A Bluestocking Knits

Fine Art Funnies

David sent me a ton of these, so I thought I'd share a few -- we could all use some humor these days!

"Alexander Carse with his Mother and Sister"

Alexander Carse (c.1770–1843), "Self-Portrait with Two Women (Presumed to be the Artist's Mother and Sister)" (1795), National Galleries of Scotland, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

I received a postcard yesterday that was the cover of the Penguin edition of Persuasion, with a detail of a very Austenian painting which the caption informed me was Alexander Carse's "The Visit of the Country Relations".  Little seems to be known about this earlyish Scottish genre painter, whose Wikipedia article is a decent length but manages to say not very much except a few details such as that he may have painted the earliest-known depictions of football (!) and that the "Country Relations" painting is regarded as his best work. 

It is like a little novel in itself, so I'm very interested to see it in better detail and in color.  Curiously for it being regarded as his best work, I can find only one single black-and-white image of it, with no indication of its whereabouts -- but I did appreciate finding another painting of someone reading, so I will have to be satisfied with that for the time being!

Thoughts on the "Good Dame Eve's Cap"

Part of David's Renaisssance Faire garb for this year -- for I wasn't the only one this year who wanted to dress for it, so I am at the moment sewing like a madwoman -- is to include what is generally known as a Tudor or Elizabethan flat cap.  Of course I had seen the July/August 2012 issue of Piecework with the "Good Dame Eve's Cap" pattern written up by Joanne Watson, "inspired by a Tudor cap from Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, England".  I promptly sent off for two skeins of the Manos del Uruguay Clasica, and began to knit.  Unfortunately, as I've said elsewhere, I got to the end of the wool before I got to the end of the hat: I then shook my fist and ordered another skein from Jimmy Beans, wh. arrived within a few days, and the hat was done the next afternoon. 

I suspect now that this is why I ran short --

I weighed the new skein just out of curiosity -- glad I did now.  So as it turned out, the finished hat weighed before felting 193g -- which not coincidentally would be 2 skeins' worth if the skeins had actually weighed 100g, so it's not the pattern -- I used 26g of the third skein, which by my calculations makes the first two skeins more or less 83.5g each.  I used every bit of wool in the first two skeins, as well -- spliced the joins and wove in the ends -- so it's all there.

When the new skein arrived and had been balled up and ready to go, I realized that I didn't much like the narrow-on-one-side, wide-on-the-other brim in the magazine photograph,

which doesn't really show up if you only look at it and think "Tudor hat, great!" like I did, and don't examine it carefully -- so I worked the alternate version of the pattern, the folded-brim one.

The only modification I made was to use a three-needle bind-off, instead of binding off and sewing down the turned edge.  Since I already had put in a "life line" at the beginning of the brim, picking up a row of stitches at that point was fairly simple.  I don't know much about the period accuracy of a three-needle bind-off in this manner, but there it is.  It makes a lovely sharp crease there, just where one is wanted.  I might have put a purl row at the point where the hat part goes from increasing to decreasing, if I'd felt more devil-may-care about authenticity, actually.

(Notice the color difference between the skeins of the Clasica.  Pity the lighter one wasn't the third skein.  Oh well.)

The shape of the finished hat is a little irregular, due to the straight section at the start (just above the brim).  This gives it a sort of mushroom-y shape, not with the sharp increase-section/decrease-section look that you see in some paintings -- more like the third hat in the paintings below than the second one.

I pressed and steamed it like anything to try and get it to lie flatter on the top than the spiral decreases really wanted to do, as I'd had in mind something rather flatter, more I guess like this one from the Museum of London --

but the Good Dame Eve's Cap is a quick knit (with enough wool ...) and makes a good choice for impulsive Ren-Faire garb.

Notice in the Museum of London hat that the brim is split, which to my eye makes a very fetching hat.  I can't help looking at this one and thinking, "hmm, finer wool of course, irregularly-spaced decreases at the crown," and wondering what I've got in my stash that I could tinker with.  There are probably dozens of flat hats like this in the Museum of London alone, many photographed like this one, and of course the flat hat appears again and again in paintings.  One of the reasons for its popularity was, I suspect, the ease with which the style lends itself to variations.  Here are a few I've found --

Ludger tom Ring, "Portrait of a Man" (1566). Interesting that part of the cap seems to have been painted out.  It looks like the brim is fur and the top is not -- velvet, perhaps? and thus eminently scrunchable, as this man seems to have done.  (I am fascinated by the detail in this portrait: the button loops, the lines of silver embroidery on the doublet, the visible stitching on the white lining of the jacket.)

Oh, here is the artist, in fact --

Ludger tom Ring (German, not Dutch as I'd suspected) in a 1547 self-portrait.  Isn't it interesting how you find faces that seem to cross the centuries.  This is partly his looking straight at the viewer, I think -- it gives the portrait a modern directness.

John Bettes, "Portrait of a Man" (1545).  This man wears his cap much lower on his head than the first two men.

Hans Holbein the Younger, "Portrait of Thomas Cromwell" (1532-33).  Difficult to see, with the black against a dark background, but I suspect it is the same type of flat hat, worn pulled down low over his forehead.

Will of the World

On the new-books shelf at the library the other day, I came across Contested Will by James Shapiro.  Being mildly interested in seeing "Anonymous" sometime soon, I took this home with me, although it is not about the authorship controversy as such, but about the history of it, when it first started being mooted, who were the major proponents -- and their nominees, as it were -- how it has developed over the years, and by way of wondering why there is such debate about the authorship of the plays, how an increasing, and increasingly insistent, belief that an author's life will inevitably be reflected in great detail in his works.

Shapiro says right off that he believes that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but he maintains a fairly level-headed fairness throughout, only seeming a bit baffled at times how someone as intelligent as, for example, Freud, would become so obsessed with proving that someone else wrote the plays.  Shapiro's book is very readable -- it could in fact have been a bit more academic, and have included more than just a "bibliographical essay" at the end, especially since on this topic there are so many people who will argue and counter-argue about particular points apparently until Doomsday.

(Why, why, why, do publishers think that readers of non-academic works are not interested in footnotes?)

So, anyway, I got interested in reading a biography of Shakespeare, so tottered down the street to the public library, and picked out two of the most-recent on the shelf, starting with Anthony Holden's Shakespeare : the Man Behind the Genius.  Now, I have had a fairly high opinion of Anthony Holden for many years, admiring his biographies of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, but I found this book, while comfortably readable, to be superficial and filled with speculation presented as fact.  He blithely states one one page that there is no evidence that Shakespeare attended the Stratford grammar school, as the registers for the period have not survived, and then almost on the next page is writing as though it were fact, "In 1571, the year of William's arrival in the senior school..." which I find really shoddy scholarship.  He does lots of things like this: "Capitalising an intial letter, second only to moving a comma as the nicest of nicities among textual emendations, could see 24-year-old Shakespeare on the road with the Queen's Men in 1588.  'I sick withal the help of bath desired / and thither hied a sad, distempered guest ...'  What does this mean? An out-of-sorts actor-poet in need of a hot bath?  Capitalise the 'B' of Bath in Sonnet 153, and you have a sick player -- no doubt after some post-performance over-indulgence with his fellows at the local inn -- seeking solace in the waters of the West Country spa, already renowned for their medicinal properties.  The Queen's Men made a documented visit to Bath in 1588.  Was the hungover actor a new recruit, enjoying one of his first forays out of London?"  It's a short step from "could have" and "might have" to "did": "[Shakespeare's] brief, half-hearted attempt at retirement to Stratford had made him realise how bored he would be in his native rural backwater, for all his fondness (tinged with guilt) for his daughters."  Three assumptions presented as fact in one sentence! four, if you count the parentheses.  And he does not hesitate to assume the validity of sources who must be taken with at least a grain of salt.  There was it seems an old tradition that Shakespeare kept his own half-pint mug at the local inn, “out of which he was accustomed to take his draught of ale at a certain public house in the neighbourhood of Stratford every Saturday afternoon.” “Our source for this engaging vignette,” Holden writes guilessly, “is, for once, as respectable as a Treasury man, James West, who ‘assured’ George Steevens of this solemn truth in the 1770s.” The 1770s! I ask you.

I went back to the library after that, and borrowed Peter Ackroyd's Shakespeare : the Biography.  I admit that reading this hard on the heels of Holden's book may have made me look on it with a kindlier eye, but I liked this one much better.  The two make almost exactly the same points -- regrettably, judging by the respective bibliographies, neither did much original research -- but Ackroyd is a better writer, and his chapters on London are vivid and fresh.

That said, Ackroyd also does allow himself reams of speculation -- I found it both amusing and frustrating that he can say things like "Shakespeare had been writing 'The Winter's Tale' in the preceding year, and its overwhelmingly pastoral setting has suggested to some critics that he wrote it at New Place in Stratford.  The same reasoning would suggest that he wrote 'The Tempest' while temporarily residing on an island in the Mediterranean," and yet in another place, "As a boy Shakespeare had passed [New Place] every day on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence.  It represented his childhood dream of prosperity," assigning motives that he has no way of authenticating. 

And perhaps I notice this more because of my interest in genealogy and thus church records, but over and over again Ackroyd assumes, it seems (because he doesn't footnote his sources), that Shakespeare was the godfather of various children in Stratford and London simply because the boys were called William -- a possibility, I will agree, but to say it with certainty is misleading, since the baptismal records of the time included not even the name of the mother, let alone the godparents.  (On a somewhat related note, I find his assumption that Shakespeare attended various Stratford funerals rather sentimental.  He says at one point that the journey from Stratford to London took four days on foot or two days on horseback.  If the average time between a death and the resulting funeral is two or three days, then if you allow two days for the news to get up to London, and two days for Shakespeare to travel down to Stratford, he's already at least a day late, less if the death was from an infectious disease.)

And almost no footnotes!

But as I say, Ackroyd is a good writer, and I enjoyed reading his book -- perhaps his eye for detail allowed me to forgive his lapses, although obviously not the more egregious ones. 

And I thought it would be appropriate to include with this post some of the portraits alleged to be Shakespeare.  At the top is the famous Chandos portrait.  This is thought to have been painted somewhere between 1600 and 1610, although on what grounds I don't know.  It was thought for many years to have been painted by Richard Burbage, Shakespeare's contemporary and fellow-actor, and also something of a dab hand at painting; it is now thought that the painter John Taylor is equally if not more likely to be the artist.  An expert from the National Portrait Gallery notes that in addition to damage from over-cleaning, the hair and beard have been lengthened at some point. Next is the so-called Grafton portrait, alas somewhat more discredited these days than it was a few years ago.  The resemblance to the more-iconic portraits is tentative at best, but this of course assumes that those portraits are accurate representations.  I personally would very much like to believe that this boy would go on to write all of those wonderful plays.  Third is the Soest portrait, which even to my eye looks at least a hundred years too late to be from life, but it's a lovely doublet.  Just above is a relatively new contender, the Sanders portrait, with a label identifying it as Shakespeare and having been painted in 1603.  The smile is certainly unusual in portraits -- although frankly I see it as more of a smirk, and find it in fact slightly unpleasant. The collar is interesting and unusual -- I wonder if any period-clothing experts have weighed in on the dating.  And below is the Cobbe portrait, claimed by no less an authority than Stanley Wells on behalf of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust to be a portrait from life to be dated 1610.  A nice portrait -- the beard is especially well done.  Is it Shakespeare?  Are any of them Shakespeare?  Will we ever know?

Mary Delany, a Nice Person

I am currently reading The Paper Garden : an Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72 by Molly Peacock, a biography of the woman who invented the art of paper collage -- rather accidentally, it seems, by noticing the similarity of a piece of colored paper and the petal of a geranium.  Interesting to think that of such trivial coincidences are art forms born.

I don't remember ever having heard of Mary Delany (1700-1788), so this was all new to me, and thus perhaps all the more amazing, to look at a collage like the one above and try to comprehend that it is all little bits of colored paper meticulously cut and pasted onto a black background, with startlingly life-like accuracy.

Delany had an interesting life, a marriage arranged by her family when she was seventeen to a much-older landowner who turned out to be an alcoholic and a gambler, which hardly surprisingly with hindsight turned out to have been such a disaster that Mary could not help being more than a little relieved when he dropped dead quite unexpectedly after seven years.  Now only 24, Mary could perhaps have hoped to live the rest of her life in peace, but unfortunately her husband had not altered his will, and so she did not inherit even what little remained of his estate, and spent the next twenty years living with various friends and family, trying to secure a court appointment, setting up a small household and yet still finding time to produce reams of intelligent, witty, and sensible letters. 

In her forties, Mary received a proposal of marriage from Patrick Delany, an Irish clergyman of her acquaintance (later Dean of Down), who it seems had long held her in the utmost regard.  Now both widowed, the two enjoyed a very happy marriage until the Dean's death in 1768.  A few years later, Mary made the connection between the bits of colored paper and the flower petal, and made nearly a thousand of these flower portraits, what she called collectively her "Flora Delanica", until her eyesight failed in her late eighties.

I found the book at the public library, opened it at random and read the first pages of the chapter on the passion flower, and was enchanted.

A portrait of Mary Delany, by John Opie, 1782.

Peacock, being a poet, has a way with words, so that her prose too is often very poetic.  I did, though, I must confess, get a little tired of the amount of autobiography Peacock stuck into Mary's story.  I can understand objectively why she felt it works, I guess, but subjectively, as it went along, I really wanted more Mary.  The book itself is beautifully made, which I thought a lovely dollop of extra poeticism -- lovely creamy thick pages, a handsome dark font and wide margins.  I was not sure in the end, though, that I wouldn't rather have simply a catalogue of Delany's "mosaicks", and spend a great many hours enjoying a vicarious friendship through her letters.

"Olympia"

I found this new-ish Lion Brand yarn at Michael's not long ago -- wasn't sure I liked the feel of it much, being a bit rough, but frankly the dreariness of this colorway appealed to me in its subtlety, sort of greys with a bit of grey-blue here and there like a stormy sky, a bit of grey-green, a bit of grey-brown. I thought almost at once of the Multidirectional Diagonal Scarf, and found that they suited each other very well.  I had to go around to a number of different stores looking for another ball when I realized that two was not enough -- the Pasadena store had two as well, so I finished the scarf with one and now have one left over.

I have not really captured the color to my satisfaction, even outdoors in natural light, but it does seem very elusive even to the eye, so I can't really blame the camera. 

My first thought upon seeing the name of the colorway was this,

which I have to admit seems unlikely.  Possibly this,

although upon reflection it is probably this,

A Day at the Getty

We went to the Getty the other day, the "new" one in Brentwood.  I hadn't been in ages.

We went to see the exhibit of Jean-Léon Gérôme paintings on view through September.

I am not particularly familiar with Gérôme, although I do know his "Pygmalion and Galatea" and "Duel After the Masked Ball", both of which are on view here.

This is the one that is on all of the posters, "Pollice Verson (Thumbs Down)" of 1872 --

Apparently Gérôme was famous for the historical accuracy of his paintings such as this -- the inspiration for hundreds of sword-and-sandal flicks from C.B. DeMille to Ridley Scott's "Gladiator".

He was one of the prime figures in the Orientalist movement in 19th-century painting and sculpture, typified in "The Carpet Merchants" (1887), a stunning piece of color and detail and exoticism.

Gérôme also turned towards sculpture in his later career, and experimented with different polychrome techniques in the Classical manner.  I must say I rather admire the nice little conceit of the self-portrait of the artist at work in "The End of the Sitting" from 1886.

"Veiled Circassian Lady" (1876).

None of these images really gives the full effect of the real thing -- the richness of color and detail are quite amazing.

We also saw the Renaissance drawing show, "From Line to Light".

This is a ca. 1508 sketch of three trees by Fra Bartolomeo, and here a sketch of a "Standing Saint" by Filippino Lippi from about 1490 --

 

I always like the white detail on ink and metalpoint sketches, especially on grey paper -- something about that color combination speaks to me, I suppose.

This portrait of a young woman from the 1520s, attributed to Andrea Previtali is one of the showpieces of the exhibit, and rightly so --

Certainly worth closer study.  Here is a detail of the workmanship --

Lovely.

It was a beautiful day -- I highly recommend it.