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Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898)
Text by Kevin Dann
Jun 21, 2022

On a frosty East Midlands morning, when Agnes Giberne was but seven or eight years old, she asked her father why it wasn’t warmer. She already knew, after all, that the Sun was some three million miles nearer in winter than during the summer months. Sitting across from a roaring fire in the hearth, her father pointed to a fly on his knee and replied with his own question: “See — if that fly were one inch nearer to the fire, would it feel any hotter?”
Distance — immeasurable, humbling, stupefying distance — is the leitmotif of Agnes Giberne’s 1879 Sun, Moon, and Stars: A Book for Beginners. This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom. Remaining in print for nearly a century, it remains a compelling narrative that transports us to the most remote astral bodies, but also quickens every reader’s lost seven-year-old sensibility that the universe was made to be brought within one’s humble yet unbounded reach. The method of her father’s koan-like response — simple, striking analogy — would become Giberne’s own foolproof method to ask immense questions about the Earth’s history, atmosphere, oceans, vegetation, and, especially, the starry heavens above.
The answer to her book’s opening question (“What is this earth, of ours?”) promises that no matter how immense and incomprehensible it may appear, Earth is “Something very great — and yet something very little. Something very great, compared with the things upon the earth; something very little, compared with the things outside the earth.” Employing always the inclusive “we” in her wide-ranging narrative, Giberne’s poetic voice swings gently between wide-eyed wonder and hard-nosed empiricism. She compasses the Earth as one sibling in the solar system “family”, embraces each planet as a beautiful and mysterious bosom friend, and rocks the reader not to sleep but to wakefulness in the Cosmos.
When Sun, Moon and Stars appeared in 1879, Agnes Giberne had published thirty-five works of Victorian evangelical fiction. In the original and subsequent editions until 1898, when it was repackaged as The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, each chapter came prefaced by Bible passages, with God’s hand everywhere invoked. This was hardly a contradiction. For years, Giberne had carried on a lively correspondence about how to reconcile Biblical miracles and modern natural science’s materialist gospel with University of Oxford observatory director Charles Pritchard, who wrote an admiring preface for Giberne’s pioneering venture: a layperson’s guide to astronomical science.
Despite its title’s inviting offer of a “story”, the 1898 edition featured-above — while retaining nearly the entirety of Giberne’s 1879 narrative, with “Copious Additions” of wonderful silhouette woodcuts — is recognizably more modern and more “scientific”. Revisions include new sections on the technology of stellar photography, a capsule history of (male) astronomers, and the deletion of all the Biblical passages and half of the enthusiastic outbursts acknowledging God’s benevolent intelligence. One feels in the arc of these changes the process of celestial disenchantment that was accelerating as the nineteenth century closed. In 1898 the world’s attention turned to speculation about life on Mars and the Moon, fueling both literary fantasy and astronomical exploration. Agnes Giberne’s goal — to foster soulful intimacy with the solar system and the stars beyond through perceptual practice and pedagogy — gave way instead to a largely alienating, technologically-driven, and competitive professional astronomy, increasingly inaccessible to interested amateurs. Reading her wonderful book now, in any edition, one returns to a lost world: the forgotten cosmos of childlike curiosity.


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The Turns of the Turnverein: Heinrich Hamann’s Gymnastic Photographs (ca. 1902)
Text by Kevin Dann
Sep 27, 2022

Despite their best efforts to keep still and straight-faced, the young, uniformed bodies in Heinrich Hamann’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein) remain in motion. Girls shaping a human pyramid alternate looks of attentiveness and amusement. Boys performing handstands on parallel bars are flanked by onlookers who smile, fidget, or grimace. A series of images involving inventive uses of the pommel horse — to reenact Don Quixote, to strike tableaux vivants of Romulus and Remus, and, when paired with a bicycle, to play “Texas Yack” (Jack) — allow physical education to decay into silliness. Only the adult gymnasts in these photographs approach the gravity of purpose desired by their coach. One can see in Hamann’s photographs both the playful spontaneity of the Turnvereins’ original exercises and the rigid postures and movements that would soon help meld individuals into the fascist masses of the Nuremberg rallies and 1936 Berlin Olympics.
The Turner movement and its calisthenic equipment sprang from a man known as “the Turnvater”: Johann Friedrich Ludwig Christoph Jahn (1778–1852), a German gymnastics educator and fervent nationalist who took the rough-and-tumble turnen (romping about) of unruly schoolboys and molded it into a populist force. Beginning with simple hikes alongside his students in the Berlin countryside, Jahn developed jumping, throwing, and catching games, as well as now-familiar gymnastics exercises — often performed during patriotic commemorations — to train the undisciplined youth. “Just as the gymnasts bounced over their bars with the firm strength of their bodies”, writes Hans Kohn, “so they expected to bounce into the future Volksstaat with the firm strength of their conviction and will”. More than a set of techniques to improve individual fitness, Jahn’s refinement of Johann Christoph Friedrich GutsMuths’ earlier exercises was meant to train a new form of body politic.
Threatened both by Napoleon’s occupation of German states during the First French Empire and by French aristocratic culture, Jahn’s pedagogy (formalized in his 1816 Die deutsche Turnkunst) was a “paradoxical combination of Bohemianism and Puritanism”, with its emphasis on the Du form and informal dress. A significant presence in the 1813 to 1815 wars of liberation, the Turnverein movement spread widely until it was banned by a Prussian cabinet order in 1820, when gyms were closed and Jahn went to prison for two years as a political subversive. A number of Turnverein disciples played a role in the 1848 revolutions, although their desire to establish a gymnastic army (Turnerschar) was never realized. Despite many Turners fleeing Germany after the failure of these uprisings and founding clubs in the United States and throughout Europe, German Turnverein — which maintained their connection to Jahn’s völkisch philosophy — had nearly 1.5 million members by World War I.
While American Turners would work toward abolitionism during the Civil War, with each turn in Germany away from liberal principles that fed the revolutions of 1848, Jahn’s gymnastics movement became further adapted to serve martial impulses and fascist myths. “Initially imbued with the spirit of liberal nationalism, Turnen by the eve of World War I had become a conservative social movement, allied with right-wing nationalism and chauvinism”, writes Barbara J. Keys, leading some critics to cast Jahn’s ethnonationalism as a precursor to Nazism. Though it welcomed the National Socialists’ seizure of power in 1933, even the acutely nationalistic Turnerschaft was dissolved in 1936, when all German sport was taken under state control. ※※Indexed under…Exerciseas precursor to Nazism
The St. Pauli club photographs, shot before Germany’s and the world’s twentieth-century catastrophes, capture the contradiction inherent in the organized discipline of the body. On one hand, these images of wall-bar exercises and vertiginous pole vaults honor the innocent pleasures of group sport. On the other, documentation of Frankfurt’s Turnfest — a festival uniting various Turnverein — feels retroactively infected by the spectacles of Volksgemeinschaft that were to follow.

source: public-domain-review

author: Kevin Dann

type: collection

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


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Trimalchio in Newburyport: Timothy Dexter’s A Pickle for the Knowing Ones (1848)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Sep 13, 2022

“Never since the Flood has there lived a man so little appreciated as Timothy Dexter”, wrote a later biographer of this eccentric, eighteenth-century businessman. Born near Boston in 1747, Dexter began life as a leather dresser, earning his living by crafting garments with techniques disseminated from the Levant. He took a financial position in the success of American independence, wagering his wife Elizabeth Frothingham’s dowry by going long on depreciated Continental currency after the Revolutionary War (a strategy copied from John Hancock). With the debt-addressing measures introduced through Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan, Dexter’s notes were redeemed at par, making him a wealthy man almost overnight.
This was but the beginning of an odd assortment of undertakings, successes, and controversies. Most notable: a strange 1797 text with literary ambitions, written in Dexter’s personal eye dialect and entirely devoid of punctuation. Boasting that his work would be remembered once Shakespeare and Milton were forgotten (and not until then), he responded to critics of his style by furnishing all subsequent editions of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones with a supplemental page of full stops, commas, and exclamation points: “Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops”, explains the author. “I put A nuf here and thay may peper and solt as they please”.
Dexter’s life itself reads like literary fable — a Trimalchio reborn in New England, whose wealth afforded him everything but what he really desired: respect. Self-educated, he served as the elected Informer of Newburyport, Massachusetts, tasked with enforcing laws regarding the slaughter of deer. Each week, he synchronized his vast clock collection, and the device that ran truest (or “behaved best”, in his words) was baptized with a grandiose title. He kept a court of confidantes, including a personal poet laureate whose name, Jonathan Plummer, perhaps reflects the man’s talent with verse — “Lord Dexter, like king Solomon, / Hath gold and silver by the ton” — and the upper-class Lucy Lancaster, daughter of a formerly enslaved African king, who provided both council and mitigation: “If Dexter loaded a gun to shoot some one, Luce was sent for”.  ※※Indexed under…Timepieces rewarded for running true
Other anecdotes are even less credible. Tricked into shipping coal to Newcastle and opening a warming-pan business in the West Indies, it is said that Dexter turned a profit against all odds — his fossil fuel arrived during a miners’ strike; the bed warmers proved vital to molasses refinement. A man of supposedly open mind and stentorian voice, Dexter had violent tendencies that intensified through his flirtation with the “insanity of inebriation”, delivering soused oratories at dinner parties that commenters found “truly Ciceronian”. He staged his own mock funeral, complete with a mahogany coffin and sun-lit tomb for the self-styled “first Lord in Amerika”, and interrupted the service by viciously caning his wife in the kitchen, as punishment for her dry eyes. (His son, also inebriated, escaped a beating when his inability to hold himself upright was mistaken for grief.) Dexter later commissioned a statuary for the family garden, placing his likeness among busts of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, which bore the inscription: “the greatest philosopher in the known world”. A published obituary, following his swift decline in 1806, remembered Dexter as “truly ridiculous”, possessing “intellectual endowments not being of the most exalted stamp”.
Despite numerous other exploits, Dexter’s voice survives through his literary endeavor, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, a muddled rant targeting politicians, religious officials, and his own wife, which contains a theological excursus on man’s place in the animal kingdom:
If you can bare the trouth I will tell the trouth man is the best Annemal and the worst all men are more or Less the Divel but there is sit of ods sum halfe sum three quarters the other part of beast of Difrent kind of beasts sum one thing and sum a Nother sum Like a Dog sum Lik horses sum bare s Cat sum Lion sum lik ouls sum a monkey sum wild Cat sum Lam sum A Dove sum a hogg sum a oxe sum a snake. . .
Self-published and distributed for free, A Pickle was sought-after by eager readers and would-be ridiculers, stretching into eight print runs. Even so, it quickly became a rare book — Dexter’s biographer Samuel Knapp (1784–1838) was unable to find a copy during his life — until it underwent several subsequent reprintings in the nineteenth century. Perhaps more interesting than the text itself are the supplemental pages of punctuation, which vary between extant editions. A version appended to an 1858 volume of Knapp’s biography features tildes, double daggers, and dashes of various lengths. Arranged with an unexplained symmetry, the page appears almost like concrete poetry, as if anticipating later avant-garde works such as Christian Morgenstern’s typographical “Fisches Nachtgesang”.
Antics aside, Dexter has had a lasting, if sometimes uncoveted, place in American letters. “I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter”, a writer who “makes his own rules of rhythm, so far as there is any rhythm in his sentences”, thought Oliver Wendell Holmes. There is something almost modernist about A Pickle’s neologisms, the printed voice of a Revolution-era eccentric, and how they are haltingly joined through his listing cadence. One begins to wonder if Lucy Ellmann’s full-stop-eschewing Ducks, Newburyport (2019), whose title and plot involve Dexter’s hometown, bears a debt to this strange book.

author: Hunter Dukes


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The Blood Collages of John Bingley Garland (ca. 1850–60)
Text by Sasha Archibald
Sep 20, 2022

The novelist Evelyn Waugh was an inveterate collector. His interest was Victorian arcana — bric-a-brac unfashionable in his time, even gauche, and cheaply acquired. He had a soft spot for histrionic decorative objects, and furniture much larger than function demanded. By his own account, Waugh’s taste referenced the musty, redolent home of his three maiden aunts, a house that hadn’t been altered since 1870, which had entranced Waugh as a young child. Brownish oil paintings; mounted butterflies; glass cabinets of fossils; a taxidermized monkey on the bathroom shelf. “It all belonged to another age, which I instinctively, even then, recognized as superior to my own.”
In middle-age, Waugh turned his collector’s eye toward books, telling Life magazine in 1946 that he was now “collect[ing] old books in an inexpensive, desultory way”. Indeed, he amassed some 3500 volumes, all of which were transferred after his death to the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. Despite the size of Waugh’s library, the archive had no trouble designating its “single most curious object”. That distinction belonged without question to the Victorian Blood Book.
The Blood Book is handmade, folio-sized, with a handsome marbled endpaper and forty-three pages of exquisitely crafted decoupage. John Bingley Garland, the manuscript’s creator, used collage techniques, excising illustrations from other books to assemble elegant, balanced compositions. Most of the source material is Romantic engravings by William Blake and his ilk, but there are also brilliantly colored flowers and fruits. Snakes are a favorite motif, butterflies another. A small bird is centered on every page. The space between the images is filled with tiny hand-written script that reads like a staccato sermon. “One! yet has larger bounties! to bestow! Joys! Powers! untasted! In a World like this, Powers!” etc.
The book’s reputation, however, rests on a decorative detail that overwhelms: To each page, Garland added languid, crimson drops in red India ink, hanging from the cut-out images like pendalogues from a chandelier. Blood drips from platters of grapes and tree boughs, statuaries and skeletons. Crosses seep, a cheetah drools, angels dangle bloody sashes. A bouquet of white chrysanthemums is spritzed.
To be clear, Garland’s blood is not that of surgery or crime or menses, but of religious iconography. He obviously intended the blood to represent Christ’s own. And yet the final work suggests that the properties of actual blood tugged the artist’s shirtsleeves, pulling him away from the symbol and towards its source. It’s as if God gave Garland permission to fetishize hemorrhage. The Blood Book isn’t the only evidence of this fixation. Garland also made several single-page collages, now dispersed in various museums. In these, the imagery is more densely layered and the compositions more clamorous than those in the Blood Book, but the trademark drips remain.
It’s not clear that Garland ever saw collages like the ones he decided to make. While Victorian scrapbooking could sometimes veer toward collage, the Blood Book is in a different category entirely, deploying techniques usually dated to Cubism in the early twentieth century. There is no evidence that Garland even considered himself an artist. Born in Poole, England, in 1791, he was a politician and merchant who joined the family fishmongering business. The fish came from Trinity, Newfoundland, such that Garland moved back and forth between Poole and Trinity, distinguishing himself in both places. He was Newfoundland’s first speaker of the house and a two-term mayor of Poole; with his brother, he spearheaded the building of a church in Trinity. He seems to have retired early, leaving public life around age forty-five, though he lived another four decades. The occasion of the Blood Book was the 1854 marriage of his daughter Amy, who treasured it as the pious craft of a loving father. Her heirs rejected the Blood Book nickname, preferring “Amy’s Gift”. (Garland’s own title—Durenstein!, a cryptic reference to the castle in which King Richard the Lionheart was ransomed during the Third Crusade — didn’t stick.)
It’s not surprising the Garland heirloom ended up in Waugh’s library. The Blood Book’s singularity would have spoken to any collector of mid-Victorian whatnots, and Waugh was moreover a devout Catholic. But it was perhaps the specific pitch of Garland’s creation that made the purchase inevitable, the breathless exuberance of so many exclamation points, and so much exclamatory blood. For a man famously cynical and perpetually bored, the Blood Book was the perfect novelty.
Below you can browse all forty-one collages from Garland's Blood Book, courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center.

author: Sasha Archibald


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Unai no tomo: Catalogues of Japanese Toys (1891–1923)
Text by Kevin Dann
Jun 15, 2022

When Brooklyn Museum Curator of Ethnology Stewart Culin visited Japan for the first time in the fall of 1909, he escaped from the harangues of curio dealers by asking them to bring him a traditional children’s toy called burri-burri. Culin knew this rare and obscure object only from a specimen in Tokyo’s Imperial Museum and another owned by the collector Seifu Shimizu. Culin’s request to the dealers quickly confirmed the toy’s rarity, as neither he nor any of his numerous assistants were ever offered one. In the end, Culin asked Shimizu to make him a copy to bring back to Brooklyn.
Only on a subsequent trip to Japan in 1912 did Culin secure an original, from an old shop on Kyoto’s famed Shijo Street. It bore the dim painted traces of pines and storks beneath its patinaed surface, complete with a plaited cord of knotted and tasseled red silk, and was accompanied by a pair of small wooden disks. The only lore that the shop owner could provide Culin was that the burri-burri had been used in an ancient game. The designs seemed to resemble the emblem associated with the Boys Festival, and also with traditional New Year’s toys — battledores and shuttlecocks.
During Culin’s visits to Japan, Seifu Shimizu — director of a major Tokyo trading company, artist, calligrapher, and leading Meiji Era collector of omocha (toys) — was in the midst of publishing the ten-volume Unai no tomo, comprised of charming woodblock prints of traditional objects of play. The founder of Odomokai (十八番クラブ), a Connoisseur's Club to advance the appreciation of tomo (“playfellows” or “companions”), Shimizu treasured Japanese toys. He created the Takeuma-kai (Hobbyhorse Club) for their study in 1880, and curated the first known exhibition in 1906. After Shimizu’s death in 1913, his friend Nishizawa Tekiho completed the final volumes of the Unai no tomo series. Browsing through these catalogs we meet: jack-in-the-box chickens; whales on wheels and magnetic mice; a clay sumo wrestler grappling an orange carp; and popguns, hobbyhorses, and noisemakers galore.
Only the barest of labels accompany each of Seifu Shimizu’s prints and were it not for Culin’s connoisseurship, these ubiquitous folk objects may have remained in obscurity for the English-speaking world. Student, friend, and colleague of the pioneering anthropologists of play Frank Hamilton Cushing and Frank Gouldsmith Speck, Culin was the world’s paramount encyclopedist, philosopher, and collector of children’s games and toys, having published Korean Games in 1895 and the eight-hundred page Games of the North American Indians in 1907. Widening his discoveries about burri-burri, he noticed that the Unai no tomo were almost without exception derived from amulets and talismans rooted in Shinto and traditional Japanese folklore. As miyage — souvenirs — they were commonly given as presents to children by travelers returning from both sacred and secular pilgrimages. “They are frequently, in fact”, Culin concluded, “degenerate forms of charms and magical things, and the line between the two classes of objects cannot be sharply defined”.
By the time that Culin penned these words, he felt a deep, bittersweet attachment to both the Unai no tomo volumes and the toys that he brought home to deposit in the Brooklyn Museum, for modernity was sweeping from the American as well as the Japanese child’s landscape all manner of games and toys. Regaling a Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter in 1925 with descriptions of a half-dozen varieties of tag, “hares and hounds”, “ring relieve”, “red lion”, “head and footer”, “Spanish fly”, “kick the wicket”, “one o’cat”, and “fungo”, Culin grew wistful, observing that “the street games of Brooklyn grow fewer and fewer. The great amount of traffic has driven the children from the streets that used to be their playgrounds. The old-time street games like the burri-burri are becoming a thing of the past.”
Thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can browse volumes 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10 of Unai no tomo and see highlights in our gallery below.


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The Kumatologist: Vaughan Cornish’s Wave Studies (1910–14)
Text by Kevin Dann
Sep 22, 2022

Walking along the Devon coast at low tide in the autumn of 1895, geographer Vaughan Cornish (1862–1948) watched two sets of waves interact on the shore. As one set rippled across the flat strand, the other rounded a shoal and broke onto the beach. After colliding, each set then continued on its separate path, which brought to his mind how waves of light can pass through each other unaffected. Cornish’s casual association, between the behavior of light and water, speaks to how immersed he and his contemporaries were in a world of invisible waves. British and continental science in the 1890s was wrangling with gravitational waves, magnetic waves, sound waves, and mysterious new emanations — cathode rays, x-rays, and uranium radiation. And yet, the common ocean wave possessed its own secrets, having undergone only the barest scientific scrutiny in the two centuries since Newton’s Opticks.
Setting to work on a course of reading, Cornish quickly discovered that waves of the air, water, and earth were virtually a “Land of the Unknown”. In his 1910 Waves of the Sea and Other Water Waves, the English geographer made his first sustained attempt to plumb their mysteries, finding that “[o]f all manifestations of the inorganic world [the wave] is most like a living being”. By 1914, when he published Waves of Sand and Snow and the Eddies Which Make Them, Cornish’s twenty-two scientific papers and previous book made him Earth’s pioneer “kumatologist” — the term he coined for the scientific study of waves. Though kumatology failed to find a professional rhetorical foothold, Cornish’s research gave physical scientists a set of powerful indications by which they could make their own studies of geomorphological and atmospheric phenomena. American geographer Carl O. Sauer considered Cornish one of but four predecessors who could serve as a master for twentieth-century geographers.
After that moment on the Devon shore, Cornish’s entire life became organized around the wave. Liberated from the need to work by his wife Ellen’s inheritance, the couple traveled around the world studying Earth’s variegated waveforms. Experiencing a catastrophic earthquake together in Kingston, Jamaica in 1907, they saw a familiar pattern: uniformitarian agency operating across crests and troughs. The pair subsequently traveled to the Panama Canal to understand waves in the volcanic bedrock, and in 1913, after Ellen’s death from cancer, Cornish penned a tribute to her scientific companionship: The Travels of Ellen Cornish. Being the Memoir of a Pilgrim of Science.
Travels opens with a lengthy description of waves in the Bay of Biscay, passes on to note wave patterns in the pools of Buddhist temples in Kobe, and then goes into exhaustive detail about standing waves in the various cataracts of Niagara Falls. Along with learning about barchan dunes in the Arabian Desert, snow mushrooms in British Columbia’s alpine forests, and cahots (undulations produced by sledges) in Quebec farm fields, Cornish’s curiosity leads him to make discoveries about the waves created by a London omnibus and by leaves blown against stone steps in Kensington Gardens. Part III of Waves of Sand and Snow finds parallel forms in deltas, quicksand, and mackerel skies.
An award-winning scientific photographer, Cornish included plates that expertly capture the subtleties of shadow and light playing across oscillations in various bodies. Yet his books also record a moment before cinematography became a scientific tool. In any medium, waves are not things but events, their dynamic processes best portrayed as moving rather than static pictures. Though Cornish was the first person to make a film of the Severn River’s spectacular tidal bore, and celebrated motion pictures’ observational advantages for the study of waves, he never took up film as a scientific practice.
In later life, Cornish authored a series of books that established a nascent science of scenery in Britain, and he was an outspoken champion of landscape preservation, returning to kumatology with his 1934 Ocean Waves and Kindred Geophysical Phenomena. Both the prose and photographs of the 1910s wave studies give ample evidence of Cornish’s refined aesthetic sense, yet in his later works one learns that the steady empiricist of sand, snow, and sea was often swept away by an altogether otherworldly species of invisible waves. Contemplating ripples on the Lake District’s Ullswater, “magic began to work upon my mind; the will was shackled; the mystic sense set free.” Like Henry David Thoreau contemplating the metamorphic, pulsing life of sand flowing down from a bank near Walden Pond, Cornish’s wave-induced ecstasies hint at larger transcendental rhythms still waiting to be explored.


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The Discarnates: Thomas Carlyle in the Spirit-World (1920)
Text by Anna Della Subin
Jun 1, 2022

In 1869, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle horrified legions of spiritualists with a letter, printed in the American Scotsman, that described the new religious movement as a “Liturgy of Dead Sea Apes”. Carlyle enlisted a favorite insult: a fable held that when a wayward tribe, who lived by the Dead Sea, refused to listen to the wisdom of Moses, they were transformed into apes, “gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense”, as Carlyle narrated in Past and Present (1843). “They sit, with… such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of Things”. For Carlyle, the notion that people could converse with the dead, encountering vaporlike spirits as they sat in the darkness, was the latest instance of ape-consciousness, the “truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of man”.
One will never know what happens after death, Carlyle contended. “Give up all that”, he advised in his letter. In response, a spiritualist in Bristol took it upon himself to write to the esteemed Sage of Chelsea, to politely ask whether he had ever investigated the phenomenon of Spiritualism himself. He received a curt, one-sentence reply, in blue colored pencil: By volitn., or except passively and by accidt., I never did; nor have the least intentn. of ever doing.
By 1919, Carlyle had changed his mind. His body had lain in its grave for nearly four decades when his spirit appeared to a certain Dr. Wm. J. Bryan, with the urgent need to author another text. Over the course of a year, the philosopher transmitted the chapters of What Spiritualism Really Is, By Thomas Carlyle In the Spirit-World, And Through the Impressional Brain of Dr. WM. J. Bryan, at a moment when a teeming ocean of dead, killed in the Great War or by flu, were beckoning new generations of spiritualists worldwide. “The change which comes to all who pass the portal of death, is simply…. a walking across the threshold of two rooms”, Carlyle, “a so-called dead man”, excitedly announced. It was the duty of the living, he reported, to receive the truths of Spiritualism in midnight communiqués “by wireless”. Dr. Bryan, who worked a day job as a physician, found his pen gliding across the page at night through automatic writing, the same process, he noted, as that which inscribed the ten commandments on tablets of stone.
In What Spiritualism Really Is, Carlyle posthumously describes the nature of death, wherein the magnetic chord that connects the soul, or astral-body, to the physical body, is severed. Leaving behind their cadavers, all souls arrive at the same place, “Over There” — for there is no such region as hell, even for those who might deserve it. The gauzy newcomers take time to build strength again, and to adjust to the brighter colors of heaven, before they begin to speak. “Change certainly has taken place; but annihilation—never!” The dead, Carlyle relates, are the “discarnates”, those who have shed their bodies but retain their unique selves: “always it is found that personality persists”.
During his “earth career”, Carlyle had worried over how to write history that still had arterial blood. Haunted by his own unfinished biography of Oliver Cromwell, he wrote to Emerson in 1840, “A subject dead is not worth presenting.” For Carlyle, “the past was not a dead thing awaiting the resurrecting pen of the historian, but something ‘alive’”, the scholar David McAllister notes; “Carlyle’s fear was that in the act of writing he would kill it.” Although he ridiculed the rituals of the séance room, as a historian, Carlyle was already engaged in the practice of letting the deceased speak for themselves. Later, Carlyle’s spirit would appear again in a classroom in Michigan in 1936, when a professor invited a Detroit medium, Mrs. Lillian Lee, to conjure the dead for his session of History 112, “Europe in the 17th Century”.
Other souls swarm around Dr. Bryan in the book: Washington Irving, Frederick Douglass, Bryan’s own father, the biblical prophet David, an unnamed nun, “casting all sectarian thought aside”. Thomas Jefferson speaks of justice and mercy; President McKinley applauds Bryan for his efforts. The Neoplatonist martyr Hypatia arrives to say, “The doctrine is sound!!” The abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher tells of how the dead wouldn’t care to live again, even if they could. Carlyle relays: “The question which is so often asked by mortals of spirits is: ‘Are you happy?’ And the answer comes, invariably, ‘Yes’”. Yet at the heart of Carlyle’s transmitted text is a riddle. If personalities persist in the afterlife, how can it be that the spirits seem to agree on absolutely everything? The mysteries of death endure.

author: Anna Della Subin


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Evrard d'Espinque’s Illuminations of De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1480)
Text by Jo Livingstone
Oct 4, 2022

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, also known as Barthélémy l'Anglais and Bartholomew the Englishman, was a medieval scholar, monk, and politician. Born near the beginning of the thirteenth century in England (hence his name), he made a career abroad in continental Europe’s institutions of higher learning. Bartholomaeus started out studying and teaching in Paris as a member of an intellectual order devoted to the tradition of Aristotlelian reasoning called Scholasticism. Later, he went into politics, holding serious positions in Bohemia and Saxonia — regions around present-day Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic — during the turbulent period when Mongols were invading Europe and Europeans were once again besieging Jerusalem.
In 1240, Bartholomaeus wrote a book about everything. Titled De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Properties of Things), it was conceived as an encyclopedia of general knowledge. Across nineteen books, he traces the Great Chain of Being, a theory of all things that begins with God and runs through celestial beings, the soul, bodies (both human and heavenly), the elements, rocks and stones of the earth, animals, and the senses. De Proprietatibus Rerum is special for the rigor with which Bartholomaeus cites his sources. These include household names in the West like Plato and Aristotle, doctors and mathematicians from the Golden Age of Islam, such as Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi of Persia, and those who translated scientific works to and from Arabic and Latin, like Constantine the African.
The Great Chain of Being was the dominant theory of all creation during the High Middle Ages, and the idea that God’s will permeates its every aspect in an intentional and patterned way was important to Bartholomaeus and his fellow medieval encyclopedists. You can see this patterning most clearly in the lush illustrations that accompany certain manuscripts of Bartholomaeus’ text. Among the loveliest of these is a French translation by Jean Corbechon, illuminated by the masterful Evrard d'Espinque. Made in the later fifteenth century, its heavy leather covers protect 392 leaves of parchment.
Evrard d'Espinque’s illuminations depict the world in a semi-abstracted way — and his simplified designs, as demonstrated by the map above, can be confusing to our contemporary eyes, since the decorative elements on the earth’s circumference (birds and water and ships) are embellishments to an otherwise precise and roughly correct rendering. If you look closely at this image, you will see four rivers flowing down from a glowing spot towards a faint “T”. The orb at their source is Eden, which contemporary scholarship thought was somewhere beyond India (medieval maps oriented the world with East at the top). The four rivers are the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris and Euphrates, which the same sources said flowed out of Eden and into the world. The three radial segments of the “T” represent bodies of water (the Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean). As boundary lines, these three aqueous bodies divide the landmasses of this circular world. The bottom quadrants are Europe and Africa, with the top semicircle being Asia. The “O” and “T” shapes themselves had a symbolic meaning in this era, standing for orbis terrarum — “the lands of the earth”.
Later in the same chapter, we can see the T-O shape repeated in another illuminated diagram, this time of the seven classical planets, distributed in space according to the regions of the zodiac, which are placed in the outer area of the circle. At this map’s center sits the earth. This does not mean that medieval scholars thought that the earth was at the center of our solar system. Instead, the illumination shows the planets as they appear in the night sky, which is the primary datum of western astrology. In Book XI, De Aere (“On the air and weather”), the same little diagram of the world appears again, also against an abstracted blue background that evokes a summer sky, this time illustrating a section of the text about the four cardinal winds: septentrio, auster, favonius, and subsolanus. A zoomed-in and more elaborate T-O map is found in Book XIII, De aqua (“On water and fishes”). Here, the abstracted sea areas of the first map we saw have become specific waterways. A similar symbolic map appears in Book XI, De regionibus et provinciis (“On regions and places”). Instead of ships, now d’Espinque shows land masses in and around the waterways — islands, mountains, and cities appear in miniature form as rocks, hills, and houses. These are not labeled or specified geographically, and instead decorate the earth in quick, elegant brushstrokes.
Patterning was inherent to the visual aspect of this kind of scholarship, particularly in the use of these circular diagrams that Naomi Reed Kline calls “rotae” to organize information. On one hand, a two dimensional circle instinctively relates to an orb in three dimensional space, helping medieval geographers to represent real space on the page in intuitive ways. But there’s also a formalism to the circles, which illuminators used to illustrate everything from the zodiac to the clock to the earth to the cycle of Fortune. A bit like Cartesian coordinates for depicting graphs, or the spreadsheets which organize so much of our modern world’s most crucial data, Kline describes these maps as “circular wheels that made understandable, in simplified graphic manner, concepts that explained the way the world worked”. Bartholomeus and other encyclopedists like him, as well as their illuminators, such as the extraordinary Evrard d’Espinque, collaborated to refine and elaborate this understanding of the world’s mechanics. It looks utterly unlike our visual representations of geography, with map keys and GPS coordinates, but these forms lie inside and underneath everything science has visualized since. Our world is still an orb, and we still draw planetary motion using circles and ellipses. Science runs along a Great Chain too.

author: Jo Livingston


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Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 3, 2022

Asked why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1891), a now infamous critique of “the rest cure”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman recounted her own treatment for neurasthenia. Forbidden by her doctor from intellectual labor and confined to the domestic sphere, she was brought “so near the border line of utter mental ruin that I could see over.” Seventeen years earlier, in the preface to Shadows from the Walls of Death (1874), a book that gathers real swaths of arsenic wallpaper sourced from stores across Michigan, physician Robert Clark Kedzie made his own evaluation of treatments for nervous exhaustion, offering a peculiar chemical theory for the descent into madness during bed rest. From Kedzie’s perspective, Gilman’s narrator — who believed that her boudoir wallpaper bore a “vicious influence” — was right: something sinister had been lurking in plain sight.
How many women have thus “gone into a decline,” I will not venture to guess. Perhaps a consideration of the “delicate state of her lungs” leads her to confine herself to her room, and the fear of “taking cold,” to avoid all ventilation; and thus she breathes constantly an air loaded with the breath of death. . . . and finally succumbs to consumption, — a consumption of arsenic in every breath she inhales!
Kedzie was writing during a frenzy for wallpaper in Europe and the United States, fueled by eighteenth-century innovations in block printing, steam-powered presses, and new color compounds (in Britain, for example, the supply of wallpaper increased 2615% between 1834 and 1874). Opulent greens, yellows, and violets could now be cheaply rendered on a mass scale thanks to Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele’s invention of copper arsenite paint, whose colors soon bled into bookbinding, drapes, gowns, and other pigmented garments. Commenting on the Parisian fad for arsenic green dresses, such as this exquisite tea gown worn by Élisabeth de Caraman-Chimay — an inspiration for Proust’s Duchess de Guermantes — Punch magazine called their shade “the hue of death, the tint of the grave”.
Known and used as a poison since Ancient Greece, arsenic was something of a pharmakon in the nineteenth century, believed to be both medicine and poison, depending on the dose. As Lucinda Hawksley tracks in her expansive and beautifully-wrought Bitten by Witch Fever, the same Victorian newspapers that venerated Austrian arsenic eaters for their rosy complexions also carried shocking accounts of Gesche Gottfried, Hélène Jégado, and Maria Swanenburg: nineteenth-century serial killers suspected of claiming hundreds of victims with the substance colloquially known as “inheritance powder”. In the realm of aesthetics, a similar contradiction arose in the art and life of William Morris, socialist activist and famed wallpaper designer, whose business was built on wealth from Devin Great Consols, a copper mine turned world’s largest arsenic refinery. Criticized for blinkering himself to the health conditions of miners, Morris also remained skeptical of research that suggested his signature patterns could cause disease, going on the record with a quotation that supplied Hawksley with her study’s title: “As to the arsenic scare a greater folly it is hardly possible to imagine: the doctors were bitten as people were bitten by the witch fever.” In response, Dante Gabriel Rossetti poked venomous fun at Morris in his unpublished satirical skit The Death of Topsy. The play sees George Wardle, Morris’ real life business manager, and his wife Madeleine Smith — a Glaswegian socialite famously tried for poisoning her lover with arsenic — slip the substance into the boss’ coffee.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, modern wallpaper experienced a backlash, both from aesthetes and medical professionals. In an 1882 lecture on the British renaissance in decorative arts, prepared for his tour of the United States, Oscar Wilde declared recent wallpaper “so bad that a boy brought up under its influence could allege it as a justification for turning to a life of crime.” And indeed, his deathbed quip in 1900 — “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go” — inadvertently captured the emerging scientific consensus about arsenical wallpaper: its presence, like crime, was a threat to life. Few had thought arsenic could be volatilized until Bartolomeo Gosio discovered that fungi growing in damp paper paste were prone to synthesize noxious fumes that bore notes of garlic. In books and pamphlets such as Our Domestic Poisons (1879), Our Homes, And How to Make Them Healthy (1883), “On Chronic Arsenic Poisoning, Especially from Wall-Paper” (1889) , and a strange, anonymous novel of the era, The Green of the Period; or, The Unsuspected Foe in the Englishman’s Home (1869), the element’s full-fledged dangers were unveiled to the public. Some went so far as to revise the past, suggesting, for example, that Napoleon was ultimately defeated, not on the battlefield, but by his green wallpaper on St. Helena. (Drawing on recent chemical testing of Napoleon’s wallpaper in The Arsenic Century, James C. Whorton believes that the emperor did suffer from arsenic poisoning, but doubts wallpaper was the primary source.)
Dr. R. M. Kedzie, who served on the Michigan Board of Health in the 1870s, explains his unique strategy for raising awareness in the preface to Shadows from the Walls of Death. Originally printed in a run of one hundred copies, only a half-dozen of which remain due to recipients fearfully destroying their copies, the book is contaminated by the very substance under indictment. That is, to eradicate the poison, Kedzie chose to archive its vehicle. “[T]o call attention to this source of danger, and to assist persons in detecting these dangerous colors in wall paper, the State Board of Health Directed me to prepare specimen books of such dangerous wall papers. . . . The wall papers in this book all contain arsenic.” Below you can browse selections from Kedzie’s pernicious book through the safety of your digital display — a magic made possible, in part, by arsenic embedded in the electronics that have come to wallpaper modern life.


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Playing Indian: Cummings’ Indian Congress at Coney Island (1903)
Text by Kevin Dann
Nov 2, 2022

This recording of Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’ Wild West Show held in Brooklyn’s Steeplechase Park is one grand audio sleight-of-hand. The orchestra at Columbia Records’ Manhattan studio created the sounds of whooping “Sioux warriors”, beating tom toms, and stampeding horses. Cummins’ “five hundred Indians representing forty-two tribes, living in teepees, wigwams, and adobe houses” were all out at Coney Island, under the watchful eye of showman Cummins and his Lakota wrangler Henry Standing Bear, a veteran of Carlisle Indian School. Vaudevillian Len Spencer supplies the carny barker introductions, and orchestra musicians round out each section with mock applause or war cries.
The closing chapters of the perennial wars against native peoples in North America coincided with a mania for all things Indian, including audio recordings. While Arthur Foote, Edward Macdowell, Antonín Dvořák, Arthur Farwell, and other classical composers wrote symphonic music celebrating the vanishing Indian, Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths churned out ersatz “Indian” ballads, intermezzos, novelty numbers, and even fox-trots. The Library of Congress’ National Jukebox collection includes more than fifty Indian-themed discs recorded between 1902 and 1924 — the year of the last Apache raid, widely considered to mark the end of the American Indian Wars.
The Coney Island “Congress” — a title consciously chosen to distance Cummins’ production from Wild West Shows, which Indian reformers saw as undermining their efforts at “civilizing the savages” — was itself a conglomeration of counterfeits. A former prospector and cowboy turned Chicago theatrical manager, F. T. Cummins masqueraded as “Chief La–Ko–Ta”; Annie Oakley’s rival Princess Wenona, “Sioux Indian Maiden & Champion Rifle Shot of the World”, was really Lillian Francis Smith, the daughter of a Massachusetts Quaker couple, who had joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the age of fifteen in 1886. The show Indians — reservation dwellers mostly recruited from the Pine Ridge Agency — were given mock warrior names and biographies: Ghost Face, Painted Horse, Standing Soldier, Red Shirt, Bad Wound. The highbrow pageant of pottery makers, blanket weavers, and lace workers was but a thin veneer over the frontier violence that the Steeplechase audience thrilled to see and hear. A review of Cummins’ Congress later that same summer at Madison Square Garden highlighted a reenactment of the capture and lynching of a horse thief, and a white captive’s running of an Indian gauntlet before being burned at the stake.
The recording’s most recognizable feature — the “war dance” vocal monody — is a non-native musical convention, which helped produce the kind of problematic stereotypes that Michael Pisani charts in his magisterial study, Imagining Native America in Music. The “dance” harks back through John Philip Sousa’s 1890 reimaginings of Cherokee and Chippewa songs to as early as 1641, when French performers in the Royal court ballet dressed as American Indians and danced to the moresca. Some iteration of this mostly monotone melody and percussion typically appeared in the musical accompaniment to early cinema’s silent Westerns. It continued into the talking picture era up through the Hollywood Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, notably used during the dance of Mose Harper in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), becoming a musical signifier of Native America as imagined by characters contributing toward its demise.


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Shores of the Polar Sea (1878)
Text by Paloma Ruiz
Jun 16, 2022

When the British Arctic Expedition set sail from Portsmouth on May 29, 1875, the explorers hoped to reach the highest latitude, and perhaps even approach the ever-elusive North Pole. It was believed that, should they successfully pass through Smith Sound, between Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island, they would encounter an Open Polar Sea free from troublesome ice. With this primary goal, three steamships set out across the stormy Atlantic only to immediately become separated by a violent cyclone, reconvening at Disko Bay on the western coast of Greenland some weeks later. Perhaps they could have interpreted this early inconvenience as a sign of the winter to come, or a warning that the Arctic waters are rarely kind. Regardless, the captains pressed on.
In Shores of the Polar Sea, Edward L. Moss, an artist and esteemed Royal Navy Surgeon, records this journey from his first-hand seat in the belly of HMS Alert. A mixture of intimate journal entries, miscellaneous engravings, and sixteen chromolithographs, the book provides a unique, often surreal, retelling of life on the ice. Moss prefaces his work with a modest appeal: “Whatever may be the artistic value of the Sketches — and they lay claim to none — they are at least perfectly faithful efforts to represent the face of Nature in a part of the world that very few can ever see for themselves.”
As their expedition begins, every detail seems to emphasize the boyish excitement of Moss’ comrades. When the summer brings endless midnight sun, some sailors find themselves passing days at a time without sleep. Even the exhaustion and isolation of ocean travel does not send the mesmerized sailors to bed, captivated, as they are, by the natural landscapes. Ice floes, stretching for miles in every direction, shine kaleidoscopically: “pink and metallic, green, pale yellow, and violet… like fields of mother-of-pearl”. And alongside the awe felt toward an inhospitable Arctic, a reader is met with the adrenaline of discovery, and a desire for ownership over what was formerly unknown. “When we stopped to secure a sketch, the lifeless stillness… was most impressive”, writes Moss: “No human eye had ever looked upon it before. And now there was neither bird or beast, or even flower or blade of grass, to dispute possession”. In this way, the sketches and chromolithographs became akin to laying claim over the land, an artistic gesture that reproduced natural beauty in order to seize it for oneself and nation.
The British Arctic Expedition was not unique in its brutality. Perhaps invigorated by the perceived violence of their environment, the men fought back. In hopes of expanding England’s contribution to natural history, they captured, bottled, and preserved everything from brittle feather stars to small black spiders. And what they didn’t capture for study, they killed en masse to consume. Carrying Winchester repeating rifles — “murderous weapons for this sort of work” — the men hunt everything that moves. Arctic hares, reindeer, walruses, and seals, which they grimly nickname “floe-rats”. In a particularly successful outing, Moss describes the midnight pursuit and overpowering of seven burly musk oxen. One man, thinking himself rather clever, tried to make a wounded ox “carry his own beef”, and guided it onto the deck of the ship while the animal could still walk. Moss notes that, although these oxen had likely never seen a human before, they understood instinctively to be afraid.
As the winter encroached, so did a seemingly permanent darkness. Fearful of the perennial ice floes, which could easily crush whatever ship crossed their path, the Alert landed at Floeberg Beach, where it would rest until the following summer allowed for safe escape. And while the daily life of a sailor may appear unsympathetic, Moss’ prose is deeply personal, poetic, and even romantic. Not only are his accounts of the expedition unflinchingly thorough, they also linger playfully on every odd moment, awkward bit of dialogue, or alienating aspect of harsh Arctic life. Through dreamlike sketches and descriptions, Moss depicts the process of building igloos to house special scientific instruments. Here, the men could sit for hours collecting data, protected from the wind and provided with an influx of dull heat from the earth. Because of the near constant snowfall, their igloos became quickly submerged, and “long before winter had passed, [the] town had disappeared as completely as Nineveh or Pompeii. Only an uncertain mound here and there projected over the bleak slope of drifted snow”. Inside their buried, makeshift town, the space reverberated with the sound of footfall overhead: the heavy steps of men, and the faster patter of paws. Often, it smelled strongly of burnt candles, and the moonlight filtering through the ice would create a greenish-blue effect, “like a diver sees deep underwater”.
Throughout this frosted travelogue, we can imagine how frantically Moss might have worked to make his landscape images come to life. Crawling up from the eternal dampness of his quarters, he would hasten across the ice to gain perspective on the ship or the igloos or the men, and maneuver his pencil through “two pairs of worsted mittens”. Once the sketch was laid, he would scurry inside to add color by candlelight, emerge again to check for accuracy, and repeat the process several more times.

author: Paloma Ruiz


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Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighbourhoods (1860–1902)
Text by Elaine Ayers
Oct 11, 2022

As temperatures drop and leaves fall, blanketing forest paths and city sidewalks in layers of red and orange, nature’s decomposers spring from the ground. Transforming organic matter into fertile soil, fungi and their vast underground networks work silently beneath our feet. October is peak mushroom season for many, as foragers trained in the art of finding tasty, meaty puffballs and hen-of-the-woods also begin their labor. Our fascination with fungi, one of the oldest organism groups on earth, has remained a human constant. From umami-rich meals to poisonous and psychedelic specimens, mushrooms have represented something queer, sexy, and dark for centuries.
Behind recent calls for fungal futures — involving everything from “biohacked” bodies to anti-capitalist visions — lie carefully illustrated descriptions of the mushroom world by naturalists like M. F. Lewis. Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes with filigreed title pages, her Fungi of Shropshire features hundreds of species, collected across forty-two years of work in England and Wales, rendered in pencil, watercolor, and ink. Despite the enormity of Lewis’ project, little is known about her life — we have yet to discover her first name. What we do know is that she was deeply and intensely committed to studying mushrooms.
The title of these three volumes, Fungi Collected in Shropshire and Other Neighborhoods is a bit of a misnomer: her illustrations, which range from the recognizably red-and-white spotted fly agaric to smaller, drabber species, were produced over many hundreds of miles, painting a stunning portrait of Britain’s rich fungal diversity in regions seldom explored by mycologists. Most pages feature several species collaged together, sprouting from vegetable hosts or moldy organic matter. Lewis’ pages avoid the classificatory divisions of typical herbaria (or, in this case, fungaria), grouping mushrooms mostly by aesthetic arrangement rather than taxonomic relations.
Like many other women naturalists in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lewis appears to have collected and illustrated specimens for her own edification, combining her “polite” training in the arts with meticulous scientific observation against the backdrop of a growing embrace of natural history’s wonders. As some women filled their parlors with seaweeds and skeletonized flowers, Lewis turned her eyes to something decidedly darker. Scraping through rotting leaves and the animal feces from which mushrooms sprung, Lewis saw the beauty in these odd, seemingly unclassifiable specimens (we didn’t separate fungi into their own kingdom until the 1960s), emphasizing their sumptuous colors and casually ignoring their potentially poisonous qualities. Anticipating what would become a full-blown mycological fever later in the nineteenth century — most clearly demonstrated by beloved children’s book author and mycologist Beatrix Potter — Lewis knew that mushrooms were for more than consumption. They held scientific and aesthetic value amidst showier flowers and elegant ferns, even as they worked within a system of decay in which death preceded reproduction.
It’s unclear whether today’s obsession with fungi — tracked in recent books by Litt Woon Long, Merlin Sheldrake, and Anna Tsing — is another fleeting trend or a longer embrace of our primordial ancestors, bred by an increased understanding of these deceptively massive, spore-producing organisms’ importance for a networked world in peril. What is clear, though, is that the beauty and diversity of the fungal world has captivated amateur naturalists and artists for centuries. From the smallest mushroom caps to sprawling, fleshy, phallic specimens, women like Lewis chose to study fungi over other plants, animals, and everything in between, pointing to the artfulness in decomposition, the liveliness of rot.
Below you can browse highlights from the only known copy of Lewis’ work, courtesy of Cornell University Library and the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

author: Elaine Ayers


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Howard Pyle's The Mermaid (1910)
Text by Kevin Dann
Sep 8, 2022

There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel, especially when that work has had such a powerful hold on the modern world’s imagination. Writing about Howard Pyle’s (1853–1911) The Mermaid in The Outlook less than a year after the artist’s death in Italy, a “Spectator” described the unfinished and unsigned painting “brought back from Florence”:
heaving sea of iridescent blue and green, a cold moon, and slippery rocks, from which a mermaid siren, glittering, mysterious, alluring, winding her white arms about the young fisher-lad, was dragging him down, down, into the depths below of white lacing foam.
But the painting did not travel with Pyle to Florence: it never left the artist’s atelier in Wilmington, Delaware. (His student Ethel Pennewill Brown, who had rented the studio during Pyle’s European sojourn, captured the painting’s unfinished state in 1912.) Pyle had begun The Mermaid in 1908, using a model from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as his inspiration for the mermaid. The young man’s aquiline nose, delicate lips, and fine feminine eyebrow are features that can be seen in dozens of Pyle heroes — prominent among them Sir Galahad, Robin Hood, and the buccaneer Captain Henry Morgan (Douglas Fairbanks’ inspiration for The Black Pirate, and later Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow).
Considered the “father of American illustration”, Howard Pyle’s capacious imagination compassed both American and European historical subjects. Born but a few blocks from the wharves and quays of the Wilmington riverfront, summering most of his life at Rehoboth Beach near the surf-battered Cape Henlopen, Pyle’s oeuvre leaned ever seaward, and so mermaids had long lived alongside his pirates, sailors, and sea captains. A decade before The Mermaid, Pyle had caught Man and Maid in a similarly Moon-kissed embrace in The Merman, whose hybrid, piscine nature is half obscured, registered only by the fingers of his right hand, which appear faintly scaled and webbed. Among Pyle’s illustrations for Oliver Wendell Holmes’ Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1894), we find an image of a half-dozen mermaids swimming alongside a mythic goddess-carrying ship and another of a mermaid playing the lyre. And Pyle’s lively 1902 collection “North Folk Legends of the Sea”, for Harper’s Monthly Magazine, included an eerie frontispiece of bare-breasted mermaids, and a portrait of St. Brendan wearing a brocaded cape adorned with undines.
When Pyle set off for Italy with his family in November 1910, he had just finished a trio of immense murals on Dutch colonial era subjects for the Hudson County Courthouse in Jersey City, and was keen to garner more commissions. Having crisscrossed the Atlantic for decades in his imagination, this was his first actual trans-Atlantic voyage. Ill almost from the moment he arrived in Rome, Pyle persevered in his study of Florence's mural masterpieces, but died a year later of a lingering kidney infection before completing a full work. Orphaned on his Delaware easel, The Mermaid was finished by Pyle’s student Frank Schoonover, who added a pair of flying fish (almost exactly reproduced from Pyle’s headpiece for “North Folk Legends of the Sea”) and a scuttling crab.
Along with The Mermaid and over a thousand other works by Howard Pyle, the Delaware Art Museum owns nine of his pencil sketches for the painting. Every single sketch — most as furiously dynamic as the sea foam enveloping the two Moon Lovers — is of the cross-species embrace, a long longing that has haunted the human imagination for millennia, and haunts us still. A century ago, the Outlook’s Spectator mistook that embrace as the Mermaid’s murderous design on a young fisherman. A reading more consonant with the painter’s soul might note the deep atmosphere of reciprocity shimmering between the lovers. Amid the relentless movement of the restless sea, they find fulfillment in fusion. Yet the fisherman’s pileus or Phrygian cap, the soft, conical hat of emancipated Roman slaves, is also the classic red liberty cap that became an icon of the French and American revolutions, suggesting that this mercurial subject’s freedom is not solely otherwordly. Pyle’s mermaid — palpably more human than fish, for her alabaster skin runs down below the water line, and there is only the barest hint of a forked, scaled tail — is made alongside man, neither for or against him. If only for a moment, their loving embrace stills all stormy waters, and heals all wounds.


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Wheels Within Wheels: The “Flammarion Engraving” (ca. 1888)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Nov 9, 2022

A man crawls to the ends of earth. He has journeyed for days under the light of a splendorous sun, passed his nights beneath a firmament shot through with stars. There is no reason to look back toward his origin: everything that came before appears at toytown scale against the enormity of his present purpose. Crouching down to explore a seam, the suture where sky and ground meet, the traveler pushes his head through the celestial vault and out into the heavens beyond. Curtains of flames replace the alchemical sun of his old world. In this lacerated empyrean, the planetary bodies move like clockwork — a cosmic machinery whirring along in adherence to laws yet to be discovered, whether natural or divine.
Seemingly first published in astronomer and science fictionist Camille Flammarion’s (1842–1925) L’atmosphère: météorologie populaire (1888), this image has puzzled enthusiasts of the scientific mystic’s works, both for its obscure provenance and cryptic symbolism. With its pastiche of Renaissance visual style and medieval caption — “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch” — the illustration was once thought to have originated centuries before Flammarion published his text. The artist remains uncertain, but early interpreters believed he or she was a contemporary of the paradigm shift that the work seems to depict: when ancient cosmogony gave way to the Scientific Revolution. Heinz Strauss and Heinrich Röttinger dated the engraving to the mid-sixteenth century, while Erwin Panofsky, writing in 1963, found its style indicative of the seventeenth. On the other hand, Ernst H. Gombrich, speaking on behalf of the Warburg Institute, was convinced that the engraving had to be a more-recent homage to the Renaissance. The artist employed a stippling technique, for example, not used before the late eighteenth century. A skilled draftsman, it is feasible that Flammarion created the image himself, although it differs slightly in style from his other artworks.
More mysterious than its provenance is the work’s potential meaning. As Stefano Gattei enumerates, in a book chapter that promises to “close the debate” on Flammarion’s engraving, the stooping man has been variously described as “a missionary, a skeptic, a wandering Jew, a researcher, a traveler, a learned man contemplating divine wonders, a pilgrim, or an Earth-bound frustrated astronomer.” Part of the difficulty here comes from the image’s symbolic polyphony: aspects of the Ptolemaic universe mingle with a prominent ofan — the wheeled structure that resembles a gyroscope, which Ezekiel and David glimpsed in their vision of God’s throne — layering astrological and esoteric iconography. For many, this singular image, of a man passing beyond the world’s limits, feels indebted to a problem of bounded finitude that arises in commentaries on Aristotelean cosmogony and theological genesis. If the universe is finite, how can its limits (or creator) lay within it?
Below you can read the text that originally accompanies this engraving in Flammarion’s L’atmosphère as well as passages from other works by Flammarion, gathered by Stefano Gattei, that seem to anticipate it.
Camille Flammarion, L’atmosphère (1888):
Whether the sky be clear or cloudy, it always seems to us to have the shape of an elliptic arch; far from having the form of a circular arch, it always seems flattened and depressed above our heads, and gradually to become farther removed toward the horizon. Our ancestors imagined that this blue vault was really what the eye would lead them to believe it to be; but, as Voltaire remarks, this is about as reasonable as if a silk-worm took his web for the limits of the universe. The Greek astronomers represented it as formed of a solid crystal substance; and so recently as Copernicus, a large number of astronomers thought it was as solid as plate-glass. The Latin poets placed the divinities of Olympus and the stately mythological court upon this vault, above the planets and the fixed stars. Previous to the knowledge that the earth was moving in space, and that space is everywhere, theologians had installed the Trinity in the empyrean, the glorified body of Jesus, that of the Virgin Mary, the angelic hierarchy, the saints, and all the heavenly host.... A naïve missionary of the Middle Ages even tells us that, in one of his voyages in search of the terrestrial paradise, he reached the horizon where the earth and the heavens met, and that he discovered a certain point where they were not joined together, and where, by stooping his shoulders, he passed under the roof of the heavens.
Camille Flammarion, Astronomie populaire (1880):
The Earth looks like an immense plain, rugged by a thousand kinds of facets and reliefs, green hills, flowery valleys, mountains more or less high, meandering rivers in the plains, lakes with cool shores, vast seas, infinitely varied countryside. This land seems to us fixed for eternity, sitting on century-old foundations, crowned by a sky at times pure and at times cloudy, extended so as to form the unshakable foundation of the universe. The Sun, the Moon and the stars seem to turn around her. From all these appearances, man has easily believed himself to be the centre and the purpose of creation, a vain presumption that he held for a very long time, as there was no one to contradict him.
Camille Flammarion, Les mondes imaginaires et les mondes réels (1865):
This fact reminds us of the story Levayer relates in his Letters. It seems that an anchorite, probably a nephew of the Fathers of the Eastern deserts, boasted of having been to the farthest edge of the world, and of having been forced there to bend his shoulders, due to the meeting of heaven and Earth at that very end.


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Visualising Bubbles (1500–1906)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jul 19, 2022

We have entered the dog days of July in the Northern Hemisphere, with a heat wave bringing Europe to a rolling boil, and thoughts of sea, shade, or cooler climes to many people’s minds. Writing of a shadowed garden, Spanish poet Luis Cernuda (in Stephen Kessler’s translation) captures the lethargy of this weather and the pleasures of relief: how the summer atmosphere can feel “light, afloat; the world turning slowly, like a soap bubble, delicate, iridescent, unreal”. While soap froth has existed since at least the time of Mesopotamia, the fragility, iridescence, and impermanence that Cernuda describes started to bubble into the West’s visual imagination during the sixteenth century. Like the substance itself, which binds to all kinds of grime, soap bubbles make for sticky symbols, assuming disparate associations — from innocence to vanitas, physics to politics — in the artist’s eye.
Despite a monkey who seemed to be huffing bubbles in the 1480s, and the reed-blowing youth of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games (1560), the earliest explicit soap bubble in painting is often credited to a panel on the back of Cornelis Ketel’s Portrait of Adam Wachendorff (1574). The front shows the secretary Wachendorff performing scribal duties, holding a letter freshly sealed above his inkwell and pen. Yet the painting’s frame reminds him that his writing, like all else, will fade too soon. “Sermo Dei Æternus Caetera Omnia Caduca”, reads the text: the word of the lord is forever and all else transient. Unlike the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s famous seduction, Ketel does not choose “time’s winged chariot” to chafe at Wachendorff’s back. Instead, he paints a bubble boy. Yet like the scribe himself, we are blinkered to this symbol of impermanence: the Rijksmuseum has not shared photographs of the verso, which shows a curly haired putto blowing suds. He is wreathed by Greek that reads: man is a bubble.
Ketel’s Portrait is an early example of using soap bubbles to represent vanitas — the transience of life and surety of death — while his putto plays the role of an allegorical figure associated with the emblem tradition of homo bulla. We find similar scenes in Netherlandish engravings and paintings, dating through the eighteenth century, by Raphael Sadeler (I), Jacques de Gheyn (II), Hendrick Goltzius, and Johannes de Groot (II). Across these images, lounging children blow bubbles while resting on skulls, as extinguished candle stubs and smoking urns create a cloudscape overhead. There is a kind of primordial equation here between life and enclosure. Like soap and water, the spirit cannot be separated from its etymological link to expiration. “Who first had the thought that the world is nothing but the soap bubble of an all-encompassing breath?”, asks the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in Bubbles, while, during his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope imagines individuals as “bubbles on the sea of matter borne, / They rise, they break, and to that sea return”. Karel Dujardin’s 1663 Boy Blowing Smoke Bubbles seems to speak to the delicate membrane between our lives as distinct beings and what Freud — building on his correspondence with Romain Rolland — described as an oceanic pull: “a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless, unbounded”. In the painting, a sashed youth blows bubbles while balancing on a clamshell amid dark and choppy waters. In place of a pearl, a giant surfactant orb rests beneath his left foot, the last piece of a necklace originating from the deeps. Spending time with this painting, we get the sense that it is “bubbles all the way down”, as it were — that the borders between soul, body, and world could, in an instant, pop.
From the mid-eighteenth century, artists turned their back on vanitas toward a focus on technique, melancholy, physics, and politics. Greater attention to the material details of bubbles may have come from longer-lasting soap, marketed explicitly for blowing by merchants such as Andrew Pears in Soho. A painting by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin dampens allegory to highlight the luster of its bubble’s edgeless body: a curved plane that throws sparkling light. Chardin’s painting, claims the soap-bubble scholar Sabine Mödersheim, marks a shift in cultural narratives of childhood, when bubbles became “much more about personal melancholy, mourning one’s own childhood being gone rather than the general idea of vanitas and fleeting time.”
If the bubble’s brief lifespan prompted considerations of vanitas and melancholy, its shape offered a vantage onto the laws of color, light, and space. Pelagio Palagi’s 1827 Newton’s Discovery of the Refraction of Light envisions the scientist finding revelation in the stuff of child’s play. As Isaac Disraeli recorded with pith in Curiosities of Literature: “Newton is indebted for many of his great discoveries… he observes boys blowing soap bubbles, and the properties of light display themselves!” In addition to the body-as-bubble, there seems to be a parallel between this soapy form and the stuff of thought — the bubble catching Newton’s eye in Palagi’s work is at once a demonstration of optical interference and a painterly technique for visualizing units of undiscovered knowledge, retrievable from the external world. An astounding 1883 mezzotint by Alexandre-Blaise Desgoffe demonstrates the principles of interference up close, displaying a kaleidoscopic window mirrored in the soap bubble, which, in turn, becomes a window onto understanding the physical properties of light.
The nineteenth century is notable for its use of soap bubble pipes in a micro-genre of caricature, where the same joke gets made about varying political concerns. An 1803 hand-colored etching shows George III puffing bubbles, filled with a tiny Napoleon and the words “flat bottom boats”, “invasion”, and “little ships”. In short, the king is not concerned. Boney blows back in an anonymous 1813 print, where he sits surrounded by bubbles labeled with capitals and countries of conquest — the most recent being Rome, which his son, king of the city from birth, reaches toward. In the midst of making “Europe”, Napoleon’s basin spills to the floor, but he is not yet aware of its fall: a premonition of what the future holds. The trope merges with our modern sense of “economic bubble” in an illustration for Puck by Udo J. Keppler titled “Wall Street Bubbles:—Always the Same”, showing J. P. Morgan as a bull in both senses, blowing “inflated values” toward a desirous crowd: a commentary on the Panic of 1901.
And then, of course, there are countless images primarily about the simple magic of soap bubbles — and they are indeed wondrous. A gang of enraptured boys tussle and bubble in an engraving from Claudine Bouzonnet-Stella’s 1657 series about The Games and Pleasures of Childhood; a joyous mother produces perfectly rounded specimens for her son beneath a plum tree in a mid-eighteenth century woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu; and various turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographs capture children completely absorbed in their task. As they fix upon the tiny fleeting world they have exhaled inside of soap film, we do something different: glance over a scene preserved by the capsule that is film stock. And this gets us to the hollow core of soap bubbles in visual art, no matter the medium. In depicting their fragility, representation robs bubbles of something essential to their form — the ability not to be.


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Black Bibliography: Daniel Murray’s Preliminary List (1900)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Oct 18, 2022

Reflecting on more than a century of attempts to archive African American literature, Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill — directors of the Black Bibliography Project — recently argued that “Black bibliography reminds us that organizing knowledge is a vital and deeply political act”. For Daniel A. P. Murray (1853–1925), only the second Black American to work at the Library of Congress, the recovery and preservation of a literary tradition could help grant dignity previously withheld. “As literature is the highest form of culture and the real test of the standing of a people in the ranks of Civilization”, he wrote in a 1900 article for Colored American Magazine, the multitude of works unearthed from previously neglected writers “must undoubtedly raise the Negro to a plane previously denied him.” Having dedicated his life to books, serving as an assistant librarian for forty-one years, Murray’s proclamation took aim both at gatekeepers of belles-lettres and the violent rhetoric of racial inferiority in 1890s America. During “Bibliographia-Africania”, a 1904 essay penned for The Voice of the Negro, he quotes Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique — “All the world, except savage nations, is governed by books” — before asking a question of his readers: “Have [Black American writers] produced anything in the literary line worthy of recognition and preservation? That is the test. If they have, let us see it, so we may justly assign to them their proper place in the ranks of civilization.”
In 1900, Murray had a chance to invigilate this test on a global stage, preparing a Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors in anticipation of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” at the Paris Exposition — an event that would be attended by more than forty-eight million visitors. As Elizabeth McHenry tracked in last year’s To Make Negro Literature, Murray built on the “Works by Negro Authors” compiled for the Bureau of Education’s Report of 1893–1894, adding an additional 117 titles before printing the list as a circular in an effort to elicit reader contributions. In its preface, Murray writes that his goal is “to secure every book and pamphlet in existence, by a Negro Author”, to be used in the “Exhibit of Negro Authorship” and later archived in the Library of Congress. His Preliminary List includes Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s Violets (1895), Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), the classical scholarship of William Sanders Scarborough, and novels by William Wells Brown, as well as authors such as Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth who would be later excluded from the canons of Black bibliographers such as Benjamin Brawley. In compiling his list, Murray found himself frequently cut off from the past by the dearth of historical record, sometimes resorting to the study of title-page portraits as a method for confirming an author’s race. Teaming up with Thomas J. Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois for the Paris curation, Murray displayed books and pamphlets from the Preliminary List alongside a vast collection of photographs and stunning infographics designed by Du Bois and his students at the University of Atlanta. Intended to make visible the history of “the American Negro”, his “present condition”, “education”, and “literature”, the exhibition was a great success — despite the reticence of many American newspapers to review it domestically.
While Murray’s circular was not the first document of Black bibliography — it was preceded, for example, by abolitionist Henri Grégoire’s 1808 De la Littérature des Nègres — the list had a considerable afterlife. The Library of Congress’ first bibliography of African American literature, Murray’s Preliminary List eventually grew to contain more than two thousand titles, laying the groundwork for a project of Alexandrian scope: Murray’s Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race Throughout the World, which promised twenty-five thousand biographical sketches, six thousand titles, and five thousand musical scores. Despite never completing this project, Murray’s efforts and ambitions inspired a sizable bibliography of later bibliographical projects, such as Du Bois’ Select Bibliography of the Negro American (1901), Monroe Work’s 1912–1938 Negro Year Books, Benjamin Brawley’s The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (1918), the New York Public Library’s The Negro: A Reading List (1925), and Dorothy Porter’s North American Negro Poets (1945). In Murray’s “incompleteness”, present-day critics find an invitation to continued conversation. As Shirley Moody-Turner writes: “To bequeath a capacious field of study, one that could be dismantled, reassembled, and debated: such was the imagined future of the ‘preliminary lists’ and ‘incomplete’ biographies that marked African American knowledge production at the turn of the century.”


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Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789)
Text by Kevin Dann
Oct 20, 2022

Great revolutions were stirring in Paris during January 1789: Abbé Sieyès published his incendiary pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le tiers-état? (What is the Third Estate?), and from the study of “M. Etteilla, Professeur d’Algebre” at 48 Rue de l’Oseille, a letter was sent applying for a patent to print a French edition of Livre de Thot, which promised to reveal the theory and practice of ancient Egyptian magic through Tarot. By July, when the French Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille fortress, scores of Parisians were already turning to Etteilla’s cards to divine the fate of France.
Engraved by Pierre-François Basan, the luxury edition of Etteilla’s tarot deck contained seventy-eight brush-colored cards and included a specially designed carrying case. Even in its cheaper, uncolored iteration, this deck was radically different from the many Tarot de Marseilles permutations that had appeared over the previous centuries. Etteilla — pseudonym of French occultist Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738–1791) — founded an organization specifically dedicated to the study of the esoteric Tarot, La Société des Interprètes de Thot, which promulgated the systematic integration of Tarot and astrology, thus refashioning the tarot deck as a tool for spiritual and mundane divination. Etteilla was the first to give divinatory meanings to cards and spreads. And some historians consider him the first person to earn a living as a professional tarot reader.
To merge the two ancient sciences, Etteilla assigned zodiacal constellations first to the seven stages of Creation (culminating in Card 7, “Rest” — its illustration looking like a scene built up out of Baron Cuvier’s paleontological finds in the Paris basin) then to Cards 8 (a woman encircled by eleven rings) through 12 (La Prudence, a sandaled, caduceus-bearing goddess paused before a serpent). Though many of Etteilla’s cards are clearly recognizable as reproducing the Trumps from the Tarot of Marseilles, the order of the cards (which proclaims to mirror a symbolic syntax discovered on the walls of the Temple of Memphis), individual details, and the astrological associations are altogether novel. Though he does not explain his method for assigning correspondences, it appears that Etteilla drew upon the mystical, Hermetic text Pymander for his picture of the Cosmos and its creation.
Etteilla’s radical publications — cf. Etteilla, ou la seule manière de tirer les cartes 1773; Cours théorique et pratique du livre de Thot (1790); L'oracle pour et contre mil sept cent quatre-vingt-onze (1790) — elevated the Tarot as Abbé Sieyès’ political-scientific impulses elevated the Third Estate, enabling the citizenry to understand their fate and fortune, even as these descended into the Terror and beyond. The later “Grand Etteilla” series, printed well into the nineteenth century, and the present-day proliferation of tarot decks, following ephemeral fads and fashions, all trace their origins to this beautiful and beguiling creation from the enigmatic Egyptophile at 48 Rue de L’Oseille.


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Fearful Symmetry: Inkblot Books (1857–1915)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 26, 2022

“Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish, / A vapor sometime like a bear or lion”, says Shakespeare’s Mark Antony in a moment of lamentation. He is describing pareidolia: the tendency to hallucinate faces or patterns in meaningless shapes. This seemingly widespread ability has long been a wellspring for visual artists. The Renaissance polymath Leon Battista Alberti went so far as to suggest that imitative art began when the ancients made minor changes to veined marble or knotted wood, bringing out a figure that was already partially present to their eyes. A parallel process underlies divinatory rituals: searching for images formed in tea leaves, spilt milk, or the distortions of a crystal ball. From the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries, a microgenre of books appeared at the convergence of these two traditions. Marrying accidental artistry — the kind, for example, employed by Victor Hugo in his suggestive use of stains — to divinatory claims, inkblot books were part bestiary, part parlor-game séance, cataloging those creatures that seemed to crawl out of the inkwell with the slightest encouragement.
But what exactly do we spot in a blot of ink? For Justinus Kerner (1786–1862), who produced a series of kleksographien (or “blotograms”) decades before the Rorschach test laid claim to this form, the answer was not “the projections of our own minds”. Rather, the faces that appeared on this doctor-poet’s page were “daguerreotypes of the invisible world”. Kerner discovered the technique by chance. Writing with eyes clouded by cataracts, he tended to dribble excess ink onto his paper. When folded, the mirrored blots gained the symmetry of humanoid faces.
Kleksographien (1857) features dozens of otherworldly creatures, hellfiends, and messengers of death (todesboten), begun as indelible smears and sometimes further infused with life through Kerner’s embellishments. Due to “the blackness of ink”, Kerner believed that “the power of a noxious demon / Often hides in the inkwell”. To browse through this volume is to become uncomfortably attuned to the mind’s malleability. We meet goat-headed deities wreathed by trumpet vines, a bearded man whose waist has grown pustule skulls, and a full-page spread of mothy recursions. Poems accompany the klecksography, often styled as announcements from distant realms. These offer origin stories for the spirits, who spawn in moonlight from the ruins of castle dungeons and other gothic landscapes.
While Kleksographien echoes lifelong interests for Kerner — who wrote the first biography of mesmerism’s namesake and once used hypnotism to exorcize the spirit of a bloodlusting monk — other nineteenth and early-twentieth century inkblot books struck a more juvenile tone. Indeed, as Damion Searls tracks in The Inkblots, playing “klecks” or “blotto” was once a common activity for children: Carl Jung recounts filling “a whole exercise book with ink blots” and “giving them fantastic interpretations”.
Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine’s Gobolinks (1896) captures the youthful, imaginative quality of the inkblot and features characters such as “A Flit-Flit Flitter”, “The Kangar-Rooster-Roo”, and other “goblin[s] of the ink-bottle”. Commenting humorously on the tendency of their animal blots to feature a plethora of tails, the authors note that they “have added nothing to the price of the book on account of undue liberality in the matter of caudal appendages”. In an even more amateur vein, John Prosper Carmel’s Blottentots (1907) infuses Kerner’s accursed characters (it features menacing “Gobble-Me-Ups” and “Bucking Nightmares”) with Stuart and Paine’s formal silliness. A blot that looks like two terriers with tails as long as leads is named after the poetic form that accompanies the image: doggerel. Yet all is not innocent play. Some of the books’ “comically monstrous figures” are evoked to suggest “the cute domestication of sinister forces”, writes Susan Zieger, and are named in ways that echo “nineteenth-century racist discourses of ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Golliwogs’”.
While these blotted books have artistic precursors, such as Alexander Cozens’ mechanism for summoning imaginary landscapes, their chronological clustering prompts us to ask if there is something historical at play. Are their ghostly associations part of the wider cross-pollination between new media technologies and occult perception in the nineteenth century? (Kerner, after all, glossed his klecksography as akin to “the pictures in a photographic camera”.) This seems to be the case, at least, in another blot experiment, Cecil Henland’s The Ghosts of My Friends (1915) — an autograph book that begins with an epigraph from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The best in this kind are but shadows”. However, whereas the album amicorum tradition sought preservation — as if, through writing, friendship might withstand even death — the signatures in Henland’s book are to be folded over while wet, creating a nearly illegible effect, blurring alphabetic letters into ghostly characters. Viewing these shapes in light of the title, it is as if ink too gains a documentary capacity, harboring the names, but also the visible spirits, of friends past.
On the other hand, these figures peeking out of ink have always been there. For the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, pareidolia is not a fringe phenomenon: it is at the core of religious experience. “Anthropomorphism by definition is mistaken, but it also is reasonable and inevitable. Choosing among interpretations of the world, we remain condemned to meaning, and the greatest meaning has a human face.” Condemned, in their own way, to meaning, inkblot books play upon the tension between word and image. Unlike Hermann Rorschach’s infamous assessment, meant to plumb an individual’s personality, these works hint toward a universal vocabulary of shadows. “The strangest images and figures are formed entirely from themselves”, wrote Kerner in an 1854 letter, they “resemble those from the bygone eras of the dawn of mankind”.


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It Started with Muybridge (1964)
Text by Hunter Dukes
Jun 28, 2022

Produced by the U.S. Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1964, It Started with Muybridge begins with a voiceover proclaiming the center’s mission: “research and development for tomorrow’s weapons”. The future’s bombs, this training film claims, will be detonated atop the shoulders of yesterday’s “photographer extraordinary”, Eadweard Muybridge. His famous sequential studies of animal movement innovated photography as a tool for motion analysis — the field that excites these ordnance laboratorians most. On screen we watch timelapse experiments with floral blooms and crystal growth set to whimsical flute music before the film smoothly cuts to instruments of human annihilation. The visual transition is itself an object lesson in the power of sequential images. “The elaborate equipment of today, adapted to a variety of special purposes, finds many uses outside of scientific research”, intones the narrator, as a driver makes contact with a golf ball in slow motion, and a composited woman skips in lingerie to demonstrate “how well a certain article of clothing will stay with the wearer”. Lulled, as we are, by imagery of leisure and a familiar scopophilic gaze, when aerial bombers arrive on screen, they appear almost beautiful: their parachute mines descending like synchronized divers to sow the sea. The documentary proceeds to recount the Naval Ordnance Laboratory’s contributions to scientific photography, containing “dimensions that Muybridge could not have foreseen”, and explain the use of various instruments that calibrate, synchronize, and sequence cameras for recording the flight of ballistic missiles.
While this film makes a military forefather of Muybridge, his photography and inventions were crosscut with warfare in other ways during his lifetime. Étienne-Jules Marey — whose La Machine animale (1873) inspired the hippophilic industrialist Leland Stanford to commission Muybridge’s famous equine photographs — repurposed the Gatling gun into a chronophotographic rifle on the heels of Muybridge’s research. And as a pioneering war photographer, Muybridge manipulated the candid form toward affecting fictions. His stereographs of the Modoc War (1872–1873), for example, were financed by the United States Army — one particularly famous image, captioned A Modoc Brave on the War Path, shows a crouched and shirtless marksman, with sights aimed on a target beyond the frame. In truth, writes Jarrod Hore, “the few photographs claiming to depict Modoc warriors were shams — the subjects were friendly scouts framed as rebels”. This wartime propaganda was, in effect, a weapon itself, creating complex visual “pathos formulas”, in John Trafton’s words, and garnering public support for expansionism and forced resettlement. Turned into engravings for Harper’s Weekly, Muybridge’s stereographs inadvertently documented U.S. imperialism’s role in wider trajectories of history. “Muybridge was photographing the journey to modernization”, recounts Rebecca Solnit in River of Shadows. “His Modoc pictures are not great expressive works of art; what is important in them is his act of witness and how it connects this history to the other histories he was tied to: the transformation of a world of presences into a world of images”.
It Started with Muybridge ends on an image so banal it winks sinisterly. After a ten-minute exposition of military pulse generators, timing units, spark gaps, shadowgraphs, and the “phenomena” of explosive detonations, we conclude with horses. Muybridge’s observation that all four galloping hooves are off the ground at the same time “has been a boon to artists, horse trainers, and veterinarians, and photography has been solving tough problems ever since”. When we remember that this documentary was released on the eve of Operation Rolling Thunder — the U.S. Navy and Air Force’s three-year campaign of aerial bombardment against North Vietnam — these “tough problems” may come into greater focus.


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Portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (1801)
Text by Hunter Dukes
May 26, 2022

Our attention is initially drawn to the light, which clings to the contours of a woman thought to be Marie Joséphine Charlotte du Val d’Ognes, fuzzing the borders of flesh, fichu, and the muslin of her neoclassical dress. In the midst of creation, the artist meets our gaze: are we the model or a mere distraction? Yet her dark irises seem to blend into the matte wall. Instead of holding eye contact, our concentration strays to a frame within the frame — the scene encased by a broken windowpane. In the foreground, the artist’s fingers fold her material over a drawing portfolio, adding a sense of depth to a two-dimensional surface, while the cracked glass opens this studio to the evening air. For art historian Amelia Rauser, du Val d’Ognes becomes “animated by her own sensibility, a living statue pulsing with vitalist energy”. And indeed, juxtaposed with the couple at the painting’s vanishing point — heads canted in amorous engagement — it seems as if the artist’s solo absorption illuminates this artwork, her unseen canvas a spotlight bringing the world into focus.
First attributed to Jacques-Louis David and then Constance Marie Charpentier, this portrait is now believed to be the work of Marie-Denise Villers (1774–1821), who may have exhibited the painting at the Parisian Salon of 1801. As Estella Lauter shows, the shifting ascription inadvertently exposes the gendered reception of art: what was once described as a merciless portrait by David of “an intelligent, homely woman” quickly became imbued with fault and “feminine” technique. Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Charles Sterling’s 1951 commentary on the painting illustrates how conjectured gender can overcolor the beholder’s eye: the idea that this “may have been painted by a woman is, let us confess, an attractive idea”, he writes. “Its poetry, literary rather than plastic, its very evident charms, and its cleverly concealed weaknesses. . . all seem to reveal the feminine spirit”. Yet, through its trompe l’œil effect — whereby the cracked glazing illustrates how glass alters the sky — it is as if the artist (Villers or otherwise) anticipated the somewhat facile nature of scholarly interpretation. We can look as long as we like, but we will never see the drawing that occupies du Val d’Ognes’ attention. Like broken windowpanes, all interpretations of artworks remain fractured views onto the world.
We know less than we would like about Charlotte du Val d'Ognes and Marie-Denise Villers — the latter can only be firmly credited as the artist of one other painting: A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802). Thanks to Anne Higonnet’s masterful sleuthing, we can posit that this portrait is set in the Louvre, where Jean-Baptiste Regnault and Sophie Meyer created an atelier for women artists, which Villers may have attended. Charlotte du Val d'Ognes also aspired to a career in the arts, and, according to Bridget Quinn, gave up painting after marriage for the demands of family life. Perhaps the couple in the portrait’s distance, then, represent looming social expectations in a revolutionary era, when debates about equal rights for women gripped 1790s France. “The device of the window scenes allows us to see public and private selves simultaneously”, writes Higonnet, “the woman who trains professionally, and the woman attached to male partner and home”. And the broken glass might gesture toward a shifting social order, a time when it could finally become possible to be at once a “professional woman” and “traditionally feminine”.