Old news just in.

Little diamonds.

We've reached into history's mist and pulled them out for your perusal.

William Sharp’s sumptuous 1854 illustrations of The Great Water Lily of America, the “vegetable wonder” that owes it’s life to scarab beetles, has 10 foot wide leaves and flowers that smell of fruit.

The Victoria Regia; or the Great Water Lily of America, a gigantic water lily, was first discovered along the Amazon River and taken to Britain for cultivation. This so-called “vegetable wonder” was a spectacular flower. Nineteenth century commentators described with amazement the...
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Art & DesignNature

Trending prints.

Life & Art.

Same thing, right?

Time travel tourism.

You can still go there.

THE PHOTOCHROM GUIDE TO : Switzerland & the Alps, 1890-1905.

These Photochrome images of Switzerland are by Photocrome Zurich, made shortly after they invented the process in the 1880s. There were 3 variations of the Photocrome processes at the time; Fotochrom, & Aäc Photocrome & the original, PhotoChrome. The Photocrome process was an old school process for colourizing black-and-white negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lo-fi lithographic printing plates made of stone. The process is a photographic variant of chromolithography (color lithography). Creatively choosing...
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Art & DesignTravel

Get aquainted with these real characters from the streets of 1836 Paris in “Gallerie Physionomique” by C.J. Traviès, the artist Baudelaire called “the prince of the unfortunate”.

Physiognomy is the practice of assessing someone’s character and personality based solely on their appearance, especially the face. In other words judging a book by its cover. In his Gallerie Physionomique of 1836, the prolific caricaturist, Charles-Joseph Traviès de Villers (known as C.J. Traviès), practiced this shamelessly un-PC exercise on the denizens of 1830s Paris in the form of character portraits. Traviès was ruthless, but it’s so evident that he drew these people with love, insight and understanding....
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Art & Design

All kinds of blue.

To colour match your decor, add indigo accents or use as the catalyst for a new colour scheme.

Behold. Anonimo.

The unintentionally surreal and strangely engaging art of an anonymous ("anonimo") turn of the century Italian Zoological wallchart maker.

Time travel tourism.

You can still go there.

In 1878, an obscure Japanese artist named Watanabe Seitei went to a Paris dinner party and drew two birds in old-school kachōga style for the legendary painter Degas. 20 years later, Seitei was designing amazing avant garde woodcuts.

Whilst these woodcut prints (below) by Watanabe Seitei for the art magazine, Bijutsu Sekai (The World of Art) seem surprisingly simple and contemporary, the artist’s background is complex and ancient. In 1851 when the artist now known as Watanabe Shōtei (AKA Watanabe Seitei) was born he was named Yoshikawa Yoshimata and Tokyo didn’t yet exist. Tokyo was then a city called Edo and samurai still walked its streets. He descended from a family of rice brokers and was apprenticed to...
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Art & DesignObscurity

The alien U.S. landscapes of Henry “Yellowstone” Moran.

Irrespective of him being one of the greatest interpreters of the American landscape, England should claim Thomas Moran (1837-1926). He was born there, in Bolton, Lancashire. He came to the states as a child, attended the Hudson River School in New York and as a fledgling artist, shared a New York studio with his older brother, the noted marine artist Edward Moran. A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner’s Monthly who...
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Art & DesignNature

Myth & legend.

Add some storyline and authentic epicness to your walls.

Cast your eyes on wonderful things.

"I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things.” - the Egyptologist, Howard Carter talking about the moment he first looked inside the Tomb of Tutankhamun.

Featured prints

Irrational Geographic.

Backdated & belatedly curated.

3 years in the life of a shadowy Dutch artist in a cloak and hat. The revealing 1800s visual diaries of Christiaan Andriessen. The Amsterdam Drawing Academy wouldn’t let him draw female nudes so he left to set up a studio at home.

Between 1805 and 1808, the Amsterdam artist Christiaan Andriessen kept a diary; a visual diary with over 700 drawings and watercolors depicting the the goings on in his life, with his friends, family and events in the city. Christiaan came from a family who encouraged his artistic pursuits; his father was the Dutch decorative painter, graphic artist and teacher, Jurriaan Andriessen (1742-1819). Jurriaan was also a meticulous diary keeper and the Rijksmuseum holds 20 years of his diaries. Perhaps...
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Art & DesignHistory

Art. Leaked from ancient labs.

Seriously awesome art by serious scientists.

People are strange.

When you're a stranger.

Featured prints

Still gorgeous.

After all these years.

Authentic outliers & outsiders.

Putting the "also rans" first.

Just a thin biographical trace remains of the Polish artist, Anna Berent. All that remains are 6 canvasses of real note. 4 of them contain elusive symbolism, indecipherable allegories of her own making that whisper to us of old age, death and passing. Their full meaning is as opaque and as lost in time as their creator.

We have this. Anna Berent was born in 1871 in Kaiserslautern and died sometime after 1944. Perhaps in Zagreb. In the 1890s, she was studying in Munich, at the Stanisław Grocholski school and at the school...
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Art & Design

Abraham Hendriksz van Beijeren. It’s both magical to remember & easy to forget that the objects that glisten there now, once glistened in the gloom of his studio almost four hundred years ago; his fruit and his fish, fresh for eternity; his silver shining forever in the darkness.

Abraham Hendriksz van Beijeren or Abraham van Beyeren was born in The Hague somewhere around 1620. He died in March 1690 in Overschie, Rotterdam. During his 70 years he was little known or recognised for his dark, Baroque still lifes. Van Beyeren specialised in an ornate style of still life known as Pronkstilleven, (Dutch for ‘ostentatious’, ‘ornate’ or ‘sumptuous’). This sumptuous style (and it is so very sumptuous) originated in Antwerp in the 1640s from where its ostentatiousness spread over the Dutch […]...
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Art & Design

Featured prints

Nudes of the 1800s.

Poland.

Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936), led the Polish modernist movement, painted brilliantly and relentlessly in all kinds of styles. They named a museum after him in a remote northern city and, after his death, his wife gave over 700 paintings.

Leon Wyczółkowski (1852-1936) was a leading figure in Poland’s modernist movement who dabbled in history painting, the Polish Realism movement, Impressioniam (after visiting Paris, of course), Orientalism and even Symbolism. This was all...
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Art & Design

New ephemera. Just in.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Breitner sought social realism in his work. He was one of the first artists to use photos as studies for specific paintings, not just of street scenes but in the studio as well. He integrated this perspective into his studio portraits by making a point of employing working class models. One of these models would become the “girl in the kimono”, immortalised in a series of 13 Japonisme inspired paintings. The “girl in the kimono” was a milliner’s shopgirl named […]...
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Art & Design

James Sowerby (1757-1822), “A new elucidation of colours, original, prismatic, and material; showing their concordance in three primitives, yellow, red, and blue; and the means of producing, measuring, and mixing them. With some observations on the accuracy of Sir Isaac Newton”. London, 1809.

James Sowerby (1757 – 1822) was an English naturalist, illustrator and mineralogist. When he published his colour theory, A new elucidation of colours (1809), as his homage to Issac...
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Obscurity

John Martin’s sister was murdered by a neighbour, one brother was a “perfectly cracked” eccentric philosopher/inventor & the other an insane religious firestarter. Perhaps it’s no surprise John became the ultimate harbinger of The Apocolypse.

John Martin painted various apocolypses. Over and over and over. He was an Apocolyptian painter. Perhaps, it was a kind of escapism. It makes a kind of sense; a man born in a claustrophobic one bedroom cottage in Northumberland, England, who grew up to paint vast open expanses. It could be the other way around. He felt safe when closed in, safe from the hell of a threatening world outside. The source of calamity however most likely eminated from blood. […]...
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Art & Designcrime

Getting arty with the dear departed. The serious business of 19th century mixed media meddling. Anonymous c. 1880 – 1900.

This art form takes time and planning ahead. Way ahead. Simply take your loved ones to a local photo studio, select your favourite image, have it printed out in sepia. Now cut it out ever so carefully. Now paint your choice of background in oils on a wooden board, glue on your photo and hand colour it to blend it right in. Make their cheeks a little bit rosy and perhaps as a final touch consider adding a little lock […]...
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Mystery

Art & life.

Strawberries & cream.

Armchair tourism.

Canadian “Rogue Photographer”, Reuben R. Sallows (1855 – 1937) travelled everywhere & anyhow; by Model A Ford, by train and even by canoe. See the snippets of what remains of a 60 year career.

On July 30, 1937, an 81 year old photographer named Reuben R. Sallows was driving a truck, packed with photography apparatus, south on Highway 21 near Kintail in Ontario, Canada. He was on his way to photograph a local summer camp, when one of his tyres blew out. The road’s loose gravel meant that Sallow’s truck flipped. It landed in into a roadside ditch, pinning him into the ground. “Mr. Sallows was conscious when pulled from beneath his old car […]...
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Obscurity

Friedrich Paul Theodor Sarre, abandoned mosque raider & jihad negotiator.

Monuments of Persian architecture: historical study and recording of Muslim brick buildings in Asia Minor and Persia by Friedrich Paul Theodor Sarre. Sarre was a German Orientalist, archaeologist and art historian who, during amassed an impressive collection of Islamic art during his lifetime. His father was from a Huguenot family, his mother from the Heckmann industrialist family. Sarre studied art history in Leipzig. He travelled for archaeological research thanks to his aunt Elise Wentzel-Heckmann (1833-1914) to Anatolia, Persia and Central Asia, specializing in Islamic art. Together with Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948) he excavated […]...
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Art & DesignObscurityTravel

Here's to the crazy ones.

The few in the multitudes that stand up and stand out.

Adolphe Menzel, Part Number 1 : “…no taller than a cuirassier-guard’s boot, bedecked with pendants and orders, not missing a single one of these parties, moving among all these personages like a gnome…’. The small, dark and very personal world of the man Degas called “the greatest living master”.

Adolphe Menzel was different to other people. Or rather, everyone was different to him. He was very small man, he stood just four feet and six inches tall, and had an unusually over-large...
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Art & Design

The legend “E.T.” Compton (1849 –1921). The Quaker boy from N.E. London who taught art to a Princess, climbed over 300 humungous mountains all over the planet and painted sights few humans, even today, will ever see.

Renowned for his “brilliant mountaineering skill on ice and rock, his truly admirable perseverance, his inexhaustible patience in bearing hardships”, Edward Theodore Compton, a.k.a. “E. T.” Compton, (1849 –1921) also painted the mountains...
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NatureObscurity

OBSCURE EDITORIAL AESTHETICS : Kickass 1920s illustrations from the left wing, anti-nazi, anti corruption & anti-war German satirical magazine, Lachen Links.

The first issue of the German satirical magazine, Lachen Links (Laughter Left) was published on January 11, 1924. “Ridiculousness kills” was its’s motto. The name, Laughter Left refers to German parliamentary parlance – the laughing at an opponent on the other side of the political spectrum was referred to as to “laugh left” or “laugh right’. Laughter Left was clear where it stood. The magazine “laughed left”. The magazine is an impressive testimony to wit and satire as a powerful protest […]...
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Art & DesignObscurity

Miscellaneous. A pot pourri of pearls purloined from the past.

Random bite-sized chunks of extreme retro-ness plucked from the time's dust and polished for your perusal.

‘All authentic art is conceived at a sacred moment and nourished in a blessed hour; an inner impulse creates it, often without the artist being aware of it’. So sayeth the King of Gothic gloom, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).

Caspar David Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative...
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Art & Design

Remote fragments from the void.

Scattered elements. What stories lie in the gaps between? You fill in the blanks.

Treacherous rapids and remote shamanic Siberian tribes. Photography from the Russian explorer I.G. Ivanov’s 1913 Land Management Expeditions into the remote Gornaia Shoria mountain region.

During 1913, an obscure Russian explorer named I.G. Ivanov (1826-1929) undertook two gruelling topographical expeditions into southern Siberia, one to the Gornaia Shoria in the Altai region and another to the Mrasskii region, the Kuznetskii District the centre of the Gornaia Shoria). The indigenous population of this region were the Shors or Shoria, people, practitioners of both shamanism and animism. These excellent photographs reflect both expedition activities and the life of the Shors. In the 1920s the negatives were transferred […]...
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Travel

FOUND : Early photographs of an extraordinary time in a remote place. Leaf through a scrapbook of early soviet-era Berdsk, central Russia.

Berdsk sits in the centre of Russia on the left bank of the Berdsk gulf, a wide flooded valley of the Berd River. Berd river > Berdsk town. Founded at the beginning of the 18th century as a fortress, at the time these images we taken, the town is not yet a city. The land surrounding the town is monotonous and incredibly plain. To the south of the town there are fields and a 20 square kilometer pine forest lays […]...
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ObscurityTravel

Bodies of work.

2 almost forgotten full of life artists models & some not so full of life. Peruse an artist's muse.

1910s - 1920s Russia. Three artists recorded one disappearing Siberian culture. Their art is all that remains.

The government surveys that capture so much more than they intended.

"Photographers unknown" give us a wonderfully randomised & totally unique scattergun view of the world. Anonymous deserves some belated kudos.

Design.

Obscuriousities.

Plucked quickly from within the fog of time for you to scroll slowly thru'.

‘Say the name, Lindauer, and every Māori chief will nod his head…When you attend a funeral and visit the house of a chief, what do you see above the displayed corpse? You will see a painting, which is the true likeness of the chief. And who was the creator of this work? If you look at the corner of the painting, you will recognize the artist’s signature: Bohuslav Lindauer”. Josef Kořenský, globetrotting writer, 1905.

Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926), was amongst the most prolific and best-known painter of Māoris in the late 19th & early 20th centuries. He was born far, far away form New Zealand in Pilsen, Bohemia,...
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Art & DesignTravel

Viktor Vasnetsov.

Viktor Mikhaylovich Vasnetsov (May 15, 1848, Lopyal, Vyatka Governorate – July 23, 1926, Moscow) was a Russian artist who specialized in mythological and historical subjects. He is considered the co-founder of Russian folklorist...
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Art & Design