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The Serious and the Smirk
The Smile in Portraiture
By Nicholas Jeeves
September 18, 2013

Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner's photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

Today when someone points a camera at us, we smile. This is the cultural and social reflex of our time, and such are our expectations of a picture portrait. But in the long history of portraiture the open smile has been largely, as it were, frowned upon.
In Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) the portrait painter Miss La Creevy ponders the problem:
. . . People are so dissatisfied and unreasonable, that, nine times out of ten, there’s no pleasure in painting them. Sometimes they say, “Oh, how very serious you have made me look, Miss La Creevy!” and at others, “La, Miss La Creevy, how very smirking!”. . . In fact, there are only two styles of portrait painting; the serious and the smirk; and we always use the serious for professional people (except actors sometimes), and the smirk for private ladies and gentlemen who don’t care so much about looking clever.
A walk around any art gallery will reveal that the image of the open smile has, for a very long time, been deeply unfashionable. Miss La Creevy’s equivocal ‘smirks’ do however make more frequent appearances: a smirk may offer artists an opportunity for ambiguity that the open smile cannot. Such a subtle and complex facial expression may convey almost anything — piqued interest, condescension, flirtation, wistfulness, boredom, discomfort, contentment, or mild embarrassment. This equivocation allows the artist to offer us a lasting emotional engagement with the image. An open smile, however, is unequivocal, a signal moment of unselfconsciousness.
Such is the field upon which the mouth in portraiture has been debated: an ongoing conflict between the serious and the smirk. The most famous and enduring portrait in the world functions around this very conflict. Millions of words have been devoted to the Mona Lisa and her smirk — more generously known as her ‘enigmatic smile’ — and so today it’s difficult to write about her without sensing that you’re at the back of a very long and noisy queue that stretches all the way back to 16th century Florence. But to write about the smile in portraiture without mentioning her is perverse, for the effect of the Mona Lisa has always been in its inherent ability to demand further examination. Leonardo impels us to do this using a combination of skilful sfumato (the effect of blurriness, or smokiness) and his profound understanding of human desire. It is a kind of magic: when you first glimpse her, she appears to be issuing a wanton invitation, so alive is the smile. But when you look again, and the sfumato clears in focus, she seems to have changed her mind about you. This is interactive stuff, and paradoxical: the effect of the painting only occurs in dialogue, yet she is only really there when you’re not really looking. The Mona Lisa is thus, in many ways, designed to frustrate — and frustrate she did.
The hubbub around her smile really got going in the 19th century, when unfettered critical devotion to Renaissance art was at an all-time high. One critic and historian in particular, Jules Michelet, enjoyed, or at least endured, a very personal moment with her. In Volume VII of his Histoire de France (1855) he wrote, ‘This canvas attracts me, calls me, invades me. I go to it in spite of myself, like the bird to the serpent.’ Artfully concealed under the guise of Romantic criticism, this was in fact an expression of the new cult of the Mona Lisa, and over the years historians would attempt to outdo each other with their devotion to her charms. Michelet’s son-in-law Alfred Dumesnil, also a critic, went even further in his L’art Italien, as if locking antlers with his in-law: ‘The smile is full of attraction, but it is the treacherous attraction of a sick soul that renders sickness. This so soft a look, but avid like the sea, devours.’ In England, John Ruskin asserted that it was a merely a ‘caricature’, to which a young Oxford don named Walter Pater responded in his Renaissance: ‘All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there. . . the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. . .’
Things came to a head in 1919 when the French artist Marcel Duchamp triumphantly created his version, augmenting the smile with a fancy moustache and titling it L.H.O.O.Q., which only exacerbated things in rascally Dadaist fashion. (L.H.O.O.Q. translates phonetically as ‘she has a hot arse’, but also relates to an idiomatic expression of ‘fire down below’.) For Jules Michelet she may have been the object of romantic love: for Duchamp, she was the object of spirited masturbation.
It remains a commonly held belief that for hundreds of years people didn’t smile in pictures because their teeth were generally awful. This is not really true — bad teeth were so common that this was not seen as necessarily taking away from someone’s attractiveness. Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s whig prime minister, was often described as being devastatingly good-looking, and having a ‘strikingly handsome face and figure’ despite the fact that he had a number of prominent teeth missing as a result of hunting accidents. It was only in later life, when he acquired a set of flapping false teeth, that his image was compromised. His fear of them falling out when he spoke led to a stop-start delivery of his speeches, causing Disraeli to openly poke fun at him in parliament.
Nonetheless, both painters and sitters did have a number of good reasons for being disinclined to encourage the smile. The primary reason is as obvious as it is overlooked: it is hard to do. In the few examples we have of broad smiles in formal portraiture, the effect is often not particularly pleasing, and this is something we can easily experience today. When a camera is produced and we are asked to smile, we perform gamely. But should the process take too long, it takes only a fraction of a moment for our smiles to turn into uncomfortable grimaces. What was voluntary a moment ago immediately becomes intolerable. A smile is like a blush — it is a response, not an expression per se, and so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily recorded.
Smiling also has a large number of discrete cultural and historical significances, few of them in line with our modern perceptions of it being a physical signal of warmth, enjoyment, or indeed of happiness. By the 17th century in Europe it was a well-established fact that the only people who smiled broadly, in life and in art, were the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment — some of whom we’ll visit later. Showing the teeth was for the upper classes a more-or-less formal breach of etiquette. St. Jean-Baptiste De La Salle, in The Rules of Christian Decorum and Civility of 1703, wrote:
There are some people who raise their upper lip so high. . . that their teeth are almost entirely visible. This is entirely contradictory to decorum, which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them.
Thus the critical point: should a painter have persuaded his sitter to smile, and chosen to paint it, it would immediately radicalise the portrait, precisely because it was so unusual and so undesirable. Suddenly the picture would be ‘about’ the open smile, and this is almost never what an artist, or a paying subject, wanted.
In this sense, a portrait was never so much a record of a person, but a formalised ideal. The ambition was not to capture a moment, but a moral certainty. Politicians were particularly sensitive to this. For a more modern, photographic example of the principle, we may consider Abraham Lincoln. Here was a man better known than most, in his day, for his sense of humour, there being a number of well-known stories about him regularly drawing hoots of laughter from those in his company. While there are some informal images of him looking distinctly avuncular, a wit doesn’t abolish slavery without tough critical opposition, and in his best-known image, the ‘Gettysburg portrait’, he takes on the gravest expression imaginable. So powerful are these images that this is how he is generally remembered today. Mark Twain, a contemporary of Lincoln’s, was firm on the matter in a a letter to the Sacramento Daily Union:
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
As far back as the late 1460s, Sicily’s Antonello da Messina was surely considering all this when he painted what we now know as Portrait of a Man (one of many Antonello portraits of unknown sitters). Antonello painted quite a few portraits with smiles, and the subject seemed to interest him. We might even infer that it was the very challenge of painting a smile in a new tradition that motivated him, being a pioneer by nature. As you might expect from any portrait of the period, there is little doubt that the sitter is a gentleman. Antonello doesn’t go quite so far as to show the teeth, but does goes give him long dimples on his cheeks and laughter lines at the corners of his eyes. The teeth, we feel, are but a moment away. Unfortunately, this has the effect of making him look less, rather than more, human. The tension between the static nature of painting and the awkward animation of the smile confuses us, so much so that we find a facial expression that is unnervingly unreadable. It is ugly in a way that is hard to describe — it is just repulsively ‘other’ — though some people still think it beautiful, and the unknown Man himself must at least have been satisfied.
Better-known artists also attempted it. Caravaggio’s Triumphant Eros of 1602 was designed as a meditation on adolescent beauty, and as such is not strictly portraiture. But so wild and voracious was the boy’s smile that it was typically read at the time as a celebration of tumescent homosexual passion. In the picture, all the instruments of civilised society have been turned over in the face of all-consuming love — but his wicked smile speaks of lust. It may seem extraordinary to us today, in these unforgiving times, that the open smile was perceived as being the most pointedly shocking aspect of the picture despite Eros’ childishly displayed sex. Caravaggio, a rebel and sociopath to his core, revelled in the scandal.
In more modern times, John Singer Sargent, in his 1890 study for Miss Eleanor Brooks, draws his subject with a smile that manages to be both truly warm and civilised. Despite this, he later dropped it in favour of a more composed expression in the final work, clearly dissatisfied with the result. As he himself put it, ‘A portrait is a picture of a person with something wrong with the mouth.’ Again, we need to speculate a little as to what might have gone through his mind, but such a choice would lead us to believe that even a painter of his capability found it hard, in the end, to reconcile the smile with his reputation.
These artists from very different centuries have all grappled with the open smile, but each of them has failed to inspire in the viewer a consistent reading. It seems that, paradoxically, the less readable the smile, the more we feel we are able to read into it. As with magic tricks, we seem to be moved more by wonder than with explanation.
To see the smile at its biggest and best, we have to leave the upper classes and instead visit our attentions on those lower in the social order. 17th century Dutch painters were fascinated with recording the fullness of life, and deliberately sought out the smiles found within it. Here there are almost no end of artists to choose from, and in consequence ‘Dutchness’ in painting, and in life, was often a society shorthand for licentiousness. Jan Steen, Franz Hals, and Judith Leyster were all followers of this style, all painted broad smiles, and all were said to be good company, there being no attempt at separation between the artist, the viewer, and the subject. With the artists as complicit as they were explicit, it was a mutual love affair that put them firmly at the centre of contemporary life.
Possibly the most accomplished of these is Gerrit van Honthorst. Having seen Caravaggio’s work in Italy, van Honthorst was so taken with him that he made every effort to channel his style, particularly with his mastery of chiaroscuro. But it was not an obvious choice to make. Caravaggio was a contentious figure — infamous during his own lifetime, he was virtually forgotten on his death. (It was only in the early 20th century that his influence on painting was fully appreciated — at which point he was either celebrated as the father of modern painting, or denounced as its murderer.) But van Honthorst was in love. He immediately saw in Caravaggio something real and worthwhile, and sped back to Utrecht to record his own amplified scenes of late-night eating, drinking and music-making in rich detail.
A terrific example of the life and low-life that he sought to represent is The Laughing Violinist of 1624. Since the Renaissance, any reference to music in painting was usually interpreted as a symbol of love. Van Honthorst, again inspired by Caravaggio, wanted to go much further, with sexual overtones so explicit as to break new ground. And so his laughing violinist not only has a lewd expression and almost audible laugh, but is making a universally understood hand gesture. What is quite brilliant about the painting is that, on its own, it crashes through the boundaries of contemporary taste with sheer skill (just as Caravaggio’s paintings did). But when it is hung, as intended, immediately to the right of his portrait Girl Counting Money, it becomes clear who the jeer is aimed at. It is an explicit dialogue, just as Leonardo made with the Mona Lisa, but without the pretence of subtlety. Van Honthorst cracks the issue of the open smile by ensuring that we see it as it exists — not as an expression, but as a reaction.
The Dutch, likely relieved to see the back of the strict Calvinist regime of the 16th century, celebrated their everyday lives and experiences with art that was made to be inclusive. Such a relaxed attitude never really caught on in countries where a more protective attitude to class prevailed. England’s William Hogarth was very interested in the smile and its impact on beauty. In his Analysis of Beauty he approved of the lines that ‘form a pleasing smile about the corners of the mouth,’ but loathed a face in extreme contour, considering it ‘a silly or disagreeable look,’ so he saved it for the poor, the corrupt, the drunk, but without the affection of his Dutch near-contemporaries.
By 1877 the photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge had solved the problem of fleeting movement with his series of photographs entitled The Horse In Motion. As we know from artists’ previous attempts to paint running horses, the horse’s movement was impossible to capture accurately in paint. Thanks to Muybridge’s pictures, almost overnight all the painted horses became transformed from awkward caricature into great galloping beasts. And before you could say ‘cheese’ photographers found themselves able to capture another fleeting thing: the true smile.
Nowadays each of us is recorded across hundreds, or thousands of images, and many of us are smiling broadly. Collected, they represent us accurately in all our moods and modes, so we no longer have to worry about being defined by one picture. Indeed, unlike Abraham Lincoln, modern US presidents try to ensure that a number of images are available that will capture the gamut of their emotional range, from troubled solemnity to enthusiastic joy. The same goes for the royal families, recorded in either carefree, knockabout moments, or in stately focus. In the 21st century these figures must be all things to all people, and all occasions.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 18, 2013

author: Nicholas Jeeves


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The Founding Fathers v. The Climate Change Skeptics

By Raphael Calel
February 19, 2014

When claims from Europe accused British America of being inferior on account of its colder weather, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Fathers responded with patriotic zeal that their settlement was actually causing the climate to warm. Raphael Calel explores how, in contrast to today's common association of the U.S. with climate change skepticism, it was a very different story in the 18th century.

The United States has in recent years become a stronghold for climate change skepticism, especially since the country’s declaration in 2001 that it would not participate in the Kyoto Protocol. Nevertheless, though it is a well-documented fact, it might surprise you to learn that, a far cry from the United States’ recent ambivalence with respect to the modern scientific theory of man-made climate change, the country’s founders were keen observers of climatic trends and might even be counted among the first climate change advocates.
From the start, the project to colonize North America had proceeded on the understanding that climate followed latitude; so dependent was climate on the angle of the sun to the earth’s surface, it was believed, that the word ‘climate’ was defined in terms of parallels of latitude. New England was expected to be as mild as England, and Virginia as hot as Italy and Spain. Surprised by harsh conditions in the New World, however, a great number of the early settlers did not outlast their first winter in the colonies. Many of the survivors returned to Europe, and in fact, the majority of 17th-century colonies in North America were abandoned.
A view formed in Europe that the New World was inferior to the Old. In particular, medical lore still held that climate lay behind the characteristic balance of the Hippocratic humors — it explained why Spaniards were temperamental and Englishmen reserved — and it was believed that the climate of the colonies caused physical and mental degeneration. Swedish explorer Pehr Kalm, who had travelled to North America on a mission from Carl Linnaeus, observed in his travel diary that the climate of the New World caused life — plants and animals, including humans — to possess less stamina, stature, and longevity than in Europe. The respected French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, explained in his encyclopaedia of natural history that “all animals of the New World were much smaller than those of the Old. This great diminution in size, whatever maybe the cause, is a primary kind of degeneration.” He speculated that the difference in climate might be the cause:
It may not be impossible, then, without inverting the order of nature, that all the animals of the new world originated from the same stock as those of the old; that having been afterwards separated by immense seas or impassable lands, they, in course of time, underwent all the effects of a climate which was new to them, and which must also have had its qualities changed by the very causes which produced its separation; and that they, in consequence, became not only inferior in size, but different in nature.
Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw believed that “The Europeans who pass into America degenerate, as do the animals; a proof that the climate is unfavorable to the improvement of either man or animal.” Scientific and artistic genius, according to a prominent theory put forth by the French intellectual Jean-Baptiste Dubos, only flourished in suitable climates — climate accounted for the marvels of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, the Italian Renaissance, and, thanks to rising temperatures on the European continent that Dubos thought he observed, the Enlightenment. French writer Guillaume Raynal agreed, and made a point of saying that “America has not yet produced one good poet, one able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science.”
In the New World, refuting such theories became a matter of patriotism. In the rousing conclusion to one of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote:
Men admired as profound philosophers have, in direct terms, attributed to her inhabitants a physical superiority, and have gravely asserted that all animals, and with them the human species, degenerate in America–that even dogs cease to bark after having breathed awhile in our atmosphere. Facts have too long supported these arrogant pretensions of the Europeans. It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that assuming brother, moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will will add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness!
Building on the theories of John Evelyn, John Woodward, Jean-Baptiste Dubos, and David Hume — who all believed that the clearing and cultivation of land in Europe accounted for the temperate climate that had enabled the Enlightenment — the colonists set about arguing that their settlement was causing a gradual increase in temperatures and improvement of the flora and fauna of North America.
Hugh Williamson, American politician and a signatory of the Constitutional Convention, believed that “within the last forty or fifty years there has been a very great observable change of climate, that our winters are not so intensely cold, nor our summers so disagreeably warm as they have been,” a fact he attributed to the clearing of forests. “The change of climate which has taken place in North America, has been a matter of constant observation and experience,” wrote Harvard professor Samuel Williams. Benjamin Franklin wrote of the “common Opinion, that the Winters in America are grown milder.”  Measurements were as yet inadequate to the task of proving this, he said, but he found the proposed mechanism (i.e. clearing and cultivation) sufficiently persuasive that, even if the winters were not milder already, he could not “but think that in time they may be so.” Benjamin Rush, physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence, speculated that, if cultivation kept pace with clearing of new lands, climate change might even reduce the incidence of fevers and disease.
Thomas Jefferson was especially eager to rebut Buffon and the proponents of the theory of climatic degeneracy. He expended substantial efforts to this effect in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), with page after page of animal measurements showing that the American animals were not inferior to their European counterparts. He also had help from James Madison, who shared his own measurements with Jefferson, urging him to use them in his arguments against Buffon.
Their impassioned advocacy would occasionally lead them astray, though. Samuel Williams claimed that winter temperatures in Boston and eastern Massachusetts had risen by 10-12˚F in the previous century and a half, a climatic transformation too rapid to be believed perhaps. Jefferson, convinced that the American climate could sustain large animals too, insisted to a friend that “The Indians of America say [the Mammoth] still exists very far North in our continent.” Anxious to disprove claims of degeneracy, he wrote a letter to the American Philosophical Society in which he openly speculated that elephants, lions, giant ground sloths, and mammoths still lived in the interior of the continent. Later, believing he was on the verge of proving the skeptical Europeans wrong, he wrote a letter to the French naturalist Bernard Germain de Lacépède boasting that “we are now actually sending off a small party to explore the Missouri to it’s source,” referring to Lewis’ and Clark’s expedition. “It is not improbable that this voyage of discovery will procure us further information of the Mammoth, & of the Megatherium,” Jefferson continued, concluding “that there are symptoms of [the Megalonyx’s] late and present existence.”
The Founders did not settle for mere advocacy, though. Keen to present as strong a case for climate change as possible, and moderated by their scientific temperament perhaps, they wanted more and better evidence. To decide the issue of lions and mammoths, Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark to pay special attention to “the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S. the remains and accounts of any which may [be] deemed rare or extinct.” Although they didn’t find mammoths, they discovered many animals and plants previously unknown to science.
On the question of whether the winters were getting milder, Franklin wrote to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, encouraging him to make “a regular and steady Course of Observations on a Number of Winters in the different Parts of the Country you mention, to obtain full Satisfaction on the Point.” Madison made regular observations at his estate, which he assiduously entered into his meteorological journals. Jefferson, too, kept meticulous records, and encouraged his friends and colleagues to submit their measurements to the American Philosophical Society, “and the work should be repeated once or twice in a century, to show the effect of clearing and culture towards the changes of climate.” Jefferson himself made significant contributions to the development of modern meteorology. In 1778, for instance, Jefferson and the Reverend James Madison, president of The College of William & Mary and cousin of the fourth President of the United States, made the first simultaneous meteorological measurements. Jefferson promoted methodological standardization and expansion of geographical coverage, and was an early proponent of establishing a national meteorological service.
One need hardly belabor the point that the early climate change advocates were wrong.  Modern climate reconstructions show there was a brief warming period in New England during the late 1700s, but Jefferson’s and Williams’ measurements predate any actual man-made climate change. Their theories were pre-scientific in the specific sense that they predate a scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect. It is true that the French scientist Edme Mariotte had, as early as 1681, noticed the greenhouse effect, but it was not until the 1760s and 1770s that the first systematic measurements were made, and it would still be another century before anyone imagined that human activities might influence atmospheric composition to such an extent that the climate might be modified by this mechanism. Their pre-scientific theories also led them to believe that a changing climate would necessarily be beneficial, whereas today we are much more aware of the dangers of climate change.
Yet one should not belittle the efforts of these early climate change advocates. Fighting back against the European ‘degeneracy theory’ was necessitated by pride as much as a concern that these ideas might negatively affect immigration and trade from Europe. Their search for evidence, moreover, resulted in substantial contributions to zoology, and was instrumental to the foundation of modern meteorology and climatology. One might speculate, even, that a belief in degeneracy contributed to England’s refusal to afford its North American colonial subjects representation in parliament, and so helped spark the American revolution. In this case, one might construe the Founders’ climate change advocacy partly as an attempt to facilitate a peaceful resolution of their grievances with the Crown. Indeed, so politically important was their advocacy efforts thought at the time that Senator Sam Mitchell of New York, in his eulogy at Thomas Jefferson’s funeral, raised them to the same level as the American revolution itself.
It is an interesting historical footnote that, during a visit to London, Benjamin Franklin met and became friends with Horace Benedict de Saussure, the Swiss scientist credited with the first systematic measurements of the greenhouse effect. Franklin exchanged letters with Saussure, and encouraged his experiments on electricity. So impressed by Saussure’s work was Jefferson that he would later write to George Washington to suggest recruiting Saussure to a professorship at the University of Virginia, which was then under construction.
Far from a stronghold of climate change skepticism, as the United States is sometimes seen today, the country’s founders were vocal proponents of early theories of man-made climate change. They wrote extensively in favor of the theory that settlement was improving the continent’s climate, and their efforts helped to lay the foundation of modern meteorology. Much of the climate change skepticism of the day, on the other hand, was based on the second- and third-hand accounts of travelers, and the skeptics rarely made efforts to further develop the science. In addition, one cannot ignore its political convenience for many in Europe; for instance, Cornelius de Pauw was even hired by the King of Prussia to discourage Prussian citizens from emigrating or investing their capital in the New World.
Even if the parallels between the past and present are too obvious to spell out, they can be of some use to us today. While modern climate change advocates and skeptics have become experts at pointing to each other’s errors, we are usually the last to notice our own faults. An episode in our history that bears such strong resemblance to our present provides a rare opportunity to examine ourselves as if through the eyes of another. Today’s climate change advocates may recognize in themselves some of the overzealousness of the Founding Fathers, and therefore better guard against potential fallacies. Skeptics may recognize in themselves the often anti-scientific spirit of the degeneracy-theorists, and hopefully make greater efforts to engage constructively in the scientific enterprise today. One can hope, at least.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 19, 2014

author: Raphael Calel

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


text:
John L. Sullivan Fights America

By Christopher Klein
April 30, 2014

In 1883, the Irish-American heavy-weight boxing champion John L. Sullivan embarked on an unprecedented coast-to-coast tour of the United States offering a prize to any person who could endure four rounds with him in the ring. Christopher Klein tells of this remarkable journey and how the railroads and the rise of the popular press proved instrumental in forging Sullivan into America's first sports superstar.

A dense ocean of humanity lapped up to the doorstep of John L. Sullivan’s gilded liquor palace. Heads craned and tilted as hordes of Bostonians attempted to steal a passing glance of their hometown hero through the open doorway. Inside, a ceaseless flow of well-wishers offered their farewells to America’s reigning heavyweight boxing champion.
Sullivan’s dark, piercing eyes gleamed with the reflections of the flickering gaslights. His clean-shaven chin glistened like polished granite, although darkness hid in the recesses of a deep dimple and in the shadow of his glorious handlebar mustache. Sullivan’s pristine skin, full set of even teeth, and straight nose belied his profession and visibly testified to the inability of foes to lay a licking on him. Muscular without being muscle-bound, the “Boston Strong Boy” was constructed like a pugilistic product of the Industrial Age, a “wonderful engine of destruction” manifest in flesh and blood.
After imbibing the adulation inside his saloon on the evening of September 26, 1883, the hard-hitting, hard-drinking Sullivan waded through the throng of fawning fans outside and stepped into a waiting carriage that sprinted him away to a waiting train. The man who had captured the heavyweight championship nineteen months prior had departed on many journeys before, but no man had ever set out on such an ambitious adventure as the one he was about to undertake.
For the next eight months, Sullivan would circle the United States with a troupe of the world’s top professional fighters. In nearly 150 locales, John L. would spar with his fellow pugilists but also present a sensational novelty act worthy of his contemporary, the showman P.T. Barnum. The reigning heavyweight champion would offer as much as $1,000 ($24,000 in today’s dollars when chained to the Consumer Price Index) to any man who could enter the ring with him and simply remain standing after four three-minute rounds.
The “Great John L.” was challenging America to a fight.
Sullivan’s transcontinental “knocking out” tour was gloriously American in its audacity and concept. Its democratic appeal was undeniable: Any amateur could take a shot at glory by taking a punch from the best fighter in the world. Furthermore, the challenge, given its implicit braggadocio that defeating John L. in four rounds was a universal improbability, was an extraordinary statement of supreme self-confidence from a twenty-four-year-old who supposedly bellowed his own declaration of independence: “My name is John L. Sullivan, and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch alive!”
The “knocking out” tour opened in Baltimore on September 28 before thirty-five hundred eager fight fans who filled Kernan’s Theatre. No audience member challenged Sullivan on opening night, but a “flutter of excitement” palpitated through the boxing “fancy” when the champion donned gloves to spar with the constellation of boxing’s brightest stars who comprised the “Great John L. Sullivan Combination.”
After opening night, it was on to Virginia and Pennsylvania. The locales started to blur by — Harrisburg, Scranton, Lancaster.
John L. finally encountered his first challenger in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Local slugger James McCoy looked like the consummate tough guy. Tattoos of snakes, flowers, and a wide-mouthed dragon plastered his broad chest. The 160-pounder’s looks proved deceiving, however. After McCoy opened with a weak blow, the champion needed only a right and a left. The fight was over in mere seconds. “I never thought any man could hit as hard as he does,” McCoy said afterward. “But I can say what few men can, that I fought with the champion of the world.”
And that’s precisely why the “knocking out” tour generated unprecedented publicity in newspapers around the country, both for Sullivan and the entire sport of boxing. Not only was the best fighter in the world bringing the sport to the masses, he was letting the masses get in the ring with him!
Youngstown. Steubenville. Terre Haute.
In Chicago, the crowds were so thick that the combination pulled in nearly $20,000 in two nights. In St. Paul, Minnesota, Sullivan finally faced an opponent who could match him pound for pound. As soon as time was called, Sullivan stretched out his arm, and six-foot-tall railroad engineer Morris Hefey, who weighed 195 pounds, “fell on the stage as if struck by an axe.” The challenger rose, but as soon as he was within arm’s reach of the champion, he was down again. The fight took thirty seconds. “If you want to know what it is to be struck by lightning,” the challenger said afterward, “just face Sullivan one second.”
McGregor. Dubuque. Clinton.
In Davenport, blacksmith Mike Sheehan, the “strongest man in Iowa,” told his family that he was going to face off with the champion. Sheehan’s frantic wife visited Sullivan before the fight and beseeched him not to fight her husband, but not for the reason the champion suspected. “We’ve got five small children, and I don’t want them to have a murderer for a father. If you get into a fight with him, he’ll surely kill you,” she warned the champion.
John L. took his chances, entered the ring, and started with a smash to the nose of the stunned challenger. Sheehan’s surprise turned to rage. He charged at Sullivan. A big clout on the jaw by the champion sent his foe spinning to the back of the stage, and the challenger decided he had taken enough punishment. Sullivan sent Sheehan away with $100 for being game.
Muscatine. Omaha. Topeka.
As the combination rattled into Colorado at Christmastime, their train ascended the Rocky Mountains. Sullivan’s unprecedented transcontinental tour and his traverse of the West would not have been possible without one of the technological marvels of the age—the railroad. Only fourteen years had slipped by since the driving of the Golden Spike married the Union Pacific to the Central Pacific and bonded the nation’s railway system together. In the decade between 1870 and 1880, railway mileage in the United States almost doubled from nearly fifty thousand to over eighty-seven thousand. In the West, however, mileage more than tripled.
The railroads were powerful symbols of the industrial might of Gilded Age America. “The old nations of the earth creep on at a snail’s pace; The Republic thunders past with the rush of the express,” wrote steel magnate Andrew Carnegie of the raw energy that stoked the United States in the 1880s. That same rough fire of youth burned inside Sullivan and propelled him like a “living locomotive going at full speed.”
In fact, perhaps no American has so embodied his times like John L. The United States was the fastest-growing country in the world. Its population would soon eclipse that of Great Britain, and it was on its way to becoming the world’s leading industrial superpower. The country pulsated with the infusion of new immigrants, new industry, and new inventions—telephones, electric lights—that were transforming daily life.
Both Sullivan, son of Irish immigrants, and the upstart United States in the 1880s were young and virile, proud and cocky, crude and pugnacious. A boxer always represents power in its most visceral sense, and John L. symbolized an ascendant America that was flexing its economic muscles on the world stage. The champion exuded a rough masculinity that appealed to the growing numbers who feared that life in an increasingly urbanized United States was becoming less rugged, more sedentary. And at a time when the increasingly popular theory of social Darwinism emphasized the survival of the fittest, there was no place in America where that could be so clearly demonstrated than inside a boxing ring.
The legendary spirit of the fighting Irish that was made flesh in Sullivan transformed him into a hero for the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle who had felt emasculated in the wake of the Great Hunger. To Irish Americans who had believed themselves powerless for centuries under the thumb of the British, slighted in their new homeland, and traumatized by the horrific famine of the 1840s, here came one of their own who exuded strength, who didn’t lack confidence, and who didn’t suffer from a lack of pride. His self-belief was an elixir for a people who had suffered from malignant shame.
Working-class Irish Americans thought of the champion as one of them, just another Irish bloke scrapping to earn a living with his hands, and on the “knocking out” tour, Sullivan traveled to the outposts where the Irish labored in twelve-, fourteen-, and sixteen-hour shifts: mining towns and lumber camps along railroad lines that were built by calloused Celtic hands.
As soon as the “Sullivan’s Sluggers” arrived in the mining boomtowns of the Rockies, the outlaw element of the Wild West seemingly infected the fighters. Reports of drunkenness and brawling appeared with increasing frequency in newspapers and made for great copy. On Christmas Day in Denver, Sullivan almost killed a fellow fighter while playing around with a double-barreled shotgun he was told was unloaded. Two days later in Leadville, a drunken Sullivan swaggered—and staggered—through his performance and backstage hurled a lighted kerosene lamp at another fighter following an argument. In Victoria, British Columbia, he was in “a state of beastly intoxication” and refused to stand for a toast to the health of the city’s namesake, Queen Victoria, explaining that he “hadn’t been brought up to seeing Irishmen drinking to the health of English monarchs.”
The combination reached the Pacific Ocean in early 1884. After visiting Los Angeles, the fighters turned back toward the East with Sullivan leaving a trail of broken bottles and fighters littered across America.
Tucson. Tombstone. Waco.
When Sullivan arrived in Galveston, Texas, he faced perhaps his toughest foe, an imposing cotton baler named Al Marx who was considered the champion of Texas. The challenger wanted to send an early statement, and just after shaking hands, he nailed Sullivan in the jaw. The Texas giant gained confidence after landing several hard blows on Sullivan in the first two rounds, and he was convinced John L. had met his match.
Sullivan had spent the day drinking, but when he came out in the third round, the “cowboy pugilist” noticed a change in the champion’s eyes. John L. glared “like a wild animal.” Then Sullivan launched an “uppercut that lifted the giant almost off the floor” that was followed by a left smash to the jaw. Marx sank “down like a bag of oats.” Sullivan lifted him up and then cracked him over the footlights and into the orchestra pit, which broke two chairs, three violins, and a bass drum. As the Texan lay unconscious, the tour’s financial manager reached into the gate receipts to scrounge for $24 to pay for the destroyed drum.
Mobile. Savannah. Chattanooga.
In Memphis, bricklayer William Fleming took the stage with the champion. At the opening signal, Sullivan charged. He feinted with his left and struck a blow on the lower part of Fleming’s left jaw that knocked him unconscious for fifteen minutes. Total time of the bout: two seconds. Fleming was lifted over the ropes and helped out of the building to his home. When he came to, he asked, “When do me and Sullivan go on?”
“You’ve been on,” he was told.
“Did I lick him?” the oblivious bricklayer asked.
On May 23, 1884, “Sullivan’s Sluggers” pulled into Toledo, Ohio. Nearly eight months after they had started in Baltimore, the combination had reached their final stop on an epic barnstorm through twenty-six of the country’s thirty-eight states as well as the territories of Arizona, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming. In spite of Sullivan’s drunken exploits, the tour had been a success, and somehow, through all the debauchery, everyone in the combination made it through without any permanent damage. According to some accounts, thirty-nine men had stepped into the ring seeking to go four rounds with the champion. Thirty-nine men failed.
Accounts of the financial receipts from the tour vary, but Sullivan likely pocketed tens of thousands of dollars, and his earnings probably approached or surpassed the $50,000 annual salary earned by President Chester A. Arthur. While the exact size of his financial windfall may not be known, it’s certain that Sullivan earned an incredible level of superstardom by traversing the continent. The “Boston Strong Boy” proved to be a drawing card around America due to both his prowess in the ring and his personal magnetism. Americans paid money not just to see John L. Sullivan box, but just to see John L. Sullivan. On Sullivan’s tour stop in St. Louis, five thousand people paid just to see him pitch five lackluster innings in an exhibition game for baseball’s St. Louis Browns.
Thanks to the “knocking out” tour, Sullivan became the most famous athlete in the United States—and one of the most famous Americans in any walk of life. Through railroads and newspapers, Sullivan was able to reach hundreds of thousands of people across America, something that wasn’t possible just years before. He became an American celebrity of the highest order as well as the first sports superstar, and his fame would endure even after he lost the heavyweight championship to “Gentleman Jim” Corbett in 1892.
The American publicity machine was beginning to crank, and John L. knew how to pull the levers. He rarely turned down a request for an interview, and he was good copy. His boozing, womanizing, and chronic police-blotter presence were godsends to big-city newspapers engaged in heated circulation wars. John L., like generations of athletes to follow, thought that the spotlight pointed at him by the press burned too harshly at times. “My excesses have always been exaggerated,” he said. “I am almost as much in the public eye as the President of the United States.” John L. had it wrong, however. He lived a life much more in the public eye than the president.
The American people literally wanted a piece of John L. Women purchased his shorn hair from his barber for a dollar to snap into their lockets. Vaudeville songs and marching tunes were written in his honor. “Let me shake the hand that shook the hand of Sullivan” quickly became a cultural catchphrase, and wherever John L. traveled, an outstretched arm always reached in his direction.
Sullivan later pointed to the transcontinental “knocking out” tour as the seminal moment in his lofty career. “I have always believed what popularity I have today is due to that triumphal tour,” he said after his fighting days were done. It was a logistical endeavour, however, that wouldn’t have even been technologically possible a decade before.
Newly constructed railroad lines allowed Sullivan to cover enormous swathes of America, from frontier settlements to major metropolitan areas, in short order. He could be in Rawlins, Wyoming, one night and nearly three hundred miles away in Salt Lake City the next. The ability to traverse hundreds of miles on a single overnight train made it possible for legions of his fans to view him in the flesh, to be personally awed by his ring prowess and seduced by his charisma. Sullivan became one of the most “seen” men in the world. Certainly, more eyes gazed upon him than even the president of the United States, and the audiences he drew around the country rivaled those of Barnum and “Buffalo Bill.”
It was the simultaneous communications revolution, however, that allowed Sullivan to connect with exponentially more Americans than just those who saw him in person. The subterranean printing presses that rumbled beneath the streets of the country’s big cities were in the process of shaking up American culture. Print barons such as Joseph Pulitzer and Charles A. Dana noted the success of tabloids such as The National Police Gazette in pioneering sports coverage, and they followed suit by hiring sporting editors and developing their own sports sections.
Some of the big cities that Sullivan visited supported a half-dozen daily newspapers or more, and John L. spawned page-one headlines wherever he traveled. Thanks to brand-new telegraph lines, blow-by-blow accounts of his fights and news of his out-of-the-ring exploits could be transmitted rapidly around the country, which meant that oceans of ink were spilled on him every day. With every story about Sullivan that coursed through the tentacles of America’s telegraph lines, his fame and celebrity deepened.
The intense press coverage and fan interest surrounding the “knocking out” tour provided a mere glimpse of the future. With a transportation and communications network stitching the country together and a burgeoning mass media, the modern sports age had begun, and in John L. Sullivan it had found its first athletic god.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Christopher Klein


text:
Time and Place
Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)
By Frank Delaney
November 27, 2013

In many countries around the world the works of Eric Ravilious have come out of copyright this year – he died when his aircraft went missing off Iceland while he was making war paintings. An artist in multiple disciplines, his greater legacy dwells in water-colours. Frank Delaney re-visits the work of this understated, yet significant figure.

In the early nineteen-eighties, for a commission about the sense of place in John Betjeman’s poetry, I worked with a photographer named James Ravilious. He lived in Devon, where he set forth every day to capture the profound countryside around him. His are the kind of photographs that Chaucer might have taken, monochrome and immortal. Distant windswept combes; gnarled trees; the square towers of village churches; beasts closer to the primitive earth than God — his work invites a leaning towards the word “timeless.” But James’s photographs are not timeless, and that was the first point of him — they are of their time and their time only; they are, indeed, what may be called, in the deepest sense, record.
Second point: to the sense of Time add sense of Place — because neither could these photographs have been taken in any other country; put the words “English” and “quintessence” together and you get the idea. This unique confluence was, I now think, genetic; James was the son of the similarly unmistakable Eric Ravilious.
Only Art controls Time. It can freeze it, pin its moment, accelerate it, ignore it, invent and re-invent it, spin it over, under, sideways, down. Consequently (imagination being truer than fact), our artists have become our best recorders of all our worlds. Time and Place are conjoined and frozen in the fullness of their reportage; we see how it was There and Then — in the house in Delft, where Vermeer’s girl reads her letter, or in the early twentieth-century Byleorussian village which Chagall showed from his most credible point of view, of the couple flying above it. The most touching are particular to their time and their place.
Eric Ravilious likewise recorded England in that watchful, changeful moment between the world wars. He served both masters — his own time, in his own England. Indeed, he confirms Englishness in Art, where the power so often comes from restraint; the real stuff is beneath the surface. Given an already substantial body of work in his thirty-nine years — hundreds of wood engravings, close to 100 water colours alongside multiple other outputs — we can only imagine what he might have gone on to produce had the gods of war not been so hungry.
Throughout, his own character emerges — composed, unhysterical, clear and unfettered. We can all quote Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry in the Lyrical Ballads as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ but we overlook a more interesting note in the same Preface; ‘. . . The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.’
In the super-perceptive Ravilious there are no “gross and violent stimulants,” and without blinking he put up a surfeit, almost, of “beauty and dignity” — and yet he never sacrificed his own stern and often lonely edge.
And he is so individual, so recognizable at first glance, so much his own man, because, though delighting in the Surrealists and the Chinese, he made his point without playing for any team. Not the Fauvists, not the Cubists nor the Dadaists nor the neo-Impressionists, he was also too subtle for the harsher, uber-Modernist school of his German contemporaries.
Look, though, at his 1935 water-colour Train Going Over a Bridge at Night — he knew about those other fellows, and the wind that blew from their direction ruffled his hair, but he wasn’t like them. He was 33 when he painted it, and so mature.
‘Rav’ to many who knew him, ‘Boy’ to his pals who adored him and his cheerful ways, was born in Acton in 1903, the youngest of four births, one of whom had died in infancy. His parenting by a mercurial, bible-minded father and a more tranquil mother birthed the emotional range that can give an artist a useful swing.
In his father’s early trade there’s an influence there for the taking — a drapery shop. It’s easy to see the modest sheens of Edwardian fabrics in Ravilious’s work. Indeed, once you know of his childhood among the swatches of cloth, it’s astonishing to note how often his use of stippling and cross-hatching echoes domestic patterns, e.g., The Bedstead, 1938.
When Papa Ravilious’s fierce biblical vision failed to hold his finances steady, the family moved to Eastbourne. One of the French novelists (I think it was Mauriac) said, “the door slams shut on a writer at the age of twelve.” There’s enough evidence to suggest that Eric Ravilious saw much of what he would paint by then, not least the flat planes of the English Channel, and its cliffs and lighthouses, as in the 1939 piece, Beachy Head.
In general, the trace elements in his geology shine up at us. At Eastbourne Grammar School when he was eleven, he made a drawing of his egg in its eggcup. The teacher gave him 8 out of 10. It merited a higher mark — that was a moment when his ability to create and hold an original line became apparent. Twenty years later, Wedgwood had him commissioned — vases, teacups, plates, the 1937 Coronation Mug of George VI and the gorgeous Boat Race Bowl.
In 1919, aged sixteen, he gained a scholarship to the Eastbourne College of Art. Three years later he had another, to the relatively new and as yet unsung Royal College of Art. One day, through the door of his Chelsea classroom, walked the man who would help teach Eric Ravilious up into maturity, the much feistier, more damaged and brilliant Paul Nash.
Not everybody, always and ever, worked in oils (Ravilious said it was like painting with toothpaste), but aren’t they essential when you’re reaching for sheer force? Maybe not: Nash had been invalided out of World War I, and although his body healed, his attitude bore scars that he believed we should all know about. And he displayed them — in scathing water-colours as lush and violent as rain forests.
Nash saw Ravilious early and liked him, liked his range, his refusal to be trammelled by one medium. The similarities between the two would eventually be more suggested than striking.  In Ravilious you can see some Nash, but it’s the intent without, so to speak, the cocaine, the energy without the driving pain. Nash introduced his likeable student to the Society of Wood Engravers, a place where one could show one’s work. This exposure — and Nash’s good word — got Ravilious early commissions for book plates, one of the great minor art forms of the period.
Wood engraving has its own mystery: think of the language. Ravilious’s tools included a “scorper,” a “spitsticker,” a “graver” — a scorper is a small gouging-tool for hollowing and chasing wood — they use it to make bowls (from “scalper” or “scauper,” a surgeon’s scraping lance); a spitsticker is a tapering kind of triangular scalper, again for routing, and a “graver” (more obviously) carves or scrapes the wood; archers used it, and antique dentists scaled teeth with it. Ancient instruments — timeless results.
His engraving output became a major part of his artistic and economic life. Ravilious seems to have grasped the single outstanding quality of the form; eternal and universal, it closes the gaps between cultures and centuries. The work he delivered, whether for the little private presses — or the larger commercial publishers — who just wanted to produce glorious books — could as easily have frontispieced Boccaccio or Malory. The 1933 work for the Golden Cockerel Press Prospectus shows Ravilious in full engraving form.
And the money helped, though he did take a job as a part-time art teacher back at Eastbourne;  “He had the eager curiosity of a young boy, and a most refreshing cool judgement. He was never our art master but rather the most stimulating and hard-working member of a group. He was a cheerful though absorbed person, and rather reserved in spite of appearing friendly. . . he was so unassuming and never tried to dominate us or show off.”
While one of his students was observing him thus, another student married him, Tirzah Garwood. Long-shaped and grave, she had walked straight out of a Modigliani painting — and she too loved engraving.  They wed in London on the 5th of July, 1930 and went to Cornwall on honeymoon with Charles, i.e., Tirzah’s dog.
By now Rav was fairly motoring, with commissions for engravings, illustrations, murals, theatre designs, and recognition from those who knew people. With the presence of a wife, and thus a thoughtful and like-minded companion, he began to paint more and more. He painted Tirzah in multiple ways; she’s riding bicycles, walking village streets, playing the piano and memorably as one of the Two Women Sitting in a Garden, 1933.
No major formal portrait of Tirzah by her husband exists that I’ve been able to find. Other than angled ciphers and dark, anonymous makeweights on a landscape, human beings never provided Ravilious with a major subject. It was England who sat for him, in diverse poses, for a decade and more, and in his portraits of her, painted with deep and lasting love, reside his best work, such as Wiltshire Landscape, 1937.
Ravilious’s choice of media must surely have delayed his fuller appreciation — he has been dismissed too often and too long as “minor.” It was understandable: with oils as king, wood engravings amounted to, at best, bookplates or colophons, and water-colours remained the premise of ladies in garden clubs; ceramics reached no farther than the domestic or memorial.
It’s a shallow view. If technical requirement and skill arbitrated stature, Ravilious and the others along that bench — Reynolds Stone, John Piper, the Nash brothers — should in all justice be called “New” Masters. Wood engraving is powerfully demanding; ceramics too; and water-colours require the damndest fiddling and risk prevention. Ravilious, for instance, discovered that he could firm up control of the paint if he dampened the back of the paper. And his choice was shrewd unto his particular gifts; because he worked at great speed water colours gave him an advantage over oils — he could tear up a picture that wasn’t going his way.
But — aren’t water colours “mild”? Not capable of being political? If you think that, why are Ravilious’s landscapes so empty of people? Could it be that he was also a chronicler of the flight from the land that denuded the English countryside — because livings were no longer to be made as of old? And yet his England goes back to darker Englands, such as the great chalk horse hillsides that he painted more than once.
James Ravilious, my delightful one-time colleague, died in 1999, at the age of 60 — not as prematurely as his father but his death still makes me wince and turn aside in sadness. Working with him was a pleasure — and doubly so now, because without having known him I might never have come close to the joy of his father’s work, who perished off Iceland when James was only three years old.
Retrospection decides how an artist can or ever will be considered. Writers, for instance, tend to stay in the shadows for a generation after death. Only when they climb out will the work be assessed and accurate reputation decided. One of the pleasing little miracles of this process is that, when all is said and done, the artist, in whatever medium, seems to settle in the most fitting place. With Eric Ravilious now in the public domain, we can all stand back, fold our arms and look long and pleased at this gracious and talented artist.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 27, 2013

author: Frank Delane


text:
Picturing Pyrotechnics

By Simon Werrett
June 25, 2014

Simon Werrett explores how artists through the ages have responded to the challenge of representing firework displays, from the highly politicised and allegorical renderings of the early modern period to Whistler's impressionistic Nocturne in Black and Gold.

Such were the pleasing triumphs of the skyFor James his late nocturnal victory:The pledge of his almighty Patron’s love,The fireworks which His angels made above.I saw myself the lambent easy lightGild the brown horror and dispel the night.(John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, 1687)
In the early modern period, throughout the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, elaborate fireworks displays were often put on by European courts, governments, and cities to celebrate a whole host of events: religious festivals, coronations, royal weddings and birthdays, triumphs, treaties, and the bringing in of the new year. These events were celebrations and opportunities for revelry but also an opportunity for those in power to show their might, and for this end fireworks were crucial, serving to manifest power by appearing to discipline the most dangerous of the elements and to transform nature itself. Contemporaries often commented that fireworks turned night into day and — being benign version of military pyrotechnics — transformed war into peace, or “marte” into “arte”.
As well as this general demonstration of power, displays also typically featured symbolic or allegorical decorations and scenery which were intended to present a more specific message to audiences. The figure of a lion might represent a powerful king, or the slaying of a dragon might signal the conquest of the king’s enemies. As such, it was important to states to make sure that everyone understood the message of fireworks, and so artists were commissioned to engrave large prints of displays for distribution to relevant audiences. Fireworks prints became something of a genre in their own right, and were made by artists across Europe for several hundred years. They are interesting because of the diverse ways they represented very fleeting episodes, playing with time, space, and visual techniques to commemorate pyrotechnic dramas.
It might be imagined that fireworks prints are pictures made after the event looking back, but this was not the case. It was typical for fireworks prints to actually be made before an event, so they do not depict a scene witnessed at all. They were not a record of history but rather an anticipation of its being remembered. The remembering of fireworks served many different purposes. In Russia, for example, large fireworks engravings were published along with explanations of their allegorical content in pamphlets that were distributed to courtly audiences during a display. These engravings were schematic, designed to make clear the iconography of the performance which was described and explained in the text. An event was turned into a storia, a narrative or history.
One such engraving shows a fireworks temple designed by the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences professor of eloquence, Jacob von Stählin, and executed by the artillery officer Petr Ivanovich Melissino for the anniversary of the coronation of Empress Catherine II in June 1763. The accompanying description explained how the display centred on the Island of Pallas represented in fireworks, which carried a temple, in front of which Pallas sat on a dark cloud casting out bolts of lightning. Subsequent decorations appeared, including palm trees, garlands, and the figure of the goddess Minerva holding a cornucopia. These decorations were all meant to signal the wisdom and power of the Empress Catherine and the happiness of the empire under her reign.
Prints were also included in festival books in western Europe. Images were typically large, printed on paper, or sometimes silk, and distributed either at the display or as gifts to diplomats and other courts subsequently. Prints were not intended to capture the reality of a performance, like a photograph, but to serve as well-ordered representations of official events. Fireworks prints acted as a front-stage, sanitizing the messiness of the real event to leave only an idealized account. In fact many fireworks failed — displays often witnessed accidents, sometimes quite horrible, and there were frequently mistakes.
An etching by Dumont le Romain of a firework shown on the Seine in Paris on 21 January 1730, depicted a display staged on behalf of Philip V of Spain to celebrate the birth of Louis XV’s son Louis. To show Spain and France’s mutual regard, the display included two eighty-foot high Pyrenean mountains, across which a rainbow spread to show the two countries’ unity before a great sun rose up symbolizing the dauphin’s birth. All this was captured admirably by Dumont le Romain, but the performance apparently never took place, at least according to a report from an English observer (who perhaps isn’t to be trusted either). This tells us,
the Rising sun was omitted for Want of Time; and the Rainbow, when made, was too unwieldy and unmanageable; and therefore could not appear; nor the Goddess Iris. . . these should have been describ’d as designed only, and not executed.
In the eighteenth century, these official images were joined by a growing number of commodified fireworks prints, cheaply produced, smaller, and, in the case of vue d’optique prints, designed for consumption in the home. In the latter colour and pattern begin to become more important than any desire to record or commemorate an event. Here aesthetics begin to be disassociated from content, a form of abstraction which fireworks, with their explosions and patterns, were well-suited to.
Simultaneously, other images sought out more reality in fireworks art, in journalistic illustrations and satires. Official prints appeared in 1749 advertising the splendid classical temple erected in Green Park as a stage for setting off fireworks to celebrate the peace of Aix la Chapelle. But The Times newspaper showed what really happened on the night, when a wing of the temple accidentally caught fire and burned to the ground. Such an image, countering the court and government’s vision of events, would have been unthinkable in France or Russia at this time. It anticipates the uses of art later in the century to promote more urgent issues such as the abolition of slavery.
In all cases, pictures of fireworks were always conventionalized images using a wide repertoire of visual techniques to create the impression of a pyrotechnic performance. The art historian Kevin Salatino has explored many of these conventions in his book Incendiary Art (1997) published by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. They ranged from a host of techniques for depicting fire to the bold and apparently random colors used to brighten up perspective views. It should be said that fireworks prints were also very unconventional — they rarely followed a pattern in their overall design, and different artists emphasized different elements of displays — the pyrotechnics, the labour, the architecture, the audience, often with a politics lying behind those decisions. In Russia, for example, images of fireworks very rarely depicted any of the artillerists who set them off, perhaps because the artists who made the images were in competition with them for credit in realizing displays.
Despite the great variety evident in fireworks prints, artists always seem to have sought to reveal fireworks to their audience in some way, making accessible an otherwise fleeting and obscure experience. One convention in this regard, as Salatino mentions, is that the engravings rarely showed smoke, or made it into a backdrop for more prominent fiery effects. An exception is A representation of the Fire-Workes in St James’s Square on the joyfull occasion of his Majesties Glorious success in taking of Namur Sept 9 1695, in which the engraver Bernard Lens II shows smoke billowing from barrels of gunpowder. Indeed, displays in the early modern period certainly were smoky, and one diarist wrote of how smoke completely obscured a displays from the audience’s view. But it was more common for a print to show no smoke, or to make it nothing more than a minor decorative feature of the composition. Painters interested in the sublime, however, might make smoke part of the sublimity of the scene they wished to capture, as in Paul Sandby’s 1769 painting, Windsor Castle from Datchet Lane on a rejoicing night.
To capture smoke might imply the representation of a moment in time in a display, and fireworks images dealt variously with the issue of representing time visually. Most commonly, artists and engravers created a single image capturing a significant moment in a pyrotechnic performance. An image of fireworks on the Seine in front of the Louvre in 1628 by Morel, celebrating the siege of La Rochelle, showed the moment when Perseus (Louis XIII) attacked a Sea Monster (representing Protestantism) to save Andromeda (Catholicism) tied to a rock (La Rochelle).
The same approach was used later in the eighteenth century, when fireworks might be staged in several acts. One act might be chosen to be represented in a print, or a significant moment in each depicted. Only rarely did artists try to capture the passage of time in displays, with a few notable exceptions. For a festival book in honour of the election of Ferdinand III as Holy Roman Emperor in February 1637 in Rome, Claude Lorrain produced a sequence of thirteen images showing fireworks in which each image showed a different stage of the display. One artificial edifice burned down or exploded to reveal another inside before finally revealing a statue of the King of the Romans. Lorrain’s choice to do this probably reflected the nature of the performance itself, staged as a series of revelations. This was quite a common feature of fireworks displays, but it was not common to use serial images to record them.
The early modern artists who made fireworks prints used many different techniques to capture the passing of time, the explosive effects of pyrotechnics, and the complex iconography of fireworks displays. Their work presents a remarkable ingenuity in developing so many different solutions to difficult problems of representation. This was in part owing to the peculiar demands of the fireworks print, made before the event, and depicting something which destroyed itself in a matter of minutes or even seconds. But it was also owing to the great skill of artists in imagining fireworks in an image, a skill which remained even after the grand symbolic fireworks of royal courts declined in the nineteenth century.
James McNeill Whistler, for example, in his Nocturne in Black and Gold (1875), developed a very different solution to the problem of capturing fireworks in an image. In the age of photography, he seems to have captured, as in a photograph, a single instant in a fireworks display, envisioned while it is taking place. He does not reproduce the appearance of a photograph, but recalls its temporality. Neither was he interested in the meaning of the fireworks. There is no symbolic content here to explain, and the smoke stands all around the image instead of being parted to reveal the fireworks more clearly. There was no demand on Whistler to commemorate the state or the king, and his image is really a commemoration of the firework itself — its colours, textures, and dynamic movements. No wonder then that fireworks came to be seen as exemplary of abstraction in the twentieth century. The critic Theodore Adorno reckoned fireworks were the “other of the empirical world” being “a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning.” This might have been true for Whistler and fireworks in Adorno’s time, but it was precisely to capture meaning and manifest it dramatically that fireworks had been used and recorded in images for several centuries previously.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Simon Werrett


text:
The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse

By Matthew Green
August 7, 2013

In contrast to today's rather mundane spawn of coffeehouse chains, the London of the 17th and 18th century was home to an eclectic and thriving coffee drinking scene. Matthew Green explores the halcyon days of the London coffeehouse, a haven for caffeine-fueled debate and innovation which helped to shape the modern world.

From the tar-caked wharves of Wapping to the gorgeous lamp-lit squares of St James’s and Mayfair, visitors to eighteenth-century London were amazed by an efflorescence of coffeehouses. “In London, there are a great number of coffeehouses”, wrote the Swiss noble César de Saussure in 1726, “. . . workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms to read the latest news.” Nothing was funnier, he smirked, than seeing shoeblacks and other riffraff poring over papers and discussing the latest political affairs. Scottish spy turned travel writer John Macky was similarly captivated in 1714. Sauntering into some of London’s most prestigious establishments in St James’s, Covent Garden and Cornhill, he marvelled at how strangers, whatever their social background or political allegiances, were always welcomed into lively convivial company. They were right to be amazed: early eighteenth-century London boasted more coffeehouses than any other city in the western world, save Constantinople.
London’s coffee craze began in 1652 when Pasqua Rosée, the Greek servant of a coffee-loving British Levant merchant, opened London’s first coffeehouse (or rather, coffee shack) against the stone wall of St Michael’s churchyard in a labyrinth of alleys off Cornhill. Coffee was a smash hit; within a couple of years, Pasqua was selling over 600 dishes of coffee a day to the horror of the local tavern keepers. For anyone who’s ever tried seventeenth-century style coffee, this can come as something of a shock — unless, that is, you like your brew “black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love”, as an old Turkish proverb recommends, and shot through with grit.
It’s not just that our tastebuds have grown more discerning accustomed as we are to silky-smooth Flat Whites; contemporaries found it disgusting too. One early sampler likened it to a “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes” while others were reminded of oil, ink, soot, mud, damp and shit. Nonetheless, people loved how the “bitter Mohammedan gruel”, as The London Spy described it in 1701, kindled conversations, fired debates, sparked ideas and, as Pasqua himself pointed out in his handbill The Virtue of the Coffee Drink (1652), made one “fit for business” — his stall was a stone’s throw from that great entrepôt of international commerce, the Royal Exchange.

Remember — until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very — drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (“small beer”). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses — in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s, and Garraway’s — spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.
The meteoric success of Pasqua’s shack triggered a coffeehouse boom. By 1656, there was a second coffeehouse at the sign of the rainbow on Fleet Street; by 1663, 82 had sprung up within the crumbling Roman walls, and a cluster further west like Will’s in Covent Garden, a fashionable literary resort where Samuel Pepys found his old college chum John Dryden presiding over “very pleasant and witty discourse” in 1664 and wished he could stay longer — but he had to pick up his wife, who most certainly would not have been welcome.
No respectable women would have been seen dead in a coffeehouse. It wasn’t long before wives became frustrated at the amount of time their husbands were idling away “deposing princes, settling the bounds of kingdoms, and balancing the power of Europe with great justice and impartiality”, as Richard Steele put it in the Tatler, all from the comfort of a fireside bench. In 1674, years of simmering resentment erupted into the volcano of fury that was the Women’s Petition Against Coffee. The fair sex lambasted the “Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE” which, as they saw it, had reduced their virile industrious men into effeminate, babbling, French layabouts. Retaliation was swift and acerbic in the form of the vulgar Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, which claimed it was “base adulterate wine” and “muddy ale” that made men impotent. Coffee, in fact, was the Viagra of the day, making “the erection more vigorous, the ejaculation more full, add[ing] a spiritual ascendency to the sperm”.
There were no more Women’s Petitions after that but the coffeehouses found themselves in more dangerous waters when Charles II, a longtime critic, tried to torpedo them by royal proclamation in 1675. Traditionally, informed political debate had been the preserve of the social elite. But in the coffeehouse it was anyone’s business — that is, anyone who could afford the measly one-penny entrance fee. For the poor and those living on subsistence wages, they were out of reach.  But they were affordable for anyone with surplus wealth — the 35 to 40 per cent of London’s 287,500-strong male population who qualified as ‘middle class’ in 1700 — and sometimes reckless or extravagant spenders further down the social pyramid. Charles suspected the coffeehouses were hotbeds of sedition and scandal but in the face of widespread opposition — articulated most forcefully in the coffeehouses themselves — the King was forced to cave in and recognise that as much as he disliked them, coffeehouses were now an intrinsic feature of urban life.
By the dawn of the eighteenth century, contemporaries were counting between 1,000 and 8,000 coffeehouses in the capital even if a street survey conducted in 1734 (which excluded unlicensed premises) counted only 551. Even so, Europe had never seen anything like it. Protestant Amsterdam, a rival hub of international trade, could only muster 32 coffeehouses by 1700 and the cluster of coffeehouses in St Mark’s Square in Venice were forbidden from seating more than five customers (presumably to stifle the coalescence of public opinion) whereas North’s, in Cheapside, could happily seat 90 people.
The character of a coffeehouse was influenced by its location within the hotchpotch of villages, cities, squares, and suburbs that comprised eighteenth-century London, which in turn determined the type of person you’d meet inside. “Some coffee-houses are a resort for learned scholars and for wits,” wrote César de Saussure, “others are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.” Flick through any of the old coffeehouse histories in the public domain and you’ll soon get a flavour of the kaleidoscopic diversity of London’s early coffeehouses.
The walls of Don Saltero’s Chelsea coffeehouse were festooned with taxidermy monsters including crocodiles, turtles and rattlesnakes, which local gentlemen scientists like Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Hans Sloane liked to discuss over coffee; at White’s on St James’s Street, famously depicted by Hogarth, rakes would gamble away entire estates and place bets on how long customers had to live, a practice that would eventually grow into the life insurance industry; at Lunt’s in Clerkenwell Green, patrons could sip coffee, have a haircut and enjoy a fiery lecture on the abolition of slavery given by its barber-proprietor John Gale Jones; at John Hogarth’s Latin Coffeehouse, also in Clerkenwell, patrons were encouraged to converse in the Latin tongue at all times (it didn’t last long); at Moll King’s brothel-coffeehouse, depicted by Hogarth, libertines could sober up and peruse a directory of harlots, before being led to the requisite brothel nearby. There was even a floating coffeehouse, the Folly of the Thames, moored outside Somerset House where fops and rakes danced the night away on her rain-spattered deck.
Despite this colourful diversity, early coffeehouses all followed the same blueprint, maximising the interaction between customers and forging a creative, convivial environment. They emerged as smoky candlelit forums for commercial transactions, spirited debate, and the exchange of information, ideas, and lies. This small body-colour drawing shows an anonymous (and so, it’s safe to assume, fairly typical) coffeehouse from around 1700.
Looking at the cartoonish image, decorated in the same innocent style as contemporary decorated fans, it’s hard to reconcile it with Voltaire’s rebuke of a City coffeehouse in the 1720s as “dirty, ill-furnished, ill-served, and ill-lighted” nor particularly London Spy author Ned Ward’s (admittedly scurrilous) evocation of a soot-coated den of iniquity with jagged floorboards and papered-over windows populated by “a parcel of muddling muck-worms . . . some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco.” But, the establishments in the West End and Exchange Alley excepted, coffeehouses were generally spartan, wooden and no-nonsense.
As the image shows, customers sat around long communal tables strewn with every type of media imaginable listening in to each other’s conversations, interjecting whenever they pleased, and reflecting upon the newspapers. Talking to strangers, an alien concept in most coffee shops today, was actively encouraged. Dudley Ryder, a young law student from Hackney and shameless social climber, kept a diary in 1715-16, in which he routinely recalled marching into a coffeehouse, sitting down next to a stranger, and discussing the latest news. Private boxes and booths did begin to appear from the late 1740s but before that it was nigh-on impossible to hold a genuinely private conversation in a coffeehouse (and still pretty tricky afterwards, as attested to by the later coffeehouse print below). To the left, we see a little Cupid-like boy in a flowing periwig pouring a dish of coffee à la mode — that is, from a great height — which would fuel some coffeehouse discussion or other.
Much of the conversation centred upon news:
There’s nothing done in all the worldFrom Monarch to the Mouse,But every day or night ‘tis hurled Into the Coffee-House
chirped a pamphlet from 1672. As each new customer went in, they’d be assailed by cries of “What news have you?” or more formally, “Your servant, sir, what news from Tripoli?” or, if you were in the Latin Coffeehouse, “Quid Novi!” That coffeehouses functioned as post-boxes for many customers reinforced this news-gathering function. Unexpectedly wide-ranging discussions could be twined from a single conversational thread as when, at John’s coffeehouse in 1715, news about the execution of a rebel Jacobite Lord (as recorded by Dudley Ryder) transmogrified into a discourse on “the ease of death by beheading” with one participant telling of an experiment he’d conducted slicing a viper in two and watching in amazement as both ends slithered off in different directions. Was this, as some of the company conjectured, proof of the existence of two consciousnesses?
If the vast corpus of 17th-century pamphlet literature is anything to go by then early coffeehouses were socially inclusive spaces where lords sat cheek-by-jowl with fishmongers and where butchers trumped baronets in philosophical debates. “Pre-eminence of place none here should mind,” proclaimed the Rules and Orders of the Coffee-House (1674), “but take the next fit seat he can find” — which would seem to chime with John Macky’s description of noblemen and “private gentlemen” mingling together in the Covent Garden coffeehouses “and talking with the same Freedom, as if they had left their Quality and Degrees of Distance at Home.”
Perhaps. But propagandist apologias and wondrous claims of travel-writers aside, more compelling evidence suggests that far from co-existing in perfect harmony on the fireside bench, people in coffeehouses sat in relentless judgement of one another. At the Bedford Coffeehouse in Covent Garden hung a “theatrical thermometer” with temperatures ranging from “excellent” to “execrable”, registering the company’s verdicts on the latest plays and performances, tormenting playwrights and actors on a weekly basis; at Waghorn’s and the Parliament Coffee House in Westminster, politicians were shamed for making tedious or ineffectual speeches and at the Grecian, scientists were judged for the experiments they performed (including, on one occasion, dissecting a dolphin). If some of these verdicts were grounded in rational judgement, others were forged in naked class prejudice. Visiting Young Slaughter’s coffeehouse in 1767, rake William Hickey was horrified by the presence of “half a dozen respectable old men”, pronouncing them “a set of stupid, formal, ancient prigs, horrid periwig bores, every way unfit to herd with such bloods as us”.
But the coffeehouse’s formula of maximised sociability, critical judgement, and relative sobriety proved a catalyst for creativity and innovation. Coffeehouses encouraged political debate, which paved the way for the expansion of the electorate in the 19th century. The City coffeehouses spawned capitalist innovations that shaped the modern world. Other coffeehouses sparked journalistic innovation. Nowhere was this more apparent than at Button’s coffeehouse, a stone’s throw from Covent Garden piazza on Russell Street.
It was opened in 1712 by the essayist and playwright Joseph Addison, partly as a refuge from his quarrelsome marriage, but it soon grew into a forum for literary debate where the stars of literary London — Addison, Steele, Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot and others — would assemble each evening, casting their superb literary judgements on new plays, poems, novels, and manuscripts, making and breaking literary reputations in the process. Planted on the western side of the coffeehouse was a marble lion’s head with a gaping mouth, razor-sharp jaws, and “whiskers admired by all that see them”. Probably the world’s most surreal medium of literary communication, he was a playful British slant on a chilling Venetian tradition.
As Addison explained in the Guardian, several marble lions “with mouths gaping in a most enormous manner” defended the doge’s palace in Venice. But whereas those lions swallowed accusations of treason that “cut off heads, hang, draw, and quarter, or end in the ruin of the person who becomes his prey”, Mr Addison’s was as harmless as a pussycat and a servant of the public. The public was invited to feed him with letters, limericks, and stories. The very best of the lion’s digest was published in a special weekly edition of the original Guardian, then a single-sheet journal costing one-and-a-half pence, edited inside the coffeehouse by Addison. When the lion “roared so loud as to be heard all over the British nation” via the Guardian, writing by unknown authors was beamed far beyond the confines of Button’s making the public — rather than a narrow clique of wits — the ultimate arbiters of literary merit. Public responses were sometimes posted back to the lion in a loop of feedback and amplification, mimicking the function of blogs and newspaper websites today (but much more civil).
If you’re thinking of visiting Button’s today, brace yourself: it’s a Starbucks, one of over 300 clones across the city. The lion has been replaced by the “Starbucks community notice board” and there is no trace of the literary, convivial atmosphere of Button’s. Addison would be appalled.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: August 7, 2013

author: Matthew Green