Time and Place: Eric Ravilious (1903-1942)
Frank Delaney - November 27, 2013 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, engravings, Eric Ravilious, Painting, sussex, watercolours
Frank Delaney - November 27, 2013 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, engravings, Eric Ravilious, Painting, sussex, watercolours
Adam Green - November 1, 2012 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, athanasius kircher, Books, dragons, earthquake, giants, History, hollow earth, mount etna, mount vesuvius, Science, volcanoes
Adam Green - July 12, 2012 in apocalypse, Art and Illustrations, Articles, History, john martin, Painting, Pictures, shelley, turner
Detail from Henry Warren's 1839 portrait of John Martin, National Portrait Gallery. (Click for source)
Adam Green - May 28, 2012 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, gerard manley hopkins, History, krakatoa, Literature, nature, Poems, poetry, richard hamblyn, Science, sunsets, william ascroft
Lithograph from 1888 showing the Krakatoa eruption, author unknown.
Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1866, detail from a photo by Thomas C. Bayfield. National Portrait Gallery
Above the green in turn appeared a red glow, broader and burlier in make; it was softly brindled, and in the ribs or bars the colour was rosier, in the channels where the blue of the sky shone through it was a mallow colour. Above this was a vague lilac. The red was first noticed 45º above the horizon, and spokes or beams could be seen in it, compared by one beholder to a man’s open hand. By 4.45 the red had driven out the green, and, fusing with the remains of the orange, reached the horizon. By that time the east, which had a rose tinge, became of a duller red, compared to sand; according to my observation, the ground of the sky in the east was green or else tawny, and the crimson only in the clouds. A great sheet of heavy dark cloud, with a reefed or puckered make, drew off the west in the course of the pageant: the edge of this and the smaller pellets of cloud that filed across the bright field of the sundown caught a livid green. At 5 the red in the west was fainter, at 5.20 it became notably rosier and livelier; but it was never of a pure rose. A faint dusky blush was left as late as 5.30, or later. While these changes were going on in the sky, the landscape of Ribblesdale glowed with a frowning brown. (from G. M. Hopkins, “The Remarkable Sunsets”, Nature 29 (3 January 1884), pp. 222-23)Hopkins was a gifted empirical observer with a near-forensic interest in the search for written equivalents to the complexity of the natural world. Such interest in the language of precision was shared by many scientists at the time, science, like poetry, being an inherently descriptive enterprise. Anyone who reads the official Royal Society report on the Krakatoa sunsets (published in 1888) will find flights of poetic prose to rival those of Hopkins, who described such language as “the current language heightened and unlike itself,” a dynamic written form that was particularly suited to the expression of what he called “inscape”: the distinctive unity of all natural phenomena that gives everything in nature its characterising beauty and uniqueness. The force of being that holds these dynamic identities together he termed “instress”, instress being the essential energy that enables an observer to recognise the inscape of another being. These post-Romantic notions formed a kind of personal poetic creed, a logocentric natural theology that was rooted in the work of Duns Scotus, the medieval Christian philosopher.
Photograph taken in 1928 of the destroyed Krakatoa island resurfacing, forming what is known now as 'Anak Krakatau', or 'Child of Krakatoa'. Tropenmuseum of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT).
Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peakVisual artists also found themselves extending their colour ranges in awed emulation of the skies. Painter William Ascroft spent many evenings making pastel sky-sketches from the banks of the Thames at Chelsea, noting his frustration that he “could only secure in a kind of chromatic shorthand the heart of the effect, as so much of the beauty of afterglow consisted in concentration.” He exhibited more than five hundred of these highly-coloured pastels in the galleries of the Science Museum, in the repository of which they remain to this day, little known and rarely seen.
Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe?
For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve . . .
The wrathful sunset glared . . . (“St. Telemachus”, pub. 1892)
Three of the hundreds of sketches carried out by William Ascroft in the winter of 1883/4 - used as the frontispiece of The Eruption of Krakatoa, and Subsequent Phenomena: Report of the Krakatoa committee of the Royal Society (1888), ed. by G.J. Simmons.
Adam Green - April 24, 2012 in algonkin, algonquin, Art and Illustrations, Articles, colonialism, History, john white, lost colony, Painting, Pictures, richard grenville, Roanoke colony, settlers, virginia dare, walter raleigh, watercolours
'The Flyer', a Secotan Indian man painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.
Engraving of Tupí Indians harvesting cashew fruits in André Thevet's Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique; (Paris, 1557)
John White, "A cheife Herowans wyfe of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 years." (1585) British Museum, London.
Engraving by Theodore de Bry after John White's watercolour, from Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (1590)
Village of the Secotan Indians in North Carolina, by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.
Ceremony of Secotan warriors in North Carolina. Watercolour painted by John White in 1585. British Museum, London.
We found no signe of distresse; then we went to a place where they were left in sundry houses, but we found them all taken downe, and the place strongly inclosed with a high Palizado [i.e. a palisade of wooden stakes], very Fortlike; and in one of the chiefe Posts carved in fayre capitall Letters C R O A T A N, without any signe of distresse, and many barres of Iron… and such like heavie things throwne here and there, overgrowne with grass and weeds…Interestingly, White’s account here connects his two identities as governor and painter. He remarks that his men “found diverse Chests which had been hidden and digged up againe” surrounding the palisade. Among these chests, White was surprised to find objects which he knew “to be my owne”: “books” and “pictures” he had created in the years before, now “scattered up and downe…[and] spoyled.” In the end, White was unable to follow up on these strange clues: storms forced the expedition’s ships to turn back before reaching Croatan, and he returned to Britain with the mystery unresolved. The ultimate fate of the Roanoke colonists continues to be debated. Some have conjectured that White’s fellow colonists may have opted to join a local Algonquian Indian tribe and adapt themselves to the very different (and rather more effective) Amerindian methods of contending with the harsh American landscape. It is unlikely that we’ll ever know what happened – but if White’s daughter and granddaughter really did become incorporated into an Indian tribe, it would have made a strange sort of sense. Few sixteenth century Europeans looked upon indigenous Americans with anything other than a jaundiced and prejudiced eye. Yet White’s sensitive and humane portrayals of daily life among the Algonquians tell a different story, and suggest that his own stance toward the native peoples he encountered in the New World was rather more complex. In White’s sensitive depiction of the Algonquian woman and her child holding a European doll, perhaps we can discern a foreshadowing of the hybrid Euro-American fate of his own daughter and grandchild. The intertwined tales of the failed colony White governed, the family he raised, and the artworks he created offer one of the earliest examples of the mingling of cultures that would define the history of the Americas in the centuries to come.
Watercolour by John White of Fort Elizabeth in Guyanilla Bay, Puerto Rico, where the colonists were based before going on to found the Ranoake Colony in North Carolina.
Adam Green - March 14, 2012 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, bethlem hospital, Elimination of a Picture and its Subject, fairies, Painting, richard dadd, tate, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke
Detail of the main section showing the Fairy-Feller about to hew the nut - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)
Photograph by Henry Hering (ca. 1856) of Dadd painting Contradiction: Oberon and Titania.
“Of the / Chinese Small Foot Societee, He’s a small member. But / if Confucius sent him Now I can’t remember.” -Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)
The crown patriarch - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)
The as of yet uncracked nut with onlookers - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)
Queen of the fairies Mab with her rival monarchs Oberon and Titania - Source: Tate (Richard Dadd, The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke c.1855-64, Tate)
Adam Green - October 25, 2011 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, Books, Dürer, early Dürer, narrenschiff, Religion, sebastian brant, teh ship of fools, woodcut
Attributed to Albrecht Dürer, woodcut illustration for Chapter 85, “Not Providing for Death”.
The Master of the Haintz Narr, woodcut illustration for Chapter 5 , “Of Old Fools”.
Attributed to Albrecht Dürer, woodcut illustration for Chapter 14, “Of Insolence toward God”.
Dürer's Fools on a Cart and a Boatload of Fools, the original title page.
Attributed to Albrecht Dürer, woodcut illustration for chapter 103 , “Of the Antichrist”.
Attributed to Albrecht Dürer, woodcut illustration for chapter 75, “Of Bad Marksmen”.
Master of Haintz Narr, the frontispiece of the 1494 edition which became a popular choice for title page in later editions.
Adam Green - September 13, 2011 in alchemy, Art and Illustrations, Articles, Books, kabbala, Philosophy, Religion, robert fludd, Science, Utriusque cosmi
Adam Green - August 22, 2011 in anatomy, Art and Illustrations, Articles, Books, Osteographia, Science, William Cheselden
if I had not been so much engaged about an Osteology in which every plate is twenty one inches long, and fifteen broad. All the bones will be done so large as the life, and the bones of the limbs and trunk, with sceletons as large as the plates will admit of; And besides these there will be some plates of the cartilages, ligaments and diseased bones; and every chapter will have a distinct head-piece and tail-piece, which will be chiefly made of the sceletons of different animals.The Osteographia eventually appeared in 1733 with a double set of plates, 56 lettered and 56 unlettered, “to shew them in their full beauty” (ch. 8). Part of the delay was that the initial drawings for the plates were abandoned when Cheselden, in his desire for the greatest accuracy in the rendering of the skeleton, had his artists, Gerard Vandergucht and Jacob Schijnvoet, employ a camera obscura, the use of which is illustrated in a vignette on the title page. As described in chapter VIII, the artist drew upon a roughened glass set six inches inside; a sliding lens allowed him to adjust the scale. The resulting image was then traced on to paper. Many of the preparatory drawings survive in the collection of the Royal Academy, London.
Camera obscura vignette, Title page, Osteographia, 1733
Skeleton praying, tab XXXVI, Osteographia, 1733, and Skeleton bound, tab. X, The Anatomy of the Human Body, 1740
Skeleton of a year-and-a-half-old child holding an adult humerus, tab. XXXII, and Skeleton of a 9-year-old child leaning on a horse's skull, tab. XXXII
Adam Green - August 15, 2011 in Art and Illustrations, Articles, Australasia, Books, botany, d'Entrecasteaux, History, Labillardière, Lapérouse, Oceania, tazmania