A good one from the Library of Congress / Flickr
Posted: July 4, 2012 Filed under: America, pictures Leave a comment
Seems decent to link to original.
Albert Bierstadt
Posted: July 2, 2012 Filed under: California, painting Leave a commentBierstadt sometimes changed details of the landscape to inspire awe. The colors he used are also not always true. He painted what he believed was the way things should be: water is ultramarine, vegetation is lush and green, etc.
Baton Practice at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943
Posted: June 21, 2012 Filed under: California, photography Leave a comment
Ansel Adams, the original king of US 395.
Mrs. Schuyler Burning Her Wheat Fields On The Approach Of The British, 1852
Posted: June 11, 2012 Filed under: painting Leave a comment
Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze. That one’s over at LACMA.
Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog, 1818
Posted: June 4, 2012 Filed under: adventures, art, mountains, painting 1 Comment
Caspar David Friedrich.
By 1820, he was living as a recluse and was described by friends as the “most solitary of the solitary”. Towards the end of his life he lived in relative poverty and was increasingly dependent on the charity of friends. He became isolated and spent long periods of the day and night walking alone through woods and fields, often beginning his strolls before sunrise.
The Glorious First Of June
Posted: June 1, 2012 Filed under: adventures, history, painting, the ocean Leave a comment
The Glorious First of June (also known as the Third Battle of Ushant, and in France as the Bataille du 13 prairial an 2 or Combat de Prairial) of 1794 was the first and largest fleet action of the naval conflict between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the First French Republic during the French Revolutionary Wars. The British Channel Fleet under Admiral Lord Howe attempted to prevent the passage of a vital French grain convoy from the United States, which was protected by the French Atlantic Fleet, commanded by Vice-Admiral Louis Thomas Villaret de Joyeuse.
In the immediate aftermath both sides claimed victory and the outcome of the battle was seized upon by the press of both nations as a demonstration of the prowess and bravery of their respective navies.
Blind, 1916, Paul Strand
Posted: May 18, 2012 Filed under: Met, museum, photography, pictures Leave a comment
That one’s not on display over at the Met. Gotta find his photos of the Outer Hebrides online.
Sitting Bull Part 2
Posted: May 11, 2012 Filed under: books, Custer, Fate, from wikipedia, history, Indians, photography, pictures, the American West, writing Leave a commentThat detail about the meadowlark is from Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and The Battle of The Little Bighorn. At best the second-best book about the Little Bighorn battle, first of course being:
but that image is amazing. Good on Philbrick.
What is amazing about “Son Of The Morning Star” is Connell doesn’t just tell the story, he follows the meandering lines that lead to it and out of it, and the people who traced them. He demonstrates that as soon as you focus on any particular incident, you can keep finding new dimensions of weirdness in it.
Take, for example, this meadowlark warning Sitting Bull. Philbrick cites that detail as coming from the recollections of One Bull, Sitting Bull’s nephew, found in box 104, folder 21 of the Walter Campbell collection. Walter Campbell was born in Severy, Kansas in 1887. He was the first Rhodes Scholar from the state of Oklahoma. He wrote under the name Stanley Vestal. Why? I don’t know. According to the University of Oklahoma, where his collection is kept, he was adopted by Sitting Bull’s family, and “was named Makes-Room or Make-Room-For-Him (Kiyukanpi) and His Name Is Everywhere (Ocastonka). Kiyukanpi was the name of Joseph White Bull’s father, and Ocastonka is a reference to the Chief’s great fame.”
Here’s a picture from the Walter Campbell collection:
That’s Young Man Afraid Of His Horses. Here’s another:
Regrettably OU won’t let me make that any bigger. Campbell/Vestal/His-Name-Is-Everywhere died of a heart attack on Christmas Day, 1957.
There’s also a Walter CAMP who is very important in Bighorniana. Camp worked for the railroad, and so could travel all over. An unsourced detail from Indiana University’s Camp collection is that this is how he “spent his summers,” finding lost battlefields and interviewing old Indians and soldiers. Here is a picture from Camp’s collection:
As for One Bull, here he is. This is a photograph by William Cross (which I found here):
On wikipedia’s page for One Bull, however, they illustrate him with a picture of his spoon:
This spoon is now in the Spurlock Museum, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaigne, where they also have collections of Japanese wood carvings, Arctic artifacts, and Babylonian clay tablets.
Sitting Bull
Posted: May 10, 2012 Filed under: Custer, from wikipedia, history, Indians, museum, mysticism, people, photography, pictures, the American West 2 Comments
In August of 1890, Sitting Bull left his home to check on his ponies. After walking more than three miles, he climbed to the top of a hill, where he heard a voice. A meadowlark was speaking to him from a nearby knoll. “Lakotas will kill you,” the little bird said.
Hills around the Bay of Moulin Huet, Guernsey (Renoir, 1883)
Posted: May 9, 2012 Filed under: art, painting, pictures, Renoir 1 Comment
Met Artwork of the Day nails it again. This might be in a similar spot, anyway the closest photo I can find on Google streetview.
Nuns at Tatsang, 1931
Posted: May 7, 2012 Filed under: adventures, mountains, photography, pictures, Tibet, travel Leave a comment
Wish I had a larger version of this. The photographer is Frank Smythe, who went on the 1938 Shipton-Tilman Everest expedition. My source is the Royal Geographic Society.
In 1949, in Delhi, [Smythe] was taken ill with food poisoning; then a succession of malaria attacks took their toll and he died on June 27, 1949 two weeks before his 49th birthday.
Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy, by George Chinnery
Posted: May 6, 2012 Filed under: art, George Chinnery, painting, pictures Leave a comment
And here’s Chinnery himself, done by himself:
One more Jack Delano
Posted: May 3, 2012 Filed under: adventures, photography, pictures Leave a commentBorn in the Ukraine in 1923, “he travelled to Puerto Rico in 1941 as a part of the FSA project. This trip had such a profound influence on him that he settled there permanently in 1946.” Died 1997.
More Jack Delano
Posted: May 2, 2012 Filed under: Chicago, machines, photography Leave a commentChicago Railyards, 1942
Poster for a side show at the Vermont State Fair, Rutland, 1941 by Jack Delano
Posted: May 2, 2012 Filed under: New England, photography, Vermont Leave a comment
Tatjana Veiled Head
Posted: May 1, 2012 Filed under: MFA Boston, museum, photography, pictures Leave a commentHerb Ritts, 1988, from the MFA.
North Shore Homesick?
Posted: April 29, 2012 Filed under: art, Childe Hassam, Fitzhugh Lane, Met, museum, New England, North Shore, painting, pictures, Winslow Homer Leave a commentSometimes my friends from the North Shore of Massachusetts who live in New York get homesick and call me up, desperate for a solution. Always I tell them the same thing! “Go to the 760 galleries on the second floor of the Met!”
There you can see Childe Hassam’s “The Church at Gloucester”:
Then you can see Winslow Homer’s “Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide):
Then you can see “Stage Fort Across Gloucester Harbor” by our boy FHL:
“Thanks Hely!” they say.
The Head of John The Baptist on a Charger
Posted: April 22, 2012 Filed under: art, beheadings, Christianity, Met, MFA Boston, museum, painting, pictures, religion Leave a commentWe here at The Hely Times are shameless about catering to our readers. We’ve discovered that pictures depicting beheadings are among our most popular subjects. So, today, a review of one of the great themes in Western Art, John the Baptist’s head on a charger. NOTE: some other day we’ll do actual action-shot beheadings of John the Baptist. Today, we’re just dealing with the paintings that include the charger as well.
Caravaggio did it twice. There’s the National Gallery, London:
And the Palacio Real, Madrid:
Met has a good one by Aelbert Bouts:
MFA has one by Bernardo Luini:
Lucas Cranach the Elder, now hanging in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest:
That’s enough.
Last stop on the Hemingway/Lillian Ross tour of the Met
Posted: April 21, 2012 Filed under: art, Cezanne, Hemingway, Met, museum, painting, pictures Leave a comment
We came to El Greco’s green “View of Toledo” and stood looking at it a long time. “This is the best picture in the Museum for me, and Christ knows there are some lovely ones,” Hemingway said.
After we reached the Cezannes and Degases and the other Impressionists, Hemingway became more and more excited, and discoursed on what each artist could do and how and what he had learned from each. Patrick listened respectfully and didn’t seem to want to talk about painting techniques any more. Hemingway spent several minutes looking at Cezanne’s “Rocks – Forest of Fontainebleu.” “This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and the woods, and the rocks we have to climb over,” he said. “Cezanne is my painter, after the early painters. Wonder, wonder painter…
As we walked along, Hemingway said to me, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cezanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cezanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.”
Wiki, close out Cezanne for us:
One day, Cézanne was caught in a storm while working in the field. Only after working for two hours under a downpour did he decide to go home; but on the way he collapsed. He was taken home by a passing driver. His old housekeeper rubbed his arms and legs to restore the circulation; as a result, he regained consciousness. On the following day, he intended to continue working, but later on he fainted; the model with whom he was working called for help; he was put to bed, and he never left it again. He died a few days later, on 22nd October 1906. He died of pneumonia and was buried at the old cemetery in his beloved hometown of Aix-en-Provence.
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