The Organ Recital, Henry Lerolle
Posted: October 4, 2012 Filed under: film, painting Leave a comment
at The Met.
There is literally nothing interesting on LeRolle’s wikipedia page, so we turn to a tidbit sent recently from our Greenville office. Our correspondent there found this on the wikipedia page for the movie “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”
“(Director Stanley) Kramer considered adding a fifth ‘mad’ to the title before deciding that it would be redundant but noted in interviews that he later regretted it.”
Children Playing On The Beach At Guernsey
Posted: September 29, 2012 Filed under: pictures Leave a comment
Guernsey is one of the UK’s Channel Islands, sitting there out in the ocean on the way to France. Here it is seen from the air:
And that’s Renoir’s “Children On The Beach At Guernsey,” which you can see bigger here or here:
(That’s the Barnes Foundation in Philly). But wait, here also is another picture of that same name?
With less prominent children? What is Renoir up to? Forgetting how to draw kids, looks like. That second one’s in a private collection.
In 1883, Renoir spent the summer in Guernsey, creating fifteen paintings in little over a month. Most of these feature Moulin Huet, a bay in Saint Martin’s, Guernsey. Guernsey is one of the Channel Islands in the English Channel, and it has a varied landscape that includes beaches, cliffs and bays. These paintings were the subject of a set of commemorative postage stamps issued by the Bailiwick of Guernsey in 1983.
Photo of Greenland
Posted: September 26, 2012 Filed under: photography, pictures, world Leave a commentFrom this NY Times slideshow, credited to Andrew Testa:
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Posted: September 24, 2012 Filed under: heroes, photography Leave a comment
In 1843, while performing a conjuring trick for the amusement of his children, Brunel accidentally inhaled a half-sovereign coin, which became lodged in his windpipe. A special pair of forceps failed to remove it, as did a machine devised by Brunel to shake it loose. At the suggestion of his father, Brunel was strapped to a board and turned upside-down, and the coin was jerked free.
Scene from “Seven Samurai” (1954)
Posted: September 17, 2012 Filed under: film, heroes, pictures, screenwriting Leave a commentThe main characters in Helen DeWitt’s excellent novel The Last Samurai are deeply emotionally invested in the Arika Kurosawa movie Seven Samurai.
Here is a scene from the movie they often reference:
The Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City
Posted: September 16, 2012 Filed under: adventures, New York, painting, pictures Leave a commentIs an under-visited place. Pittsburgh Office told us about it awhile ago
H.P. Lovecraft referred to the “strange and disturbing paintings of Nicholas Roerich” in his Antarctic horror story At the Mountains of Madness.
Some Paintings Mentioned in “The Last Samurai” by Helen DeWitt
Posted: September 13, 2012 Filed under: painting Leave a comment
Highly recommended, this book has no connection at all to the Tom Cruise film of the same name. It’s 1000x better. It’s about a child genius in London. A painting the child sees in the book:
Odysseus Deriding Polyphemus, by J. M. Turner, 1829:
Wikipedia on Turner:
He died in the house of his mistress Sophia Caroline Booth in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea on 19 December 1851. He is said to have uttered the last words “The sun is God” before expiring.
More to come??
(found the image here).
Lionel Pries
Posted: September 9, 2012 Filed under: architecture, California, pictures Leave a commentReading up on some Disney animators and writers.
Ken Anderson, one of the credited screenwriters for The Rescuers, Aristocats, The Jungle Book, and Cinderella, was (wikipedia tells me) “particularly influenced” by his University of Washington architecture professor, Lionel Pries.
Lionel Pries designed the Andalucia building in Santa Barbara:
Here’s a house he designed for himself:
“He used affordable modern materials — concrete, concrete block and cement-asbestos board.”
Here’s another house Pries designed, in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Seattle:
Wikipedia:
Pries was gay, but deeply closeted in the University of Washington community. He anticipated teaching at least until he reached retirement age, but was forced to resign his university position in 1958 after he was picked up in a vice sting in Los Angeles. The reason for Pries’s abrupt departure from the university was concealed at the time.
Pries worked as a drafter until he was able to retire in 1964, then lived quietly until his death in 1968.
Lionel Pries:
(Pries photo is credited to Dorothy Conway and the Pries Collection, Special Collection, UW Libraries, Pries house photo to Charles R. Pierson from the same collection, Laurelhurst house photo “courtesy Max and Helen Gurvitch, and I got them all from this Seattle Times article by Laurence Kriesman.)
Good one from The Atlantic’s tribute to Neil Armstrong
Posted: August 27, 2012 Filed under: heroes, photography 2 Comments
“Astronaut John Young, Frank Borman and Neil Armstrong with Deke Slayton, during astronaut desert survival training near Reno, Nevada, in 1964.”
Logging Bunkhouse Interior, ca. 1895
Posted: August 24, 2012 Filed under: photography Leave a commentfrom the University of Washington’s “Industries and Occupations” photograph collection.
View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow – Thomas Cole, 1836
Posted: August 24, 2012 Filed under: New York, painting Leave a comment
go over to the Met and see it big.
Cole learned the rudiments of his profession from a wandering portrait painter named Stein
The fourth-highest peak in the Catskills is named after Thomas Cole:
Automatic Dumper, Jack Delano, 1943
Posted: August 15, 2012 Filed under: California, pictures Leave a comment
from Library of Congress
Bob Ross
Posted: August 7, 2012 Filed under: art, painting 2 CommentsAfter enjoying this video:
I did a typically cursory investigation into his backstory:
Ross enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at age 18 after graduating from Elizabeth Forward High School in Elizabeth, Pennsylvania and was living in Florida early in his military career when the Air Force transferred him to Eielson AFB (in Alaska), where he first saw the snow and mountains that later became recurring themes in his artwork; he developed his quick-painting technique in order to be able to create art for sale in brief daily work breaks. Having held military positions that required him to be, in his own words, “mean” and “tough”, “the guy who makes you scrub the latrine, the guy who makes you make your bed, the guy who screams at you for being late to work”, Ross decided that if he ever moved on from the military, “it wasn’t going to be that way any more”, “vowing never to scream again.”
“The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus Discovered by Alexander the Great”, Folio from a Falnama (Book of Omens)
Posted: July 31, 2012 Filed under: painting, pictures Leave a comment
from the Met. If you don’t know about the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus then fool there’s no helping you.
The Met claims it came from Qazvin, Iran. What does Qazvin look like, I wonder? In 1921 it looked like this:
from the Life Magazine set of photos entitled “A Squirrel’s Guide To Fashion”
Posted: July 27, 2012 Filed under: photography, pictures Leave a comment
Life’s website explains:
In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a woman named Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’ back yard.
“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.”
They do? At any rate, LIFE went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”
“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”
And so it begins … a series of at-once touching and creepy photographs by LIFE’s Nina Leen, chronicling the quiet adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker the squirrel.
Request
Posted: July 19, 2012 Filed under: adventures, Ireland, mysteries, photography Leave a commentNow that my readership has doubled 10,000, I would like to ask for everyone’s help. Summer before last, in the legendary harsh Twelve Bens wilderness of western Ireland I met these people, and took this lovely picture. I would like the Internet’s help in sending the picture to the photographed heroes. Their names are Rob and Lou, and they live in Belfast. Lou at one time worked in the schools of Kankakee, Illinois. Those are all the clues I can provide.
Early Treatment of Psychiatric Disorders
Posted: July 18, 2012 Filed under: painting Leave a comment“Early color illustration of psychiatric treatment disorders,” says wikipedia, re:
Le Bal des Ardents
Posted: July 17, 2012 Filed under: history, painting, wikipedia Leave a commentWikipedia recently had an incredibly interesting article of the day, about a disastrous court entertainment that occurred in Paris in 1383. I recommend this article, and the related article on the “glass delusion“, but if you’re short on time this picture pretty much tells the whole story:
Helytimes 
