Lambeth Walk". A member of the Nazi Party achieved attention in 1939 by declaring "The Lambeth Walk" (which was becoming popular in Berlin) to be "Jewish mischief and animalistic hopping" as part of a speech on how the "revolution of private life" was one of the next big tasks of National Socialism in Germany. The film so enraged Joseph Goebbels that reportedly he ran out of the screening room kicking chairs and screaming profanities. The propaganda film was distributed uncredited to newsreel companies, who would supply their own narration. This version is from the Universal Newsreel company: "The cleverest anti-Nazi propaganda yet! You will howl with glee when you see and hear what our London newsreel friends have cooked up for Hitler and his goose-stepping armies. The 'Nasties' skip and sway in tune to the Lambeth Walk!"


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A Manual of Gesture (1875)

Jun 6, 2012

Based heavily on Gilbert Austin's Chironomia of 1806, this book by Albert. M. Bacon explores the art of hand gestures, particularly in relation to effective public oratory - all complete with a system of notation and many practise examples with which to hone one's skills. As Bacon states in the preface: "Agreeable sounds and harmonious action — one addressing the ear, and the other the eye — combine to perfect the orator."


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Development of a Salamander (1920s)

Jun 4, 2012

Early biological silent film, made sometime in the 1920s, which uses time-lapse photography to show the development of a salamander from egg to larvae. From the Department of Anatomy at Yale University.


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Paradise Found: the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole (1885)

Jun 14, 2012

A book by William Fairfield, the first president of Boston University, placing Atlantis at the North Pole, as well as the Garden of Eden, Mount Meru, Avalon and Hyperborea. Warren believed all these mythical lands were folk memories of a former inhabited far northern seat where man was originally created.
From the preface:
This book is not the work of a dreamer. Neither has it proceeded from a love of learned paradox. Nor yet is it a cunningly devised fable aimed at particular tendencies in current science, philosophy, or religion. It is a thoroughly serious and sincere attempt to present what is to the author s mind the true and final solution of one of the greatest and most fascinating of all problems connected with the history of mankind.


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A History of Mourning (1890)

Jun 28, 2012

A history of mourning, burial customs, and funerary rites.
"Then occurred an event unique in history," continues this naive contemporary chronicle. "The body of Inez was lifted from the grave, placed on a magnificent throne, and crowned Queen of Portugal. The clergy, the nobility, and the people did homage to her corpse, and kissed the bones of her hands. There sat the dead Queen, with her yellow hair hanging like a veil round her ghastly form. One fleshless hand held the sceptre, and the other the orb of royalty. At night, after the coronation ceremony, a procession was formed of all the clergy and nobility, the religious orders and confraternities which extended over many miles each person holding a flaring torch in his hand, and thus walked from Coimbra to Alcobaga, escorting the crowned corpse to that royal abbey for interment. The dead Queen lay in her rich robes upon a chariot drawn by black mules and lighted up by hundreds of lights."
The scene must indeed have been a weird one. The sable costumes of the bishops and priests, the incense issuing from innumerable censers, the friars in their quaint garments, and the fantastically-attired members of the various hermandades, or brotherhoods some of whom were dressed from head to foot entirely in scarlet, or blue, or black, or in white with their countenances masked and their eyes glittering through small openings in their cowls ; but above all, the spectre-like corpse of the Queen, on its car, and the grief-stricken King, who led the train when seen by the flickering light of countless torches, with its solemn dirge music, passing through many a mile of open country in the midnight hours was a vision so unreal that the chronicler describes it as "rather a phantasmagoria than a reality." In the magnificent abbey of Alcobasa the requiem mass was sung, and the corpse finally laid to rest.


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Coloured Engravings of the Fugger Family

May 31, 2012

Throughout the course of the 15th and 16th century The Fugger Family from Augsburg became became one of Europe's most powerful merchant dynasties. They replaced the de' Medici family as probably Europe's most influential family, taking over many of the Medici assets as well as their political power and influence. Ennobled at the beginning of the 16th century, the Fuggers began to withdraw step by step from business during the second half of the century and as the 1600s began adopted an aristocratic lifestyle. Jakob Fugger, who died in 1525, is considered to be one of the richest persons of all time, and is today referred to as Jakob Fugger 'the rich'. The series of images below are a selection from the Fuggerorum et Fuggerarum. Quae in familia natae. Quaève in familiam transiervnt. Quot extant aere expressae imagines, a limited edition of highly elaborate coloured engravings, published exclusively in 1593 and 1618 for the family members which they depicted. The work was commissioned by Philipp Eduard Fugger and carried out in the most part by the Augsburg engraver Dominicus Custos (see also his Atrium Heroicum)


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Images from Japanese Design Magazine Shin-Bijutsukai (1902)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 1, 2012

Shin-Bijutsukai (New Oceans of Art) magazine appeared during a watershed in Japanese publishing history: when pattern and design books became standalone works of art. The first Japanese pattern books — colorless woodblock manuals, known as hinagata-bon (雛形本) — were created in the 1660s, when political stability and a bullish economy fostered an expansion in fashion and a desire for voguish textiles. While growing out of this genre, the colorful and abstract designs in Shin-Bijutsukai magazine (1902–1906) reflect a convergence of historical and technological shifts in turn-of-the-century Japanese society. Notably, artists traveling abroad on government grants encountered Art Nouveau and Japonisme — the Western European fondness for a mediated, Japanese aesthetic — which they, in turn, folded back into domestic patterns: forging originality through the prism of cross-cultural pollination. Emboldened by innovations in book production, such as newfound color-printing capabilities, and seeking to keep pace with developments in manufacturing, the Unsōdō and Unkindō publishing houses began to collaborate with artists to print a type of book known as zuan-chō (図案帳), featuring designs for textiles, lacquerware, screens, ceramics, and other crafts. As the British Library notes, “some of these were meant as source books for artisans”, but others “were conceived as beautiful objects to be enjoyed for their own sake”.
Published by Unsōdō, Shin-Bijutsukai was edited by Furuya Kōrin (1875–1910) and overseen by Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the artist of A World of Things (Momoyogusa), who has been hailed as “the greatest twentieth-century Japanese designer”. Sekka taught at what is now Kyoto City University of the Arts, in one of several departments dedicated to design that were established in the late 1890s. There is a balance in Kōrin’s life and work between the traditional and the modern. Influenced by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Rinpa school of painting, Kōrin chose his pen name knowingly, styling himself as an “[Ogata] Kōrin of the modern age”, in reference to the artist after whom the Rinpa school was coined. In 1907, Furuya Kōrin published the two-volume Designs after Kōrin, which, unlike other Rinpa-influenced pattern books dating back to 1706, weds aesthetic approaches of the Art Nouveau with older motifs. Following his mentor, Kōrin secured a teaching position in the same department as Sekka, and fashioned himself to be his teacher’s professional and artistic successor, only to pass away at the age of forty-five.
Like its editor, Shin-Bijutsukai (1902–1906) plots a similar course between timeless themes and novel influences — with title pages announcing, in English, a “New Monthly Magazine of Various Designs by the Famous Artists of To-Day”. With contributions from a variety of artists, the most striking designs in the magazine are captivatingly abstract and layered, dislocating the imagination from place or period: pastel blobs beneath a translucent surface crackled with leaf shapes; oozing, cellular frames encasing beautiful plant matter; a forest whose canopy dissolves into a wash of spilled wine.
You can browse 1902 issues of Shin-Bijutsukai as a collected set, courtesy of the Smithsonian, at archive.org. For another pattern book produced at this same time, see our post on Ueno Seikō’s unique designs.

author: Hunter Dukes


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The Illuminated Sketchbook of Stephan Schriber (1494)

Jun 15, 2012

Selected pages from the Spätgotisches Musterbuch des Stephan Schriber, a manuscript which appears to be some kind of sketchbook, belonging to a fifteenth-century monk working in South-West Germany, where ideas and layouts for illuminated manuscripts were tried out and skills developed.


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San Francisco Earthquake Aftermath (1906)

Jun 10, 2012

Haunting footage on the streets of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake which devastated much of the city, left more than 300,000 people homeless and killed over 3000. The earthquake was the first natural disaster of its magnitude to be documented by photography and motion picture footage. This film appears to be made by amateurs who attached a camera to a car driven around the city. Noticeable is the huge amount of people out sightseeing amid the rubble. See also this Edison newsreel showing scenes of the rescue operation and clearup. And see "A Trip Down Market Street" which shows the streets of San Francisco only 6 days prior to when the earthquake hit.


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What to Draw and How to Draw It (1913)

Jul 4, 2012


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Novum Instrumentum Geometricum (1607)

Jun 22, 2012

Illustrations from Leonhard Zubler's Novum Instrumentum Geometricum (1607). Zubler was a Swiss goldsmith and instrument maker who is credited with introducing the use of the plane table into modern surveying. This book demonstrates the use of his instruments in techniques of triangulation, particularly in the context of warfare.


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The Whole Booke of Psalmes collected into Englishe Metre (1584)

May 27, 2012

Thomas Sternhold published his first, short collection of nineteen Certayn Psalmes between mid-1547 and early 1549. In December of 1549, his posthumous Al such psalmes of Dauid as Thomas Sternehold ... didde in his life time draw into English Metre was printed, containing thirty-seven psalms by Sternhold and, in a separate section at the end, seven psalms by John Hopkins. This collection was taken to the Continent with Protestant exiles during the reign of Mary Tudor, and editors in Geneva both revised the original texts and gradually added more over several editions. In 1562, the publisher John Day brought together most of the psalm versions from the Genevan editions and many new psalms by John Hopkins, Thomas Norton, and John Markant to make up The Whole Booke of Psalmes, Collected into English Meter. In addition to metrical versions of all 150 psalms, the volume included versified versions of the Apostles' Creed, the Magnificat, and other biblical passages or Christian texts, as well as several non-scriptural versified prayers and a long section of prose prayers largely drawn from the English Forme of Prayers used in Geneva. Sternhold and Hopkins wrote almost all of their Psalms in the "common" or ballad metre. Their versions were quite widely circulated at the time; copies of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter were bound with many editions of the Geneva Bible, and their Psalms were used in many churches. The Sternhold and Hopkins psalter was also published with music, much of it borrowed from the French Geneva Psalter. (Wikipedia)


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Correct Postures for Housework (1920s)

Jun 18, 2012

Series of photographs taken of Miss Ruth Kellogg demonstrating correct postures for various forms of housework. Photos taken by Troy for Delineator magazine. No date given, but Miss Kellogg was at Cornell 1921-26.


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The Faerie Queene (1596)

May 27, 2012

Original 1596 first edition of the second part to Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene - disposed into twelue bookes, fashioning XII. morall vertues - a book published, according to Spenser, to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.” It is a highly allegorical tale, the adventures of several medieval knights, dragons, damsels in distress, etc., in a mythical "Faerie land" ruled by the Faerie Queene, all used to explore moral issues and what makes for a life of virtue under the reign of his 'Queene' Elizabeth. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer and Il Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, whom Spenser greatly admired. He originally indicated that he intended the poem to be twelve books long, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete.
Read the first 3 books in Part 1 in this later (and slightly more legible!) edition from 1859.


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Navaho Legends (1897)

Jun 28, 2012

Book from the American Folk-Lore Society compiling Navaho myths and legends and including also a lengthy introduction on the history, beliefs and customs of the Navaho people.
I. THE STORY OF THE EMERGENCE.
136. At To'bIllhaskI'di (in the middle of the first world), white arose in the east, and they regarded it as day there, they say ; blue rose in the south, and still it was day to them, and they moved around ; yellow rose in the west and showed that evening had come ; then dark arose in the north, and they lay down and slept.
137. At To'bIllhaskI'di water flowed out (from a central source) in different directions ; one stream flowed to the east, another to the south, and another to the west. There were dwelling-places on the border of the stream that flowed to the east, on that which flowed to the south, and on that which flowed to the west also.


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Frances Power Cobbe’s “The Peak in Darien: The Riddle of Death” (1882)

Feb 11, 2020

Humans have always wondered what becomes of individual consciousness after death. Does it disappear all at once? Fade? Does it find some new existence in a dimension the living cannot see? In the nineteenth century, belief in some sort of unseen spiritual world was taken for granted by almost everyone. But with the Second Great Awakening in America came the birth of “spiritualism”, which held that the dead (or rather “discarnate humans”) were not only able but eager to speak to the living, with the aid of mediums, who often charged a pretty penny for their services.
In 1882 — five years before the Seybert Commission debunked slate writing, spirit rappings, and ghost photography, among other spiritualist practices — the Irish writer and women’s rights advocate Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) published an essay called “The Peak in Darien: The Riddle of Death.”
Cobbe, who was no friend of superstitions, begins by observing that “inquirers into so-called ‘Spiritual’ manifestations” have bitten off more than they can chew by trying to “obtain communication with the dead”. Instead, she suggests, we might better “penetrate the great secret of mortality” by paying attention to the dying. While she concedes “it is possible that the natural law of death may be that the departed always sink into a state of unconsciousness, and rather dip beneath a Lethe than leap a Rubicon”, she adds, “there is also at least a possibility that consciousness is not always lost, but is continuous through the passage from one life to another”.
Cobbe finds proof of this possibility in the many reports of happy visions seen by the dying. A lover of poetry, Cobbe connects these deathbed visions with John Keats’ description, in “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, of the awe Cortez must have felt when, “with eagle eyes”, he first stared at the Pacific—
... and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise —Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
A dying person is, according to Cobbe, our “forerunner on the hill-top” and perhaps shows “by his looks and actions, since he is too far off to speak to us, that he beholds from his ‘Peak in Darien’ an Ocean yet hidden from our view?”
Cobbe cites a number of deathbed scenes in which the dying are gladdened to see their deceased children and relations, or become ecstatic at the sight of a vision invisible to others — such as the elderly man “dying of a painful disease” who, in his last moments, “opened his eyes wide, and gazed eagerly upward with such an unmistakable expression wonder and joy that a thrill of awe passed through all who witnessed it”.
But perhaps the most curious incident Cobbe relates concerns a dying lady who was delighted to see,
one after another, three of her brothers who had long been dead, and then, apparently, recognized last of all a fourth brother, who was believed by the bystanders to be still living in India. The coupling of his name with that of his dead brothers excited such awe and horror in the mind of one of the persons present that she rushed from the room. In due course of time, letters were received announcing the death of the brother in India, which had occurred some time before his dying sister seemed to recognize him.
Indeed, in the years since the publication of Cobbe’s essay, the term “Peak in Darien” Experiences has come to describe, in the words of Bruce Greyson, a range of “mystical experiences” in which the dying see either a dead person they could not have known was dead or a dead person they could never have known at all. Though this is a somewhat narrower definition of a “Peak in Darien” Experience than Cobbe intended, it does speak to our abiding fascination with what becomes of consciousness, individuality, and experience after death.
Cobbe herself expresses it very well:
[F]or most of us, God be thanked, no dream of celestial glory has half the ecstasy of the thought that in dying we may meet — and *meet at once*, before we have had a moment to feel the awful loneliness of death — the parent, wife, husband, child, friend of our life, soul of our soul, whom we consigned long ago with breaking hearts to the grave. Their “beautiful” forms…entering our chamber, standing beside our bed of death, and come to rejoin us for ever, — what words can describe the happiness of such a vision? It *may* be awaiting us all. There is even, perhaps, a certain probability that it is actually the natural destiny of the human soul, and that the affections which alone of earthly things can survive dissolution will, like magnets, draw the beloved and loving spirits of the dead around the dying. I can see no reason why we should not indulge so ineffably blessed a hope.


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W. W. Denslow’s Illustrations for the Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)

Jan 8, 2020

L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first book in what became a fourteen-volume series. It sold nearly 15,000 copies within a month of its publication in September 1900 and remains the most popular of the Oz books — not least of all because it’s the only one illustrated by W. W. Denslow, whose depictions of Dorothy, Toto, and all the other creatures and landscapes of Oz have become so iconic as to be inseparable from Baum’s story.
Denslow wasn’t simply a hired hand. Before he and Baum collaborated on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, they had already worked together on other projects, including Father Goose: His Book, which became the bestselling children’s book of 1899. Their insistence on including full-color illustrations in Father Goose turned out to be crucial to its success, but it also meant they had to agree to pay all printing costs.
This was the case with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, too, which was even more lavishly illustrated. Denslow worked closely with Baum to create pictures of characters and landscapes not described in the text. He was truly a co-creator. As Denslow said, he had to “work out and invent characters, costumes, and a multitude of other details for which there is no data — and there never can be in original fairy tales.”
Born in Philadelphia in 1856, William Wallace Denslow started drawing early. In the words of Michael Patrick Hearn:
He soon developed into an extraordinarily adaptable designer and went wherever the work was. He roamed the countryside drawing lithographs for county atlases in New York and Pennsylvania. He designed theater posters and other advertising in Philadelphia and New York City. When the daily press started using pictures, he went from paper from paper from New York to Chicago to Denver to San Francisco and back to Chicago…. He supplemented [his] income by designing dozens of book covers for Rand McNally and supplying hundreds of little pictures for Montgomery Ward’s mail order catalogues. In almost every design could be found his totem — a tiny seahorse.
After 1900, Denslow was rather rich. He held joint copyright with Baum for most of the books they worked on together, as well as for the Broadway musical The Wizard of Oz, which debuted in 1902. After breaking permanently with Baum when they quarreled over royalty shares for this musical, Denslow, according to a 2013 article in the Bahamian paper Bernews, “used the profits he made from illustrating L. Frank Baum’s classic Oz book to buy Bluck’s Island in the Great Sound, build himself a turreted castle-like house, and proclaim himself King Denslow I.” “A delightful old reprobate who looked like a walrus”, as the poet Eunice Tietjens quipped, Denslow was not exactly a modest man.
Musicals and money were not Denslow’s forte. He invested a considerable amount in the ill-fated 1905 Broadway production of The Pearl and the Pumpkin (a children’s book he created with Paul West in 1904). By 1908, Denslow was broke. He moved to Buffalo, New York, and worked for the Niagara Lithograph Company; then to New York City, where he worked for an agency, earning a salary of $25 per week. Years of alcohol abuse by then had taken their toll. “In 1915, [Denslow] unexpectedly sold a cover to the popular humor weekly Life,” Hearn writes, “went on a bender with the money, caught pneumonia, and died. He was only 58 years old.”
Looking at Denslow’s illustrations today, one can see how essential they were to the cultural legacy of The Wizard of Oz on page, stage, and screen.


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The Jester (1908)

Jan 21, 2020

Ah, the magic of cigarette smoke! In this film from 1908 — most likely directed by the British magician and filmmaker Walter R. Booth, though titled in Dutch here and digitized by the Eye Film Institute in Amsterdam — a woman dressed as a jester makes things appear, disappear, and transform every times she exhales…
Puff! She turns a throne into a pedestal. Puff! On that pedestal, a terrier appears. But the jester’s magic is not limited to now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t stuff. She can also make her body spin like a pinwheel and her face revolve like a mask.
In a second scene, spookily blue, the jester conjures a Pierrette  and a Pierrot, whom she splits into two Pierrots. This is predictably followed by a boxing match between the Pierrots to see who will win the hand of the miserable-looking Pierrette. Less predictably, the match ends with the two men becoming one again. The victorious Pierrot now claims Pierrette, who looks more miserable than ever in the moments before she changes into another woman and Pierrot changes into an apple, which the new woman eats. Finally, the jester returns with her cigarette, re-conjures Pierrette, and hides her in a cigar box.
In a brief final scene, with everything now pinkish red, the jester pours Pierrette out of the cigar box back into the world, and with a hefty dose of nicotine transforms her into a twirling girl in a party dress. Then she separates Pierrette from that girl and makes her twirl as well. The End.
An entertaining, if rather eerie, bagatelle from the early days of film, The Jester reminds us how magical the medium must have been for audiences — and how bewildering for actors — accustomed to the stage. Aside from the dog, whose chops are impeccable, everyone in the film looks either terrified or vaguely amused.


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Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre (1916)

Jan 21, 2020

In the autumn of 1911, Franz Kafka went to see several performances of a Yiddish theater troupe who’d recently arrived in Prague. Mesmerized, he noted down the details in his diaries, dwelling on everything from the costumes of "Mrs K, ‘male impersonator’" to the plots of the melodramas and the "long-drawn-out forward movement" he heard in the melodies of the songs. Over the next few months, while the troupe was stranded in Prague due to money troubles, Kafka became increasingly fascinated by the world of the Yiddish theater — an itinerant subculture that found a home wherever there were enough Yiddish-speakers to support them.
Reading Kafka’s diary entries, which record not only the performances but the friendships he struck up with the actors, one soon realizes how sizable this subculture once was. It had its share of infighting (arguments over who was "the greatest Jewish writer"), its celebrities ("‘the great Adler,’ from New York, the most famous Yiddish actor, who is a millionaire"), and its hardships: "Mrs Tschissik", Kafka writes, "has protuberances on her cheeks near her mouth. Caused in part by hollow cheeks as a result of the pains of hunger, childbed, journeys, and acting…"
Theater in Yiddish had not been around for very long when Kafka discovered it. The first modern Yiddish theater production was staged in 1876 at an open-air garden in Bucharest; its impresario, the poet Avrom Goldfaden (1840–1908), would afterward become a one-man industry, composing operettas that were distributed and performed all through Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century. From the beginning, however, Goldfaden struggled to get audiences to accept serious plays (rather than vaudevillian combinations of music, comedy routines, and melodrama). His own humble ambition was to become "the Yiddish Shakespeare", but he continually found that all audiences wanted was, as he put it, "a good glass of wine and a song".
The translator Isaac Rosenberg’s edition of Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre, published in 1916, at the height of the First World War, is a document of a later era. By then, Yiddish playwrights — many of whom had been born in present-day Poland or Russia and then emigrated to New York City — had long begun to expand the repertoire beyond shtick mixed with music. Six Plays collects work by four playwrights central to expanding this repertoire.
Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948), sometimes called "the Yiddish Maeterlinck", became famous for the moody atmospheres and terse dialogue of his drama, here well represented by "In the Dark", in which an odd-job man, his daughter, and his blind mother exchange laments on a winter evening in "two long and narrow rooms in a deep cellar".
David Pinski (1872–1959), who as a boy had been destined for a career as a rabbi in his native Russia, was much celebrated by Yiddish theatergoers and critics in the early decades of the twentieth century. He often wrote on biblical themes, as he does here in "Abigail": the story of a woman who has a love affair with King David. His other great subject, in Goldberg’s words, was "the struggle and tragedy of the Jewish proletariat", as is evident in a second play, "Forgotten Souls".
Sholem Aleichem (1859–1916) — confusingly listed under his birth name, Solomon J. Rabinowitsch — remains one of the best-known Yiddish playwrights. His talents were vast. At fifteen he wrote a Jewish version of Robinson Crusoe and never looked back, composing, over the course of his life, dozens of plays, several novels, an autobiography, and countless stories, including Tevye’s Daughters, which formed the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The Aleichem play included here, "She Must Marry a Doctor", is pure vaudeville — a proto–Marx Brothers routine in which Abram, the studious and thoroughly modern young man, and Sholom, the old-fashioned matchmaker, couldn’t be more hilariously at odds:
ABRAM: [pompously] The word despot is derived from "despotism"… Now do you understand?SHOLOM: [Shakes his head.] And what does despotism mean?ABRAM: Despotism is the same as despot… A despot means a tyrant — despot and tyrant are practically the same, and for heaven’s sake don’t bother me any longer! [*Turns to his books and begins to thumb over the pages.*]
Last but not least, Sholem Asch (1880–1957) — another Yiddish playwright whose work is still regularly performed — is represented by two plays, "Winter", about a self-sacrificing sister, and "The Sinner", an allegorical play about death which takes place entirely in a graveyard. Neither of these, however, give a very good idea of what Isaac Rosenberg calls Asch’s "erotomania", alluding to his masterpiece God of Vengeance, in which a Jewish brothel-keeper tries to become respectable. With its portrayal of Jewish prostitutes, its rough handling of the Torah, and its depiction of a lesbian kiss (the first ever seen on a Broadway stage), God of Vengeance was destined to be shut down on charges of obscenity not long after it premiered in 1923.
Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre opens a door into a vibrant literary universe not often discussed nowadays. You can find modern translations of plays by some of the same authors here. And you can read more about Yiddish literature in general — and browse a number of texts and images — at the Yiddish Book Center’s impressive Digital Library.


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François de Nomé’s Imaginary Ruins

Jan 16, 2020

A cathedral collapses. The fires of hell rage. Fantastic ruins stand in unrecognizable surroundings. Above it all, the sky swirls with ominous clouds.
These baroque paintings, with their theatrical chiaroscuro, saturated colors, and love of columns of every kind, were forerunners of the fantastic architecture depicted in Piranesi’s capricci — though for us they perhaps more immediately bring to mind the work of surrealists and futurists such as De Chirico, Dalí, and Ernst.
They are the work of François de Nomé. Born in Metz (present-day France) in 1593, Nomé moved to Rome while still a child and studied there with the Flemish artist Balthasar Lauwers. In 1610, he relocated to Naples, where — as far as anyone can tell — he would remain for the rest of his life.
Nomé’s visions of imaginary cities and ruins, though exceptional, are not without counterparts in the Naples of his day. The paintings of Didier Barra (also born in Metz and with whom Nomé shared a studio in Naples) are similar enough that, up until the twentieth century, both his and Nomé’s work was attributed to a mysterious man named Monsù Desiderio.
There’s no question Nomé’s paintings bear comparison with Barra’s, especially in their fascination with perspective and their use of color. But nothing ever quite matches the menace of Nomé’s skies or the extravagance of his scenes. His paintings of Atlantis, the burning of Troy, and assorted Roman rubble demonstrate a real talent for discovering beauty in disaster — and a real love for dreaming up ever more elaborate architecture.
You can explore our selection of Nomé’s extraordinary pictures below.
Note: While we are fairly certain all pictures can be sensibly attributed to Nomé, some doubt does remain in some cases. The titles given are also, in some cases, approximations — the true title not always being entirely clear.


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Studies on Twilight Phenomena, after Krakatoa (1888)
Text by Adam Green
Apr 9, 2020

On the 27th August 1883, on a small island in Indonesia, the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano peaked — the violent culmination of one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history, the explosion of which was heard as far as 3000 miles away.  In addition to the terrible devastation (36,000 deaths were attributed to the eruption) strange optical effects the world-over were reported, a result of the massive plume of ash and debris sent into the upper atmosphere.
Skies at the beginning and end of the day, when the sun was lowest in the sky, were particularly affected, glowing strange colours for years following the eruption and enrapturing and intriguing scientists, writers, and artists alike. Given the nature of the mystery — a scientific phenomenon expressing itself in such dramatic visuals —  attempts to document and explain it often took the form of an interdisciplinary effort, both art and science working in tandem. One such example is a German book published in 1888 — Untersuchungen über Dämmerungserscheinungen: zur Erklärung der nach dem Krakatau-Ausbruch beobachteten atmosphärisch-optischen Störung, which roughly translates as "Studies on twilight phenomena: to explain the atmospheric-optical disturbance observed after the Krakatau eruption". While most of the book is an exploration via text, by the German physicist Johann Kiessling, the final pages are given over to a wonderful series of chromolithographs from watercolour images by Eduard Pechuël-Loesche, all featured below.
Pechuël-Loesche was a German naturalist, plant collector, and watercolour painter who travelled extensively, including to West Africa where he accompanied Paul Güssfeldt on the Loango Expedition of 1873–76 and played a role in the founding of the Congo state. Although most of Pechuël-Loesche's images in the Studies on Twilight Phenomena book are from the years following the Krakatoa eruption, three hail in fact from the "Loango Coast" (in modern-day Republic of Congo), from his time on the Loango Expedition.
As for Johann Kiessling's text, it proved pivotal in the understanding of these strange post-Krakatoa skies, explaining as it did the enigmatic phenomenon in terms of ash-cloud particles diffracting sunlight. Seeking to replicate the effect through laboratory experimentation Kiessling designed and built a fog chamber. It was an invention which, together with Kiessling's successful experiments, proved instrumental in the development of Charles Thomas Rees Wilson's cloud chamber which was used in particle physics to detect the paths of radioactive particles.
You can read more about the artistic and literary response to the strange skies caused by Krakatoa, in particular in relation to Gerard Manley Hopkins, in our essay "The Krakatoa Sunsets" by Richard Hamblyn.


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George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864)

Jan 8, 2020

We have known about the origins of our disaster for longer than we like to imagine. More than 150 years ago, George Perkins Marsh (1801–1882) published Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action — a study of how human action modifies the physical world, from the crust of the earth to the atmosphere.
The scope of Man and Nature is vast. Beginning with chapters on “the general effects and the prospective consequences of human action upon the earth’s surface and the life which peoples it”, Marsh then proceeds to trace
the history of man’s industry as exerted upon Animal and Vegetable Life, upon the Woods, upon the Waters, and upon the Sands; and to these I have added a concluding chapter upon Probable and Possible Geographical Revolutions yet to be effected by the art of man.
Despite the vastness of the project, Marsh’s message to readers was clear: If people do not take care of the earth, the earth will cease to take care of them.
If we now find this claim self-evident, this is partly due to Marsh’s “epoch-making” work. For centuries, it had been taken for granted that the resources of the land and the sea were inexhaustible. Marsh, however, mustered historical evidence against this mythological claim, pointing out that the Mediterranean landscapes described by ancient writers seldom resembled their “present physical condition”:
[M]ore than one half of their whole extent — including the provinces most celebrated for the profusion and variety of their spontaneous and their cultivated products, and for the wealth and social advancement of their inhabitants — is either deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation, or at least greatly reduced in both productiveness and population.
What Marsh here calls “desolation” is what’s now known as “desertification” brought about — as he also argues in Man and Nature — by the destruction of forests.
Marsh was born in rural Woodstock, Vermont, in 1801. Like his father, Charles, he would attend Dartmouth College in New Hampshire before going on to study law and serve as a representative to Congress. He wrote his many books — including an Icelandic grammar, a study of the camel, and two volumes of English linguistics — while leading an active life as a lawyer, statesman, and ambassador, first to the Ottoman Empire (in 1852–53) and later to Italy, where he would be the longest-serving envoy in US history, remaining there from 1861 until his death in 1882.
Unlike many early American conservationists, Marsh was more a scholar than an outdoorsman. Whereas John Muir made arguments for preserving the wilderness that appealed to the heart, Marsh aimed squarely at the head. He was fond of forests and other wild spaces (and played a role in the establishment of the Adirondack Park in New York State), but he emphasized above all the harm to humanity their destruction might cause — desertification, flooding, resource scarcity, and soil erosion, among other things.
Human action transforms the earth, Marsh writes in the concluding pages of Man and Nature, “though our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still more their ultimate consequences.” Lest this seem like a reason to shrug our shoulders and turn our backs, Marsh adds:
But our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not a reason for ignoring the existence of such causes […] and we are never justified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown, or even because no physical effect can now be traced to it as its origin.
The mystery of how our actions affect the landscape was not, Marsh wanted us to understand, an excuse for irresponsibility; it was rather a reason to take responsibility for learning about the ongoing “action and reaction between humanity and the material world”.


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Nooks and Corners of Old New York (1899)

Jan 28, 2020

Charles Hemstreet’s 120-year-old guidebook to lower Manhattan is, surprisingly, not at all obsolete. Probably this is because its interest lies in the past. While some of the landmarks Hemstreet mentions in order to orientate the reader (a patch of grass here, a building there) are by now long gone, anyone who has a passing familiarity with “old New York” can enjoy the book’s blend of local knowledge and historical trivia.
One learns, for example, that Bowling Green, the minuscule park at the southern tip of Broadway (once much larger)
was originally the centre of sports for colonists, and has been the scene of many stirring events. The iron railing which now surrounds it was set up in 1771, having been imported from England to enclose a lead equestrian statue of King George III. On the posts of the fence were representations of heads of members of the Royal family. In 1776, during the Revolution, the statue was dragged down and molded into bullets, and where the iron heads were knocked from the posts the fracture can still be seen.
Hemstreet delights in these sorts of details. He especially likes to describe the pile-on of events in some of Manhattan’s oldest places, such as Castle Garden — a small artificial island built in 1808–1811 and later, in the 1860s, incorporated into the mainland. “It was the first real home of opera in America,” Hemstreet tell us, before launching into a litany of names and dates:
General Lafayette was received there in 1824, and there Samuel F. B. Morse first demonstrated the possibility of controlling an electric current in 1835. Jenny Lind, under the management of P. T. Barnum, appeared there in 1850. In 1855 it became a depot for the reception of immigrants; in 1890 the officers were removed to Ellis Island, and in 1896, after many postponements, Castle Garden was opened as a public aquarium.
In the 1890s, New York had already changed many times beyond recognition. Still, at that time much more of the past remained intact. Obviously, Hemstreet — like E. C. Peixetto, whose pen-and-ink drawings nicely illustrate Nooks & Corners — was attuned to these visible traces. “Chatham Square,” he writes, “has been the open space it is now ever since the time when a few houses clustered about Fort Amsterdam”; “Thames Street is as narrow now as it was one hundred and fifty years ago, when it was a carriageway that led to the stables of Etienne De Lancey”.
Writing about Greenwich Village, Hemstreet tells us that it was built on the site of a Native American settlement, in a fertile region whose
natural drainage afforded it sanitary advantages which even to this day make it a desirable place of residence. There was abundance of wild fowl and the waters were alive with half a hundred varieties of fish. There were sand hills, sometimes rising to a height of a hundred feet, while to the south was a marsh tenanted by wild fowl and crossed by a brook flowing from the north. It was this Manetta brook which was to mark the boundary of Greenwich Village when Governor Kieft set aside the land as a bouwerie for the Dutch West India Company.
Bouwerie is Dutch for “farm”. (This, as you might guess, accounts for how the Bowery — which used to be the road to Peter Stuyvesant’s farm — got its name.)
Hemstreet, who was also the author of The Story of Manhattan and When Old New York Was Young (as well as a practical guide to newspaper reporting and at least one novel), is almost entirely forgotten today. Yet his books on knickerbocker history are well worth looking into. Readers of Luc Sante’s Low Life — or anyone enamored with the city’s lore — will find something fascinating on every page.