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hippolyte-hodeau-trench-art

A Family Tree: Hippolyte Hodeau’s Trench Art (ca. 1917) Text by Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes Mar 26, 2024 Thierry Dornberger’s family keepsakes include a memento exceptionally delicate. His great-grandfather, Hippolyte Hodeau, was a World War I private who served in Argonne. As Dornberger relates, Hodeau “made the trenches and was gassed. Following the dull sound of a shell falling . . . he was wounded in the ear.” Like many soldiers, Hodeau spent hours huddled in these muddy channels. In order to kill time, perhaps, or lift his spirits, he gathered leaves from an oak tree — elongated, striated, forest green — and used a form of relief carving to inscribe the names of his daughters, Andrée and Eléonore, as well as the word “souvenir” and what looks like “Argonne”. “Trench art”, as it’s called, wasn’t necessarily fashioned in dugouts and wasn’t usually so fragile. Collectors seek out letter openers made of shrapnel; crucifixes made of bullets; and artillery shells fashioned into everything from bracelets to clocks to candelabras. Wooden walking sticks were festooned with intricate carved heads, and tiny valentine pillows sewn and beaded for sweethearts back home. Hodeau’s engraved leaves are part of this resourceful genre, but there is another artistic tradition to which they also belong — that of arborglyphs, or tree carving. Humans have long regarded trees as witnesses. Basque sheepherders in the American West wrote poetry on birch, Confederate Civil War soldiers graffitied their names in trunks, and various Aboriginal Australian tribes honored the dead on bark. Whereas these gestures leave a bit of the human in the landscape, Hodeau’s engravings take a bit of the landscape with the human. “I was here” says one; “I was there” says the other. As unique as his objects may seem, Hodeau was not alone in carving leaves. The art form flourished during World War I as a way to enhance letters home with a unique lightweight enclosure. Soldiers used a needle or knife to whittle between the oak and chestnut veins, leaving only words or, sometimes, an image. Due to the partial opacity of perforated leaves, the carvings are especially enchanting when lit from behind; sometimes they’re called “feuilles de poilus”, or “tree leaf lace”. Little has been written about this kind of memorialization, but French military history forums brim with amateur investigators and collectors. The user “GillesR”, for instance, reports tracing a leaf that reads “Souvenir Alsace” to an infantryman named Bringuier, who was left for dead on the battlefield in 1914, captured by the Germans, and subsequently released as unfit for combat after the amputation of his left arm. Andre Dupuis of the 52nd Territorial Infantry Regiment emblazoned “CapNap” in 1915, whereas Alfred Laperrière was fond of writing longer, more complicated phrases — “Souvenir de Serbie” (Serbian souvenir); “Je pense à toi” (Thinking of you); “Ton mari aimant” (Your loving husband). Words predominate, though there are startling exceptions. The Jardin Botanique de Nancy claims to have unearthed a silhouette of a soldier in profile, perhaps a self-portrait. Bernard Dauphin’s website gathers an assortment of leaves reading “Souvenir”, “Helene”, and “Yvonna” (the last enclosed in a heart), and tells of meeting a Frenchman who was deported to Germany during World War II under the service du travail obligatoire and who survived by traded carved leaves for sausage. Other specimens have no author, and no story. It seems that these type of leaves have only recently been gathered for exhibition. A 2022 show at the Halle Saint-Piere in Paris apparently included a “mémoire végétale de la Grande Guerre” (botanical memorial of World War I), while the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres, Belgium, exhibited a remarkable collection of leaf portraiture in that same year. This eco-trench art might have quietly composted were it not for Europeana’s 1914–1918 project, which drew attention to the phenom by soliciting information from the public and digitizing thousands of fragile artifacts.

public-domain-review

Mar 26, 2024

Sasha Archibald and Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:18.287720

maria-catharina-prestel

Maria Catharina Prestel’s Printed Cabinet of Drawings (ca. 1780s) Text by Miya Tokumitsu Apr 24, 2024 From the Renaissance onward, drawings have fascinated collectors and connoisseurs, who often perceive them as intimate affordances of an artist’s creative process — prized as mediums of an artist’s physical gestures. As unique works, drawings can exist in only one collection at a time, where they are typically secreted away from the vast majority of eager spectators. Reproductions offer art lovers a satisfying degree of access to these works, but to create convincing facsimiles in the early modern era required a challenging technical feat: translating drawings into print. In the 1770s and 1780s, the enterprising artist Maria Catharina Prestel (1747–1794) was hard at work in Frankfurt, refining her printmaking technique to meet the demand of this secondary drawings market, reproducing sheets by Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Giulio Romano, and others. She capitalized upon a new printing technique, aquatint, that allowed printmakers to render areas of tone in etchings. In her engaging history of aquatint, Rena M. Hoisington notes that Prestel and her colleagues manipulated aquatint in combination with a host of other intaglio printing processes, including line etching, soft-ground etching, and chalk-manner etching in order to best replicate particular drawings. In some instances, she used several printing plates to create multicolor prints when reproducing drawings with various inks and washes on colored paper. In one particular tour de force, Prestel applied gold dust onto freshly printed ink lines to recreate the metallic tonal heightening of Jacopo Ligozzi’s Triumph of Truth Over Envy. Together with her husband, Johann Gottlieb Prestel (1739–1808), and an apprentice, Regina Catharina Schönecker (ca. 1762–ca. 1818), Maria Catharina created three portfolios of prints after drawings in private collections, which they took care to reproduce at scale. Although Johann’s name appears on the portfolio covers, it is now acknowledged that Maria Catharina was the creator of a significant portion of the prints, among them some of the most technically complex. She and Johann eventually separated, and Maria Catharina moved to London, where she resumed her printmaking career. She remained there until her death in 1794. Opening one of the Prestel portfolios was a sensuous and intellectually rewarding experience. The prints were mounted onto sturdy sheets for easy handling, and viewers could bring each one close to their eyes to inspect its numerous details and guess its artist before turning the image over to read the informative inscriptions on the reverse. Hoisington points out that this format allows connoisseurs to admire both the drawings reproduced and the craft of printed facsimiles. The Prestels’ portfolio titles were in French and are named after cabinets where the drawings they reproduced were kept. Within the world of art collecting, Kabinett (German), kabinet (Dutch), or cabinet (French) refers to a room for viewing collections of small-scale artworks, including drawings. The term encompasses both the physical and metaphorical aspects of enclosure — these were walled spaces designed for the intimate appreciation of treasures. A cabinet is an interior within an interior, a place of privacy and curiosity and mystery, a capsule that contains things to discover. Beyond disseminating drawings of some of the canonical figures in European art, the Prestels offered their collectors just such a room of their own.

public-domain-review

Apr 24, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:18.614041

passio-verbigenae

Grotesqueries at Gethsemane: Marcus Gheeraerts’ Passio Verbigenae (ca. 1580) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 27, 2024 In his final days, Christ is haunted by grotesqueries. Cherubs and putti ogle the last supper’s lamb. Hybrid creatures sprout up in the Garden of Gethsemane. And during his descent into Limbo, demonic bodies roar and hiss at the Son of God. A series of thirteen prints by Jan Sadeler (I) after Marcus Gheeraerts (I), the Passio Verbigenae Quae Nostra Redeptio Christi (ca. 1580) employs a monstrous mélange of genres, sitting somewhere between a passion print series and a design book, a sacred narrative and a grotesque statuary. Subtly advertising ornamental patterns suitable for painters, silversmiths, and textile workers, these oval, cartouche-like images dissolve the distinction between framing and content. Strap- and scrollwork penetrate the scenes; biblical characters navigate jungles of exotic arabesques. On the cusp of modernity, these sixteenth-century engravings arrive at a postmodern tenet: any supposed distinction between a narrative and its frame is an illusion, a feint. The designs for these prints were created when Gheeraerts resided in Antwerp, after a decade’s exile in London. A stalwart reformist, he had fled after the Low Countries’ iconoclastic Beeldenstorm in 1566. Tried in absentia for heresy, Gheeraerts may have designed the Passio Verbigenae with economic, imperial, religious forces in mind. There was a bullish European market for ornamental prints in the mid-sixteenth century; early modern travelogues were increasingly detailing monstrous encounters with hybrid creatures abroad; and in the wake of iconoclasm, the mimetic claims of religious imagery was increasingly called into question. “Gheeraerts’s grotesques . . . work against verisimilitude and thus the Catholic image doctrine”, writes Tianna Helena Uchacz. “They cast the religious representation not as a truthful reportage guaranteed by mimesis but as an image — this is, an artifice of the human hand.”. And yet, by confounding the devotional gaze with a labyrinth of ornamental excess, which appears to swell as Christ approaches death, the images also seem to plot a path toward a new form of worship. Centuries later, artists now substitute for prophets in a secular age, and artworks offer a glimpse of the mysteries that icons once contained.

public-domain-review

Mar 27, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:19.113033

wierix-flemish-proverbs

Flemish Proverbs by Jan Wierix (ca. 1568) Text by Miya Tokumitsu Mar 14, 2024 “I wear mourning, seeing the world in which so much deceit abounds.” So laments The Misanthrope as he skulks along, withdrawn emotionally and sartorially, in a deep-hooded cloak. But world-weariness does not amount to wisdom in Jan Wierix’s engraving; rather than serving as a hermetic sanctum, the misanthrope’s heavy garment only blinds him to the fact that the world — personified as a waddling orb — has caught up to him to steal his purse. The Misanthrope belongs to a series of twelve engraved roundels depicting literal enactments of Flemish proverbs, each concerned with some aspect of human folly or treachery. Seven of the scenes, collected below, were engraved by Wierix; the precise authorship of the remaining five remains mysterious. Rather like many actual proverbs, the Proverbs’ motifs look backward to origins that are uncertain in some respects while maintaining vitality through repetition, reuse, and appropriation. In addition to The Misanthrope, the other six scenes engraved by Wierix include: a man shooting arrows into the ground; a hawker praising his own wares; a man playing a jawbone like a fiddle; a crowd crawling into a rich man’s asshole; a husband berated by his wife; and mendicant monks begging at unresponsive homes. The five more obscure scenes depict: the blind leading the blind; a man warming himself by his neighbor’s house fire; a fool perched on an egg; a horse frightened by an ambulant bale of hay; and an agitated peddler seated by a bride. To a contemporary anglophone audience, some of the scenes are comprehensible; for instance, the archer seems to symbolize the expenditure of energy on futile endeavors, similar to “spinning one’s wheels”. Others refer to specific Flemish proverbs of varying obscurity. It is not known who provided the initial designs for these engravings. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had long been considered the originator of the compositions, and in fact Bruegel had supplied designs for mass-market prints early in his career. He also maintained an interest — popular in the sixteenth-century Low Countries — in literal renderings of proverbs, most famously in his painting, Dutch Proverbs, a busy scene in which around 126 proverbs are enacted before the spectator. Wierix’s Misanthrope unmistakably references Bruegel’s independent painting of the subject, and the roundel format and the count of the prints echo the circular vignettes of Bruegel’s Twelve Proverbs panel, although none of the scenes in that painting are repeated in the prints. The prints only demonstrate that the engravers, Wierix and a possible collaborator, were familiar with some of Bruegel’s imagery, not that Bruegel himself was an active participant in their production. Indeed, Walter Gibson has noted that a set of drawings initially thought to be designs for the roundels, are now considered to have been made after them, and that eleven of the twelve engravings (The Misanthrope being the one exception) may well have been designed by Wierix himself or someone else working with him. Nevertheless, all of the engravings in the series could be described as Brugelian in their attitude and style. In addition to directly referencing an artist’s known works, imitating or attempting to elicit another artist’s manner — even in the creation of original compositions not sourced from that artist’s oeuvre — was a deliberate artistic practice in the sixteenth century. Artists and publishers kept close track of the print-buying public’s responses to their collective offerings. If a particular artist’s work became popular, it was common for others to create images in a similar vein. Indeed, none other than Bruegel himself began his career designing prints in the “mode” of a popular, elder artist: Hieronymus Bosch. Bruegel haunts the entire Proverbs series even though he neither conceived of it nor intentionally supplied its designs. His spectral presence affected their reception and future iterations. Several of the Proverbs were reformulated in later prints, and two painted versions of the crawling brownnosers were created by none other than Bruegel’s son, Pieter Bruegel the Younger.

public-domain-review

Mar 14, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:19.568427

dr-berkeleys-discovery

The Afterimage of Death: Dr. Berkeley's Discovery (1889) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 16, 2024 In 1888, the year before Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery was published, Jack the Ripper mutilated his second victim, Annie Chapman. Lacking a witness to the murder, the press wondered if an image of the killer might be preserved on his victim’s retinas — recoverable using the budding science of optography. This was an era when new media seeped into conceptions of the world and self, as sight, hearing, and other senses were extended beyond the body’s traditional reach. Telegraphy offered spiritualists a “medium” through which to conceive of instantaneous communication between the realms; phonography freed the voice from the biological limits of its body, allowing the dead to speak across their graves; and photography became a model for how images are imprinted on the eye and mind. That last analogy begged some questions: If photographs can outlive their subjects, and memory works like photography, do images somehow endure in the brain after death? Could these undead memories be recovered with the right technologies? Tinkering in his laboratory with microscopic slides, the protagonist of Richard Slee and Cornelia Atwood Pratt’s sci-fi novel, Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery, suddenly yells eureka. He calls his labmate Farrington over to look through the scope. “Carefully focusing the object glass up and down, he studied the field for a while. The thing he saw was merely a view of a crowded city street, and, though wonderful as a micro-photograph, which he immediately assumed it to be, there was nothing about it, on that supposition, to create keen excitement as Berkeley evidently felt.” Things are stranger than they appear. An urban metropolis up close, the specimen on the slide looks, without magnification, like a smattering of “brain-tissue”. Berkeley lets out an unsteady laugh. “What have I to do with micro-photographs? Man! I’ve done what I set out to do. I’ve proved that there are pictures in the brain and that I can develop them—for that is a section of brain-tissue and it came—it came from the Centre of Memory!” Like so many tragedies, the book begins with marriage. Ashford Berkeley is an absorbed scientist — absorbed in his work, absorbed in himself — living a life abroad after an undisclosed accident of youth. Tellingly, he does not “meet” his future wife, Aline Lefevre; “she came into his field of vision one evening in Paris”. He fails at making conversation; she doesn’t mind at all. “She had read that in America it was only the women that talked.” And so, Aline carries forth on her schooling in England, contemporary art, how she admires “the things that are new”. Ashford stares at his feet, tells her that she should visit America, “which is very new.” They marry and move to New York, but they put off “getting acquainted”: he is too busy with science. Aline grows wistful; Ashford neglects her for months on end. He takes her to France, leaves her with an aunt for the summer, flees back to New York to work alongside Farrington on his one true love, science. She writes long, impassioned letters, which are reproduced at length. We never see him respond. There is talk of Aline returning home early. Time passes and the letters grow sedate, “as if they were carefully made to conform to some pattern the girl kept in her mind of what such letters ought to be”. Meantime, Farrington is sore that Berkeley beat him to the scientific discovery of the century, and jealous of his labmate’s new wife, whom he has yet to meet. Waking late after a long evening in the laboratory, he buys the morning paper and reads about a bloody crime just a few blocks away in New York. A hotel reported that a “M. et Mme. Massoneau, France” had checked in to a private parlor the previous evening, before the husband, in an agitated state, asked for directions to Jersey City and Chicago. A housekeeper later heard groans behind the door and entered to find Mme. Massoneau soaked in blood and clutching an oriental dagger. Suicide is suspected until the plot grows more sinister. “M. Massoneau” seems to be a lover with whom the woman eloped to escape married life in France. Farrington visits her in the hospital and hears her final words. “Tell—my—husband—”, but she doesn’t finish the sentence. The coroner hires Farrington to do the autopsy, and his examinations reveal very little — it seems like “a case for Sherlock Holmes”. Nevertheless, he brings her brain back to the laboratory; after dragging his feet, Berkeley prepares the slides. His beloved technique, his sole devotion and pursuit for so many years, is working once again. He starts to see dim memories of childhood. Autumn at an English boarding school. The streets of Paris. A joyful wedding. His own two eyes. . . We know almost nothing about Richard Slee, whom is unfortunately sometimes credited as the sole author of Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery. On the other hand, Cornelia Atwood Pratt (1865–1929) is a forgotten nineteenth-century force. Born in Ohio, she graduated from Vassar before working as a journalist in Seattle. She wrote for popular periodicals like the Critic, the Century, and Harper’s Weekly, and served as a tastemaker for new literary forms on the cusp of modernism: “the map of the world and the atmosphere of civilization are changing radically”, she wrote in 1901. “A corresponding change in art should not be surprising.” Her short story collections, A Book of Martyrs (1896) and The Preliminaries (1912), were widely reviewed, as was her novel, The Daughter of a Stoic (1896). Reading her polemic — “Letter to the Rising Generation” (1911), published in the Atlantic Monthly — we see that Dr. Berkeley’s Discovery is barely science fiction. Cornelia Atwood Pratt believed that she was living on the cusp of a new historical era: The brain-specialists and the psycho­logists between them have given in the last ten years what seems conclusive proof of the servitude of the body to the Self. . . . Coming as this psychological discov­ery does, in the middle of an age of unparalleled mechanical invention and discovery, it is almost—is it not?—as if the Creator of men had said, “It is time that these children of mine came to maturity. I will give them at last their full mastery over the earth and over the air and over the spirits of themselves. Let us see how they bear themselves under these gifts.”

public-domain-review

Jan 16, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.059361

capital-and-labor

Mayday, Mayday: Capital and Labor (1907) Text by Hunter Dukes May 1, 2024 Labor is of divine origin, and no man should be ashamed that he is a workman. . . . We are a country of millionaires and beggars, and between these two extremes of society, there is a chasm so wide that no power under our present system of selfishness and private greed can bridge it. The reverend William Schuler Harris’ Capital and Labor (1907) frames its titular subjects as locked in a perennial struggle, “dating back to the time when the Egyptians laid the lash upon their slaves”. Writing in the early twentieth century, Harris is skeptical of the “orator [who] frequently soars into ecstasies over the privileges of the American workers”, for he sees how the labor force is suffering under the “galling yoke” of trusts and monopolies. Substitute those scourges of the Gilded Age with unfettered multinational conglomerates and something similar holds true today. The author’s list of obstacles facing workers are as relevant now as they were more than a century ago: the needs of “civilized life” increase more rapidly than wages; the skilled worker remains at the mercy of a boss; and her “sacrifices and sufferings” serve to further “the unlimited and unearned wealth of the rich”. Jobs bleed into the weekend, robbing workers of “the Sabbath rest”; economic inequality affects our “prospects of old age”; the wealthy are “indifferent” to the sufferings of the lower classes; “political corruption is on the increase”; “the Capitalists and the great corporations have generally been able to secure legislation in their favor”; and automation provides no new jobs when we are “superseded by the machine that takes [our] place”. How are we to fight the tentacles of capitalist exploitation, which regrow, hydra-like, with greater fortitude at every setback? Harris is bullish on labor unions, which he believes are “the most natural and effective method of reaching the desired end”, supportive of “temperate anarchists”, who will one day be praised for “arousing the masses against the oppressions under which they suffered”, and disdainful of “nihilists” for their “lawlessness and Godlessness”. While pickets, strikes, and legislative reform all earn measured praise in these pages, as does a plan to “Christianize the Capitalist”, his most sustained discussion is reserved for socialism. Harris believes that “thoughtful men are rapidly clearing their minds of the prejudice that they have held against Socialism” — a sentiment that feels, with hindsight, more than a little optimistic. He preaches the merits of nationalizing utilities, railroads, communication networks, and food manufacturers, and believes that a Christian socialist form of political economy will soon triumph worldwide, supplying “every human being with ample food, clothing, shelter and education”. There will be universal healthcare, a comfortable retirement at sixty years old, and an elimination of capitalism’s wasteful practices. His treatise ends with a vision of the future, one we are perhaps still waiting for: When the war is over, and the din of battle no longer disturbs a peace-loving people, what will be the opinion of that fortunate generation as it reviews the past? It will most naturally regard our present Capitalistic system as the second of the Dark Ages in which day and night mingled in strange confusion. . . . The question arises from the murmuring masses of today, “Will humanity ever be free?” Below you will find illustrations by Paul Krafft for Capital and Labor. A worker prunes the rosebuds of a monopolist, the personifications of vice and graft steer the nation’s motorcar off a cliff, and, in the most chilling image, skulls are stacked high to form an obelisk in memory of “the victims who were crushed under capitalism”.

public-domain-review

May 1, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.245628

blackwork

Paper Gems: Early Modern Blackwork Prints Text by Miya Tokumitsu Jan 30, 2024 Early modern prints are recycled waste products of everyday life. Paper was fashioned from soiled and tattered linen, which was boiled and beaten into pulp, then strained and dried in sheets. Ink was an admixture of lampblack or soot blended with oil. Rags and grime thus became the material basis for print media, once wrought through the printmaker’s resurrective craft. As printmakers of this period continued to discover, this act of applying ink to paper with a printing matrix and a press could be accomplished via an astonishing multitude of techniques, some quite esoteric. One unusual technique, called blackwork, resulted from the adaptation of an enameling process known as champlevé. In traditional metalwork, champlevé entails filling shaped voids in a metal object, such as a brooch or box lid, with a powder of colored glass and sometimes, metal. The object is then heated to melt and bind these fillings, and, once cooled, polished until smooth and an image or pattern becomes crisply legible. To create blackwork prints, shaped voids are gouged into a copper printing plate (rather than a piece of jewelry or decorative object) and filled with a concoction of thick ink (rather than colored glass). When pressed onto paper, the inked voids print areas of pure black that contrast with the unprinted paper; the resulting image was often an intricate pattern or lacy ornamental motif. Artists who made these prints frequently combined blackwork with the linear compositional elements of traditional burin engraving. Blackwork prints often signaled explicitly the technique’s origins in jewelry design. The earliest known print of this kind is a design for a ring and bezel. Insect and flower motifs are common in blackwork prints, as they are in jewelry. Many of these prints present designs for hypothetical objects like pendants, brooches, or earrings. As they imagined these objects that could be, but as yet did not exist, blackwork engravers were determined to make their own works — paper prints — precious and full of visual interest. The prints of Jean Toutin (1578–1644) and Elias Holl II (1611–1657) depict pendants and gemlike motifs suspended in the air above figural compositions that seem to bear little logical relation to them. Their jewelry designs and arabesques float over scenes of minimal narrative: harvesters pushing wheelbarrows; strolling couples. These curious juxtapositions anticipate department store window displays that appeared centuries later, where scenes of light narrative suggestion, in miniature, become backdrops for salable items. One printmaker, Giovanni Battista Constantini (active 1615–1628), understood that sex sells: in Octagonal Case and Two Other Motifs Held by Ignudi (1622), the contours of two blackwork patterns brush suggestively across the genitals of the nude male figures presenting them. ※※Indexed under…Jewellerydesign's influence on blackwork In addition to functioning as design proposals, these printed motifs could also manifest more purely as compositional experiments that toyed with the pictorial elements of scale, perspectival space, and contour. As Madeleine Viljoen suggests, the blackwork process itself provided specific content to many of these prints, invoking the air and gusts that produced the soot of printing ink and the creative spiritus of engraving. In one print by Toutin, for instance, a blackwork pendant hovers above a furnace tended to by a goldsmith and an assistant who clutches bellows. The production of blackwork prints spanned only a few decades, from the mid-1580s through the 1620s. Shifting tastes in fashion and ornament are the commonly understood causes of blackwork’s decline, but that does not explain why these engravers were either unsuccessful or uninterested in adapting blackwork to other types of imagery. Perhaps blackwork was too bound up in increasingly out-of-vogue designs for audiences — and makers — to conceive of the labor-intensive technique as fit for anything else. Nevertheless, for a time, these prints’ creators appropriated both the design principles and craft techniques of jewelry-making for graphic art, and in so doing, created objects of virtuosity and whimsy.

public-domain-review

Jan 30, 2024

Miya Tokumitsu

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.464109

photographs-of-palestinian-life

Photographs of Palestinian Life (ca. 1896–1919) Text by Hunter Dukes and Adam Green Apr 30, 2024 Girls pose in ornately embroidered tatreez. Women hold cauliflowers stacked four heads high; men carefully consider the heaps at a watermelon market. Commerce thrives: olive oil soap factories pile their bars by the thousands; merchants grade glossy bushels of Jaffa oranges; and in the bazaars, cutlers sharpen sickles and farriers fit shoes. Domari speakers raise their hands toward the camera in a grove on Mt. Hermon; women hoist water pots in the Druze community of Daliyat al-Karmel; men wear the tarboosh and prepare a Passover feast of roasted meat. Recreation takes many forms, from gramophone cafes to concerts, nargilah sessions to calisthenics. Families dressed in white walk through a cemetery after Ramadan; mourners mass for the funeral of a rabbi in Jerusalem; mothers attend a bible class shoulder to shoulder in Bethlehem. A family pitch their tent high above the Dead Sea, and, with his feet firmly planted, a man stares out over the fertile olive groves of Gaza. These images of Palestine before the British Mandate — all from stereograph collections held by the Library of Congress and Brown University — fall into two broad categories: stereoscope cards (made by overseas companies such as Keystone View and Stereo-Travel) and photographs produced by the American Colony based in Jerusalem (who would often provide stereoscope manufacturers with scenes). The vast majority of images produced by such organizations were intended to feed a “Holy Land” mania that increasingly obsessed the United States throughout the nineteenth century, a period in which only the Bible and Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold books about Palestine. In addition to the rise of international tourism, this fixation was fueled by a wave of Christian thought in which Palestine was seen as a neglected Ottoman “backwater” in need of restoration, revitalization, and resettlement to facilitate the second coming of Christ. For those unable to make the transatlantic steamer, the “Holy Land” was brought home in the form of travelogues, photo books, theme parks, exhibitions, and, of course, through stereoscope cards, which — with their 3D technology — offered a unique form of sacred pilgrimage for the armchair traveler. While most of the photographs focus on historical and biblical sites — with locals demoted to mere ornamental function — the frame occasionally falls on Palestine’s inhabitants, capturing daily routines and peak experiences alike. Many of these images, often assembled to hide all traces of modernity, still carry the air of scriptural reconstruction (if not actually staged as such, then created in retrospect through captioning and biblical citation). But in others, we witness a less filtered vision of the everyday. Though, of course, a partial view and still the product of an orientalist gaze, we are offered in such photographs a valuable glimpse of Palestine at the turn of the century. Beneath the surface of biblical fantasy, we can glean a land alive with history and potential, a populace immersed in the comings and goings of village, city, and family life — a vision of Palestine that is anything but, as the early Zionist slogan would have it, a “land without a people”. Agrarian scenes predominate — when these photographs were taken, Palestinians were cultivating olives, cotton, tobacco, dura, sesame, and exporting barley to the United Kingdom, wheat to Italy and France, and Jaffa oranges around the world. In many of the photographs, women are shown at work: coffee gets ground with pestles; olives are gathered and pressed; wheat is measured, sifted, and eventually baked into bread. Of the roughly half a million residents in the Ottoman sanjaks that composed Palestine in this period, some seventy-five percent were farmers, living in more than seven hundred villages. The other twenty-five percent dwelled in towns and cities, making a living from education, commerce, government, religion, and artisanry. Joyful school scenes, coffeeshop conversations, shopkeepers and craftspeople hard at work, and ecstatic festivals all feature here. At the turn of the century, before the establishment of Mandatory Palestine and the large-scale increase of Zionist immigration, the Ottoman census recorded the population as roughly 85% Muslim, 11% Christian, and 4% Jewish. The stereoscope enthusiast would have contemplated scenes of religious and family life from all of these populations, and there’s a hint here at the kind of harmony and intermixing described in the memoirs and diaries of Jerusalem residents such as Wasif Jawhariyyeh and Yaakov Yehoshua, which detail Christians dressing up for Purim festivities, Sephardic Jewish musicians performing at Islamic weddings, and Muslim women learning the Ladino language of their neighbors. How one views these photographs today will likely be colored by their knowledge of what was to come for the communities and land depicted. The end of World War I would see the Ottoman Empire dissolve, the Balfour Declaration signed, and the British Mandate begin. Waves of Zionist settlement — encouraged by favorable Mandate policies and spurred by the terror of antisemitism in Europe — led to huge shifts in demography and power. These were changes that would ultimately prove devastating to the Palestinian Arab population in particular, from the Nakba of 1948, through the Naksa of 1967, to the horrors of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. In Camera Palæstina (2022), Issam Nassar, Stephen Sheehi, and Salim Tamari argue, however, against reading photographs like these as nostalgic, “a reading that suggests the loss and erasure of Palestine as a historical and present fact”. Rather, they believe such images “illuminate Palestine as a lived and living social fact”. In Against Erasure: A Photographic Memory of Palestine Before the Nakba (2024), Johnny Mansour speaks about what photographs like these mean to him: “I firmly believe that while the people of Palestine lost their land, they refuse to lose their history. As one of the children, the survivors, of this people, I know how sincere our relationship is with the land, its past, its history, its images, its documents. Taken together, they return to us what we need the most: our homeland.”

public-domain-review

Apr 30, 2024

Hunter Dukes and Adam Green

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:20.688247

celestial-phenomena-16th-century-germany

Signs and Wonders: Celestial Phenomena in 16th-Century Germany Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 11, 2024 The villagers of Strasbourg may have heard about a war in heaven while reading the Book of Revelation; in 1554, they witnessed one with their own eyes. As a broadsheet published in June of that year records, a bloody, fiery ray bisected the sun, followed by a clash between cavalry — each side bearing guidons. War raged for hours, and then, as suddenly as they appeared, the combatants trotted off into the clouds. Seven years later, this time in Nuremberg, the Bavarian horizon was blotted out by an extraterrestrial skirmish between unidentified orbs. “The globes flew back and forth among themselves and fought vehemently with each other for over an hour”, wrote the broadsheet’s author. Some of these vehicles crashed down beyond the city limits, while a terrifying, arrow-like object appeared in the air. “Whatever such signs mean, God alone knows.” These were not isolated incidents. German broadsheets in the Holy Roman Empire conveyed all kinds of wondrous phenomena through woodcuts: “anomalies in the sun, moon, stars . . . stones and fire falling from the sky, rainbows, miraculous births, rains of blood”, tracks Daniela Wagner. Unexplainable events happened so frequently that they were christened Wunderzeichen, wonder-signs. Between 1550 and 1559 alone, there were more than four hundred broadsheets and tracts published that recorded these prognostic events. The phenomena were also preserved in news pamphlets, astrological literature, sermons, scientific treatises, correspondence, personal diaries, and “wonder books”, broadsheets bound into a single volume. For many readers in this period, encounters with these reports and images were signs that the end was nigh. Although apocalypticism was not a novel concept, it gained newfound intensity during the Reformation. “By 1560”, writes Robin Bruce Barnes, “[clerical] attention to the unusual had become nothing less than an obsession”. New Protestant translations of the Bible rendered the Book of Revelation in particularly dramatic terms, while Luther and his acolytes encouraged followers to look upward and augur the future. “We see the Sun to be darkened and the Moon, the stars to fall, men to be distressed, all the winds and waters to make a noise”, he preached during a sermon about the Second Coming. “How many other Signs also, and unusual impressions, have we seen in the Heavens, in the Sun, Moon, Stars, Rain-bows and strange Apparitions, in these last four years?” Far from folk superstition, the belief in Wunderzeichen as portents of the Last Judgment was shot through with eschatology. Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), who systematized Luther’s theology, saw these scenes painted across the sky as communications from God: For if these signs are not meant to be considered, why are they written and painted on the sky by divine providence? Since God has engraved these marks in the sky in order to announce great upheavals for the states, it is impiety to turn one’s mind away from their observation. What are eclipses, conjunctions, portents, meteors or comets if not oracles of God which threaten great calamities and changes for the life of men? Some speculate that the prophetic attention to celestial bodies was sometimes fueled by ergotism — the fungal infection that swept across cereal grains in much of northern Europe. Ingesting these crops produced delirium, hallucinations of fire and religious fervor. Drugs aside, the skies were alive with astronomical wonder, which was ripe for interpretation in even the soberest eyes. Northern lights streaked across the horizon like blood. Solar halos, sun dogs, and light pillars were frequent and mysterious. A 1556 comet was widely reported across Europe and Asia, spotted by awe-eyed observers from Britain to China. And each shooting star further unfolded a narrative of religious reformation. One broadsheet published in Nuremberg during May of that same year, for example, depicts Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia as damaged by an earthquake. It did not surprise readers that this destruction occurred alongside the appearance of a comet: eliding Islam with Catholicism, the text suggests that “the papacy—polemically identified as the Roman Antichrist—will also get its desserts”, writes Jennifer Spinks. Just as Victorian encounters with ghosts surged after the invention of photography, media technologies also played a part in propagating these sixteenth-century visions. Most of the images below come from Einblattdruck, a form of broadsheet that consisted of a title, woodcut, and an account of wonder. These sheets could be created rapidly, disseminated widely, and purchased cheaply. News and current events were thus being printed with greater speed and reach than ever before. As such, genres evolved and hybridized with haste. In the early 1520s, so-called “siege prints” — graphic tableaux of battles — became particularly popular. And astronomical almanacs were some of the most widely consumed vernacular texts in the Holy Roman Empire. Is it any surprise, then, that battles between stars started appearing in the skies, wedding these two genres, evidenced by woodcuts of astrological siege? The art historian Aby Warburg — puzzled why, in the midst of the Reformation, a seemingly new form of paganism flourished — concluded that “astral deities . . . enjoyed a peripatetic Renaissance, in words and pictures, thanks to the new printing houses of Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig”. The observance of celestial phenomena tapered off in the seventeenth century — as the doom foretold by the heavens finally came to Earth in the form of the Thirty Years’ War. Strangely enough, in the eighteenth century, very similar signs appeared in the skies over Riga, which deeply influenced a certain printer in Philadelphia’s views of revolution. For more on that story, see our post on A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763). Below you can browse a selection of broadsheets containing accounts of wonders, courtesy of Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek.

public-domain-review

Apr 11, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.023237

weird-islands

Distortions and Grimaces: Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921) Text by Kevin Dann Apr 9, 2024 One wonders how many children might have tugged at a parent’s coattails to cajole a present of Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands when it was first released in 1921. A glance at any one of its 120 illustrations, all done by the author himself, would surely have scared off all but the most intrepid young readers. The Carpenter — an unnaturally tall, blue top-hatted, androgynous character in yellow bell-bottoms with a folding, insect-shaped airplane strapped to his back — joins a motley troupe of nine musicians (including Bing, taller still than the Carpenter, his face covered by a hawkish black harlequin mask; Peter, a fly-voiced fiddle player with spidery fingers; and Melinda, a selfish girl oblivious to everything and everyone but her own whims) for an outing upon the Thames in their Blue Boat. Uniformly incompetent and absent-minded, all have crooked postures, slightly misshapen limbs, faces like porcelain dolls, absurd arabesque costumes, and an air of vaporous unreality. Towing the Shark — a submarine piloted by a fellow dressed as a monstrous cod — and a dirigible christened the Lemon of Gold, the ten adventurers set off from Greenwich Pier while making a din with their incongruous instruments, and by the time they have reached the river’s mouth, a gale has set both the dirigible and the submarine adrift. The Carpenter must lend his instrument — a musical saw — to cut down the mast. Everyone escapes a watery grave when he then unfolds his airplane and leads the Travelers on a willy-nilly, topsy-turvy trip to a series of islands inhabited by beings even more uncanny and alien than them. On the Round Island, along with peacocks and pelicans, they meet a fiendish parrot who warns them to beware of the Balligoors and Coomasis who are known to strangle, hang, and behead any hapless shipwrecked mariners. A ferocious lion and a crown of spherical and cuboid birds accost them on another isle. They go on to encounter a pigwing, a kind of guinea pig with diaphanous useless wings; a crowd of cyclopes who wish to cage them; the Galipodes — storks with little hats made of pastry dough; and atavistic silhouetted creatures with masks of dried leaves. Both de Bosschère’s ten travelers and the archipelago dwellers are relentlessly chimerical and asymmetrical as rendered by his hand. One feels a slight frisson of gooseflesh with every encounter. Growing up together in the small village of Lier in the desolate Campine moorland of the Low Countries — isolated by having arrived to this Flemish-speaking, intensely pious area as a French-speaking family headed by a free-thinking atheist physician and naturalist — Jean and his beloved sister Marie, who suffered from a cleft lip, were bullied and ostracized. Long before Marie starved herself to death at the age of eighteen, Jean (who recalls making his first drawings at age three) shrank back from the world’s avarice, cruelty, and insensitivity. Even in his most tender and innocent literary and artistic productions — he wrote and illustrated half a dozen other children’s books, and, in the last decades of his life, four exquisite works of natural history — he is “the enraged one”, his inner rebellion perennially erupting to diagnose society’s malaise of soul. In January 1915, six months after the German invasion of Belgium, de Bosschère fled Brussels for London, carrying with him a notebook filled with sketches in which both the invaders and the invaded were marked by such unsettling dark distortions and grimaces that British censors confiscated them. Like his first books of poetic prose, his early works in English — Twelve Occupations (1916); The Closed Door (1917); The City Curious (1920) — contain their own unsettling sketches, engravings, and woodblock prints. While London appears less grotesquely sinister and threatening than Paris, he still manages to find its most anguished, tormented places; even his fairy tales cannot escape an unrelenting probing of ugliness and despair. For all his misanthropic severity, de Bosschère was the fiercest of friends. In Paris, he was an intimate of Antonin Artaud, Paul Valéry, Paul Claudel, and André Suarès; in London, he counted Ezra Pound, T. H. Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad Aiken, and T. S. Eliot among his circle. Recognized by all who knew him as a genius, the reader of any of his works must summon a certain courage to meet his strikingly sensitive gaze at the spectacle of life. Despite its grotesqueries, Weird Islands actually makes for a gentle and humane place to begin. You can browse a selection of Jean de Bosschère’s illustrations for Weird Islands below.

public-domain-review

Apr 9, 2024

Kevin Dann

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.328809

merian-metamorphosis

Maria Sibylla Merian’s Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) Text by Paloma Ruiz Mar 6, 2024 Pomelos, pomegranates, plantains, and the sociopolitical importance of a seedpod. When Maria Sibylla Merian first set foot in Suriname, her senses were overcome with surprising tastes, sights, and smells. A dissected soursop and a hovering Owlet Moth; shining pepper plants and pineapple fibers which stung her German-born tongue. In her two years of exploration before contracting a malaria-like illness, Merian expounded upon the sweetness of watermelon, just as she dutifully detailed the long-misunderstood process of butterfly metamorphosis. The result was a compilation of sixty elaborate engravings, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705) — a fascinating catalog of New World plants, animals, and insects. Nestled within these pages, we find a fragmentary understanding of indigenous knowledge, the morsels of information which were shared with Merian by members of the enslaved population. Yet of the many species and processes which Metamorphosis revealed, most potent of all is an account of a singular, seemingly innocuous species of seedpod. As a young girl growing up in Frankfurt, Merian would often travel to the countryside to search for caterpillar larvae. She raised silkworms at thirteen years old, and gave thorough attention to every subtle shift in the physiology of her specimens. When she moved to Nuremberg with her husband in 1670, she was hired to teach illustration to wealthy, unmarried women, thereby securing herself access to some of the finest gardens in Germany, elaborate oases for the insects she studied. In 1690, now the mother of two young daughters, Merian divorced. And by 1699, after a decade of supporting herself through art, she was given permission from the city of Amsterdam to undertake research in Suriname with her youngest daughter, Dorothea. Lacking the financial backing from commercial enterprise that was typical for other Dutch naturalists, the pair stayed fiscally afloat through the sale of roughly 255 of their own paintings. Rumors abound that this voyage was partially paid for by the director of the Dutch West India Company, but there is no acknowledgement of sponsorship in Merian’s writing, and she was quite open with her criticism of colonial merchants. To her, their myopic obsession with sugar was self-destructive, disappointing. There were so many other potentially world-altering plants available for export, and it was her job to illuminate their existence. Merian’s work would not have been possible without the knowledge of enslaved peoples, both of African and Amerindian descent. Through her interactions, Merian documented indigenous plant names, as well as their traditional medicinal uses. Perhaps it was because she was a woman that she was made privy to the use of peacock flower (or red bird of paradise) seeds as a natural abortifacient. It was rare for a female to travel without a man, even rarer for her to do so for the purpose of work. Perhaps the duo of her and Dorothea appeared trustworthy enough, or perhaps they were so meddlesome that the information was begrudgingly surrendered. Regardless, Merian understood the painful depth and breadth of the abortifacient’s importance while writing Metamorphosis: The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds to abort their children, so that they will not become slaves like themselves. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves. Merian returned to Amsterdam in 1701, opening a shop to sell her specimens and engravings. In 1705, Metamorphosis was published. Her engravings served as one of the first natural histories of Suriname, while her depictions of butterflies helped dispel the myth that insects were spontaneously generated out of mud and standing water. As Metamorphosis was shepherded through several editions and translations following Merian’s death in 1717, her work gained a larger audience. In spite of this, the medicinal use of the peacock flower was seemingly ignored. Instead, the plant became increasingly popular as an eye-catching, uncomplicated, ornamental shrub. First exported to Europe in the late seventeenth century, Caesalpinia pulcherrima took up residence in leading botanical gardens such as the Jardin du Roi in Paris and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, yet was excluded entirely from the official pharmacopeias of London, Paris, and Amsterdam. Other New World medicines were tested and embraced — cinchona for malaria, guaiacum for syphilis. Although there was no specific law forbidding the study of abortifacients at this time, physicians and scholars proved ignorant or chose strategic omission. In this way, the plant that was originally leveraged as a life-altering act of self-ownership by the enslaved peoples of Suriname — a physical refusal to feed the cycle of slavery — was shipped across the Atlantic, and shorn of its history. ※※Indexed under…Lossof botanical knowledge

public-domain-review

Mar 6, 2024

Paloma Ruiz

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:21.669068

millions-of-cats

Unwashed Furry Masses: Wanda Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 15, 2024 For the feline minded, there is rarely too much of a good thing when it comes to cats; Wanda Hazel Gág’s Millions of Cats (1928) tells a tale that proves the rare exception. Considered the oldest American children’s book still in print, it continues to delight the contemporary eye. A superbly talented lithographer, Gág helped popularize the double-page spread in illustrated children’s literature, collaborating on this volume with her brother, who lettered the text by hand. In 1928, The Nation placed Millions of Cats on its list of distinguished titles, and it won a Newbery the following year, a rare award for picture books. The story opens on an elderly couple: they are so very lonely. The woman lands on an idea — “If we only had a cat!” — and her husband sets off to find one. He trudges across sunlit landscapes and cool valleys until he comes across a hill completely covered with cats. Trillions of cats. Which one to choose? They are all so pretty. He picks a white one and then a black and white one and then a fuzzy gray one and then brown and yellow one . . . eventually he picks them all. Once he brings his new friends home, the old woman is more practical — trillions of cats is just a few too many — and decides they will ask the cats to choose. This is a mistake. “’No, I am the prettiest! . . . No, I am! I am! I am!’ cried hundreds and thousands and millions and billions of voices, for each cat thought itself the prettiest.” They begin to quarrel and hiss and claw and scratch. After a while, all falls silent. The couple look outside and cannot find a single cat. “‘I think they must have eaten each other all up,’ said the very old woman, ‘It’s too bad!’” But there is, of course, one runty kitten hidden out in the high grass, whom they welcome in and feed and raise. “‘It is the most beautiful cat in the whole world,’ said the very old man. ‘I ought to know, for I’ve seen — Hundreds of cats, Thousands of cats, Millions and billions and trillions of cats — and not one is as pretty as this one.’” Born into the German-speaking community of New Ulm, Minnesota, Wanda Gág (1893–1946) was raised by immigrants from Bohemia. Her father was a photographer, the son of a woodcutter, and entrusted her with the family’s artistic legacy on his deathbed: “Was der Papa nicht thun konnt’, muss die Wanda halt fertig machen” (What father couldn’t do, Wanda will have to finish). And she did. Gág won a scholarship to the Minneapolis Art Institute, where she became interested in socialist and anarchist writing, before relocating to New York in 1917 for the Arts Student League and to make a living as a commercial artist and illustrator. She hung out with the other kind of Bohemians — leftist artists in Greenwich Village — contributed to socialist magazines like The Liberator and New Masses, and eventually married the labor organizer Earle Marshall Humphreys, who would become her artistic collaborator. But before she accepted his hand, she made her intentions firm: “I would marry no man unless he would promise to run the house during my drawing moods and would excuse me from scrubbing floors.” (A few years after their marriage, she published Gone is Gone: or, The Story of a Man Who Wanted to Do Housework.) The couple had no children; Gág’s inspiration arose from something within: “I don’t write books for children. . . . I write for the child I am myself”, assembling material from “all the helpless fringes and frayed edges of our groping lives”. Her focus on the lives and plights of others caught the attention of Ernestine Evans, an editor impacted by the politically engaged children’s books produced in the Soviet Union, who agreed to publish Millions of Cats. It’s easy to read Millions of Cats as a simple story about the pleasures of pets — a Good Dog, Carl for the fairer species, a tale about the subjective beauty of a chosen cat. But Gág’s politics create tempting flights of interpretation. Julia L. Mickenberg, in Learning from the Left (2005), goes so far as to write that “Millions of Cats tells a very disturbing story about the barrenness of bourgeois living, greed, competition, environmental degradation, and senseless violence.” Viewed through this lens, the couple live in isolation, walled off from meaningful community; the trillion cats consume entire ponds and ecosystems and remain unsated; they devour their brethren and are devoured in turn — all to earn a spot in the couple’s family structure, their bourgeois home. Curiously, the trope of cats eating themselves up entirely can be found in The German Ideology: “the two Kilkenny cats in Ireland, which so completely devoured each other that finally only their tails remained.” Marx and Engels evoke this tale while pitting Max Stirner against Ludwig Feuerbach, but Gág seems to draw upon a similar image to portray a form of blindness. The beauty of a new family member trumps the deaths of a trillion starving orphans. It’s like they never existed: they simply melt into air.

public-domain-review

Feb 15, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:22.129291

my-lady-nicotine

Never-again Land: J. M. Barrie's My Lady Nicotine (1896) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 6, 2024 Before he conceived of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie decided it was time to grow up and quit smoking. He justifies this decision in My Lady Nicotine: A Study in Smoke (originally published in 1890), which begins with a common trio of arguments against substance addiction. The bodily and spiritual ruin; the economic impact; the pain caused to loved ones. In the case of our narrator (who seems to be a lightly fictionalized Barrie): he felt frequently like he was dying; realized several oriental rugs could be purchased yearly with the money saved; and delayed his marriage six months when his fiancée demanded cessation. Slowly, however, this “study” diffuses into a different mode. At the introduction’s close, fidgeting in the drawing room with postprandial cravings, he listens to his wife sing a sweet and mournful song, which takes his thoughts far away, to a parlor on the top floor of an inn, where time seems to slow as his body's hunger warmly fades, like coals in the hearth that throw light around this room — onto newspapers, through smoke rings, across the faces of gentleman friends, and against the contours of a tobacco jar. It’s a lost world, once known so well, and he pulls up a chair and begins to pack a pipe. “After a time the music ceases, and my wife puts her hand on my shoulder. Perhaps I start a little, and then she says I have been asleep. This is the book of my dreams.” It is also a book of Barrie’s dreams past. The volume was stitched together from pieces he had written anonymously for the St James’s Gazette, Edinburgh Evening Dispatch, and elsewhere, published to “establish his title to the contents in the face of pirates and rival claimants”, writes Denis Mackail. And yet it works surprisingly well as a single unit, whatever kind of unit that may be. There are: chapters on the pleasures of apparatus — pouches, smoking tables, the choice of stem and bowl; short stories masquerading as essays about friends, the men with whom our narrator smokes; speculations about literary history (surely Spenser puffed in bed); epistolary correspondence; a ghost story; three dream visions; and unfiltered wit. The only throughline to it all is how the chapters mirror the instincts of a smoker’s mind: although it may stray to other subjects, the prose always returns at steady intervals to the preoccupations of nicotine. We catch sight of the author’s slight social awkwardness, his odd sense of humor, the famed idiosyncrasies. Embittered in his youth for failings of wit, the narrator would “lay in a stock of repartee on likely subjects” the night before entering “the society of ladies”. All of this changed once he acquired his pipe. Known to scoffers as “the Mermaid”, its mouthpiece was a cigarette holder, which required “months of unwearied practice . . . before you found the angle at which the bowl did not drop off.” He turned this to his advantage at parties. She observed the strange-looking pipe. . . . It is possible that she may pass it by without remark, in which case all is lost; but experience has shown me that four times out of six she touches it in assumed horror, to pass some humorous remark. Off tumbles the bowl. “Oh,” she exclaims, “see what I have done! I am so sorry!” I pull myself together. “Madam,” I reply calmly and bowing low, “what else was to be expected? You came near my pipe — and it lost its head!” She blushes, but cannot help being pleased; and I set my pipe for the next visitor. Perhaps it’s best that this man quit smoking. While it might seem quite at odds with Neverland, My Lady Nicotine, like Peter Pan and Wendy (1904), is concerned with fleeting youth, a stage of bachelor life that has the trappings of childhood in a way: simple pleasures, imaginative adventures with companions, idleness, tranquility, and a sense that these days might go on forever, until they don’t. The book ends on a maudlin image. The narrator sits each night alone in the drawing room, while his wife sleeps upstairs. At a certain hour, a neighbor through the wall, whom he has never met, sparks a meerschaum pipe, and our man puffs his empty piece in solidarity until he hears the neighbor clearing out his bowl’s final ash. “Therefore when his last tap says good-night to me I take my cold briar out of my mouth, tap it on the mantel-piece, smile sadly, and so to bed.” For a slightly different take on nicotine, see Juliette Bretan’s essay “Documenting Drugs: The Artful Intoxications of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz”. And for a film about a smoker pitted against Tinkerbell’s cousin, see our post on Princess Nicotine (1909).

public-domain-review

Feb 6, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:22.634604

sutherland-macdonald-tattoos

The Art of Sutherland Macdonald, Victorian England’s “Michelangelo of Tattooing” (ca. 1905) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 12, 2024 It’s an era when tattoos are no longer taboo: men and women flock to a London studio to enjoy cooling drinks, a snug stove, and the steady hum of a modern electromagnetic machine, fitted with interchangeable needles for fine lines and shading. Inked on their skin are designs “gathered from all corners of the globe” — Japanese dragons, The Last Supper, a fox hunt in full cry — and words from Arabic, Burmese, and other tongues. Snakes, lizards, and frogs are a current vogue. Coloration has come a long way since the early days: ultramarine blue and emerald green, once thought impossible, are now shot freely into the dermis. Officers get their regimental badges emblazoned; “some of our best-known society men” proudly sport a patch or crest. “Tired of constantly rouging her cheeks”, a woman stops by for the application of permanent makeup. It’s truly a tattoo enthusiast’s paradise . . . Sutherland Macdonald’s studio in Victorian England. “It is no exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of men and even women are more or less decorated in this manner at the present moment”, writes Gambier Bolton in “Pictures on the Human Skin”, an 1897 article for London’s Strand Magazine from which the above descriptions are drawn. (A year later, R. J. Stephens would put the number of tattooed at 100,000 in London alone.) Bolton goes on to describe the current loci of artistic tattooing: “England, America, Burmah, and Japan”, and posits that Britain’s fascination with inked skin stretches back to before the Norman Conquest, when tattooing was “universally” practiced on the Isles. To illustrate his article, he begins with a coat of arms design by Sutherland Macdonald, the first British tattoo artist to open a public studio, “The Hammam” on Jermyn Street in London. “No one in the past, and no man living to-day, can compare with Macdonald in placing really artistic pictures on the human skin.” The photographs of Macdonald’s artworks, collected below, are records from the Copyright Office at Stationers' Hall, and perhaps relate to a service detailed by Bolton: “in more than one instance the copyright of some particularly striking image has actually been purchased outright, so no one but the wealthier patrons of the Jermyn Street studio shall have the use of them.” (This seems to have been the case with a tattoo of Psyche and Amour on the back of one Captain Studdy, whose copyright is registered to Macdonald.) During the late 1800s, tattoos became a fixation for the upper classes; as Macdonald himself remarked in an 1889 interview in the Pall Mall Gazette: “I have tattooed many noblemen, and also several ladies.” Scholars occasionally attribute the shifting class connotations of tattoos to Albert Edward, Prince of Wales — his decision to get marked while visiting the Jordan River and, later, to have his sons supposedly tattooed in Japan by Hori Chiyo, Macdonald’s competitor on the international stage. Describing tattooing as “the popular pastime of the leisured world” in an 1898 article titled “Tattooed Royalty”, R. J. Stephens named just a few of the majestically inked — Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, Prince and Princess Waldemar of Denmark, Queen Olga of Greece, King Oscar of Sweden, the Duke of York, the Grand Duke Constantine, Lady Randolph Churchill — many tattooed by Macdonald himself. Part of Macdonald’s genius was his ability to court wealth by elevating the status of his artform. Earlier in the nineteenth century, tattoos were shadow signs — encountered on the bodies of sailors, soldiers, and recidivists, occasionally described in medical literature or criminology handbooks, but largely obscured from public discourse. Macdonald changed these perceptions by wearing a white coat (emulating a medical professional), using the latest technologies (he is credited with inventing the first electromagnetic tattoo machine), operating in proximity to a popular Turkish bath (playing up fashionable orientalism with a studio full of luxurious cushions), and registering a legitimate practice in the Post Office Directory (necessitating the creation of a new category of business). He cunningly referred to himself as a tattooist, distinguished from the workaday tattooer: “He lays great stress on the ‘IST’”, writes Bolton, “as he classes the ‘ER,” with the plumber and bricklayer, whilst the work of the tattooist, he claims, should rank with the professions”. By 1900, L’Illustration had named Macdonald “the Michelangelo of tattooing”. The photographs below can only hint at the depth of color and nuanced texture that admirers attributed to his works.

public-domain-review

Mar 12, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:23.167613

edith-wharton-italian-villas

Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 2, 2024 “The traveller returning from Italy, with his eyes and imagination full of the ineffable Italian garden-magic, knows vaguely that the enchantment exists; that he has been under its spell, and that it is more potent, more enduring, more intoxicating to every sense than the most elaborate and glowing effects of modern horticulture; but he may not have found the key to the mystery. Is it because the sky is bluer, because the vegetation is more luxuriant?” So begins Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904), which followed her debut novel, The Valley of Decision (1902). The novel’s success and Italian setting — as well as her work on an earlier volume, 1897’s The Decoration of Houses — caught the eye of an editor at Century magazine, who commissioned Wharton for a series of six articles on Italian architecture and an accompanying book-length collection. She shipped out of Boston in January 1903, disembarked near Genoa, and proceeded to tour widely, as she had done since childhood on an almost annual basis — Viterbo up to Orvieto; Siena, Florence, Rome, and Venice — following recommendations from Vernon Lee, the book’s dedicatee, who “better than anyone else, has understood and interpreted the garden-magic of Italy”. When not villa-hopping, Wharton rubbed shoulders with the countesses Papafava of Padua and Maria Pasolini of Rome, and rode in her first motor car. “In a thin spring dress, a sailor hat balanced on my chignon, and a two-inch tulle veil over my nose, I climbed proudly to my perch, and off we tore across the Campagna”. By March 18, she could report to her editor that she had already taken “innumerable photographs” and made notes on no less than twenty-six villas, “many unknown or almost inaccessible, & I hope to do nearly as many more in the next month.” She ends her letter tactfully, economically, asking for a 33 percent raise. “All this has increased our expenses considerably—especially, of course, I mean, the trips to out of the way towns & the long drives—& though you may think such investigations are unnecessary for the magazine articles, you will appreciate, I am sure, how much they will add to the value & importance of the book.” She wasn’t wrong: Italian Villas and their Gardens analyzes more than eighty wonders, intercut with fifty-two illustrations: wide-angle photographs and evocative color compositions by the American painter Maxfield Parrish (featured in our gallery below), which Wharton’s text was designed, in part, to accompany. The volume itself is enchanting — its cover inlaid with gold tablature, the images veiled by protective layers of engraved velum. Across these pages, we encounter familiar landscapes — Villa d’Este and the Boboli Gardens, the Mannerist Medici villa and the abutting Borghese park — but Wharton layers architectural history with fine-grain description, and fresh impressions germinate from this well-turned loam. The grounds at Villa Albani in Rome are “laid out in formal quincunxes of clipped ilex”, its gardens “seem to have been decorated by an archaeologist rather than an artist”. She is particularly sensitive to weightiness: the famous water theater at the Villa Aldobrandini is “a heavy and uninspired production”; a portico built under the direction of Winckelmann exhibits “the heavy touch of that neo-Grecianism which was to crush the life out of eighteen-century art”. While Parrish’s images were widely praised, some critics were dispirited by Wharton’s tone, claiming she was “almost too impartial in her appreciation”. A few Century editors agreed, calling the sister articles “too dry and technical”. They asked Wharton to liven things up; her reply was curt. If they wanted “sentimental and anecdotal commentaries”, she would gladly annul her contract. All of her articles subsequently appeared. The book remained one of Wharton’s favorite projects. In A Backward Glance, her 1934 autobiography, she writes: “I never enjoyed any work more than the preparing of that book, but neither do I remember any task so associated with physical fatigue.”

public-domain-review

Apr 2, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:23.480435

earthquakes-in-japanese-woodblock-prints

Tales of the Catfish God: Earthquakes in Japanese Woodblock Prints (1855) Text by Erica X Eisen Feb 21, 2024 Legend has it that when the tremors of the 1855 Ansei Edo earthquake had finally subsided, there were so many dead that survivors were forced to carry their loved ones’ bodies away in sacks of coal and sake barrels. With much of the city having been built on reclaimed marshland — often using heavy, rigid materials — Japan’s capital was a sitting duck for what was then the worst natural disaster in living memory. As aftershocks continued to roil the city for weeks on end, even those whose houses had miraculously escaped collapse took to living in the streets rather than chance having the ceiling fall down around them as they slept. All the same, these dramatic conditions did not prevent a new genre of artwork from flourishing amid the rubble: a type of woodblock print known as namazu-e. Rooted in a myth that earthquakes were caused by the movements of a great catfish (or namazu in Japanese), these prints typically feature one or more of the titular creatures being set upon by angry humans or subdued by the gods. Associations between catfish and natural disasters predate the 1855 earthquake, with popular tales relating how the Shintō deity Kashima kept seismic shifts in check by pinning down the fish’s head with a stone. (Other versions show the creature being trapped by a gourd, visually referencing an idiomatic expression related to accomplishing a seemingly impossible task.) But it was only in the aftermath of the Ansei Edo earthquake that the idea surged to prominence in Japanese visual culture. Hundreds of these prints were issued between when the earthquake struck Edo on November 11 and when the government issued an official ban in December of the same year. Within that narrow sliver of time, anonymous printmakers across Edo — themselves still reeling from the calamity — managed to produce a truly remarkable range of images within the confines of the genre. The namazu sprout human limbs; they are led around by the “reins” of their whiskers or served up as a meal. They visit Edo’s red-light district; they dress as swordsmen and sumō wrestlers. Purchasers would typically have displayed these prints in their homes (or what was left of them), where the images acted as protective charms casting their apotropaic power over the building and those who inhabited it. What is perhaps most striking about these post-earthquake prints is the incongruity between the devastation wrought by the disaster and the emotional tenor of the images that symbolically depict it. Walleyed, their mouths stretched into toothy grins, the catfish seem unbothered by the chaos they leave in their wake — and oblivious to the mob that sets about bashing and slicing them along the way. As a genre, namazu-e prints refuse the mournfulness one might expect, instead embracing an anarchic sense of humor that transforms the unpredictable ferocity of the natural world into an almost loveable — and ultimately placable — rascal. While many histories of the Ansei Edo earthquake have emphasized its disproportionate impact on the city’s poor, the scholar Gregory Smits writes that the actual data is not so clearcut. Jōtō Sanjin, who published a written account of a walk he took in the aftermath of the earthquake, describes the wealthy area of Daimyō kōjō (Lords’ Lane) as being not only flattened but burnt over — many of the aristocratic manors having contained stores of imported saltpeter. If certain upper-class districts were particularly hard hit, by contrast, commoners across various professions stood to benefit both from the widespread rebuilding projects and aid monies splashed out by a central government anxious to head off potential discontent (natural disasters being commonly read as signs of cosmic discontent with the powers that be). This itself would become a favored theme of namazu-e artists, who satirically depicted firefighters, builders, and the like praying for earthquakes out of selfish greed. Here is another attempt to take what might be moments of profound rupture and reconcile them with familiar schemas: the avarice of our fellow mortals, not the apathy of the gods, is ultimately to blame for the calamities that befall us all. It is the socially leveling aspect of the earthquake’s impact that is to account, at least in part, for the celebratory spirit that characterizes so many of the prints created in the weeks following the disaster. In one memorable example, a catfish commits seppuku, only to have money spill out of the slash in his belly instead of blood. In another, the artist has endowed the catfish with a whale-like blowhole out of which it expels a shower of coins, to the delight of onlookers on the shore. In this subgenre of namazu-e, writes Smits, the fish are imagined as forces of yo-naoshi, or world-rectification, restoring balance to society by redistributing wealth hoarded by the rich. Beneath the rubble of the old world, a new and fairer one perhaps lay waiting — for those willing and able to bring it into being. The following examples of namazu-e come from a collection titled “Ansei ōjishin-e” (Ansei Great Earthquake Pictures), courtesy of Japan’s National Diet Library. The artist names are unknown as most of these catfish prints were published illegally and without artist signatures to evade censorship from the shogunate. Note: The English versions of the titles are by machine translation and so likely far from perfect.

public-domain-review

Feb 21, 2024

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.023102

animated-putty

I Also Am Formed Out of the Clay: Animated Putty (1911) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 5, 2024 Decades before Gumby rode Pokey and Wallace petted Gromit, tendrils of clay writhed with agency on a dim screen. Ernst Haeckel once fantasized about Urschleim, a kind of primeval sludge from which all biological beings arose; Animated Putty (1911), considered Britain’s first stop-motion clay animation film, imagines a pliable material giving rise to manifold forms. While the substance used is likely synthetic — as is the case in almost all “clay” animation — the putty seems to gather associations from its medium’s tellurian precursor. An inverted plant pot, devolving back into raw materiality, expels nuggets of clay from its drainage hole, which roll themselves into a primitive snake, and then an eagle’s face. After a rose unfurls from the stuff of earthenware, a windmill raises itself into existence. Next comes a beautiful woman with flowers in her hair. When we blink, her visage dissolves into a demon, which spawns lesser imps from its mouth. It begins to resemble a primordial story, like clay is a primordial substance: an unformed orb evolves into a child’s face and the cycle begins again, with each new viewing. The pure expressiveness of Animated Putty, absent of any artist’s visible hand — plasticity giving rise to spontaneous orders of ideas — feels indebted to older traditions of imagining the animate: Galatea and Pygmalion; Pinocchio and Geppetto; golems brought to life from inanimate clay, who subsequently escape their animator’s yoke. In this trick film’s seemingly spontaneous generation, however, we catch sight of animation’s depersonalized artistry, recalling James Joyce’s description of the artist who, “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” (Or here, cleaning the clay embedded under his nails.) Directed by Walter R. Booth, a magician whose pivot to cinema we’ve featured before, Animated Putty (as well as 1909’s Animated Cotton) were collaborations with the naturalist, nature documentarian, microphotograph enthusiast, and animator F. Percy Smith. It is perhaps Smith’s belief in the transformative power of attention that vitalizes Animated Putty. When asked by a colleague about techniques for pest control in her infested barn, he once (rather unhelpfully) replied: “If I think anything is a pest, I make a film about it; then it becomes beautiful.”

public-domain-review

Mar 5, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.650973

junghuhn-java-album

Lithographs from Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s Java-Album (1854) Text by Sasha Archibald Feb 13, 2024 Java-Album was printed from drawings by Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn to accompany a four-volume travelogue about his expeditions in the Dutch East Indies, published in 1854. The images were printed at great trouble — eleven color lithograph plates, with a twelfth tipped in as frontispiece to Volume 1— but they were not, by all accounts, appreciated by Junghuhn’s readers. Whereas the writing was judged literary, exuberant, and melodic, the renderings, as one critic wrote, “ha[ve] a hardness that makes the landscape look unnatural”. The sensuousness of Junghuhn’s prose apparently made his pictures feel sterile. Born in Prussia in 1809, Junghuhn was one of those nineteenth-century polymaths whose name is trailed by a blitz of professions: geographer, linguist, botanist, volcanologist, physician, quinine farmer, mountaineer, cartographer, and “Java’s Humboldt”. He did not admire very many people (in fact, he did not like very many people), but the naturalist Alexander Humboldt was an exception, and this moniker would have pleased him. Junghuhn arrived in Batavia (now Jakarta) around 1835 as a young man. He’d been forced by his father to study medicine, but then life stalled when he was jailed for fighting a duel. He escaped prison after a year and half, fled to France and joined the French Legion, but was discharged shortly after as unfit. Employment with the Dutch colonial government apparently had a low bar for entry. Junghuhn was hired as a doctor, though he proved a misanthrope without much aptitude for doctoring. After a few years, his superiors asked if perhaps he’d like to explore the mountainous interior of Java, which had never been mapped. Any other European transplant would have thought this task too dangerous to merit consideration. The area was known as a roiling terrain of great heights and active volcanoes. Even the urban areas of the Dutch East Indies were considered life-threatening to Europeans, who were slow to acclimatize to the relative heat and humidity, especially when they clung to their Western dress. Junghuhn himself published an article claiming that within eight years of arrival, 90% of Europeans were either dead or sick. (Racist fears of miscegenation were not deeply buried; stay in your climate also meant stay with your race.) Add to the volcanoes and heat various storybook animals: crocodiles, wild pigs, monkeys, rhinoceroses, and scorpions — all which obsessed and terrified the Europeans. Tigers were so plentiful they prowled public plazas. Batavia may have been called “Jewel of Asia” and “Queen of the East”, but it was also called “Europeans’ Graveyard”. Junghuhn, however, defiant and bristly by nature, decided that the expedition was a perfect assignment. He traveled for about twenty months, and despite many near-death experiences, rapturously enjoyed his time. In fact, he felt more contentment than he’d ever experienced before — his people weren’t people, it turned out, they were trees. Junghuhn wrote his travelogue after returning to Europe, though the drawings he claimed to have produced and colored in situ. The vantage point of each is insistently high. Junghuhn’s affection for the aerial view, which he called the “instructive vista”, was born of many factors, including philosophical prerogative. Like Humboldt and Thoreau, he privileged the eye as the best teacher of all — better than books, better than tutors, better than hands. But also, he judged the elevated mountain climate more pleasant, the major flora more dignified, and the cultural traditions more refined than at lower elevations. (Tengger, Sumatran, and Sundanese villages were higher than those of the Javanese, who lived near sea level, and for whom Junghuhn had total contempt.) The Hindu Sundanese, for instance, surrounded their villages with tall hedges of bamboo, which Junghuhn found charming; the volcano they worshiped, the nearby Bromo, struck him as deserving of worship. Junghuhn came to the conclusion that height truly does equal greatness, and mapped his preferences accordingly. One could predict his fondness for specific plants, animals, and humans based on their level of elevation. ※※Indexed under…ElevationFondness for plants and people based on As the drawings show, the Dutch had already introduced the cultivation system in 1830, according to which Java’s lands were planted with cash crops that made a fortune for the colonial state by exploiting and starving the locals. Junghuhn’s mapping project was very much an arm of colonialist power, though he criticized the cultivation system loudly enough that he was reprimanded by the Governor-General. He also advocated socialism, and thought Christians shouldn’t be allowed to proselytize. One scholar describes him as “this most uncolonial of colonials”. The critic who thought Junghuhn’s drawings “unnatural” and “hard” is not incorrect, but perhaps Junghuhn wasn’t aiming for naturalness. It’s possible that Java-Album’s stylized sterility was a deliberate effort to counter his audience’s assumptions that tropical landscapes are fetid, chaotic, uncontrollably profuse. Nonetheless, Junghuhn takes many liberties. The volcanoes are tamed, the farming terraces spaced like lines on a ruler, the moss tendrils delineated. There is no indication that this place has a smell, or a temperature. Junghuhn presents the mountain Gamping as pristine, even though its limestone was being rapaciously mined, and he sets humans at the edges as if to indicate scale, not because this is their home. Most conspicuous of all is the absence of fog: apparently ubiquitous in the areas where Junghuhn was traveling, it never appears in his pictures. He includes a few disciplined puffs of steam and a few billowy clouds, but absent entirely is the misty vapor that, on any given day, would have prevented Junghuhn from seeing clearly. Find ten of Java-Album’s lithographs, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, below. The eleventh image (of Mount Merapi) seems to be missing from their collection, so we have used an image held by Leiden University Library, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, instead.

public-domain-review

Feb 13, 2024

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:24.991921

occult-chemistry

Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater’s Occult Chemistry (1908) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Apr 16, 2024 “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” So wrote Virginia Woolf in her essay “Modern Fiction”, collected in The Common Reader (1925). It is meant as advice to novelists, but this quotation may also be a squib directed at the prominent theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater who were doing exactly this. Their findings were presented in an illustrated book, Occult Chemistry, first published in 1908, although their investigative project continued for many more years, with subsequent editions appearing into the 1930s. “The atom can scarcely be said to be a ‘thing’, though it is the material out of which all things physical are composed”, they concluded. “It is formed by the flow of the life-force and vanishes with its ebb.” This is, to say the least, an unorthodox view of chemistry, which is in some ways the least mysterious of sciences. Besant was born in 1847. Around 1871, she rejected her previously devout Christianity, separated from her clergyman husband, became a freethinker, matriculated for a science degree at London University, but did not take it, advocated for birth control, and then joined the Fabians. In 1888, she turned to theosophy, moved to India, translated the Bhagavad Gita, and joined the Indian National Congress and the campaign for Indian self-government. Theosophy began as a late Victorian spiritualist movement which held that the nature of things is deeper than can be discovered by empirical science. In Besant’s own definition, “It is the fact that man, being himself divine, can know the Divinity whose life he shares.” Leadbeater, born in 1854, turned to theosophy having served as an Anglican priest and became a prolific author of the movement’s books and pamphlets. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “an observant traveller on the astral plane”. He met Besant in 1894, and the two began their chemical observations almost immediately. Leadbeater used his clairvoyant talents, while Besant, with her scientific inclination, made sure that they followed a respectable methodology. Their first book together, though, was a psychological exploration called Thought-Forms (1901), which depicted experiences and feelings, such as varieties of love and anger, in coloured diagrams resembling abstract art. Their chemical method was — conveniently perhaps — “unique and difficult to explain”. Its clairvoyant aspect was based on a Yoga principle that one can reduce one’s self-conception to minute proportions so that very small objects appear large. The observer then simply draws what he sees on paper and his commentary may be taken down by a stenographer. It is much like somebody using a microscope and, in the view of its adherents, no less objective. Transcripts of the dialogue between Leadbeater and their illustrator, Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, which were included in Occult Chemistry, display admirable frankness during these observation sessions, but do not really explain much more. Besant and Leadbeater’s investigations in Occult Chemistry begin with “four gases in the air” — hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and “a fourth gas (atomic weight=3) so far not discovered by chemists.” These were the simplest elements. As the atomic number increased, so did their geometric complexity of the atoms. Sodium, for example, was “composed of an upper part, divisible into a globe and 12 funnels, a lower part, similarly divided; and a connecting rod.” The atoms were duly grouped, not as in the periodic table (which is organized according to atomic number and reveals different elements’ related chemical properties), but according to overall shapes: spikes, dumbbell, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, crossed bases, and star. Thus, boron, nitrogen, and vanadium, for example — elements with little in common chemically — all “have six funnels opening on the six faces of a cube”. Even the simplest element, hydrogen, was found to comprise eighteen units, which they called anu, in reference to the indivisible in Jain metaphysics. As the work progressed, Besant and Leadbeater “found” new elements, such as “meta-neon” and “platinum A” with positions intermediate between the established elements, and began to include simple compounds such as copper sulphate and benzene. In water, “The Oxygen double snake retains its individuality, as indeed it usually does, while the two Hydrogen atoms arrange themselves around it.” Although Besant’s and Leadbeater’s science is clearly misguided, their interest was obviously sincere, and their labour fairly exhaustive. At a time when there was no other means of “seeing” atoms, what is truly remarkable is that their visualizations so closely resemble those developed later by chemists relying on Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure from 1913 and laws of quantum mechanics not worked out until the 1920s. The cloudlike volumes known as atomic orbitals within which the electrons of an atom may circulate around its nucleus are today visualized as fuzzy-edged spheres, dumbbells and doughnut rings.

public-domain-review

Apr 16, 2024

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:25.201358

galateo

The Age of Impoliteness: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners (1774 edition) Text by Hunter Dukes Feb 27, 2024 In the 1770s, a contagion was sweeping England and women were in danger: the danger of “contracting habits entirely opposite to their natural delicacy”. Take Belinda, for example, who after dinner, equipped with a linen napkin, “rummages the most remote cavities of her mouth and gums”, all the while thinking this behavior reflects “an infallible mark of her familiarity with the bon ton of fashionable life.” The contagious disease of bad manners did not discriminate by sex, however. It also infected fathers, with their eighteenth-century dad jokes: the man who “render[s] his whole family miserable, by making them dependent on his humour or caprice”. It corrupted the man-spreading public schoolboy, who, when in coffeehouses amid the public, “spreads himself before the chimney, and ‘gropes his breeches with a monarch’s air’”. Inoculation was possible, and the vaccine came in book form: a 1558 treatise by Giovanni della Casa, newly translated and prefaced by Richard Graves (who wrote the words above) in 1774: Galateo: or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners. Il Galateo, as it is known in Italian, had been making waves in England for centuries by the time this edition was released. The work — first translated into English in 1576 by Henry Peterson — was immediately taken up by young Oxbridge scholars, who wanted to ditch their reading lists for practical knowledge that would serve them at the Elizabethan court. Gabriel Harvey, for example, in a 1580 letter to Edmund Spenser, reports what Cantabs were clandestinely consuming in their sets: “Machiavell a great man: Castilio of no small reputation, Galateo and Guazzo never so happy.” It makes sense that a new translation would be needed in the late-eighteenth century, an era marked by unprecedented mobility. The nascent Industrial Revolution created a burgeoning middle class of merchants and employees who found themselves attempting to ascend the greased rungs of an increasingly nuanced social hierarchy. The Earl of Chesterfield described the situation four years after Graves’ translation of Galateo hit bookshelves: “An aukward country fellow, when he comes into company better than himself, is exceedingly disconcerted. He knows not what to do with his hands, or his hat”. Unlike bloodlines, however, good behavior can be aped, and the popularity of etiquette books in this period — not to mention the rise of the novel — speaks not only to a desire for pecuniary emulation but also social mimicry. The takeaway from Galateo is simple — politeness is the art of pleasing others. Some examples of virtuous behavior are easy to enact. Well-bred men neither take “monstrous strides” nor let their hands “hang dangling down”. Indecent and improper men make a habit of “thrusting their hands into their bosoms, or handling any part of their persons which is usually covered”. Loud and messy sneezers were as detested in Della Casa’s time as our own, those people who deign to “sputter in the very faces of those that sit near them”. Spittle, the public paring of fingernails, and flatulence are held in eternally low esteem. Pages are devoted to table manners. Toothpicks make one look “like a bird going to build his nest”; only “inn-keepers and parasites” express great pleasure when consuming food and wine. Other examples are less accessible, such as the prohibition on smelling anything you intend to eat or drink. One emergent theme is a kind of social prophylaxis for the sensorium. The politest personages in Galateo are those that keep the mouth, ears, and eyes free of offensive stimulus — protecting their own bodies and those of their peers. The motif is taken to ends that seem initially odd, at least to the modern-day reader, who is told that it is rude to peruse personal correspondence in front of guests. The logic makes sense, however, for one should never portray themselves as bored, idle, or distracted in the company of others: the affront of an acquaintance checking text messages over drinks predates smartphones by several centuries, it seems. ※※Indexed under…HandsEtiquette involving In addition to prohibitions of the body, there are dicta regarding the spirit. Men must not be too “thoughtful” — “wrapt up in your own reflections” — or exceedingly sensitive, for to socialize with the latter kind of person is like being “surrounded with the finest glass ware; to which the slightest stroke may be fatal”. Discussing dreams is boorish, for most people are not “wise men amongst the ancients” but see only “trifling and frivolous” images thrown against the screen of sleep. Lying is bad. Arrogance is bad. Gossip should be reined in by a government of the tongue. No one ever wants unsolicited advice. People who subject others to “jingling puns” mistake wit for the shopworn speech of the low and vulgar. A prostitute should never be described as such — “an immodest woman” will do just fine. Galateo ends with a bit of rhetoric that evinces its author’s grace and manners: “because each of the particulars hitherto mentioned is marked but with a slight degree of error, therefore there can be no great harm in neglecting the whole”. What could be more gauche than instructing a stranger how to act? Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556) was a Florentine humanist and cleric, born into mercantile wealth with aristocratic origins. After a libertine youth in which he penned obscene poems, he leveraged family connections, which trumped his shaky religious convictions, and found himself appointed Archbishop of Benevento. Initially angling after a cardinalate, the change of papal regime led Della Casa to take retirement, living “in tranquility, rest, and idleness amongst my books”. Here he set about composing, among other texts, what we now would call an etiquette manual, addressed to a young nobleman. Written between 1552 and 1555, Il Galateo was completed just a year before his death. In the months of his final decline, Della Casa asked a nephew to incinerate his compositions, but — thanks again to a network of family and friends — Il Galateo was published posthumously, seeing French, Spanish, German, and Latin editions circulating before the century’s turn, and dozens of others since. The work’s subsequent influence was so great that it inspired envy and impolite admonishments from other writers: Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy wonders how Della Casa managed to compose such a work — spending, as he did, “the greatest part of his time in combing his whiskers”. For another Italian book of manners from the sixteenth century, see our post on Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528).

public-domain-review

Feb 27, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:25.644927

gotham-attucks

Sheet Music Covers for the Gotham-Attucks Company, ca. 1905–1911 Text by Dorothy Berry Feb 1, 2024 We are all unfortunately immersed in the visual legacy of Blackface minstrelsy. Caricatures that mutated Black men into creatures, women into mockeries — offensive ornamentation designed to highlight a lascivious, criminalized otherness. One of the key ways these racist imaginaries seeped into the Western subconscious was through the proliferation of print material, and particularly through the covers of sheet music brought home to play around the parlor piano. These images appeared on music written by both Black and white artists, as the standard of presentation. And yet, beginning in 1905, one star-studded song-publishing company would push the aesthetic limits of how Black popular music was shown to the public. Throughout the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, popular music traveled from stage to page via publications featuring songs written and performed by white performers who blackened their faces with burnt cork to transform into living racial stereotypes. The covers of these publications often featured cartoonish drawings of these racist figures, and as the century moved onward, photographs of the performers in and out of Blackface, illustrating the depth of their transformation. By the early twentieth century, the genre had reached a bizarre space. African Americans were allowed to perform on the popular stage, but often only if they too painted themselves a shiny Black. The path to self-determination on the musical stage came in fits and starts, with some broad-brush overviews attributing the major breakthrough to the 1921 music Shuffle Along. The first two decades of the twentieth century, however, were marked by conflicted attempts to balance a public demand for established ethnic characterization with the desire for authentic self-expression. A lesser-known attempt that encapsulates this incongruity is the 1905–1911 run of the Gotham-Attucks Co., a song-publishing company managed by some of the most famous Black writers and performers of the day. In the August 12, 1905 issue of the controversial Black newspaper The Broad Ax, under the headline “News and Comment from our Yankee Metropolis”, the New York beat reporter covered the merger of two smaller music concerns and the opening of Gotham-Attucks in “elaborate and cleverly appointed headquarters” on 42 W 28th St. The article lists a who’s who of Black entertainment as taking leadership in the new company, with performing duo George Walker and Bert Williams as president and vice president, and with collaborators Earle Jones, R.C. McPherson (Cecil Mack), Alex Rogers, and Jesse Shippe as part of the team. Most, if not all, of these men would be household names to anyone interested in popular entertainment at the time. All of them had written lyrics, music, or starred on the covers of sheet music published by other firms, and many were visually represented in racist manners, often out of their control. The Broad Ax was unequivocally in favor of the enterprise upon its founding, writing: The Gotham-Attucks are extremely fortunate in having published about 9 songs this summer that are really “hits” with the public. It is the first colored American music publishing house properly established and managed that is deserving of the name. Most all the compositions handled by the firm are the fruit and product of Negro Brain and creation. Sylvester Russel, one of the more acerbic Black critics of the day, had a harsher view on the firm, publishing a satirical poem referencing a Black business convention in an issue of the Indianapolis Freeman published on the same August Saturday: The Gotham-Attucks music houseWill probably be seen there,As business men exhibitorsOf coon songs and hot air. Russel’s critique was directly commenting on the incongruity described at the outset. While Gotham-Attucks was run by Black creatives, much of the lyrical content was still clearly in the legacy of blackface minstrelsy. The writers may have only been able to subtly push the status quo, but the artistic design was a radical shift. Sheet music for popular songs by and about African Americans, up to that point, had trafficked in stereotypical images and racial grotesques. Gotham-Attucks publications featured modern colorways, art deco detailing, and flattering, naturalistic illustrations of Black people. In some of the boldest covers, there are illustrations of an (apparently) white woman representing the song’s subject, accompanied by a photo of the famed Black performers. This inverted a long-standing practice of featuring photographs of white performers in formal dress paired with Blackface, racial caricatures to both assure the purchasing audience that white performers were behind the minstrel mask, and to impress them with the transformation. Though Gotham-Attucks was short-lived, their decisive visual designs were part of a larger push towards Black creative life defined on its own terms. Marked by a striking logo — featuring the Pyramids of Giza, bookended by four-leaf clovers — the company’s published sheet music has a distinctive look. Though information on the specific designers and illustrators has not yet been discovered, the creative direction is clear. “Nobody” and “(That’s Why They Call Me) Shine” became classics of the American Songbook and their covers feature enduring designs. Inspired by Arts and Crafts styles, they exhibit rich colors and modernist floral elements with nothing verging on the cartoonish. Pieces like “Bon Bon Buddy” and “Malinda (Come Down to Me)” reveal the particular tightrope that Gotham-Attucks walked with popular taste. Though the use of stereotypical dialect is lessened in the music itself, both songs are closely tied to traditional minstrel themes, and both have illustrative elements — like a banjo-playing man serenading his beau, or cherubic Black babies — that had commonly been exaggerated for “humorous” racist intent in many other publications. There is a beauty in these Gotham-Attucks publications that can feel designed directly for a new, Black audience wanting to see versions of themselves in popular music — or, at least, wanting to own the latest popular songs and not feel ashamed to have them out on the piano stand.

public-domain-review

Feb 1, 2024

Dorothy Berr

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.159038

steamboat-willie

As Loud as a Mouse: Mickey’s Sonic Debut in Steamboat Willie (1928) Text by Hunter Dukes Jan 24, 2024 When Steamboat Willie premiered in the autumn of 1928, marking Mickey Mouse’s public debut, rivers were on the American mind. Show Boat had hit Broadway the previous Christmas, its racially integrated cast creating wake as they cruised the Mississippi on Cotton Blossom. That same year, the river’s waters surged to a high-water mark during one of the most destructive floods in US history. From the trauma came comedic release. In the summer of 1928, Buster Keaton commandeered a paddle steamer for Steamboat Bill, Jr., leading to his most infamous stunt. During a cyclone, a house makes to flatten Keaton, but he passes through a window and remains improbably upright — an image of resilience for all those devastated by recent disasters. And then, who next comes lazing down the river? A cartoon mouse in the employ of a villainous cat, ready to unleash a deluge of animated films upon the world. Although it was not the first cartoon to use synchronized audio, Steamboat Willie was the first to exhibit this new technology to a widespread audience. Walt Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks needed something to distinguish their cartoons from competitors, after two previous Mickey Mouse shorts failed to find a distributor earlier that year. And they bet it all on sound. While Iwerks drew almost every frame himself using cel animation, Disney accomplished the sound design with the help of a dime store, scooping buckets, bells, and cans into his shopping cart. Spittoons littered their screening room floor, repurposed as gongs. When Steamboat Willie finally debuted at New York’s Colony Theatre, it was the soundscape — of the film, of the crowd — that caught critical attention. Variety called it “a peach of a synchronization job all the way”; Weekly Film Review noted that the movie kept “the audience laughing and chuckling from the moment the lead titles came on the screen, and it left them applauded”. From the earliest frames, the film is alive with Cinephonic sound. The steamboat’s funnels blow scratchy o’s of smoke; its whistles honk and bark; and Mickey whistles too, the popular vaudeville song “Steamboat Bill”, while he spins a helm that clicks like a winch. It is sound that seems to grant animals their human qualities. The chaw of Peg-Leg Pete’s Star Plug tobacco and the subsequent slap of the spit smacking across his gob, Minnie’s nervous squeals at Podunk Landing before she is hauled aboard by her bloomers, a parrot teasing the mouse, both voiced by Walt himself, “Hope you don’t feel hurt, big boy!” — these spellbinding moments of synchronicity between eye and ear reveal the animism in animation. The extraction of voice from bodily forms serves as Steamboat Willie’s persistent theme. After a goat gobbles down Minnie’s ukulele, the animal becomes a music box, bleating out the tinny minstrel standard “Turkey in the Straw”. Mickey not only slaps a drum kit of saucepans, he also bullroarers a yowling cat, bagpipes a living duck, and approximates the legendary cat piano by plucking the tails of suckling piglets. It’s all very funny, yet also seems to repurpose a darker history for humor: the centuries of violence inflicted upon beings thought to be voiceless, speechless, dumb. Despite the outlandish premise, it starts to make sense why a forthcoming film adapts Steamboat Willie into a horror flick. “Steamboat Willie has brought joy to generations”, claims the director’s press release,“but beneath that cheerful exterior lies a potential for pure, unhinged terror”. How can it be that Mickey Mouse will find his way into not one but two terrifying (and possibly terrible) movies in 2024? Well, the mouse finally escaped its owners’ trap: Steamboat Willie entered the public domain at last on January 1, 2024. To appreciate the monumental nature of this one needs to understand a little about The Walt Disney Company’s relationship to, and perverse effect on, copyright law in the United States — and how symbolic Mickey has become in the fight to preserve the public domain. The story takes a significant turn in 1998 with the passing of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which basically did what it says on the tin: extended copyrights for many thousands of works that otherwise would have entered the US public domain, including Steamboat Willie (and also Plane Crazy). While Disney wasn’t the only lobbyist for this bill, it was certainly one of the most prominent, and its involvement earned the legislation a derisory moniker: “The Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. The effect of this Act (and previous extending Acts, also involving Disney) has been devastating to the enlargement of the US public domain, locking up an enormous number of works for many decades, but . . . all things must pass, and so too the copyright on Steamboat Willie. What does this mean? In a simple sense, one can now use the film as one wishes (in the US, at least). And this copyright expiry also applies to the characters of Mickey and Minnie who star in the film, but with two important caveats: first, it’s only these particular versions of Minnie and Mickey (e.g. long arms, gloveless), later iterations are still under copyright; and second, Disney still has the trademark, so you cannot reuse this material in a way which implies an affiliation with the company. For a more in-depth look at the issues involved here (including why aspects of the later Mickey iterations might also be fine to reuse), we highly recommend this great post by Jennifer Jenkins from the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and also this Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow.

public-domain-review

Jan 24, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.636591

kumanaki-kage

Clear Shadows (1867) Text by Koto Sadamura Jan 23, 2024 Silhouette portraits came into fashion in late-nineteenth-century Japan following their popularity in Europe and the United States. They were a form of party entertainment. Partygoers would take turns sitting behind a paper sliding door (shōji) while an entertainer captured their backlit silhouettes. A simple leisure activity soon gave way to more complex publications and commemorations. Clear Shadows (Kumanaki kage, 1867), for instance, is a compilation of silhouette portraits depicting members of the kyōga-awase club by the artist Ochiai Yoshiiku (1833–1904), which includes short biographies, picture riddles, and poems. Kyōga-awase (picture-matching for amusement) was played somewhat like Pictionary, where each person was given a subject to illustrate — and could draw anything but the subject itself. Points were awarded on the basis of cleverness. As scholar Satō Satoru details, Clear Shadows was created to honor Hagetsutei Kasetsu, a young patron of the kyōga-awase club, who died three years earlier. The book features sixty-seven individuals, of which fifty-seven are men and ten are women, including seven young members who are aged ten to sixteen. The silhouettes are far from static: these figures prune flora, draw with a brush, wave fans, finger the beads of a Buddhist rosary, read, smoke, and drink. A cat steals the limelight in one image and shadow puppets enliven others. This picture-matching club was formed in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and its members included ukiyo-e artists, popular authors, book publishers, and playwrights. Clear Shadows demonstrates that women and children were part of this social network of cultural activities in nineteenth-century Japan. The page spread below, for example, shows a female figure with the pseudonym “Satoyuki”’ on the right and a young man with the nom de plume “Doryū” on the left. According to their short biographies, Satoyuki is a daughter of a Jōruri chanter, a type of sung narrative with shamisen (the banjo-like, three-stringed instrument) accompaniment. As a young girl, she performed with her father and her precocious talent moved the audience to tears. Now she is reputed to have outstripped her teacher. Doryū is presented as a multi-talented person who is good at drawing and composing prose and verse — in particular, haikai (haiku) — as well as impersonating popular kabuki actors. The images at the top right of each portrait are the club members’ respective riddle submissions. For this commemorative occasion, each participant was given a theme related to the meaning of one of the kanji characters in Kasetsu’s name (“wave”, “moon”, “flower”, or “snow”), which was then combined with one of the five elements (“wood”, “fire”, “earth”, “metal”, or “water”). It is not easy to interpret the images, but Satoyuki’s theme was “flower and metal” and Doryū’s “moon and wave [water]”. Others are even more cryptic: a woman soaking pieces of paper with writings on them in a washbasin is “wave and water”, a man nodding to sleep is “flower and metal”, as is a woman brandishing a sword with her foot raised. Silhouette likenesses were particularly favored for memorial uses in nineteenth-century Japan. In the frontispiece of Clear Shadows, by the artist Shibata Zeshin (1807–1891), the deceased Kasetsu’s silhouette portrait is shown in a display alcove (tokonoma) with an incense burner and lotus flowers, suggesting a space to honor the departed. We also know that the image of a girl pseudonymized as Sekka (Tatsu) was later used for commemorative purposes, after she died two years on from the book’s publication. Her silhouette portrait is included in the memorial surimono album Mirror of Many Years (Ikuyo kagami, 1869), for example, and also painted inside the lid of the storage box for Journey around Hell and Paradise (Jigoku gokuraku meguri zu, 1869–1870, 1872), an important and moving album of paintings by Kawanabe Kyōsai. A further example of memorial silhouettes can be found in the poetry compilation entitled Moonlight (Katsura kage, 1872), which has twenty-eight silhouette portraits of people who attended a service for the memorial of a deceased child of Tsutagashi Bunkyō, a wealthy merchant in Osaka. Clear Shadows was compiled by Kasetsu’s brother Kōkōsha Baigai, who was also a member of the kyōga-awase group — possibly with the support of their father, Tsuji Den’emon, an official at the shogunal silver mint (ginza). The volume was first issued as a private publication, but subsequently printed commercially by Hirookaya Kōsuke, a publisher who also appears in the book as “Usen” and who must have seen its wider appeal and economic potential. The same year that Clear Shadows was published, Ochiai Yoshiiku produced another series of thirty-eight woodblock colour prints that preceded this memorial book, each featuring a silhouette profile image of a kabuki actor. The text included on one of the prints in the group offers a hint as to why silhouettes became a technology for memorializing the dead: “they indeed give the impression as though one is in the presence of these people.” The faddishness of silhouettes in Japan at this time reflected an increasing interest in verisimilitude, as was also found in contemporary Western media of visual representation such as oil painting, lithography, and photography. In the postscript of Clear Shadows, the popular writer Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) observed: “Appearance is a deceptive skin. Silhouette shows the real bones [core structure of the person].” Silhouette images of this kind were entrusted to family members as truthful portraits and vivid reminders of their departed loved ones. For a contemporaneous book of silhouette shadows made in England, and the truths that they can hold, see our post on C. H. Bennett’s Shadows (1856).

public-domain-review

Jan 23, 2024

Koto Sadamura

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:26.991630

tom-seidmann-freud-hare-tales

Tom Seidmann-Freud’s Book of Hare Stories (1924) Text by Hunter Dukes Mar 20, 2024 “Quite often in dreams it is the hare that shoots the sportsman.”—Sigmund Freud, “The Dream-Work” Hares and rabbits have been known to serve as messengers between the conscious world and those deeper warrens of the mind. In Tom Seidmann-Freud’s 1924 Buch Der Hasengeschichten (Book of Hare Stories), folk and fairy tales are collected from across the globe, chosen for their leporine heroes. The stories are often comic and bleak; their anthropomorphic animals live in worlds darkened by adulthood. In a version of a Norwegian tale collected by Asbjørnsen and Moe, a recently married hare somersaults across a vale, recounting the reasons for his happiness. Soon after his wedding — to a woman with hairy teeth, who turned out to be a dragon — a fire broke out, reducing his home to ash . . . and his wife burned up too. In addition to fables from Inuit, Zulu, and Pomeranian oral traditions, there is a variant of the Br’er Rabbit “tar baby” story; a spin-off of Aesop’s “Hares and Frogs”, which opens with a bevy of bunnies who would rather kill themselves than live in fear; and an opaque Estonian aphorism about a hare who laughs so hard that its lips burst. At the turn of the century, German children’s literature was stuck in a mire of repetition and pedantry. “We have the most glorious things, gleaming gold treasures and gems”, wrote the education reformer Heinrich Wolgast in The Misery of Our Children’s Literature (1896), “and we choose to adorn the spring of our people with dull junk.” Combining the stylistic traits of Art Nouveau, New Objectivity, and Expressionism, Tom Seidmann-Freud belonged to a crop of artists who began to make children’s literature into a primary artform, when it had so often been treated as a supplement to more “serious” endeavors. While the stories she collects in the Buch Der Hasengeschichten might be familiar, her illustrations are strikingly new and bizarre. Against a rich pastel pallet, humans and animals have wide-eyed expressions, as if warning the viewer against looking too closely. A standing man and hare hold each other suggestively; giraffes appear to embalm a corpse in yellow; and a scene that initially registers as cute — featuring two little girls and hares in a rainbow-lit landscape — starts to feel utterly unheimlich as the eyes linger on. One of the girls, in a salmon skirt, rides her hare toward a funhouse whose door is a sinister void. The other looks on from a house that should be, well, homey, but its proportions seem to shrink around her gesturing arm: is she pointing somewhere over the rainbow or begging for release? Born in Vienna, Tom (née Martha) Seidmann-Freud (1892–1930) was the daughter of Maria Freud, Sigmund’s sister. Around the age of fifteen, she assumed the name Tom — preferring its masculine tone — and moved abroad to study art in London and Berlin, finally settling in Munich. Here, she befriended the scholar Gershom Scholem, who would remember her as: “an authentic bohemian”, who “lived on cigarettes, so to speak”. Expelled from Bavaria in 1920 due to her father’s Romanian citizenship, she returned to Berlin, where she created children’s books and founded the Peregrin publishing house — named after the Latin peregrinus, a Roman term for foreigner — with Jankew Seidmann, her soon-to-be husband. In one of only a handful of private letters that have survived, we can hear the excitement of this period in Tom’s own words: “Jakele is good and clever and I love him very much. In spring, all our sins will be forgiven. Which I really need!” It was through Peregrin that the Buch Der Hasengeschichten was released, along with 1923’s Die Fischreise (The Fish’s Journey), the story of a young boy who finds a golden realm beneath the waves, published shortly after her teenage brother drowned in the Mäckersee. She worked for a time with the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik to illustrate fairy tales in Hebrew — intended to stock Zionist schools in Palestine — and later turned to pedagogical texts. The quality of these primers and copybooks made Walter Benjamin poignantly suggest, during a glowing review in the Frankfurter Zeitung, that “where children play, a secret lies buried”. As Seidmann-Freud entered her mid-thirties, her cousin Anna Freud reported that the artist’s natural “warmth and kindness” had waned, confiding in the psychoanalyst Max Eitingon that “[Tom] has had a certain tendency to suicide for a long time, and was once very close to it when she was young”. In 1930, Seidmann-Freud’s Magic Boat and Game Primer No. 1 were voted to be among the fifty most beautiful books published in Germany, but it was already too late. Bialik had agreed to invest in Ophir, a publishing house set up by Jankew, but left for Tel Aviv without honoring his contract. Crumbling under the pressures of bankruptcy as the Great Depression set in, Jankew hanged himself, and fearing that his wife would follow him into death, the Freuds committed Tom to a sanitorium, taking in her seven-year-old daughter, Angela. Sigmund was among the last to witness Tom alive, writing that “the sight of her is terrible”. She died by suicide in February, 1930, at the age of thirty-eight.

public-domain-review

Mar 20, 2024

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:27.441030

body-as-house-diagram

My Body is a Temple Four-Story House: Analogical Diagram from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 14, 2023 This woodcut diagram, from Tobias Cohen’s Ma’aseh Tuviyah (1708), places the human body and house into analogy. Every organ in the man’s open torso is lettered; each letter matches with a room or architectural feature. The heart of the home can be found where “the master” resides: behind latticed windows, which are the lungs, on the top floor. The kitchen is the stomach, the site of early modern chemical processes that sound gastronomical, such as effervescence and fermentation. Toward the home’s egress, the digestive tract ends with plumbing — storage tanks and waterworks. Born in Metz, Tobias Cohen (1652–1729) was the son of a rabbi-physician who fled from Narol, Poland, during the mass atrocities of the Khmelnytsky Uprising. He studied medicine in Frankfurt an der Oder, as one of the first Jewish students admitted to the university, before transferring to a more welcoming preparatory school in Padua. Here Cohen fell under the influence and protection of Solomon Conegliano, whom he would later call “prince among philosophers and mighty among physicians”. After completing his degree in 1683, Cohen served as a physician to several sultans of the Ottoman Empire, in both Adrianople and Constantinople, retiring to Jerusalem in 1715. Scholars believe that Cohen completed Ma’aseh Tuviyah in 1700, but it was not published until 1708 in Venice, where it underwent additional print runs throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In David B. Ruderman’s estimation, Tobias Cohen’s encyclopedic work of medicine, theology, and other fields of knowledge is “the most influential early modern Hebrew textbook of the sciences”. Explaining the diagram’s analogy does not quite reveal its function, which continues to generate debate. Some think that it served a mnemonic purpose, allowing students of medicine to place the organs in “memory rooms” — the kind famously detailed by Frances A. Yates. Others, such as Conrad H. Roth, find a common trope present here and in works stretching from John Donne and William Harvey back to Ecclesiastes and Vitruvius — of the body, not as a temple, but a structure of domestic life. Yet the good doctor Tobias Cohen seems to have had more cosmological intentions with his chart, which appears in a chapter titled “A New House”. Unlike medieval physicians, who often viewed the body as a microcosm of the universe, or classical scholars such as Plato, who structured the soul like a polis, Cohen proposes an alternative: man is a house in a walled city. It is enough that he [man] be as one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city, as bars and gates, as I have shown you the pattern of the house and the pattern of its instruments, as the House of the Soul, for he has lower, second and a third stories, and an attic and roof above, and walls round about, and corners of the house. Despite Cohen’s fluent knowledge of Latin and several other languages that would have helped his treatise reach a larger audience in Europe, he wrote in Hebrew, which, in David Ruderman’s words, encouraged “his coreligionists to believe that they still remained full-fledged participants in the exciting scientific culture emerging through the Continent.” Even in Hebrew, the author’s rich style made the work inaccessible to anyone who did not seriously engage in the academic study of medicine, shielding it from quacks and “the masses”. During his preface, Cohen describes anti-semitism in bodily terms, responding to the gentiles “who vex us, raising their voices without restraint, speaking haughtily with arrogance and scorn, telling us that we have no mouth to respond, nor a forehead to raise our heads in matters of faith, and that our knowledge and ancient intelligence have been lost.” In this context, Etienne Lepicard draws our attention to how Cohen’s vision of the body offers a place of fortified refuge — as “one of the towers or houses among the dwellings of a walled city” — perhaps inspired by the supportive Jewish community he found in Padua after the discrimination of Frankfurt an der Oder. For more on the Hebrew in Cohen’s diagram, you can browse Conrad H. Roth’s blog post, featuring a translation by Simon Holloway.

public-domain-review

Jun 14, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:28.874195

comic-natural-history

The Comic Natural History of the Human Race (1851) Text by Hunter Dukes Jun 20, 2023 “Transmigration is held to be very marvelous”, reports H. L. Stephens in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race. And while these “kaleideiscopical” experiences are often attributed to “Hindoos, and other far-off outsiders”, he sets out to prove that metempsychosis can occur closer to home in Philadelphia. Lampooning well-known local and national personalities of the mid-nineteenth century, Stephens and the lithographer Max Rosenthal transformed them into exotic hybrid caricatures: forty human heads mounted on bugs, fish, and bats. Thomas Birch Florence, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, becomes The Florence Humming Bird (Trochilus politicus). Thanks to its popular vocalizations, the bird favors “the stump” as a habitat. Francis Martin Drexel — artist, banker, and father of the founder of Drexel University — reincarnates as a Gold Fish. You can find this species about the “shallow waters” of Wall Street: “we have caught him for you; now stare at him as you please—done in gold, gone, changed, transmuted perfectly, he did it himself—gold, gold—now he has turned into gold: stare at him.” The circus tycoon P. T. Barnum, self-proclaimed “Prince of Humbugs”, metamorphoses into a kind of Kafkaesque freakshow: his head growing out of a carapace with six candlewick legs. Here the Comic Natural History’s technique itself becomes a spoof of Barnum, whose fame was partially owed to his “Fee-jee Mermaid” — a hoax and monstrous cut-up of baboon, orangutan, and piscine parts. While many creatures in this comic bestiary represent specific people, others appear to satirize broader nineteenth-century types. The authors claim that Audubon, for instance, overlooked the Jail Bird, a trickster that is “often taken by hand to be confined in a cage, under the vain hope that it may learn to change its tune”. In the wild, the bird can be found near a fence with shiny things in its beak. Jail Birds are often caught by the Stool Pigeon, who is “a spy of the police”, eavesdropping at “ins and outs, ups and downs, churchs, court houses, play houses, poor houses, jail houses, hot houses, beer houses, hose houses, &c. &c.” The bird must be able to get on each particular “lay,” know all the “stalls”—be up to any “dodge,” ready for every “double,” apt at a “spot,” and “leary” at a “pull,” “shady” at a “blow,” and unerring at a “pipe,” “down upon a “plant,” certain as to the “swag,” know a “Thimble” from a “Peter” or “dummy,” and the “kickes clye” from the “pit,” and take a “tip” when “all’s right,” not always “lagg,” the crossman or put him in “quay.” Now a man to do all this must be “a bird.” One of the most popular American comic illustrators in this period, when the genre was still emerging, Stephens published this volume in parts before assembling the lithographs as the book featured above. Additional humorists may have been involved with the text, as the index credits W. A. Stephens, Cornelius Matthews, Richard Vaux, and Thomas McKeon. Other supposed contributors were more likely H. L. Stephens himself, writing under pseudonyms such as “Ali Baba the Woodcutter”. The entries signed “C.” were the work of an actual ornithologist, John Cassin, who served as Vice President of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and died from arsenic poisoning after mishandling corpses. He wrote to Spencer F. Baird, the Smithsonian Institute’s first curator, in 1851 to advertise his comic endeavor: “Stephens and I are very busy getting up a lot of the greatest nonsense you ever saw.” And there is, indeed, a great deal of nonsense. But the images themselves make use of a familiar set of sensical conventions. Imagining human heads on the bodies of animals has a long history: manticores and Zakariya al-Qazwini’s thirteenth-century hybrids are just a few of many precedents. Stephens’ illustrations rely upon a kind of correspondence between the qualities of individuals and their mirrors in the animal world — thus utilizing a logic closer to what’s at play in medieval bestiaries and antiquarian works of natural history than the pure imagination exhibited in, say, Edward Lear’s nonsense botany. In contrast to these images, the Comic Natural History’s prose is, at times, wonderfully innovative and seemingly outside of an obvious tradition. During a section on “The Little Dear”, an elkish satyr wearing tear-drop earrings and a crucifix, for example, our narrator gets lost in echolalia: My dear is apt to become an abstraction; or like many titles, duke, baron, and others, signifying nothing, or only something that has been. So changeable is language. . . . The children are mamma’s dears, the young ladies are pretty dears,—and the ladies that are married are very distinctly their husbands dears, and those that are not married are quite as distinctly their own dears; and all of us have found out,—or if we have not, we will find out that many a thing in this world is by far too dear, and so —— Oh dear!—we are quite exhausted—that’s all. North American natural history was, from some of its earliest incarnations, as much concerned with questions of national identity as it was attentive to the characteristics of flora and fauna on this newly colonized continent. Stephens’ comic natural history is no exception in the former regard. And perhaps that helps explain what is going on with all these “dears” and the cant of the Stool Pigeon above. Referencing great works of European and classical natural history throughout the book, Stephens and his contributors seek to assemble something homegrown and uniquely Philadelphian: “We have made the first effort in a species of Comic Literature, hitherto unknown in our city.” This new kind of comic literature requires a new idiom, the kind employed and referenced throughout the Comic Natural History. Americans have “a peculiarity of diction, as well in language, as in poetry and idiom and phrase, unlike the rest of mankind”, for the English language has been “outrageously corrupted” in the United States, creating “a new, or unknown tongue”. Embracing this unknown tongue, The Comic Natural History helped establish a habitat in which later species of American political cartoons could flourish. Below you can find a selection of the lithographs that appear in The Comic Natural History of the Human Race, courtesy of the Met.

public-domain-review

Jun 20, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:29.342732

raman-sea

A Distinct Phenomenon in Itself: C. V. Raman’s Discovery of Why the Sea is Blue (1921) Text by Hugh Aldersey-Williams Jul 20, 2023 In September 1921, a largely unknown Indian scientist was returning from his first trip overseas where he had attended an international universities congress in Oxford. He had ample time as his ship, SS Narkunda, made its way to Bombay via the Suez Canal to consider more deeply a question that had begun to concern him ever since his first voyages shuttling between Calcutta and Rangoon as a young civil servant in British-ruled India: why is the sea blue? In 1899, the English physicist Lord Rayleigh had breezily dismissed the matter. “The much admired dark blue of the deep sea has nothing to do with the colour of water”, he wrote, “but is simply the blue of the sky seen by reflection.” However, the Indian scientist begged to differ. Staring over the steamer’s rail at “the deeper waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas”, C. V. Raman saw, with the aid of a special prism to eliminate reflected sky light, that the blue was more intrinsic. In a short paper, which would later appear in Nature, penned even before stepping off the Narkunda in Bombay harbour, he wrote: “It was abundantly clear from the observations that the blue colour of the deep sea is a distinct phenomenon in itself, and not merely an effect due to reflected skylight. . . . the hue of the water is of such fullness and saturation that the bluest sky in comparison with it seems a dull grey.” Rayleigh had explained the blue of the sky using a formula to describe the scattering of sunlight by molecules in the air. In this process, the light preserves its wavelength or colour, with short-wavelength blue light scattered more effectively than other colours of longer wavelength. When he had completed further experiments in Calcutta, Raman confirmed that a similar effect pertained for light encountering water molecules, with the blue light scattered most effectively and other colours quickly absorbed, leading the sea to appear saturated by blue. Raman’s almost painterly obsession with the nature of light and colour would lead to other discoveries, and in 1930 won him the early accolade of the Nobel Prize for Physics, the first time the prize had been awarded to a non-Western scientist. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born in 1888 into a middle-class Brahmin family in Tamil Nadu. Upon obtaining his master’s degree in physics from the University of Madras, but with limited opportunity for a career in research, he joined the financial branch of the Indian Civil Service, and was posted to Calcutta. He pursued his own investigations as far as he could using basic equipment, exploring the acoustics of sound waves and musical instruments, including the Indian ektara, sitar, and tanbur, ignored by Western scientists, as well as analogous wave phenomena in light, and especially the way light is scattered as it passes through different translucent media. This work led to his appointment as professor of physics at the University of Calcutta by the age of twenty-five. In 1927, continued studies revealed that while most light retained its original wavelength when scattered, a small fraction of it produced a feeble glow at different wavelengths. The effect was very weak, and correspondingly hard to study. However, it would turn out to have huge implications. As the Associated Press of India reported: The principal feature observed is that when matter is excited by light of one colour, the atoms contained in it emit light of two colours, one of which is different from the exciting colour and is lower down the spectrum. The astonishing thing is that the altered colour is quite independent of the nature of the substance used. . . . There is in addition a diffuse radiation spread over a considerable range of the spectrum. Raman conservatively attempted to describe his discovery in terms of the wave theory of light, in analogy with some of his early work on acoustics and musical instruments. In fact, a proper explanation required quantum theory, with the changes in the scattered light’s wavelength being associated with changes in the quantum energy levels of the scattering molecules. Although Raman was no fan of quantum theory, what soon came to be known as the “Raman effect” turned out to provide important evidence for the quantum nature of light. Raman’s curiosity was always stimulated by looking. His descriptions from his voyage aboard the Narkunda make that clear. His analysis of the colours of the sea takes into account the brightness of the day, the weather, the exact shape of the sea waves, and his own angles of observation. He observed light and colour with an artist’s unsparing eye, and often found a scientific question to be answered, whether it was to do with the twinkling of stars or the colours that arise when a sheet of steel is strongly heated. It was only with the invention of the laser in 1960 that the Raman effect at last made the transition from laboratory curiosity to useful tool. Using this intense source of single-wavelength light, it was now possible to record spectra of the weak scattered light. Raman spectroscopy is today used in all forms of chemical analysis. It has proved especially valuable for analysing pigments and other materials in order to determine the authenticity or otherwise of works of art because it does not require the taking of a sample from the work, and some notable forgeries have been revealed in this way. In 1930, Raman had been so confident he would win the Nobel Prize that he booked tickets for Sweden several months before the announcement was made. He was lucky: the award might have gone to two Soviet scientists who had made the same discovery. Raman later recalled the ceremony in Stockholm: I, the only Indian, in my turban and closed coat, it dawned on me that I was really representing my people and my country. . . . Then I turned round and saw the British Union Jack under which I had been sitting and it was then that I realized that my poor country, India, did not even have a flag of her own. Speaking on Indian radio shortly after receiving the prize, he offered his personal definition of science as “a fusion of man’s aesthetic and intellectual functions devoted to the representation of nature. It is therefore the highest form of creative art.”

public-domain-review

Jul 20, 2023

Hugh Aldersey-Williams

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:29.791379

an-adventure

In the Mind of Marie: A Haunting Encounter in the Gardens of Versailles (1913) Text by Sasha Archibald Jun 6, 2023 In 1901, two British women just getting to know each other took a trip to Paris. The day they visited Versailles, things turned strange. They were wandering in the gardens, hoping to find Petit Trianon, a smaller palace that had been the home of Marie Antoinette, when they began to see unusual things: people in antiquated clothing, a man with dark, pitted skin, a breathless servant delivering an urgent message to a woman sketching on the ground. The atmosphere was strange too, heavy and unsettling. Things seemed flat and otherworldly; Moberly wrote later of feeling “an extraordinary depression” and a “dreamy, unnatural oppression”. In time, the women joined a tour group, and the feeling went away. Everything felt normal again. The whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than thirty minutes. A week later, the women agreed that the Petit Trianon was probably haunted, and decided to separately write down what they remembered of their walk. When comparing notes, they found some conspicuous differences. Charlotte Moberly had seen a woman in plain sight right near the path, for instance, whereas her companion, Eleanor Jourdain, had no recollection of this person. Both found these discrepancies intriguing, and decided they were part of the queer uncanniness of the whole incident. Jourdain and Moberly worked at the Oxford women’s college St. Hugh’s. At the time of the Paris visit, Moberly was fifty-five and headmistress; Jourdain, eighteen years younger, was her incoming assistant. It was a few months later, when Jourdain was researching her lesson on the French Revolution, that she discovered their visit to the gardens happened on the 109th anniversary of the Storming of the Tuileries Palace — the day that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had watched the slaughtering of their guards, and were imprisoned. Some Parisians, Jourdain learned, believed Versailles was haunted on this particular day. This set their wheels turning, but it didn’t quite make sense. Jourdain and Moberly had not witnessed a violent takeover, but a prosaic afternoon. Then the two women, who had by now become quite close, had a creative epiphany: perhaps they hadn’t visited the actual events of August 10th, 1792, but the mindscape of Marie Antoinette on that day. According to Jourdain and Moberly’s theory, as the Queen was on tenterhooks, awaiting execution, she naturally reflected back — as anyone in her position might do — to the first time she’d been told of a threat to the crown. That had happened three years previously, in 1789. Jourdain and Moberly found a description of this scene in a book written by a gardener’s wife, who was present. Antoinette had been sitting in her favorite grotto when a servant ran up to tell her there was a mob approaching the castle. This was precisely what Moberly and Jourdain had witnessed! “We had inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory”, the two concluded. No wonder they’d felt entrapped — they had been trapped: in the despondent mind of Marie Antoinette. It was time travel with a hairpin twist; they’d landed in the psyche of a woman in 1792 who was thinking about 1789. Jourdain and Moberly were astonished when the Society for Psychical Research dismissed their story as lacking credibility. They resolved to marshal evidence, and spent the next nine years on elaborate, painstaking research. Through interviews, archival sleuthing, and repeated visits to France, they coaxed facts from the woodwork. The women “proved”, for instance, that the plow they’d noticed was from an earlier era; that a door they’d heard slam hadn’t been unlocked for at least a century; that Marie Antoinette’s personal bodyguards wore coats of the grayish green color they remembered; that her seamstress had made her a green silk bodice and semi-transparent white fichu exactly like they’d seen. Some far-off violin music was decisively identified as eighteenth-century light opera, and the incidental children were matched to the age and gender of the gardeners’ children. The women’s archival zeal brokered no limits. They tracked down records of payment for the clearing of dead leaves, the material composition of 1780s shoe buckles, and the gardeners’ method of eradicating invasive caterpillars. In Moberly and Jourdain’s eyes, this crazy-quilt accretion of labyrinthian detail cemented their case. Thus armored, they decided to publish An Adventure (1911), an account of their experiences. The book was furnished with a timeline, appendices, copious footnotes, and even several archival maps, intended to prove that Moberly and Jourdain’s walking path was solely consistent with Versailles’ 1789 landscaping. An Adventure was very popular; 11,000 copies sold in the first two years, and it went through at least six subsequent editions. The story doesn’t end there, however, because Jourdain and Moberly’ obsessive fixation had the curious effect of soliciting their readers’ own obsessive fixation. Terry Castle’s essay about the affair describes An Adventure as transmitting an “infection” — an infection that caused normal people to pore over minutiae for years on end, so as to take impassioned sides in what would seem to be a very low-stakes argument. Article after article, and even, unbelievably, book after book, debated whether Moberly and Jourdain were telling the truth. To subsequent editions of An Adventure the co-authors added yet more “proof”, which fanned the controversy instead of settling it. The most salacious of the takedowns, according to Castle, was published by a former student of the pair: Lucille Iremonger’s 1957 The Ghosts of Versailles. (By this point, Moberly and Jourdain had been dead for two decades, but the debate raged on; the saga was the occasion of a London symposium a year later.) Iremonger dropped two bombshells. First, that the two women, contrary to what they publicly claimed, had had various other paranormal experiences. Iremonger alleged that Moberly had privately described many apparitions, including visions of medieval monks, the Roman Emperor Constantine wandering the Louvre, the spirit of her dead father as a dazzling white bird. Jourdain also had visions, though they were more paranoiac; in fact, she died of a heart attack after she convinced herself that her staff was plotting mutiny. The other revelation was that the two women were lesbians. Iremonger alleged that their relationship was exactly like that of “husband and wife”, and detailed who was dominant in what respect, going so far as to speculate the dynamics of their affinity. Naturally, Iremonger brought up homosexuality to impugn the women’s credibility, but nowadays, the allegation reads differently. In a saga awash in detail, this detail bobs above the others. What really happened? Here’s one version: two women of uncommon intelligence spent decades asserting the validity of their particular shared experience. They fought tooth and nail to prove that they saw what they saw, that it mattered, that it was real, and that they were credible. It was an argument about ghosts, but it might not have been about ghosts at all.

public-domain-review

Jun 6, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:30.274410

fraktur-folk-art

Fraktur Folk Art (ca. 1750–1820) Text by Sasha Archibald Mar 30, 2023 The southeastern corner of what is now Pennsylvania was once home to entire towns of religious dissidents. All had been persecuted in Europe, and sought freedom in the colonies. There were clusters of Mennonites, Moravians, Lutherans, and various other German-Protestant sects, some obscure and eccentric. Residents of the Ephrata Cloister, for instance, practiced extreme calorie restriction, sleep deprivation, and celibacy. Another group followed the sixteenth-century teachings of Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, a bearded, deaf ornithologist who split ways with Martin Luther over the meaning of the sacrament. These motley religious communities had significant theological differences, but shared a great deal as well — they were farmers who spoke German, prized religious tolerance, and practiced the same distinctive artform: fraktur. Fraktur is named after the font — heavy, angular, old-timey — which is usually called “blackletter” in the United States. Fraktur was ubiquitous in eighteenth-century Germany, and it remained so long after other European countries switched to the more readable Roman. (Fraktur is now associated with the Nazis, who used it extensively in propaganda, going so far as to outfit government offices with Fraktur typewriters.) How did the name of a font become the name of an art form? Fraktur art existed at the edges of text, as a decorative accessory of writing. It embellished fraktur script. In Pennsylvania and beyond, baptismal records, land deeds, certificates of accomplishment, bookplates, birth registries, and sometimes valentines were lettered in German-language fraktur, and decorated with the hearts, vines, and tulips that came to be characteristic of fraktur art. Fraktur has its origins in folk art traditions from Alsace, Switzerland, and the Rhineland, but in America it became more colorful, elaborate, and freehand, and far more apt to dominate the script it sought to embellish. The genre’s golden age was the period between 1790 and 1830 — a time when the American religious context was still strong, but the European influence less stultifying. The forms are highly stylized. Hearts, flowers, angels, and various birds are repeated over and over, to soothing effect. The palette favors bold primary colors, traditionally made of inks concocted from berries, iron oxide, and apple juice. The composition is orderly. The tidy leaves of the tidy vines are perfectly equidistant, and the flowers pared down to floral symbols. The goldfinch that appears in many fraktur images is drawn in such a specific way it’s still known by its German name: distelfink. Symmetry reigns, and when it doesn’t, the composition is otherwise balanced. One of the most common fraktur motifs is the “three-heart design” wherein a large heart is complemented by two smaller hearts on either side of its apex — in fraktur, even the most curvaceous of shapes assumes the rootedness of a square. Fraktur scholars and aficionados can distinguish Ephrata Cloister fraktur from Schwenkfeld fraktur from Mennonite fraktur. They can also identify the work of certain artists by sight —whether by name, or, for those who left their work unsigned, by epithet: the Nine Hearts artist or the Stoney Creek artist. But to simply appreciate the form, no expertise is necessary. Fraktur is straightforward and earnest. There is no irony and no secret code. Its pleasures are the homey kind. To contemporary eyes, the imagery signals feminine domesticity, but it wasn’t always so. Nearly all fraktur artists were men, and the papers they embellished were civic and religious documents. It is true, however, that fraktur was designed for private, domestic pleasures. It was not an artform of display or exhibition, but of personal devotion. Some of the most beautiful examples of fraktur are bookplates, hidden most of the time. Collectors and art historians have tried various ways of elevating Fraktur’s aesthetic status. One line of argument contends that the hearts and birds are all symbolic, such that each composition contains a decodable message. Others have tried to prove a direct lineage from medieval illumination. The evidence for either of these claims is so thin that the motivation behind them becomes suspect. Not all art need grasp toward grand significance to be enjoyed. A private pleasure, a small delight, a flourish both unnecessary and perfectly lovely is reason enough to look, and look again.

public-domain-review

Mar 30, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:30.724807

hokusai-warriors

Hokusai’s Illustrated Warrior Vanguard of Japan and China (1836) Text by Koto Sadamura Jul 19, 2023 Until the age of seventy, nothing I drew was worthy of notice. At seventy-three years, I was somewhat able to fathom the growth of plants and trees, and the structure of birds, animals, insects and fish. —Katsushika Hokusai, One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, 1834 One year after this statement, seventy-six-year-old Hokusai drew a series of warrior images that included the figures above: Hirai Yasumasa (958–1036) subduing a monster spider, Tsuchigumo. Lines in the background trace the motion of the gigantic arachnid as it tumbles and its sickle-like legs flail in the air, emphasizing the movement and force in a way that resonates with the visual effects of modern manga. This image is dynamic; and yet it gives the impression of a perfectly paused still-frame — the monster’s eyes meeting our own — as the moment is immortalized. This scene is part of a woodblock-printed book by Hokusai, titled Wakan ehon sakigake, which assembles images of famous Japanese and Chinese warriors, both historical and legendary. The Japanese term sakigake in the title signifies outstanding figures or leaders (Wakan means Japanese and Chinese, and ehon is a picture book). In the preface, Hokusai explains that the publisher Sūzanbō asked him to “fill three volumes with ‘wisdom’ [chi], ‘humanity’ [jin] and ‘bravery’ [yū], using examples of widely celebrated mighty heroes as reminders of military arts even in times of peace”. The second volume was published as Illustrated Stirrups of Musashi (Ehon Musashi abumi, 1836) and the third was advertised at the end of this sequel as Picture Book in the Katsushika-style (Ehon Katsushika-buri), but appears never to have been published. The block-ready drawings for the third, uncompleted volume were subsequently bound in a luxury album format that is now at the Met. Following the passage quoted above from One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, Hokusai goes on to express his ultimate desire fully to master the art of the brush: “At one hundred and ten, every dot and every stroke will be as though alive”. Already in these images we witness that he was not too far from this achievement. No two dots or lines are the same. Each tiny leaf growing on the rocks and each textural mark on the ragged surface is animated, filling the picture with vibrating energy. Every single strand of hair is charged with life. Such pictorial magic was the result of Hokusai’s masterful draughtsmanship and the skill of the highly accomplished woodblock cutters, Egawa Tomekichi and Sugita Kinsuke. We also witness the expertise of the printer who realized these sharp, well-articulated lines and the delicately-gradated texture of the monster spider. Egawa Tomekichi was designated personally by Hokusai as someone who could accurately transfer his brush lines onto woodblocks for printing. The Hokusai scholar Nagata Seiji has pointed out that the time of this book’s production coincided with the most challenging period in the artist’s life. Made in the middle of the Tenpō era’s (1830–44) great famine, the images were produced while Hokusai was in the midst of financial difficulties due to family troubles. He left the capital city of Edo for a period and even used an assumed name. In one of his letters during this time, Hokusai wrote that improving his drawing and painting skills was the only pleasure that remained to him. These vigorous images of military tales do not hint at any physical decline due to his advanced age, nor emotional exhaustion from the personal hardships and poverty he experienced. When he was seventy-five years old, Hokusai started to use another art name “Gakyō rōjin”, which can be translated as “old man crazy to paint”, combined with “Manji” (卍; the reverse swastika), an auspicious symbol used in Buddhism. These names help convey his never-ending ambition to master the arts of drawing and painting. It is with this burning ardor that Hokusai tackled his project of the late great warrior books.

public-domain-review

Jul 19, 2023

Koto Sadamura

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:31.231583

denishawn-dance-film

Denishawn Dance Film (ca. 1916) Text by Hunter Dukes May 30, 2023 “In a word, we dreamed about a school of life”, wrote Ruth St. Denis about founding, with her husband Ted Shawn, the Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. Filmed across two or three summers between 1915 and 1917, according to the New York Public Library, the three-minute silent picture above offers a glimpse into the early activities of their school, when it was housed at the Parkinson Estate on the corner of Sixth Street and St. Paul Avenue in Los Angeles, and, from 1917, at the Westlake School for Girls. After a brief clip of guests arriving in formal dress to the Denishawn estate — perhaps attendees of a “supper dance” — we are met with a sustained scene of undress, as woman after woman emerges from a changing room, dispensing robes to a turbaned attendant and revealing their one-piece swimsuits with understated flourish. The bathing costumes were the school’s uniform. As Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) describes in her autobiography, “We put bathing suits on them for working clothes, and turn them out into the sun. The release they felt from the circumscription of their ordinary lives filled the days with an artless charm and freedom.” Many of these students in the early days of Denishawn were local women, who paid $1 a day for classes, meals, and lectures. In a proto-Hollywood publicity stunt, Ted Shawn (1891–1972) was known to invite photographers to the grounds with the promise of bathing ladies, and seeded a rumor, reports Paul Scolieri, that “there was a heavy uptick in rental fees for the apartments in the building that faced the Denishawn property.” Subsequent scenes show a typical day of training. St. Denis leads a seated arm movement, which cuts to students wearing pashminas and head-carrying pots. Shawn auditions a young girl on pointe, before retreating for the garden to thumb through a French costume book. St. Denis wields a peacock feather and pets its living source in a windy colonnade. (The bird was an anniversary gift from her husband; it later escaped, as Shawn did not yet believe that peacocks could fly.) Perhaps St. Denis is practicing The Legend of the Peacock, her long-running solo that had begun as an improvisation on what Jane Sherman describes as “the frustration of being imprisoned in bejeweled vanity”. The film concludes abruptly after the students take a well-earned swim, and two people, likely Shawn and St. Denis, sit down for tea. ※※Indexed under…DancePeacock Describing his adolescent desires as “completely bisexual”, Shawn had met St. Denis two years earlier, when she invited him blindly for a cup of tea in her Upper West Side apartment. By this point, more than a decade older than Shawn, St. Denis was already a dancer of international renown. Trained in the Delsarte method, which aimed to systematize the expression of emotion through gesture, she became known for her orientalist performances — inspired by an image of the Egyptian goddess Isis that she had once seen on an advert for cigarettes in a Buffalo pharmacy. Shawn had been working at the Los Angeles City Water Department, studying and teaching physical expression in the evenings. Moving to California from Denver in 1912, he had arrived at the same moment that modern ragtime and silent films two-stepped onto the LA scene. His own Edison Company movie, Dances of the Ages (1913), allowed him to save $3000 and attend Bliss Carmen and Mary Perry King’s Uni-Trinian School of Personal Harmonizing and Self-Development, familiarizing the dancer with the Delsartian mode out of which St. Denis had crafted her style. When the future partners met in her New York sitting room in 1914, it was not quite love at first sight. Shawn recorded his initial impression: “Barefoot, she walks like Helen of Troy; in high heels, Helen of Troy, New York”. St. Denis, in turn, saw before her a man burdened by sexual insecurity, wrestling with “all of the great problems and desires and perplexities of his own nature that were yet to come.” Tea became dinner, they chatted past midnight, and Shawn returned the next day to perform his Dagger Dance, about an Aztec warrior trying to avoid ritual sacrifice. They agreed to tour together, falling in love in Paducah, Kentucky. Shawn proposed; St. Denis declined. Weeks later, she wrote him a twenty-six-page letter, describing “an all around living, progressing, experimenting partnership — in which sex in its particular sphere is a part but not the whole — this is my sense of love + loyalty + fidelity — first of all a friend, then a lover.” Nine months after marrying, the Denishawn school was born. In its early days, Denishawn was a complex mix of freedom, orientalism, and scientific racism. Ted Shawn viewed dance and eugenics as two methods for incubating idealism in the body. Ruth St. Denis agreed and they co-published articles with titles such as “Dancing Real Factor in Developing Strong and Virile Race of Men”. As Paul Scolieri writes in his recent biography of Shawn, the teacher “reasoned that his idealized white male body had the capacity to perfect the non-European, non-Christian dances he performed”. The school’s fetishism for North African, Indian, and East Asian imagery was, in part, an attempt to inhabit a kind of universal consciousness. In Dance We Must (1950), a volume of Shawn’s collected lectures, he reflects on the “universal language” of dance — how, during the famed Denishawn “Tour of the Orient” in 1925 and 1926, “the Orientals understood us, for we were human beings moving rhythmically and expressively in a manner which the Chinese, Japanese and Malays all understood and enjoyed.” Shawn also had a more-personal motive for his ethnic cosplay — his masculine representations of Eastern warriors and whirling dervishes helped separate his performances from the charge of homosexuality that hung over male dancers in this period. Though some of its methods appear flawed to modern eyes, Denishawn’s later influence cannot be understated. Pioneers of modern dance such as Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman trained at the school. Countless film stars, including the Gish sisters, Louise Brooks, and Mabel Normand, studied movement with St. Denis and Shawn. The couple’s partnership in life and art crumbled after both spouses became involved with the same lover, but they never divorced. Describing his final duet with St. Denis before their separation in 1931, Shawn commented: “The two of us were going up and up and up, remembering all the love of the earth but still lovers of infinite distance and infinite space, and still always up, going up.”

public-domain-review

May 30, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:31.768618

punctuation-personified

Punctuation Personified (1824) Text by Hunter Dukes Apr 27, 2023 Ev’ry lady in this landHas twenty nails upon each handFive & twenty on hands & feetAnd this is true without deceit.But when the stops were plac’d aright,The real sense was brought to light. The child protagonist of Punctuation Personified: or, Pointing Made Easy (1824) reads aloud without pause. Robert “gabbled so fast” and “ran on with such speed” that “all meaning he lost”. That is, until Mr. Stops comes to his aid. With commas for feet and a colon torso, Mr. Stops walks with a curly-brace cane and sports a typographical dagger in his section-symbol belt. Even his hand is a manicule, his hat a caret. Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”. Less common typographical marks get clustered into Arcimboldo-esque assemblages: a dash, circumflex, accent acute and grave, diereses, hyphen, and breve compose a rosy leafleteer, handing out fliers on punctuation to tentative children. And other personifications trade on iconic resemblances: ? is a “little crooked man” with a bent back and hat beneath his feet; ¶ carries a bindle and boards a boat toward distant shores, for the pilcrow announces something “distinct from what was read before”. In addition to providing children with images for remembering the unnatural conventions of writing, Punctuation Personified offers guidelines for translating these marks back into spoken language. When reading aloud, count one for a comma, two after a semicolon, and four following a full stop. This hierarchy parrots the instructions given in Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1795), a book that sold more than twenty million copies and remained influential throughout the nineteenth century. In this period, however, it was not uncommon for “pointing” to be supplemental — the work of printers, compositors, and correctors, who received manuscripts wholly lacking in spaces for breath. During Making a Point, David Crystal quotes John Smith’s Printer’s Grammar (1755), which illustrates the practice: “[some authors] point their Matter either very loosely or not at all: of which two evils, however, the last is the least; for in that case a Compositor has room left to point the Copy his own way.” This had a further unifying effect on punctuation and led to “a growing rapprochement between grammarians and printers”. And yet, the problem of individual usage remained. Realizing that the rules of punctuation were mystifying to children, authors of books like Punctuation Personified attempted to systematize the deployment of these signs from a young age. Published by John Harris as part of the Novelties for the Nursery series, Punctuation Personified was one of several books in this era that visualized language for pedagogical ends. The Infant’s Grammar (1822) held a picnic party for the parts of speech; Osbourne’s Pictorial Alphabet (1835) vitalized the ABCs in classical scenes. And the tradition lives on: Barbara Cooper’s 2000s series of picture books introduces Alan Apostrophe, Christopher Comma, and Emma Exclamation Point. Charming as can be, the illustrations for Punctuation Personified seem to wink at a deeper wisdom: far from dead things, these silent symbols enliven writing, opening space for the entrance of breath and understanding. Below you can browse the hand-colored engravings from Punctuation Personified. Mr. Stops would return in Madame Leinstein’s The Good Child’s Book of Stops, or, Punctuation in Verse (ca. 1825), which can be read at archive.org.

public-domain-review

Apr 27, 2023

Hunter Dukes

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:32.289230

san-francisco-calamity

Eyewitness Accounts of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake Text by Sasha Archibald May 23, 2023 The San Francisco Calamity by Earthquake and Fire (1906) was known in the publishing industry as an “instant disaster book”. This genre coalesced partly because there were so many disasters at the turn of the last century: the 1889 Johnstown Flood; the 1900 Galveston Hurricane; the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée; the 1903 Iroquois Theatre Fire; the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904; the 1904 burning of the steamboat General Slocum; and finally, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, which killed over 3,000 people and destroyed 80% of the city. All of these became topics of books that followed a certain pattern. A journalist was hastily dispatched to the scene, he furiously filed copy, the page count was fattened up with previously published odds and ends, and images were cut in, the more the better. Get the book to market before interest flits away. The author of The San Francisco Calamity was Charles Morris, though he’s actually credited as editor, an elision that allowed publishers a freer rein on the book’s final components. Morris was a professional writer who published a great number of popular histories, as well as pseudonymous dime store novels. It’s not clear when he arrived in San Francisco from Philadelphia, nor when he finished his manuscript, but his publisher claimed it was a matter of weeks. If the book wasn’t the first account of the earthquake, it was certainly among the first. The San Francisco Calamity justifies its length with a comparative survey of many other earthquakes, as well as a history of San Francisco, but the heart of the book is a small section that begins about fifty pages in, when Morris directly quotes his stunned interviewees. Their eyewitness accounts are sharp and disjointed, their experience not yet shorn of its surprise. Nothing has been smoothed or strategically forgotten. They describe a pageant of wretchedness, still unfolding. The billboard advertising beer that was converted into a public message board, and crowded with death notices. Thieves cutting off fingers and biting off earlobes to seize the jewelry of the dead. Shelters made of fine lace curtains and table cloths. Injuries seeping blood, and thousands of people with nothing to wear aside from their pajamas. Some survivors never stopped shrieking and others went comatose. Some refused to be parted with their piano, or their sewing machine, or their canary, or their lover’s body. Garbage wagons toted corpses. The air was thick with the smell of gas and smoke, and dangling electrical wires shot off blue sparks. Rich and poor, Chinese and white, were suddenly sleeping and eating side by side, to mutual bewilderment. (Between half and three-quarters of the population were made homeless.) There were shoot-to-kill orders for anyone caught looting, sometimes staged as public executions, and when a herd of cattle stampeded down a central street, passersby were gored and crushed. Water was so scarce that people lay on the ground to lap muddy puddles. As one man told Morris, “We are so drunken and dulled by horror that we take such stories calmly now. We are saturated.” The backdrop to all of this were interminable percussive blasts of dynamite. As is well known, spontaneous fires began almost immediately following the earthquake. As is less known, authorities used dynamite as a fire-fighting technique. There was no water, and they thought fire would spread less readily across rubble. It wasn’t very effective, and the collateral consequences were tremendous, but no other solution was at hand, so authorities kept at it, blowing up larger and larger patches of the city: first, select buildings, then half a block, then an entire block, and eventually, twenty-two blocks of Van Ness Avenue — a mile and a half of “handsome and costly” Victorian homes that were mostly untouched by the quake. For the better part of ten days, explosions happened every few minutes, day and night, each one ratcheting the panic and exacerbating the unease. Morris justifies his ambulance-chasing journalism in the preface. Time, he argues, will render everything into “one undecipherable mass of misery”. Getting the details while they’re fresh is important. Details make the historical record accurate, and they also solicit an appropriate measure of public sympathy. Morris’ intentions were probably not as lofty as he claims, but he’s right in the main: there is a colossal difference between knowing that there was a terrible earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, and knowing, say, that a woman gave birth in some scratchy shrubs, with no clothes or food or money or water, her house destroyed, blasts of dynamite sounding in the background. ※※Indexed under…Timeand the loss of detail

public-domain-review

May 23, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:32.784196

los-angeles-alligator-farm

Photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm (ca. 1907) Text by Erica X Eisen May 11, 2023 From 1907 until its relocation in 1953, the area of Lincoln Heights was home to what the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the city’s most exotic residents”: a thousand-strong collection of alligators that welcomed visitors every day of the year to see, pose with, and even ride them. The brainchild of Francis Earnest and “Alligator” Joe Campbell, the Los Angeles Alligator Farm housed its namesake creatures — some five hundred years old, if the rather fanciful ad copy is to be believed — in a series of age-segregated pools to prevent them from devouring each other. Along with nearby attractions like the Cawston Ostrich Farm and the Selig Zoo, the Alligator Farm was a mainstay of another major LA claim to fame: Hollywood. Billy, a denizen of the park that reportedly weighed over two hundred pounds, proved particularly popular on studio lots because, as one journalist put it, “his jaws automatically opened when a chunk of meat dangled above his head just above the camera’s field of vision”. The farm became such a local staple that LA fraternities reportedly demanded that new pledges kidnap alligators as part of their hazing rituals. Visitors — and their pets — could get alligator carriage rides or watch them rocket down slides; toddlers could have their picture taken with a crowd of hatchlings and even bring one home at the end of the day. Souvenirs sold by the park included postcards trafficking in “gator bait” imagery, a racist trope depicting Black children threatened by alligators that was common in American popular culture of the period. The lack of regulations for the safety of captive animals, staff, or visitors allowed for a level of casual proximity with adult alligators that would be unthinkable today. One photo shows a group of young women enjoying a half-submerged picnic in a park enclosure complete with what the caption claims to be a birthday cake for one of the reptiles. A keeper stands to one side, club in hand, to make sure nothing goes awry. Perhaps another picture offers a clue to what kept the creatures in line: a clutch of babies emerge from their incubator, only to be greeted in life by the sight of an enormous alligator-skin purse. Below you can browse photographs of the Los Angeles Alligator Farm courtesy of USC Libraries.

public-domain-review

May 11, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.110256

sundial-mottoes

“Though Silent, I Speak”: A Book of Sundial Mottoes (1903) Text by Sasha Archibald Apr 25, 2023 When thought needs a muse, it claims an evocative object. Long ago, love found hearts; secrets found keys; discovery found light; change found rivers. For many centuries this list would have had to include time finding sundials. Even the earliest sundials were inscribed with text, suggesting that a sundial was always both a way of telling time and a focal point for reflecting on its nature. Time has no voice, but sundial inscriptions pretend otherwise. In 1737, Charles Leadbetter published an instructional book called Mechanick Dialling: or, the New Art of Shadows about how to build a sundial. He included a selection of three hundred mottos, of which, he suggested, builders should choose one as the finishing touch on their project. The mottos were a small part of Leadbetter’s book, but as sundials entered their twilight of obsolescence, the mottos took on a life of their own. Other sundial enthusiasts began assembling and publishing collections of inscriptions, and reprinting Leadbetter’s. The task had a poetic hook: What can we learn about time from a timekeeping device made obsolete by its passage? Several books were ultimately published, among them Alfred H. Hyatt’s 1903 A Book of Sundial Mottoes. Hyatt selected sixty inscriptions, all drawn from Leadbetter, to which he added various quotes about sundials from famous writers, and his own ode-like introduction. It’s a small gift-type book, geared toward gardeners — sundials had by then become part of English country garden design. The book is awash in nostalgia, but the mottos less so. Most are bracing and hawkish. “This Dial Says Die”, for instance, makes the reader sit up straight, as does “Either Learn or Go”. Others deliver solid, if terse, advice, for example: “Do Today’s Work Today” and “Learn to Value Your Time”. A few are inscrutable, at least to this reader. “The Time Thou Killest Will in Time Kill Thee” might be a reference to harmful leisure habits, or it could darkly refer to all time, wherein time passed while living equals time killed. I was perplexed by “Opportunity has Locks in Front and is Bald Behind”, until my editors pointed out that the aphorism condenses a longer proverb, about Opportunity’s distinctive hairstyle. (“Opportunity has hair in front, behind she is bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again.”) Sundial advice is usually dispensed as generic wisdom, but occasionally the speaker reveals himself. One patriarch used his sundial to wag a finger at his progeny: “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark which Thy Father Hath Set Up.” The eeriest sundial inscriptions are written in the first person, as if the sundial is ventriloquizing time itself. What sorts of things does time say? Mostly ominous, haunting things, what one might expect from a hooded ghost with a scythe, not a sundial in an English country garden: “Look Upon Me. Though Silent, I Speak. For the Happy and the Sad, I Mark the House Alike. I Warn as I Move. I Steal Upon You. I Wait for None.” And also, stop looking at this sundial and get on with your life: “Begone About Your Business.”

public-domain-review

Apr 25, 2023

Sasha Archibald

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.629457

smillie-smithsonian

The Department of Preparation: Thomas Smillie’s Photographic Survey of the Smithsonian (1890–1913) Text by Erica X Eisen Jul 12, 2023 When Thomas William Smillie (1843–1917) was designated “custodian” of the Smithsonian Institution’s photographic “specimens” in 1896 — a position we might now call curator of photography — it was the first such appointment at any museum in the United States, and perhaps in the world. Until his death, the Scottish-born chemist would dedicate his life to building and presenting the Smithsonian’s collections, whose far-flung gamut, as Merry Foresta described it, included such categories as “ethnological and archaeological, lithological, mineralogical, ornithological, metallurgical, and perhaps the most enticing category of all, miscellaneous.” Though a scientist by training, Smillie did not confine his curatorial remit to technical illustrations. He worked with Alfred Stieglitz, for instance, to arrange the purchase of a group of important Pictorialist and Photo-Secessionist photos. In an annual report to the Smithsonian, Smillie stated his strong interest in amateur work, arguing that professional photography, being more bound by convention, often “affords less opportunity for originality and progress.” Smillie’s CV is a constellation of firsts. As the first official photographer at the Smithsonian (appointed in 1870), he traveled to Wadesboro, North Carolina, to observe a total solar eclipse, using telescope-mounted cameras to capture a set of truly awe-inspiring shots: the delicate corona of the sun against the twin voids of space and the light-annihilating moon. Smillie also started the Smithsonian’s collection of photographic devices — paying $23 for daguerreotype equipment used by Samuel Morse — and his purchase of a selection from the 1896 Washington Salon is considered the earliest known acquisition of art photography by a museum. He was notable, too, for mentoring a number of prominent women photographers, such as Frances Benjamin Johnston, who would later become much in demand for her portrait work, and Louisa Bernie Gallaher, who became an expert in photomicrography at the Smithsonian but whose work has often been incorrectly contributed to Smillie until recent attempts to correct the record. As well as accompanying scientific expeditions and curating the work of other photographers, Smillie also set out to document the extent of the Smithsonian’s holdings, from taxidermied animals to Marshallese navigation charts. The cyanotype format he chose for printing — which had the advantages of low cost and relative simplicity — gives his work a sea-soaked serenity and lends even the most prosaic objects a certain luxurious allure. One of the most curious aspects of Smillie’s photographic survey of the Smithsonian is that it encompasses what would normally be the almost invisible accoutrements of museological storage and display: showcases, racks, shelves, chests with parts pulled out and piled up before paper backdrops into oddly modish assemblages. In one such image, a single drawer is positioned delicately on a clock-draped stool, looking for all the world like a pensive sitter. Smillie was also known for taking photographs of letters, documents, and books, whether to make a personal copy of useful information or to preserve an important object in case of damage or disaster. Indeed, in a curious sort of mise-en-abîme, Smillie even had a penchant for taking photographs of photographs (is that one of Smillie’s own eclipse pictures that catches the viewer’s attention at the bottom of a display case?). In these and other images, we see his broad view of the medium’s potential: an indispensable tool and a mode of creative expression whose historical antecedents and chemical underpinnings deserved careful study and preservation lest they be forgotten.

public-domain-review

Jul 12, 2023

Erica X Eisen

collection

2024-05-01T21:38:33.977832