You see the stance of Donatello’s David when you look at a little girl’s posture.
Art
If you love NYC and fashion, you will love…
Bill Cunningham.
He started his fashion career as a millener, designing hats such as this one:
Later, and currently, he works for the New York Times:
For decades he lived in an artist’s studio space in Carnegie Hall:
Fascinating topic, these artist’s studios in Carnegie Hall. Read about them here:
http://nymag.com/homedesign/greatrooms/42385/
http://www.carnegieartiststudios.com/portfolio.html
Cunningham has an eye for fashion on the street. He rides his bike around NYC, shooting what catches his eye. He says he likes the fashion, not the people or celebrity.
Find yourself some time and enjoy this documentary on Bill Cunningham. It is completely delightful. “He who seeks beauty shall find it” says Bill.
Potus and Flotus can tango!
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-obama-does-the-tango-in-argentina/
What a wonderful thing to see! When in Rome!
Ruby in Paradise
Somehow I missed this film when it was released in 1993. Maybe it was the birth of my son? Who knows?
But, I just saw it and it’s a beauty; I highly recommend it. Catch it if you can
Coming soon: it’s here!
What’s in a word? History, association, description, and sometimes even poetry.
To me there are certain words that just seem poetic in and of themselves.
Indigo is one of them.
Indigo. I like the way it sounds.
I like to say it. Indigo.
I like the objects that are made using it.
From the sublime:
To the indispensable:
I love to think about where the word comes from and all the associations it carries. Once the dye was so valuable in the world market that it was known as “blue gold.”
indigo (n.)
17c. spelling change of indico (1550s), “blue powder obtained from certain plants and used as a dye,” from Spanish indico, Portuguese endego, and Dutch (via Portuguese) indigo, all from Latin indicum “indigo,” from Greek indikon “blue dye from India,” literally “Indian (substance),” neuter of indikos “Indian,” from India (see India).
Replaced Middle English ynde (late 13c., from Old French inde “indigo; blue, violet” (13c.), from Latin indicum). Earlier name in Mediterranean languages was annil, anil (see aniline). As “the color of indigo” from 1620s. As the name of the violet-blue color of the spectrum, 1704 (Newton).
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=indigo
The color indigo was named after the indigo dye derived from the plant Indigofera tinctoria and related species. Blue dye was hard to achieve. A variety of plants have provided indigo throughout history, but most natural indigo was obtained from those in the genus Indigofera, which are native to the tropics. The primary commercial indigo species in Asia was true indigo (Indigofera tinctoria, also known as I. sumatrana).
A common alternative source of the dye is from the plant Strobilanthes cusia, grown in the relatively colder subtropical locations such as Japan’s Ryukyu Islands and Taiwan. In Central and South America, the two species grown are I. suffruticosa (añil) and dyer’s knotweed (Polygonum tinctorum), although the Indigofera species yield more dye.
India is believed to be the oldest center of indigo dyeing, both in terms of production and processing. The I. tincture species was domesticated in India. It was a primary supplier to the rest of the world of indigo dye.
The dye was in Europe as early as the Greco-Roman era, where it was valued as a luxury product. The Romans used indigo as a pigment for painting and for medicinal and cosmetic purposes. The extravagant item was imported into the Mediterranean lands from India by Arab merchants.
Indigo remained a rare commodity in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. A chemically identical dye derived from the woad plant (Isatis tinctoria), was used instead. Woad was replaced when true indigo became available through trade routes.
In the late 15th century, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama discovered a sea route to India.
This led to the establishment of direct trade with India, the Spice Islands, China, and Japan. Importers could now avoid the heavy duties imposed by Persian, Levantine, and Greek middlemen and the lengthy and dangerous land routes which had previously been used. Consequently, the importation and use of indigo in Europe rose significantly.
Much European indigo from Asia arrived through ports in Portugal, the Netherlands, and England.
Spain imported the dye from its colonies in South America.
Many indigo plantations were established by European powers in tropical climates; it was also a major crop in Jamaica and South Carolina, with much or all of the labor performed by enslaved Africans and African Americans.
Indigo plantations also thrived in the Virgin Islands.
However, France and Germany outlawed imported indigo in the 16th century to protect the local woad dye industry.
So valuable was indigo as a trading commodity, it was often referred to as blue gold.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_dye
Indigo is among the oldest dyes to be used for textile dyeing and printing. Many Asian countries, such as India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asian nations have used indigo as a dye (particularly silk dye) for centuries. In Japan, indigo became especially important in the Edo period, when it was forbidden to use silk, so the Japanese began to import and plant cotton. It was difficult to dye the cotton fiber except with indigo. Even today indigo is very much appreciated as a color for the summer Kimono Yukata, as this traditional clothing recalls nature and the blue sea.
The dye was also known to ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Britain, Mesoamerica, Peru, Iran, and Africa.
The association of India with indigo is reflected in the Greek word for the ‘dye’, which was indikon (ινδικόν). The Romans used the term indicum, which passed into Italian dialect and eventually into English as the word indigo. El Salvador has lately been the biggest producer of indigo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo
The first known recorded use of indigo as a color name in English was in 1289.
Historically,blue dyes were rare and hard to achieve, so indigo, a natural dye extracted from plants, was important economically. A large percentage of indigo dye produced today – several thousand tons each year – is synthetic. It is the blue often associated with blue jeans.
The primary use for indigo today is as a dye for cotton yarn, which is mainly for the production of denim cloth for blue jeans. On average, a pair of blue jean trousers requires 3–12 g of indigo. Small amounts are used for dyeing wool and silk.
Indigo carmine, or indigo, is an indigo derivative which is also used as a colorant. About 20 million kg are produced annually, again mainly for blue jeans.[1] It is also used as a food colorant, and is listed in the United States as FD&C Blue No. 2.
In 1675 Newton revised his account of the colors in a rainbow, adding the color of indigo which he located between the lines of blue and violet.
Newton had originally identified five colors, but enlarged his codification to seven in his revised account of the rainbow in Lectiones Opticae.
Indigo, a color in the rainbow.
Indigo
Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun @ the Met
Remember this painting?
The work of the French 18th-century painter, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), is being featured in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York right now. Amazingly, this is the first retrospective and only the second exhibition devoted to Vigée Le Brun in modern times. The 80 works on view include oil paintings and a few pastels from European and American public and private collections.
The Met’s website has great images and good information about the artist and the exhibition here http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun
The images and information in this post is taken largely from the Met’s website.
One of the finest 18th-century French painters and among the most important of all women artists, Vigée Le Brun is a beacon of inspiration to all women. She was remarkable not only for her technical gifts but for her understanding of and sympathy with her sitters.
With her exceptional skills as a portraitist, she achieved success in France and Europe during one of the most eventful, turbulent periods in European history and indeed the path of her own life reflects that turbulence.
To wit: At the age of 21, she married the leading art dealer in Paris. Her husband’s profession created a conflict of interest that at first kept her from being accepted into the prestigious Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Nevertheless, through the intervention of Marie Antoinette, she was admitted at the age of 28 in 1783, becoming one of only four women members.
However, her association with the royalty forced her to flee for her safety from France in 1789; she traveled to Italy, where in 1790 she was elected to membership in the Accademia di San Luca, Rome. She worked independently in Florence, Naples, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Berlin before returning to France, painting portraits of, among others, members of the royal families of Naples, Russia, and Prussia.
Despite the fact that she was in exile, she exhibited at the Paris Salons. That seems pretty amazing to me.
One of the best features of the museum’s website is that you can take an audio tour online of the exhibition here: http://metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2016/vigee-le-brun/audio-guide
Let’s look at a few of the key objets in the exhibition:
Here’s her portrait of her brother, painted when she was 18 and he was 15.
Etienne (1758–1820) is presented as a draftsman holding an artist’s portfolio and porte-crayon. He later developed a reputation as a witty poet and playwright. The French Revolution marked his life in serious ways as well as that of his sister.
Here’s her portrait of her stepfather, whom she disliked intensely:
The stepfather, Monsieur Le Sèvre (1724–1810), was a gold- and silversmith who brought Vigée’s family to live above his shop on the rue Saint-Honoré. He is shown seated at a desk, reading, in a satin robe and nightcap, typical at-home attire for men of the time. The sympathetic portrayal belies the intense dislike Vigée felt for him. She accused him of hoarding her income.
Her mother, Madame Jacques François Le Sèvre:
The sitter (1728–1800) had married our artist’s father, Louis Vigée (1715–1767), a portraitist and official at the Académie de Saint-Luc. After his death, she married Jacques Le Sèvre, a goldsmith. Madame Le Sèvre encouraged her adolescent daughter’s professional aspirations by chaperoning her sittings and taking her to see works of art. Vigée’s mother wears a satin cloak trimmed with swans’ down and bows of a color the artist particularly favored.
Her allegorical interpretation of “Poetry.”
Vigée was nineteen when officials sealed her studio on the pretext that she was painting professionally without having joined a guild. She therefore applied and was admitted to the Académie de Saint-Luc. Of the works she contributed to her first exhibition, three were allegories of the arts: Painting, Poetry, and Music. Here, Poetry, a draped nude, writes in a portfolio with a goose quill. She looks upward, conveying a moment of inspiration.
Her patron, the queen Marie Antoinette in Court Dress:
In 1777, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria wrote to her daughter Marie Antoinette (1755–1793) asking for a portrait. Vigée Le Brun received the commission, her first from the queen. She remembered that the queen “walked better than any other woman in France, holding her head very high with a majesty that singled her out in the midst of the entire court.”
The Duchesse de Polignac in a Straw Hat
Vigée Le Brun shows the duchess (1749–1793), a close friend of Marie Antoinette, bathed in pale golden light. She wears the straw hat and costume of an elegant courtier-shepherdess.
Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress
The queen and her circle had grown weary of the discomforts of the formal attire worn at Versailles. In the early 1780s, in private settings, they therefore abandoned their corsets and hoops for draped, loosely belted muslin chemise dresses, which were relaxed and natural.
With the support of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Vigée Le Brun became one of fourteen women (among 550 artists) admitted to the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture before the Revolution. At her first Salon, she displayed a number of portraits, including one of the queen in a white muslin dress and straw hat. The characterization of the monarch was admired. However, the pastoral costume was condemned as inappropriate for the public portrayal of royalty and the artist was asked to remove it from the exhibition.
Comtesse de Ségur
VigÈe-Le Brun Elisabeth Louise (1755-1842). Versailles, ch?teaux de Versailles et de Trianon. MV5962.
The countess (1756–1828) shared in the work of her husband, a diplomat, historian, and supporter of the American War of Independence. With her lips parted in a smile, she here abandons the mask of impassivity traditionally embraced by courtiers.
This luminous, subtly painted image is in the new style Vigée Le Brun adopted after she saw Peter Paul Rubens’s Presumed Portrait of Susanne Lunden.
Baronne de Crussol Florensac
The baronne de Crussol Florensac turns to gaze at the viewer over her shoulder. She holds a musical score and wears a splendid red costume with a deep black velvet collar and a matching hat. Little is known of this woman of great beauty, elegance, and distinction. The support, a wood panel, contributes to the lustrous surface of the picture.
Marie Antoinette and Her Children
In 1785, by order of Louis XVI, the office of royal households commissioned this important portrait of Marie Antoinette from Vigée Le Brun, the first woman to attain the rank of painter to the king. Inspired by depictions of the Holy Family, the work was intended to extoll the queen’s maternal role. The empty bassinet alludes to her fourth child, who had recently died.
You can see many more images from the exhibition at the Met’s website linked above.
It’s about time!
Van Dyck at the Frick
This beguiling self-portrait was created around 1620 by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), one of the most talented portrait painters of all time. His sitters–poets, duchesses, painters and generals–were the elite of his age. He painted them in an elegant manner, capturing, in his best works it is often said, the sitter’s inner life.
The Frick Collection in New York has a major new exhibition running currently and, thanks to the internet, we can all take a virtual tour of the show.
And may I say, hat’s off to the Frick for their outstanding use of technology to advance knowledge of the exhibition itself as well as the work of Van Dyck. The Frick’s website is among the most advanced I have seen of all art museums. The following pictures and text are all modified from the museum’s website.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/van_dyck/virtual_exhibition
Born in Antwerp, Van Dyck rose to the top of his field, already assisting Flander’s most acclaimed artist, Peter Paul Rubens, in his late teens. Van Dyck spent the winter of 1620 in England, followed by a six year stay in Italy. By the age of 33, he was back in England, appointed principal painter to Charles I.
Self-portrait, c. 1613-15 Van Dyck’s first known self-portrait, painted when he was about fifteen.
Genoese Noblewoman, c. 1625-27
Van Dyck spent most of his Italian years in Genoa, a thriving Mediterranean port with an important Flemish community. In the wake of Peter Paul Rubens, who had preceded him there in the first decade of the century, he provided the city’s noble families with grand portraits, many of which still adorn their palaces. This portrait of a luxuriously dressed young woman standing against a loosely defined architectural background is a typical example of such images. Although she remains unidentified, the sash across her torso and the black edges of her cuffs seem to indicate she is a widow.
Lady Anne Carey, c. 1636
Anne Carey, later Countess of Clanbrassil, was the daughter of Henry Carey, second Earl of Monmouth, and Martha Cranfield. This portrait was likely painted on the occasion of her engagement to James Hamilton, heir of a Scottish family that had received large land grants in Northern Ireland. Lady Anne strides to the left in an Arcadian landscape, with the boulder behind her framing a woodland vista. Van Dyck reused this backdrop in other portraits, catering to the taste of English aristocrats who sought refuge from an increasingly unstable political situation in pastoral fantasies.
Mary, wife of Anthony van Dyck, c. 1640
Van Dyck’s wife, Mary Ruthven, came from an aristocratic, if impoverished, family of Scottish Catholics and served as a maid of honor to Queen Henrietta Maria. Van Dyck’s marriage to her in early 1640 marked his social ascent, but the painter died less than two years later, just eight days after the birth of his daughter Justina. Van Dyck’s portrait of his new bride is a sensuously painted autograph work. A cluster of oak leaves bound in Lady van Dyck’s hair may symbolize constancy, while her elegantly splayed fingers call attention to the proscribed Catholic faith that she shared with her husband, symbolized in the crucifix she displays.
Marie-Claire de Croy & son Phillpe-Eugene, 1634
Descended from one of the most ancient noble families in the Southern Netherlands, Marie-Claire de Croÿ was created Duchess of Havré in her own right by the king of Spain upon her marriage to a cousin in 1627. The child who appears alongside her is likely Philippe-Eugène, the future bishop of Valencia. The painting shows van Dyck’s customarily grandiose and richly colored court portraits.
Queen Henrietta Maria with Jeffrey Hudson, 1633
Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was the youngest child of Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici. In England, her lifelong devotion to the Catholic faith proved to be a major impediment to her popularity. Nevertheless, she served as the emotional mainstay of her husband’s life and provided an important cultural link among England, France, and the papal court at Rome. This is one of Van Dyck’s earliest portraits of the queen. He assimilates her into an English tradition of depicting queens in hunting dress, and the European practice of representing royalty in the company of dwarves — in this case, Jeffery Hudson, a famous member of the queen’s retinue.
Pomponne II de Bellievre, c. 1637-40
Pomponne II de Bellièvre, Lord of Grignon, came from a prominent family of French statesmen and twice served as French ambassador to the English court. Van Dyck most likely painted Bellièvre during the latter’s first posting to London.. Van Dyck’s likeness is a study in muted elegance, with Bellièvre’s long brown hair lapping over his floppy collar while a sash of crimson silk accents his otherwise black and white costume.
Prince William of Orange and Mary, Princess Royal, 1641
The marriage of William of Orange and Mary, daughter of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, provided an important link between the English court and the Dutch Republic. In this smoothly executed formal wedding portrait, Van Dyck depicts the two children with linked hands, calling attention to the princess’s wedding ring. Account books record William’s many purchases on the occasion of his wedding, including the diamond brooch for Mary and suit of pink silk faithfully reproduced here.
http://www.frick.org/exhibitions/van_dyck/video
What’s beer-making got to do with interior design?
Well, I’m so glad you asked!
You know how you have to break some eggs to make an omelette? Well, if you want to make beer, you gotta dry some hops.
And where do you dry hops?
Why, in an oast house, of course!
An oasthouse looks something like this one in Kent, England.
Kent is here:
If you know what I’ve been up to lately, you’ll know that the reason I am writing about oasthouses is that some of them have become residences for Brits…
and as we all know, residences must be decorated, and…
well…you know the rest.
When, oh when will my current obsession end? Only with the end of the BBC Two series, The Great Interior Design Challenge, comes to an end I fear! Yes, it is true I love interior design and up cycling old treasures, but what really floats my boat is the tour of fascinating English homes, high and low alike, and the history lessons of British social life and domestic architecture. I mean, what’s not to love?
But, I do have a couple of dilemmas.
Here’s one: whereas Google images usually has a great selection of images for most things a blogger wants to illustrate, whether it is fabrics by Fortuny or drawings of carnations, for some reason there are very few images online anywhere I can find of the various projects used in The Great Interior Design Challenge series on BBC Two. And the ones I can find won’t copy, as the folks at BBC Two obviously know how to restrict access to their intellectual property. I respect that.
So, I am unable to show you any images from the show of the oast houses featured on the series, exteriors or interiors. None of the images in this post are related to the show. But that’s okay!
Stone and timber-frame oast house interior, Leominster, Herefordshire, England.
Okay, now that I have that info out of the way, let’s look at some of these crazy oasthouses!
Here’s how they were originally used.
And here are some examples of how these great old structures have been converted for modern life.
And, for a quick primer of the variations in structural matters:
Here are some useful links for more info on British oast houses:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/property/9612529/How-about-an-oast-house.html
http://looking-at-london.com/2015/09/11/london-workers-22/
Let’s go: 17th century Cotswold cottages
Think of Britain and an image like this may spring into your mind:
As we continue with our virtual time-traveling tour of the UK–following the path set by the BBC Two show The Great Interior Design Challenge, Season 2–our next stop is the 17th century, where we visit the living rooms of three cottages where the proletariat once lived in rather crowded conditions.
We are visiting this highlighted section of England today:
The cottages look like this on the outside:
Charming, no?
Although originally meant to house many families, four hundred years after they were originally constructed, the cottages have been expanded within to single family homes.
Despite having larger interiors nowadays, however, the insides are often quite dark and usually centered around a massive fireplace.
Updating with a special eye towards brightening the interiors of living rooms in three similar cottages is the challenge facing the three amateur designers on this episode of my favorite new tv show.
You can find it on Youtube. It’s a pretty good episode. https://youtu.be/02oB-2KWslE
And, you can read about the Cotswold here, if you are the nerdy type like me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotswolds
get back, lauretta! 
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