Santiago de Compostela

The Codex Calixtinus, an illuminated 12^th century manuscript comprised of five volumes, tells how the apostle James’ remains were transferred to Santiago de Compostela, was stolen from the cathedral  on July 5, 2011.  [A year later, it was subsequently discovered hidden in the garage of a former employee of the cathedral, Manuel Fernandez Castineiras, who had worked as a caretaker for more than 25 years at the cathedral, but was fired right before the theft early last year. He had been suing cathedral authorities for unfair dismissal.]

Written in the mid-1100s, book five of the Codex is a sort of a Michelin guide to Santiago, instructing pilgrims on the best routes to take & to avoid the Gascon ferrymen who overload their own boats in order to steal their drowned passengers’ goods, the document takes a dim view of the lands along the pilgrimage route.

An enterprising French monk – Aymery Picaud – enters the pages of history as the first writer of that now well-established literary genre, the travel guide, by documenting in detail the journey. He records not only such practicalities as water sources & lodging places, but warns of such eccentrics as the Navarrese Basques (who exposed themselves when excited & protected their mules from their neighbors with chastity belts). No wonder travel guides went on to become best sellers!

http://blog.oup.com/2012/07/the-meaning-of-the-codex-calixtinus-then-and-now/

Given the French influence in the Iberian peninsula’s cultural & political environment in which the pilgrimage to Santiago developed, the manuscript contains musical notation typical of central France. A section of the Codex added in the mid-12^th century comprises a collection of polyphonic compositions & a complete mass & office for the feast of Santiago.

“The Road to Compostela”, The Rose Ensemble’s program of chant and polyphony from the Codex Calixtinus, the CD is available for purchase/download at: http://bit.ly/18zoI17

M. Alison Stones, Prof of History of Art & Architecture, Univ of Pittsburgh  “The Manuscripts of the Codex Calixtinus”

Jerrilynn D. Dodds, Dean of the College, Sarah Lawrence College  “Art, Experience, & the Exotic on the Road to Santiago”

David L. Simon, Ellerton and Edith Jetté Professor of Art, Colby College “Art and Anecdote on the Road to Santiago“

Paula Gerson, Professor of Medieval Art, Florida State Univ.  “The 12th Century Pilgrim’s Guide to Santiago de Compostela: Art & Mores along the Routes“

Wikipedia, “Way of St. James“

 

Essentialism: Haecceity & Quiddity

Haecceity  hæk-see-ê-tee… from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing. Haecceity is a person or object’s “thisness”.

Whereas haecceity refers to aspects of a thing which make it a particular thing, quiddity refers to the universal qualities of a thing, its “whatness”, or the aspects of a thing which it may share with other things & by which it may form part of a genus of things.

Haecceity & quiddity have been subsumed under the term, “essentialism” which Richard Dawkins has called “the dead hand of Plato”

Barred from participating in the Olympics

Violette Paule Emilie Marie Morris (18 April 1893 – 26 April 1944),

The youngest of six sisters, she spent her adolescence in a convent, L’Assomption de Huy. She married Cyprien Gouraud on August 22, 1914. (They later divorced in May 1923).  With the onset of WWI he left for the front & she served as a nurse during the Battle of the Somme & as a motorcycle courier & ambulance driver during the Battle of Verdun.

Standing 5 ft 5 in tall & weighing 150 lb, she was a gifted athlete: soccer, water polo, tennis, archery, weightlifting, & Greco-Roman wrestling. A butch character who smoked two to three packs of cigarettes per day, she also was the French national boxing champion of 1923. She raced planes, motorcycles & automobiles (won the 1927 Bol d’Or, the 24 hour car race at Fontainebleau).  It was said that she underwent a double mastectomy in order to fit into her race car better. Evidently, one of her male lovers, Raoul Paoli (Raymond Simonpaoli), thought that her elective surgery went far beyond the androgynous garçonne-look, so he leaked the names of her female lovers to the press. Subsequently, she was refused license renewal by the Fédération française sportive féminine (French Women’s Athletic Federation) amid complaints of her lifestyle & was therefore barred from participating in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam.

It December 1935 she was a recruited by the Sicherheitsdienst, “SD,” the Nazi Security Service, to become a German informant.  She was even invited to attend the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin at the personal behest of Adolf Hitler. She gave Germany partial plans of the Maginot Line, detailed plans of strategic points within the city of Paris, & schematics of the French army’s cavalry tank, the Somua S35.

One of her responsibilities during the war was to penetrate French resistance networks which were assisted by the British SOE (Special Operations Executive). As a member of the Carlingue, a French auxiliary of the Gestapo, she was able to torture detainees with impunity; her sadism earning her the nickname of the “Gestapo’s Hyena”.  She was killed in a resistance-led ambush as a traitor to the French state.

Beach’s “Shakespeare and Company”

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) with the help of her partner, Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955), opened Shakespeare & Company in 1919.  Beach’s English-language bookshop was originally established on rue Dupuytren, moving to 12 rue de l’Odéon in 1921, where the store remained until 1941. The wooden Directoire facade of the shop was removed after the war, and the street-level frontage rebuilt in stone. Subsequently, it housed a gift store, a jeweller and, currently, a boutique for womens’ clothes. The only indication of its history is a small stone tablet between the floors noting that Ulysses was published there. The “new” Shakespeare & Company today is located at 37 Rue Bûcherie.

In the 1920s the store was a gathering place for writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford (English author; grandson of Ford Madox Brown), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, André Gide & James Joyce.

Beach initially published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, which was banned in the United States & in the United Kingdom. Subsequent editions were published under the Shakespeare & Company imprint in later years.

Beach was rounded up & sent to the Vittel detention camp at the end of 1942, but set free in 1943 because Monnier appealed to Jacques Benoist-Mechin, minister of police in the Vichy government. (Glass, Charles Americans in Paris: Life & Death under the Nazi Occupation  NY: Penguin, 2011).

Beach is buried in Princeton, NJ, where she lived before moving to Europe when her father became minister of the First Presbyterian Church.  Her papers are archived at Princeton University

Beecher-Tilton Affair

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-87)
liberal American Congregationalist (Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn) social reformer, abolitionist (held mock ‘auctions’ from his pulpit at which the congregation purchased the freedom of real slaves); advocate of women’s suffrage, temperance & Darwin’s theory of evolution. anti-Catholic.  son of Lyman Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe

Where is human nature so weak as in a book store?  “Subtleties of Book Buyers,” Star Papers (1855)
….Ye that mourn, let gladness mingle with your tears. It was your son, but now he is the nation’s….  “The Honored Dead” (1863) memorialized the Union dead; a popular piece for declamation among school children, also published as “Our Heroes Shall Live”
Humor is the atmosphere in which grace most flourishes.  Unjust Judgments (1874)

 

1875 Beecher-Tilton Affair

newspaper editor, poet & abolitionist Theodore Tilton (1835–1907), in 1874 filed criminal charges against Beecher for “criminal intimacy” with his (Tilton’s) wife, Elizabeth “Libby” Richards Tilton. Both Tiltons were members of Beecher’s Plymouth Church. The trial in 1875 became a national sensation. At the end of a six month trial, the jury could not agree, and Beecher was acquitted.

Prince Obolensky

Prince Serge Obolensky [Sergei (Serge) Platonovich, 5^th Knyaz Obolensky-Neledinsky-Meletzky] (1890-1978)

Scion of a wealthy White Russian family, the Oxford-educated Obolensky fled his native country after battling Bolsheviks as a guerrilla fighter. The tall, mustachioed aristocrat subsequently divorced Alexander II of Russia’s daughter, Princess Catherine Alexandrovna Yurievskaya, married the daughter of American financier & real-estate tycoon, John Jacob Astor, Ava Alice Muriel Astor, & settled in the U.S.  He later became Vice Chairman of the Board of Hilton Hotels Corporation.

24th July 1924: Prince Serge Obolensky, on the occasion of his second marriage

to Ava Alice Astor at Prince’s Bow Register Office, London.

At one point he was romantically linked to socialite, fashion icon, & Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers.  And evidently proposed marriage in spite of the fact that he was already married to the Czar’s daughter. [Burns, Cherie. Searching for Beauty (St. Martin’s Press, 2011).

He was named in a divorce suit by Edward James (wealthy patron of surrealist artists Dalí & Magritte) which accused him of having an adulterous affair with James’ wife, the Austrian -born dancer, choreographer, actress & painter (Albert C. Barnes bought one of her works), Ottilie Ethel Leopoldine “Tilly” Losch.  

During World War II, Obolensky was a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. paratroopers (made his first jump in 1943 at the age of 53) & a member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), forerunner of the CIA.  He helped captured Sardinia with a crew of three in 1943.

Lévi-Strauss able to see the planet Venus in broad daylight

In the 1977 Massey Lectures (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), which were subsequently published as Myth & Meaning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), Claude Levi-Strauss writes about how he found it problematic & “extremely mysterious” to discover that there was a particular tribe which he was studying that claimed to be able to see the planet Venus in broad daylight.  He thought it must be a myth. He went to astronomers to see if this were possible, and they assured him that it was actually possible that some people could, given the amount of light Venus emits.  He then went on to look at old treatises on navigation belonging to Western explorers, and found that sailors were able to see Venus in daylight. So he concluded, we could see Venus if we had a trained eye.  So, in his case as a European social anthropologist, he needed the affirmation of Western astronomers & then the treatises in order to believe the tribe’s claims were true.  There are things in front of us that we can only perceive if we have the framework.

illustrator, Shigeru Ito

Eve Babitz & Marcel Duchamp

Eve Babitz (1943-  ) parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky who was her godfather. Her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser’s photo of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of Art (since absorbed into the Norton Simon) curated by Walter Hopps, with whom incidentally Babitz was having an affair.

Sargent’s “An Interior in Venice” 1899

John Singer Sargent’s “An Interior in Venice” (1899) was rejected by the Curtis family it depicts for its unbecoming portrayal of the redoubtable matron, Ariana Curtis.  It was intended as a gift for Mrs Curtis in appreciation for the times Sargent stayed & worked in the house as his ‘Venetian base’.

This group portrait shows the grand saloon of the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice during the heyday of its ownership by the expatriate Americans Daniel Sargent Curtis (1825–1908), who was the artists first cousin once removed, & his wife Ariana Wormeley (1833–1922), who are seen on the right. Their son Ralph (1854–1922) & his wife Lisa De Wolfe Colt are at the tea table on the left.

Sargent presented it to the Royal Academy in London as his diploma work in December 1899, withdrawing his painting Professor Johannes Wolff which he submitted the previous year.

Henry James, who, on one of his extended visits to the Palazzo, wrote The Great Condition, commented in a letter to Mrs. Curtis: “The Barbaro Saloon … I absolutely & unreservedly adored…. I’ve seen few things of S’s that I’ve ever craved more to possess!”  James included a description of the room in his novel The Wings of the Dove.

Palazzo Barbaro became the hub of American life in Venice with visits not only from Sargent & James, but Whistler, along with Robert Browning & Claude Monet. Other members of the “Barbaro Circle” included Bernard Berenson, William Merritt Chase, Isabella Stewart Gardner, Charles Eliot Norton & Edith Wharton.  The Palazzi Barbaro are a pair of adjoining palaces. The first of the two palaces, the one owned by the Curtises, is in the Venetian Gothic style built in 1425. The second structure was executed in the Baroque style at the turn of the 18^th century.

Kierkegaard & commitment

Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is not through critical detachment, but in involved commitment.  How can we get meaning and commitment back into our lives once we have gotten into the passionless, reflective attitude we are now in?  If you can commit yourself unconditionally – in love for instance – then that becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede into insignificance on the basis of that ultimate concern… when you define yourself by your dedication to that concern, your world acquires seriousness, and significance…. As our culture comes more & more to celebrate critical detachment, self-sufficiency, & rational choice, there are fewer & fewer shared commitments.  So, commitment itself beings to look like craziness…. when there are no shared examples of greatness that focus public concerns and elicit social commitment, people become spectators of fads & public lives, just for the excitement.   Dreyfus, Hubert L.  “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology & Politics”

Vanity Fair Century

Hitchens, Christopher “The VF Century“  Vanity Fair, The Portraits: A Century of Iconic Images, by Graydon Carter and the editors of Vanity Fair, 2008

    To modernity, then. Without attempting an exhaustive definition, one can mention experiments with language and form, diminished respect for religion, the celebration of the fully fledged individual personality, the spread of images that are made with celluloid rather than with paint or stone,… and—this perhaps above all—the loosening of sexual repression. Improvisation in music ceases to be frowned upon. Travel becomes a theme, even a need. The concept of speed is pervasive, as perhaps is the awareness of time being short. Easy money and new money are not thought of as necessarily immoral, and gambling becomes an art. (The implosion of the great casino of Wall Street in 1929 nearly replaces the Titanic of 1912 as the surpassing image.) Censorship, given the profusion and proliferation of means of communication, becomes almost a thing of the past. Its counterpart—Prohibition—is the occasion for something like mass civil disobedience in America, with the flaunting of the cocktail shaker and the speakeasy… An ambivalent phrase—“the loss of innocence”—becomes familiar. People start to wise up.

    Vanity Fair—born in 1914 (after four ill-conceived issues in 1913…) shuttered in 1936—had already ceased to be… (The current Vanity Fair was relaunched, with much fanfare, in 1983)…. Published by the dapper Condé Nast (who also owned Vogue) and edited by the urbane Frank Crowninshield, was therefore the right magazine at the right time: delighting and confounding readers with modern art (by the likes of Picasso, Braque, and Gauguin), modern writers (from Cocteau to Huxley, Colette to Benchley, Gertrude Stein to D. H. Lawrence), and stunning photographic portraiture. In time, the magazine would be called “as accurate a social barometer of its time as exists.”

Paris Ritz

“When I dream of afterlife in heaven,” Hemingway once wrote, “the action always takes place in the Paris Ritz”. The Ritz, located in the 1st arrondissement, is in fact two edifices. The one that faces the Place Vendôme was originally the residence of Armand Louis de Gontaut, the Duc de Lauzun, who was one of the commanders of the French troops at Yorktown during the Revolutionary War. The other half is a building that backs up against it on the Rue Cambon. Residents included Hemingway & couturier Coco Chanel; Hermann Göring lived in the Ritz during the occupation of Paris. Proust wrote parts of Remembrance of Things Past there. George Widener, the son of P.A.B. Widener of Lynnewood Hall in Elkins Park, PA, had been staying there with his family before boarding the RMS Titanic at Cherbourg (P.A.B. held part ownership in the White Star Line).

On August 30, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales & Egyptian owner, Mohamed Al-Fayed’s son, Dodi, dined in the hotel’s Imperial Suite, which rents for $17,770 a night, before their fatal car crash.

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/2012/07/paris-ritz-history-france

Cézanne & Merleau-Ponty

• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice   “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in Sense & Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus,  Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964, pp. 9–25

Alexander, Sandra   “Beyond ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’,”  Journal of Visual Art Practice  4 (2005) 2

Bond, Bruce   “An Essay on ‘Homage to Paul Cézanne’,”  The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright.  Ed. Tom Andrews. Oberlin College Press, 1995

“I would love to believe the world is Platonic, but I think it’s Aristotelean” (Wright, Charles.  Halflife. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 1988, p.130).

Pissarro, Joachim  “Cézanne’s Very Particular Truth,” Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006

Shortly before his death in 1906, Cézanne said to Émile Bernard: “I owe you truth in painting, and I will communicate it to you” (Je vous dois la vérité en peinture, et je vous la dirai)…. In fact, the question of “truth” (or of the “ideal formula”) for painting had long been on Cézanne’s mind. This had even been the subject of a fierce battle (that almost ended in a physical fight) between Cézanne & Paul Gauguin in 1881… In the end, Cézanne can be described as having coined a new conception of “truth”…  the sources of this conception of truth originally derived from the group of Jena artists, critics, and philosophers who worked together in Germany in the 1790s (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).

Tuma, Kathryn A.  “Cézanne’s Failure,”   Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006 

Misc

• Apologue – A moral fable, usually featuring personified animals or inanimate objects which act like people to allow the author to comment on the human condition. Often, highlights the irrationality of mankind. George Orwell, Animal Farm; Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book & the fables of Aesop are examples

• Fitzgerald, F. Scott   The Great Gatsby  NY: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1925

“The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.” (40-1, at Gatsby’s party)

• Dewey, John     Democracy and Education  NY: Macmillan, 1916   http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/dewey/toc.html

a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up… Continuity of life means continual readaptation of the environment to the needs of living organisms.

• synesthesia, meaning “joined sensation”, shares a root with anesthesia, meaning “no sensation.”  denotes the rare capacity to hear colors, taste shapes. The neurological mixing of the senses. A synaesthete may, for example, hear colors, see sounds, and taste tactile sensations. Although this may happen in a person who has autism, it is also a common effect of some hallucinogenic drugs.

Cytowic, Richard E.   The Man Who Tasted Shapes: A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Reasoning, Emotion, & Consciousness. NY: Putnam. 1993
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton MacDonald-Wright & Morgan Russell. Their abstract “synchromies”, based on a theory of color that analogized it to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art.

• Duffy, Carol Ann (1955- ) British poet & playwright. Professor of Contemporary Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan Univ; appointed Britain’s poet laureate in May 2009 – the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly gay person to hold the position.

“He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy, but I am God…. We heard him through the window, heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.” (Luke 2:41-52) Based on Max Ernst, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses

• Holloway, Richard  How to Read the Bible, Granta Books, 2006

refers to he calls the “hermetic circularity” upon which claims for the Bible’s authority rests. The Bible is almost universally regarded as the inspired source of God’s revelation to humanity. Should anyone dare query on what authority this claim is made, the response is that the Bible says so. That this is a circular & therefore invalid argument is not a recent objection. It was made by none other than Matthew  Tyndale in 1730, with these words: It’s an odd jumble to prove the truth of a book by the truth of the doctrines it contains, and at the same time conclude these doctrines to be true because contained in that book.

• Harris, Adrian   “Notions of Embodied Knowledge”

Philosophy in the Flesh, Lakoff & Johnson claim that “What our bodies are like & how they function in the world…structure the very concepts we can use to think.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962

• Wittgenstein 

In the long aphorism xi of the second book of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein makes a distinction between “seeing” & “seeing as”.  To “see as” is something one learns to do.  It is based on a technique that one masters.  One might look at a map, say, without recognizing it for what it is.  But with a bit of training one learns to see the map differently and to use it as a guide around the city.  Before one does that, one has to learn to see as, that is to see the scriggly lines as streets

Theodore W. Adorno – “Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”

• Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903-69) notes

Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben) a 1951 seminal text in Critical Theory.
Norman, Carol  “‘Every Work of Art Is an Uncommitted Crime’: The Application of Sociological Theories of Deviance to Modern Art,” Internet Journal of Criminology  (2009) pdf
“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime”  Like crime, it often breaks societal rules, however, art is not typically against the law & for this reason it is ‘uncommitted crime’
Three movements in modern art are particularly associated with rule breaking. Chronologically,
❶ Impressionism & Post-Impressionism. The modern period & Impressionism began with Édouard Manet (1832-1883). At this time, cultural certainties were collapsing. Manet’s work, e.g., Le Dejeuner sur L’herbe’ (1863) reflected this & transgressed the traditional assumptions of the art canon in a number of ways (Gombrich 1972). He mixed secular & religious themes; he refuted the idealised conception of the female nude & painted nudes with individual character
❷ Surrealism & Dada  Example: Max Ernst’s ‘The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard and the Painter’ (1926) depicts the three wise men as surrealists and shows Christ as merely an ordinary naughty child. (Luke 2:41-52)
❸ Contemporary art

Cemeteries (selections)

Paris: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise  20th arrondissement

Abelard & Heloïse
Apollinaire, Guillaume
Balzac, Honoré de
Bernhardt, Sarah
Caillebotte, Gustave
Delacroix, Eugène
Ingres, Jean Auguste Dominique
Lalique, René
Marceau, Marcel
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice
Modigliani, Amedeo (& reinterred Jeanne Hébuterne)

Molière
Morrison, Jim
Proust, Marcel
Seurat, Georges-Pierre
Stein, Gertrude
Toklas, Alice B.
Wilde, Oscar (initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux. remains were transferred in 1909)

Rome: Cimitero degli Inglesi, Cimitero acattolico (“Non-Catholic Cemetery”)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe drowned off the Italian Riviera, ashes interred in the Protestant Cemetery (Cimitero protestante), officially the Cimitero acattolico (“Non-Catholic Cemetery”) in Rome; his heart, which his friend Edward John Trelawny had snatched from the flames, was kept by his widow Mary Shelley until her death & buried with her in the cemetery of St. Peter’s Church, Bournemouth (where her parents, William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft are interred, their remains having been moved there from St Pancras Old Church)
Keats, John  (1795-1821)

Florence: Cimitero Accatolico Cimitero Degli Inglesi
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (d. 1861) tomb designed by Lord Leighton; Holman Hunt sculpted tomb in Fiesole for wife Fanny (1833-66) who had died in Florence following childbirth.
Browning left Florence about a month after his wife’s death, never to return or to remarry — although he lived another 28 years. He died in Venice at his son’s home. “Pen” Browning, who wanted his father to be buried in the English Cemetery, but in 1877 the cemetery had closed for new interments. Browning was buried instead in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Parker, Theodore (d.1860); Pyle, Howard (d.1911)

London: Highgate Cemetery, Swain’s Lane
Residents include most of the Pre-Raphaelite Rossetti clan (sans Dante Gabriel, but including Lizzie Siddal); novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans); Leslie Stephen, literally the father of the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf & Vanessa Bell); Karl Marx; not to mention, from a previous era, John Singleton Copley
Mary Nichols, inscription on tomb reads: “In Ever Loving Memory of Mary, the darling wife of Arthur Nichols and fondly loved mother of their only son Harold who fell asleep 7th May 1909… Mary died at the age of 58, her husband evidently was a victim on the Titanic [photo, right]

London: St Pancras Old Church
The architect Sir John Soane designed a tomb for his wife & himself in the churchyard. This mausoleum provided the inspiration for the design by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott of the iconic red telephone boxes.
Burial place of Johann Christian Bach; William Franklin, the last colonial Governor of New Jersey & illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin. There is a memorial tomb for Mary Wollstonecraft & William Godwin, though the remains of the couple are now in Bournemouth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley & the future Mary Shelley, who planned their elopement over meetings at the grave of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.
Dickens mentions it in A Tale of Two Cities, making it the location of body snatching

London: Bunhill Fields
(technically a burial grounds, not a ‘consecrated’ Church of England cemetery) – its name perhaps derives from a corruption of ‘bonehill,’ in reference to the bones carted away from St. Paul’s Cathedral to make room for new interments.  Located in the London Borough of Islington, the list of those there buried reads like a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of 17th century Nonconformity. Robert Southey called it the “Campo Santo of the Dissenters,” literally the “holy field,” referring to the Pisan Camposanto Monumentale. It’s the last resting place for an estimated 120,000 bodies marked by 2,333 monuments, mostly simple headstones with the exception of a Victorian addition to Bunyan’s tomb. The cemetery was damaged during WW2 & reconstructed in 1960 to a design by Sir Peter Shepheard (late dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts & emeritus professor of landscape architecture at the Univ of Pa).  cf. London Non-Conformist registers 1694–1921
Thomas Wilcox [c.1549 – 1608] – Admonition to the Parliament (1572)
John Owen (1616-83), Congregationalist minister, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford Univ.
George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends (Quakers) – in the Quaker Gardens, next to the Bunhill Fields Meeting House
Richard Cromwell (1626–1712) & Henry Cromwell (1628–74) sons of Oliver Cromwell
John Bunyan (1628-1688), author of The Pilgrim’s Progress
Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), author of Robinson Crusoe
Susanna Wesley (1669-1742), mother of John & Charles Wesley; John Wesley’s (founder of Methodism) City Road Chapel, home, & burial place are located directly across the street
Isaac Watts (1674-1748), “Father of English hymnody”
Thomas Bayes (1702–1761)  Presbyterian minister & mathematician, remembered for his theories regarding statistics & probability.
William Blake (1757-1827), painter & poet, & wife Catherine (1762-1831) whom he married in 1782.

Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Eddy, Mary Baker  (1821-1910)  memorial
Brooks, Phillips  (1835-93)  Episcopal priest & author of “O Little Town of Bethlehem”
Channing, William Ellery    (1780-1842)  Unitarian clergyman, social reformer
Gardner, Isabella Stewart   (1840-1924)
Homer, Winslow   (1836-1910)
Howe, Julia Ward   (1819-1910)  Author, poet, abolitionist
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth   (1807-82)

Woodlands Cemetery, West Philadelphia
Eakins, Thomas    1844-1916
Evans, Thomas William foremost Parisian dentist in the 19th century
Gross, Samuel David    1805-84
Peale, Rembrandt    1778-1860
Redner, Lewis H.  1831-1908 wrote the music for Phillip Brooks poem “O’ Little Town of Bethlehem”

West Laurel Hill Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd
Breyer, William A.   1828-82
Eiseley, Loren (1907–1977)
Garroway, David    1913-1982
Shibe, Benjamin Franklin    1832-1922
Jarvis, Anna (1864–1948)
Taylor, Frederick Winslow (1856–1915)
Trumbauer, Horace (1868–1938)

Misc
Cone, Claribel (1864–1929) & Etta Cone (1870–1949) Druid Ridge Cemetery, Baltimore
Klimt, Gustav (1862-1918) Hietzing Cemetery, Vienna
Beach, Sylvia  (1887-1962) Princeton
Humphreys, Charles (1714-86) Old Haverford Meeting House Cemetery

Muses & Models

Jiminez, Jill Berk (ed)  Dictionary of Artists’ Models   London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2001

Prose, Francine  The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired. Harper Perennial 2003

Claude Monet & Camille Doncieux ― Gedo, Mary Mathews   Monet & His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life   Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 2010

Monet, Camille & Alice

Victorine Meurent (1844-1927) Manet’s model in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass); Olympia; Gare Saint-Lazare (The Railway); (and even the boy in The Fifer). Also modeled for Degas & the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens

Renoir & His Models. Aline Charigot     http://www.artistsandart.org/2010/05/renoir-and-his-models-aline-charigot.html

Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938) Marie-Clémentine Valadon, Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France.  In 1894, became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.  “A free spirit, she would wear a corsage of carrots, kept a goat at her studio to “eat up her bad drawings”, & fed caviar to her “good Catholic” cats on Fridays.”  became a circus acrobat at the age of 15;  She modeled for Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, (Young Woman at a Table), Pierre-Auguste Renoir & Pierre Puvis de Chavannes; she also had affairs with all of them. In 1889 Toulouse-Lautrec would paint: “The Hangover.”

Valadon ― Miles, Margaret R.   “Nakedness, Gender, & Religious Meaning,”  in Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness & Religious Meaning in the Christian West   NY: Vintage, 1989 pp.169-85

Renoir (1841-1919) ‘las grandes banhistas’– (1884-1887)  Phila Museum of Art (Aline Charigot, Senhora Renoir, Suzanne Valadon)

http://bjws.blogspot.com/2010/07/henri-de-toulouse-lautrec-1864-1901_29.html

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) one of his favorite models, in addition to Suzanne Valadon, was another laundress named Carmen Gaudin (1866?–1920).(La blanchisseuse) La Rousse (the redhead)

http://www.davidrumsey.com/amica/amico935317-19344.html

Klimt & His Women – document.   Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel,  (nee Schindler) (1879-1964) Viennese-born socialite.  wife, successively, of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, & novelist Franz Werfel, as well as the consort of several other prominent men, e.g., affair with the artist Oskar Kokoschka,  Bride of the Wind

In 1911, Egon Schiele (1890-1918) met the seventeen-year-old Valerie (Wally) Neuzil, who lived with him in Vienna & served as model, Woman in Black Stockings (1913). Very little is known of her, except that she had previously modelled for Gustav Klimt & might have been one of his mistresses.

Julia Prinsep Stephen (nee Jackson) (1846–95), mother of Virginia Woolf, model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones

Lytton Strachey & Dora Carrington

Elizabeth Siddal ― John Everett Millais, Ophelia;  Rossetti,  Beata Beatrix

Annie Miller — Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, et.al

Jane Burden (later Jane Morris, 1839–1914)

Gray, Euphemia (“Effie”) Chalmers (1828-97) wife of Ruskin, but later left her husband to marry his protege, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais

Edward Burne-Jones & Maria Zambaco  she appears in some of his most inspired pictures—as the sorceress in the Wine of Circe, the witch in The Beguiling of Merlin, & the demonic sprite in Phyllis & Demophoön.

Corder, Rosa Frances (1853-93) model & lover of Charles Augustus Howell unscrupulous agent of both Ruskin (eventually Edward Burne-Jones persuaded Ruskin to sever his connection with Howell) & Rossetti (persuaded Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal). alleged to have persuaded Corder to create fake Rossetti drawings

John Singer Sargent (1856–1925)  “Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)” 1883–84

Butler, Ruth   Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model­, Wives of Cézanne, Monet, & Rodin.   New Haven: Yale, 2008  Hortense Fiquet & Paul Cézanne; Camille Doncieux & Claude Monet; Rose Beuret & Auguste Rodin

Rousseau’s portrait of  Guillaume  Apollinaire with his mistress Marie Laurencin, The Muse Inspiring the Poet (1909)

Joanna “Jo” Hiffernan (Heffernan) – Whistler’s mistress & model & Courbet’s favorite model

Evelyn Nesbit     Uruburu, Paula “Evelyn Nesbit: ‘American Eve,’ Excerpt”; Nesbit, White & Madison Square Garden; Murder of the Century PBS American Experience; http://www.americaneve.com/homepage.html

Barney, Natalie Clifford (1876-1972) & Brooks, Romaine 1874-1970

Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo

George Sand, novelist, muse to Chopin and Alfred de Musset

Anais Nin, author, muse to Henry Miller

Amanda Lear, singer, muse to Salvador Dali;  Salvador & Gala Dali

Man Ray & Lee Miller

Catherine Deneuve, actress, muse to Bunuel, André Téchiné and Yves Saint Laurent

Camille Claudel (1864–1943)sculptor, muse, model, confidante & lover of Rodin; she never lived with Rodin, who was reluctant to end his 20-year relationship with Rose Beuret.

Alice B. Toklas, author, muse to Gertrude Stein

Leonora Carrington, artist, muse to Max Ernst

Augustus John & model, mistress, wife, Dorelia McNeill

Gwen John model & mistress to Auguste Rodin (33 years her senior)

Pierre Bonnard – Renée Monchaty (model, lover, suicide), Marthe de Méligny (model, wife, muse)

“Misia” Marie Sophie Olga Zénaïde Godebska (1872-1950) muse & model to Toulouse-Lautrec, Bonnard, Vuillard, Renoir, Diaghilev, Cocteau, & Vallaton

Matisse & Lydia Delectorskaya; model Loulou Brouty; model Caroline Joblau, with whom he had a daughter, Marguerite, born in 1894
Between Dec. 1916 & the close of 1917, Matisse painted at least 25 pictures of an Italian model named Laurette. She also posed with her sister & a woman named Aïcha for some 15 additional works by the artist.  Laurette in a Green Robe (Black Background), 1916 [Met Museum]

Jeanne Hebuterne, model and painter, muse to  Amadeo Modigliani

Loulou de la Falaise, designer, muse to Yves Saint Laurent

Francisco Goya and his mistress Leocadia Weiss,La Leocadia (1819 to 1823)

Lise Trehot & Auguste Renoir

Seurat’s model & common law wife, Madeleine Knobloch

Picasso & Dora Maar; Fernande Olivier, Olga Koklova, Marie Thérèse Walter, Françoise Gilot,  Jacqueline Roque, et.al

Jessie Macauley Olssen  The Annunciation (1898) wife & model of Henry Ossawa Tanner

Raphael & Margherita Luti  La Fornarina & “Woman with a Veil (La Donna Velata)”  1516

Botticelli & Simonetta Vespucci

Godley, Kathleen (Kitty) Epstein Freud (1926-2011) ― Artist & muse, daughter of Jacob Epstein & first wife/model of Lucian Freud. Her second marriage was to musician & Cambridge economist Wynne Godley (Epstein’s model for the head of the figure of Saint Michael spearing the devil in the sculpture at Coventry Cathedral).

Beverly Whitney Kean (1921-2011)

Beverly Whitney Kean (1921-2011) died aged 89 

Her book All the Empty Palaces: The Merchant Patrons of Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Russia is still the definitive account of the two great Moscow collectors (Sergei Shchukin & Ivan Morozov) who put together before 1914 the finest collection of impressionist & modern French painters.

Early in her career she sang with the San Francisco Light Opera Company; starring roles in two Hollywood movies (Ladies of Washington & Irish Eyes Are Smiling, both with Anthony Quinn in 1944); appeared as a guest star in a dozen TV series in the early 1950s; made commercials (notably as the Marlboro Girl); & was even licensed to trade on the NY stock exchange; with her first husband, she was friends with the likes of the Shah of Iran & composer Richard Rodgers.

By the time Lenin & the Bolsheviks swept to power in Russia in 1917, the Moscow textile merchant Sergei Shchukin had managed to assemble the most important collection in the world of modern Western art. On the walls of his home, the Trubetskoy Palace, were eight canvases by Cezanne, 16 by Gauguin, 39 by Matisse, 13 by Monet, & 51 works by Picasso. Today, these works hang in the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad & the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

Typologies

• Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) religious conflict, theological debate between “Big Enders” & “Little Enders” battling over the proper way to crack open an egg
• Auden, “Vespers,” Arcadians & Utopians – those whose memory constructs an ideal past, versus those whose imagination constructs an ideal future; the Arcadian wishes to return to the lost world of the pre-Fall Eden while the Utopian looks forward to the perfect society of the New Jerusalem.
• Nietzsche – The Birth of Tragedy – Dionysian, affective; Apollonian, cognitive, reason
• L’Engle: Mennonites & Amish split over buttons. One group thought buttons were useful &, therefore, permissible & other group thought they were decorative & not permissible. They split over buttons. That is what we do. We argue over buttons. We forget that Christ is Lord. We forget that God made it all & we argue over buttons.
• Berlin, Isaiah   The Hedgehog & the Fox  NY: Simon & Schuster, 1953
• “Prosaics,” Gary Saul Morson, Russian literature at Northwestern Univ., Tolstoy believed in the prosaic life & Dostoyevsky in the dramatic.
• “Every man (sic) is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist… They are the two classes of men beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third”  Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge, entry for July 2, 1830
• Lévi-Strauss’ comparison of the Bricoleur & Engineer in The Savage Mind. (However, according to Derrida: “the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur.”
• Guelphs & Ghibellines factions supporting, respectively, the Papacy [esp. Boniface VIII] & the Holy Roman Empire in central & northern Italy during the 12^th & 13^th centuries.

Hospital – Hospitality

The primary purpose of a medieval hospital was to provide spiritual care, medicine was rather down on the list of things that a hospital did.  The word ‘hospital’ derives from hospes, a stranger or guest, & this comes from the medieval tradition of religious pilgrims being given food & lodging at monasteries on their way to various shrines throughout Europe & even into the Middle East.  The distinction between hospitals & religious houses was a matter of degree rather than of kind

In England, “hospitali” mutated into “Spital” or “Spital House,” which was particularly a house for beggars in the later medieval period, the derogation that it was slightly lower class. From 1070 to 1150 in London, 68 hospitals were founded.  Over half of these were for lepers.     [cf. Royal Hospital of Bethlehem – Bedlam]

Ayliffe, William   “St Bartholomew’s Hospital & the Origin of London Hospitals”

 

hospitals were more like hospices for the poor.  Wealthy Christians generally died in their palaces & townhouses, though some joined monasteries at the end in the pursuit of salvation. Rather than healing, the primary purpose of 16^th century hospitals was to relieve suffering, isolation, & dying by setting them in a meaningful framework of consolation & hope. Baldwin, Robert  “Anguish, Healing, & Redemption in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece,” Sacred Heart University Review  20 (2000) 1

 

The Hospices de Beaune or Hôtel-Dieu de Beaune, a former charitable almshouse in Beaune, France, was founded in 1443 by Nicolas Rolin, chancellor of Burgundy, as a hospital for the poor & needy. The original building, the Hôtel-Dieu, one of the finest examples of French 15^th century architecture, was founded when Burgundy was ruled by Duke Philip the Good. The Hundred Years War had recently been brought to a close by the signing of the Treaty of Arras in 1435. Massacres, however, continued with marauding bands (“écorcheurs”) still roaming the countryside, pillaging & destroying, provoking misery & famine. Nicolas Rolin, the Duke’s Chancellor, and his wife Guigone de Salins, reacted by deciding to create a hospital & refuge for the poor.

The Room of the Poors (50x14x16 meters). On the ceiling, the visible painted frame is in an upside down boat-skiff shape & in each beam are sculpted caricatures of some important Beaune inhabitants. On the floor tiling are written Nicolas Rolin’s monogram and his motto “Seulle” referring to his wife, Guigone de Salins. The room is furnished with two rows of curtained beds. The central area was dedicated to benches & tables for the meals.

Jan van Eyck: The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin

Schweitzer in Aspen

Albert Schweitzer made only a single trip to the United States.  It was during the summer of 1949, when he came to speak in Aspen, Colorado, at a festival celebrating the bicentennial of Goethe’s birth, to earn funds for a leprosy clinic at Lambarene, and to meet with American drug manufacturers about modern leprosy treatments. The lecture he gave on Friday, July 8, was translated from the German by playwright & novelist Thorton Wilder. He & his wife Helene returned to Europe on the Nieuw Amsterdam, the same ship on which they had arrived.

 

Schweitzer in Aspen, photo W. Eugene Smith 1949

Princess Marianne “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn

The thirteen-year-old Princess Yvonne Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn takes a swig from a bottle while Prince Alexander, just twelve, sits with a half-smoked cigarette. Taken aboard the yacht of Bartholomé March off Majorca in 1955, the photographer was Princess Marianne “Manni” Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn — the mother of Yvonne and Alexander — who’s known by her photographic soubriquet of “Mamarazza”.

Princess Manni was born in Salzburg in 1919, the eldest of nine children of Friedrich Baron Mayr-Melnhof and his wife Maria Anna Countess von Meran.

Studying at Munich during the war, she met Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein who was on leave from the front, and the pair were engaged within days. Married in 1942, their daughter Yvonne was born in December of that year with Alexander following a year later. When the war ended the castle at Sayn was severely damaged by bombs, and the family considered emigrating to Brazil before they decided to stay, rebuild, and put their farms back in order.

Car accident after the baptism of Prince Albrecht of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, 14 May 1950. The driver Prince Ludwig zu Sayn-Wittgenstein with Princess Beatrix zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, Hella Princess of Bavaria, and Princess Clementine von Croy. Prince Ludwig was later killed in a car accident in 1962.

http://www.andrewcusack.com/2011/02/14/mamarazza/

Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity

<div style=”width:425px” id=”__ss_1026538″> <strong style=”display:block;margin:12px 0 4px”><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/normanormans/annunciation-visitation&#8221; title=”Annunciation &amp; Visitation” target=”_blank”>Annunciation &amp; Visitation</a></strong> <div style=”padding:5px 0 12px”> View more <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint&#8221; target=”_blank”>PowerPoint</a> from <a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/normanormans&#8221; target=”_blank”>normanormans</a> </div> </div>

Bishop Asbury meets at Killian’s home

In October of 1801, Tobias Gibson, a Methodist itinerant preacher who had been meeting with the societies in the Asheville, NC area, invited Bishop Francis Asbury to visit a meeting at the home of Daniel Killian.   Bishop Asbury wrote:  “October 11, 1801, Sabbath Day, yesterday and today held quarterly meeting at Daniel Killian’s near Buncombe Courthouse.  I spoke from Isaiah 7:5-7 and I Corinthians 7-1.  We had some quickenings.”

The need for a meeting place became apparent as the years went by.  A one-room log building was erected & called the Methodist Church on Beaverdam.  In the early 1830s, Daniel Killian donated several acres of land to be used “for a church and burying ground forever.”  In 1879 construction began on a one-room frame building which was completed in 1881 & dedicated by Bishop Wightman.

The State of NC erected an historical marker at the intersection of US Highway 25 (Merrimon Ave) & Beaverdam Road in Asheville, commemorating Bishop Asbury’s visits to the home of Daniel Killian. Killian also built a room onto his house for Bishop Asbury & other itinerant ministers.

“Daniel Killian appears on the 1790 census of Burke Co., NC, & it is believed he was living in the area of Beaver Dam Creek at that time. He entered 200 acres of land on Beaver Dam Creek in 1792, & NC State grant #337 was issued to him on 2 Dec 1797. He bought other land in the same area before 1800. He is the only Killian listed on the 1800 census of Buncombe County, & appears with the following household: 1 male over 45, 1 male 10-16, 3 males 0-10, 1 female 26-45, 1 female 16-26, 2 females 0-10, & no slaves. Daniel Killian was born 1757/59 in Lincoln Co, NC, & died 1830/36 in Buncombe Co, NC. He was a son of Andreas Killian, who was born in Germany in 1702, & died in Lincoln Co, NC in 1788. Daniel Killian’s tombstone in the Asbury Memorial UMC churchyard, in Asheville: “Pioneer Daniel Killian, 1752-1836, and wife.”

Thanks to my Ashevillian nephew, Jake Sadler, who came across this historical marker.  I would have never known.

Steinway’s Diary

Trying to find details of the initial arrangement between William Steinway and Gottlieb Daimler to manufacture Daimler engines in New York.  Came upon Smithsonian’s website for Steinway’s diary (Nov 9, 1876 entry – reference to undetermined outcome of Presidental election, some problems in Florida [hanging chads?]; & divorce).

Maps of Middle Colonies

John Mitchell (1711-68), produced a Map of the British & French Dominions in America, published by Andrew Millar in 1755 (graphic of 2nd edition, 1757). In addition to the geographical outline of the continent & the European colonies, Mitchell included textual legends describing the extent of British & French settlements (reflecting British bias on border claims & French encroachments).  Map was also used when British & American negotiators met in Paris in 1782 to draft a peace treaty to end the Revolutionary War.  John Jay, of the American delegation, used a third edition of the map; whereas, Richard Oswald & the British used a copy of the fourth edition of Mitchell’s map. On his copy Oswald added a thin red line reflecting the British interpretation of the new U.S. boundaries.  Fascinating is the northwestern boundary of  ‘Pensilvania’ which extends into Canada.

cf. Historical Maps of Pennsylvania

[need to read: Pritchard, Margaret Beck & Henry G. Taliaferro   Degrees of Latitude: Mapping Colonial America   NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2002]

Murray, Minor & the OED

James Augustus Henry Murray  (1837-1915) Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford English Dictionary.  The first edition was published initially in 124 unbound parts (or fascicles) for those who had taken out advance subscriptions, the first in 1884 and the last not till 1928, almost half a century after Murray had commenced work.   The second edition in 20 volumes — more than 5,000 definitions, almost 2 & a half million illustrative quotations, & over 21,500 pages. Massive tomes, all 30 cm. high, & some over 5 cm. thick.  When he started, Murray had estimated that it would amount to about 7,000 pages in four volumes & take about ten years. Murray didn’t live to see the 1928 completion date, but after his death  in 1915 remainder of the Dictionary was written by Murray’s official collaborators: Henry Bradley (second editor from 1887, & chief editor on Murray’s death), William Craigie & Charles Onions.

Murray’s OED work was carried out in an unheated & poorly ventilated grey corrugated-iron portable shed lined with deal timber erected next to his house. Murray called it the Scriptorium, i.e., “a writing-room… set apart for the copying of manuscripts”.  There were actually two Scriptoria, one at the Midland village Mill Hill and then in Oxford.

Tucked away in Murray’s alphabetical acknowledgment list of the volunteers in the preface to the first completed volume is the entry “Dr. W.C. Minor of Crowthorne,” who contributed over 12,000 quotations — sometimes at the rate of over a hundred a week. Both men had been corresponding on Dictionary matters for over a decade, & while during that period Murray had been aware of Minor’s address (“Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire”), he had assumed that he was a medical officer at that institution.  William Chester Minor (1834–1920) was a physician, an American Civil War surgeon, but he was not on staff at the asylum, but a convicted criminally insane murderer! (a self-immolating, paranoid schizophrenic). During The Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, 5,371 Union soldiers deserted.  In an effort to prevent additional desertion & avoid mass executions, doctors were ordered to brand a 1.5 inch ‘D’ on the face of convicted deserters. Dr. Minor branded the face of an Irishman, & went mad– thoughts of retribution haunted him for the rest of his life.  It was this imagined retaliation that drove him to murder an innocent factory worker on the streets of London in 1872, after which he was imprisoned in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.  From there he found out about the OED, and sent submissions to Murray.

Winchester, Simon    The Professor & the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, & the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary  HarperCollins, 1998

Alfred Stevens 1823-1906

Stevens, Alfred 1823-1906

Louis Anquetin (1861–1932), Jacques Maroger (1884–1962) & Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949)

Louis Anquetin (1861–1932)
Fernand Cormon’s atelier, 1885  Toulouse-Lautrec, Emile Bernard & van Gogh; “cloisonnism” [term coined by Dujardin) use of black contour outlines & flat areas of color
Van Gogh’s Les Cafe a Arles (1888) is almost a copy of Anquetin’s L’Avenue de Clichy, Picasso used Anquetin’s Madeline (1892) as a model for his portrait Gertrude Stein (1905)
abandoned the modern art movement began to study technique & materials of great northern masters, esp. Rubens.

Jacques Maroger (1884–1962) student of Anquetin; The “secret formula” of the great masters included white lead.  Emigrated to US in 1939, Parsons & Maryland Inst.; Baltimore Realists

Édouard Dujardin (1861–1949) – along with Anquetin educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen; James Joyce claimed his style of interior monologue (stream of consciousness technique) owed its influence to works by Dujardin; editor of the journal Revue Indépendente a “voice for the symbolists”; featured with Jane Avril in Toulouse-Lautrec poster for the night club Le Divan Japonisme, watching a performance by Yvette Guilbert

Women Artists

H.W. Janson’s History of Art first published in 1962 contained neither the name nor work of a single woman artist.  “I have not been able to find a woman artist who clearly belongs in a one-volume history of art.” (Janson, 1979)

Not surprisingly, following a course she taught while at Vassar in the Spring of 1970, entitled “The Image of Women in the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries,” Linda Nochlin published, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ARTnews January 1971: 22-39, 67-71 [reprinted in Women, Art, & Power & Other Essays {Harper & Row, 1988}]).

However, over 100 years prior to Nochlin’s ‘groundbreaking’ essay, the critic & historian Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, responded to what she perceived as a lacuna in contemporary intellectual history: ‘I do not know that any work on Female Artists – either grouping them or giving a general history of their productions – has ever been published’ when she wrote Women Artists in All Ages & Countries

Ellet (1818–77), also wrote about the founding “mothers” –  women who contributed to the American Revolutionary War, The Women of the American Revolution, published in 1845

Wettlaufer, Alexandra K.   Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting & the Novel in France & Britain, 1800–1860  Columbus, OH: Ohio State, 2011

Linda Nochlin “Consider the Difference: American Women Artists,” (YouTube) Smithsonian American Art Museum

“Neither Model Nor Muse: Women as Artists” – 2010 exhibition at the McNay, San Antonio