Art & Design.


Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

Helene Schjerfbeck was born on July 10, 1862, into an originally Swedish family living in Helsinki when Finland was part of the Tsarist Russian Empire. At 4 years old the toddler Helene fell down a flight of stairs and injured her hip. The fall left her with a distinct and life-long...
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Art & Design

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s life, and his art rose and fell with the two world wars. W W1 would lead him to his spirit place and his mojo. World War 2 would would see his work vilified. Born in 1880 in Aschaffenburg, Germany, the wildly creative Ernst Ludwig Kirchner studied architecture in...
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Art & Design

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

In 1873, Ogawa Kazumasa (1860-1929) a 13 year old Tokyo schoolboy from a family of Samurai was introduced to photography by a British missionary. Enthused, he bought himself a second-hand camera and it seems it never left his hands. His career moved quickly. After leaving school he started an apprenticeship locallywith...
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Art & Design

The deep, dark magic of Henry Fuseli, a holy man hounded from Zürich for exposing corruption, who landed on his feet in London, discovered the supernatural, and leaned in.

Born Johann Heinrich Füssli, Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825), the second of 18 children to a Swiss painter, had a unique life journey forged by strange events. In Switzerland, shortly taking holy orders as a Protestant minister in 1762, and together with his friend the poet, philosopher, fellow minister, ex-schoolmate and...
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Art & Design

Histoire charmante de l’adolescente sucre d’amour or “A charming story of a sweet adolescent love” is a marriage made in Art Deco heaven. Written by an eccentric Egyptian & exquisitely illustrated by François-Louis Schmied.

“A charming story of a sweet adolescent love” or Histoire charmante de l’adolescente sucre d’amour is a love story set in the Middle East. It was written in 1927 by one Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus (1868-1949), who described himself as “Muslim by birth and Parisian by accident.” Born in Egypt and educated...
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Art & DesignObscurity

In his ultra rare Histoire de la princesse Boudour of 1926, François-Louis Schmied took a tale from One Thousand and One Nights and re-imagined as a sexually charged Art Deco tour de force.

The Swiss born French painter, wood engraver, printer, editor, bookbinder and illustrator François-Louis Schmied (1873-1941), was all about quality and definitely not quantity. He had an unusual modus operandi for a painter. He produced books. Extremely rare books. A Schmied book was extremely expensive and time consuming to produce and was...
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Art & Design

Hendrick Goltzius was “the last professional engraver who drew with the authority of a good painter”. His work is as powerful as when he etched it. Almost 500 years ago.

With Goltzius there’s no need to think about it too much. Nearly five hundred years later, you can still see and feel it. Authentic genius. Mastery. Hendrick Goltzius, or Hendrik (1558–1617), was a German-born Dutch printmaker, draftsman, and painter. He was the best Dutch engraver of the early Baroque period. He...
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Art & Design

Franz Kafka’s “fat brother’, Adelbert Stifter. The writer Thomas Mann said he was “one of the most peculiar, enigmatic, secretly audacious and strangely gripping storytellers in world literature.” His rarely seen paintings show he could paint a bit too.

Adalbert Stifter was an Austrian writer, painter and poet closely associated with the Biedermeier, a movement that originated in Vienna. After studying at the University of Vienna, he worked as a tutor for aristocratic families before becoming a supervisor of elementary schools. As a teacher he was super strict, a “pedagogue”....
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Art & Design

Itō Jakuchū. Greengrocer, eccentric painter & Zen Buddhist koji. Influential and revered, he retired to a temple and his followers were still evolving his style 70 years he died.

During the mid-Edo period of 1603-1867, Japan sealed itself off from the world outside and was ruled by the Tokugawa, a feudal military shogunate of samurai. The shoganate forged a stronghold over the 300 regional daimyō, feudal lords with vast hereditary land holdings. This made for 250 years of stability, a...
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Art & Design

When Art Nouveau lost its glow, his work was used as wallpaper or was thrown away. The undersung French Art Nouveau artist Paul Berthon (1872-1910).

The undersung French artist Paul Berthon (1872-1910) studied under two of the great Parisian Art Nouveau artists of the time, Luc-Oliver Merson and Eugène Grasset. Grasset in particular, became something of a mentor to him. Berthon’s studies of the decorative arts had an influence on his printmaking as did the strong lines...
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Art & Design

Eye candy. You’ve probably never seen the best selling art print of the 20th century let along heard of the man who painted it. Maxfield Parrish created worlds that people love to look at.

Maxfield Parrish was an insanely prolific and popular American painter and illustrator working in the first half of the 20th century. Famous in his day for his almost psychedelically saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery, his career spanned fifty years. His painting Daybreak (1922) is the most popular art print of...
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Art & Design

The world just wasn’t ready for the “incorruptable spirit” of Danish artist, Johannes Holbek and his “Decadent Barbarism” (1904).

The son of a Evangelical inner-mission parish priest, Danish painter and graphic artist Johannes Holbek was born in a small town called Årby, near Kalundborg, Denmark in 1872. Just thirty one years later he walked into, or was brought into Copenhagen Municipal Hospital’s Sixth Ward suffering with manic-depressive psychosis after a huge...
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Art & DesignObscurity

Browse some Chinese home decor inspiration swatches, personally selected, drawn & lithographed in 1867 by the original style guru, Owen Jones for his “Examples of Chinese ornament”.

The multi talented British architect and designer Owen Jones (1809 – 1874), was one of the most influential design and colour theorists of the 19th century. His specialism was in interior decoration but his ideas spanned a huge range of other fields including architecture, wallpaper, furniture, ceramics and textiles, all of...
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Art & Design

“Momoyogusa”. A World of Things : Flowers of a Hundred Generations by Kamisaka Sekka. In 1901, the son of a Samurai family was Japan’s “chosen one” to reframe Japanese art for the Western eye.

Kamisaka Sekka was a Kyoto artist born into a Samurai family. He was the last, and greatest proponent of the traditional Rinpa style and was responsible for modernising and re-popularising the old school craft. Rinpa design focussed on design values and historical or natural motifs rather than detailed illustration of contemporary life. In Momoyogusa...
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Art & Design

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 vast dimensions of its floating leaves, which could exceed...
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Art & DesignNature

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...
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Art & DesignObscurity

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...
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Art & DesignObscurity

1800s India. A mystery blue-eyed, pale skinned redhead is painted alongside those of 28 Mughal royals. An anonymous court artist evokes how richly the Indian “1%” lived, in these exquisite and rarely seen paintings.

The ginger hair, blue eyes and pale skin make it very obvious. An European woman in Mughal costume and jewellery. She (unlike the women in the other portraits here) is bare-headed with nothing to cover her hair. Her fingertips are dipped in henna, she wears elaborate jewellery and holds something to...
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Art & DesignMystery

György Sándor : Volume Number One : Rarely seen 1950s Budapest street photography shot by a Hungarian classical pianist. A scratchy symphony of composition and poise in turbulent times.

A very rare glimpse at Budapest as seen through the lens of the Hungarian concert pianist and writer, György Sándor (1912 – 2005). In the classical world, Sándor was up there. He recorded piano works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninov and Schumann amongst others; he toured the world, playing at New...
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Art & DesignObscurity

Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785). His art was described as “arrogance and charlatanery” and his studio looked like a Jack the Ripper crime scene. Take a good look at yourself.

Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1716–1785) was a French anatomist, painter and printmaker who, as part of his practice, had his own personal human dissectionist. His imagery makes the goriest of today’s horror movies look like Disney. The Marseille born Gautier-d’Agoty, began his career as apprentice to a painter and engraver from Frankfurt...
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Art & DesignNature

Joseph Schillinger. He told us so.

Joseph Schillinger (1895-1945), was a man way ahead of his time. In the 1930’s he wrote that in the not to distant future, old school orchestra instruments will be all but forgotten museum peices. The author of The Schillinger System of Musical Composition and The Mathematical Basis of the Arts maintained...
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Art & Design

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number One : In which we see Kny’s more colourful physiology artworks of mushroom & fern.

It began in the early 1860s and as a student in Berlin when German botanist, Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916), started collecting algae samples from southern Europe for his studies. His biological tastes changed over time and he moved on. His specialist subject, and the one he would become famous for, was...
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Art & DesignNature

Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny & his Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911). Part Number Two : In which Kny pares back his already minimal colour palette to create for us a more mono/duotone mushroom, fern & algae experience.

These images are University instructional posters. They come from a series entitled Botanische Wandtafeln (1874-1911) by Carl Ignaz Leopold Kny (1841-1916).  Consisting of 120 lithographs and an accompanying textbook, Botanische Wandtafeln (botanical blackboards), is an epic work of both research and mushroom/fern art that took 37 years of Kny’s life to creatre....
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Art & DesignNature

Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808). He was king of Roccoco in the 1700’s, preferred decorator to Marie Antoinette and the kings of Poland and Austria, yet died completely penniless. His landscapes were eye candy fantasy worlds for the 18th century mega rich.

Feted by the hyper rich and influential of the time, Pillement was avidly collected by the famous English actor, David Garrick, and his Austrian wife Eva Maria Weigel and Marie Antoinette employed him to decorate the Petit Trianon, her Neo Classical château on the Versailles Palace grounds. Jean-Baptiste Pillement (1728-1808), was...
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Art & Design

FACT : You don’t want to read a book about the zoology and comparative anatomy of rare Italian sea planariums. Not when you can look at these pictures from Arnold Lang’s 1884’s “The polyclades of the Gulf of Naples” instead.

Arnold Lang (1855 – 1914) was a Swiss naturalist, a comparative anatomist and student of the German biologist, Ernst Haeckel. From 1878 to 1885 he was stationed at the Zoological Station in Naples, where he conducted research on marine wildlife native to the Gulf of Naples.  The illustrations are from the book...
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Art & DesignNature

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 head. Menzel was different to everyone else in another way too. He was a genius. Adolphe Menzel, or...
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Art & Design

Elegant pre & post war modernism, Art Deco & distinctively Lisbon Noir. See 1920s-40s Portugal through the eyes of the brothers Mario & Horácio Novais, architectural photographers from Lisbon.

The brothers Horácio (1910-1988) and Mário Novais (1899-1967) were born into a Portuguese photography family. The brothers spent their lives based in Lisbon. The Novais brothers were two of the most prolific national photographers of the 20th century They both spent over 50 years as photographers leaving us with images of great...
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Art & Design

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 of Anton Azbe. In 1899 She met, became engaged and then married Stanisław Berent, the couple moved to...
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Art & Design

Marinetti’s Metal Book. A beautiful problem by the founder of Futurism who urged artists to “destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.”

The Metal Book raises problems. It is beautiful, and it is tainted. A seminal work, crucial in the development of the Italian Futurist art movement, it was co-authored by the Italian artist, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, a fascist-sympathiser. The Futurist movement launched on 20 February 1909, with a manifesto printed on the...
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Art & DesignObscurity

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...
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Art & Design

“‘Gad,’ Said Heseltine to Peril, ‘If The Doctor Can Only Keep Me Going Long Enough’? Oil paintings of key scenes from long lost dramas. By Dean Cornwell, once dubbed America’s “Dean of Illustrators”.

He was an untiring, left handed, worker who was known for making seemingly endless preliminary studies and trial compositions before he’d even think about a final painting in oils. His paintings manage to pull the spontaneous boldness of a master painter and a draughtsman’s considered intricacy at once. Dean Cornwell (1892-1960),...
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Art & Design

‘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 figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic or megalithic ruins. His primary interest as...
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Art & Design

Norway’s Amaldus Clarin Nielsen (1838 – 1932), Norway’s first naturalist painter had a superpower. How the son of an absentee shipmaster with 11 children came to be a Knight, 1st Class.

Amaldus Clarin Nielsen (1838 – 1932), was born in Halse, Norway, the son of a shipmaster and merchant, grew up in Mandal in Vest-Agder county, Norway. For most of his childhood and adolescence the boy Amaldus was without a father and, after tuition at the hands of a traveling drawing teacher...
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Art & DesignNature

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 held together by a unique richness of form and complex technical means. He painted landscapes full of drama,...
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Art & Design

Neo-romantic metaphor, mythology & symbolism remixed and reappropriated by the Polish patriot, adulterer & master of the selfie in oils, Jacek Malczewski.

Jacek Malczewski (1854-1929), is regarded as the father of Polish Symbolism. His creative output took in the predominant style of his times; historical motifs of Polish martyrdom, the romantic ideals of independence, mythology, folk tales and an evident love of the natural world. Born under the under the Russian Empire’s occapation,...
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Art & Design

The fruits of Bianchetti’s Necropolis. 1890.

One day in September 1890, in Ornavasso, a small Italian village in the Piedmont region of Italy, Enrico Bianchetti (1834-1894) received news of something that would possess him totally until his death. 56 year old Bianchetti was born into an affluent family, studied science, wrote poetry and became a meteorologist. His house was...
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Art & DesignHistory

‘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, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although his surname sounds German, he was ethnically Czech and was initially...
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Art & DesignTravel

A selection of illustrations from Antiquities of the Russian State (1830) by Fedor Grigoryevich Solntsev (1801 – 1892).

Fedor Grigoryevich Solntsev was a Russian painter and historian of art who played a major role in recording and preserving medieval Russian culture. He was the principle author of the epic Antiquities of the Russian State, an exhaustive, exquisitely illustrated encyclopedia detailing contents of Moscow’s Grand Kremlin. He discovered and restored...
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Art & DesignHistory

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 and romantic nationalistic painting (see also neo-romanticism), and a key figure in the Russian revivalist movement. Viktor Mikhaylovich...
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Art & Design

Rough and smooth simultaneously. The broad, natural and spontaneous brush strokes of the underloved English female nude specialist Allan Douglas Davidson (1873–1932).

Allan Douglas Davidson was born in London on 14 May 1873. He was an English painter who predominantly worked in oils. His father was the historical painter Thomas Davidson. Allan Douglas Davidson studied art at the Royal Academy London, where he won a medal and the Armitage prize, he also studied at Julian’s in Paris. He...
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Art & Design

John Byam Liston Shaw

The Caged Bird (1907), is an allegory. The caged bird is being released to fly where it wants, whilst the poor girl herself will never be free to follow her heart. As the youngest daughter, her duties lie with her ageing parents. The clarity and gaiety of the colours set in...
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Art & Design

“T.C.” Gotch. Undersung Pre-Raphaelite.

A son of a Northamptonshire shoe factory owner, the English painter and book illustrator Thomas Cooper Gotch or “T.C.” Gotch (1854–1931) operated on the margins of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and is perhaps the movement’s most unsung exponent. With his father’s help Gotch studied at all the very best schools. He studied art at Heatherley’s...
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Art & Design

Meet Władysław Teodor Benda (“W.T.” to his friends), the Polish artist who drew WW1 recruitment posters, exotic 1920s pin ups and made Boris Karloff’s mask for “The Mask Of Fu Manchu” (1932).

Władysław Teodor “W.T.” Benda (1873–1948) was a Polish painter, illustrator, designer and mask-maker. The son of musician Jan Szymon Benda, and a nephew of the actress Helena Modrzejewska (known in the United States as Helena Modjeska), W.T. Benda studied art at the Kraków College of Technology and Art in his native...
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Art & Design

“Four Loves I found, a Woman, a Child, a Horse and a Hound.” George the painter, Hilda the dancer, Mary the Sculptor, the horses Robin and Guido and a Deerhound called Maggie. Introducing the Spencer Watsons of Dunshay Manor. Turn of the 19th century life. Styled.

There’s not an awful lot to say about George Spencer Watson (1869-1934), he seems to have possessed both a quiet, slightly reclusive, somehow intense presence, and yet he made sure there’s an elegant abundance for us to see and to feel. The word Arcadia came from a place, an ancient mountainous,...
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Art & Design

The prodigious travelling painter Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900), master of monumental photo-real vistas, had tens of thousands lining up, paying to see just one of his latest paintings. Today you can see them free and all at once.

In his prime, Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) was one of the most famous painters in the United States. He painted huge panoramic landscapes, of mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets in exquisite detail and dramatic light. Some of his major works were so popular Church was able to debut them individually, in single-painting...
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Art & DesignTravel

“This is with clothes off, baby – there’s a big difference. Besides, the students don’t like the pretty, skinny ones. Artists prefer their models to have a lot of stuff on them.” The legendary Californian artist’s muse, Florence Wysinger “Flo” Allen (1913-1997).

Born and raised in Oakland, California in 1913, “San Francisco’s best loved artists’ model”, Florence Wysinger “Flo” Allen (1913-1997), was a legendary black Californian artist’s muse who posed for virtually every prominent West Coast painter of the past half century. There was only one motivating factor for Florence “Flo” Wysinger Allen...
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Art & Design

“Visions, delirium and nightmares!” The truly epic fails of Herbert George Ponting (1870-1935), iconic photographer of the Antarctic and the first and only pioneer of “distortography”.

Herbert George Ponting (1870-1935) is best known expedition photographer and cinematographer for Robert Falcon Scott’s legendary Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole (1910–1913). In this role, he captured some of the most enduring images of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.  Herbert also had a lesser known role....
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Art & DesignObscurity

Shaffrons.

The shaffron (also spelled chaffron, champion, chamfron, chamfrein, champron, and chanfron) was designed to protect a horse’s face. Sometimes they included hinged cheek plates. A decorative feature common to many chanfrons is a rondelwith a small spike. Shaffrons date back as early as ancient Greece, but vanished from use in Europe until the twelfth century when metal plates replaced...
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Art & DesignHistory

1950s Tibet in hand-tinted technicolor & old school black and white. Courtesy of The Chinese People’s Liberation Army propaganda dept.

Selected 1950s imagery from two Chinese government (propaganda) pamphlets on Tibet, Xizang hua ji (1954) and Zhong yang dai biao tuan zai Xizang (1956). Xizang hua ji depicts the arrival and activities of the People’s Liberation Army in Lhasa as well as traditional Tibetan landscape, architecture and society. Pictorial work of...
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Art & DesignHistoryTravel

“Views of ancient monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan,” 1844, by the East London architect, artist & original tomb raider, Frederick Catherwood.

One day in 1839, two explorers – an East Londoner, Frederick Catherwood, and an American, John Lloyd Stephens – climbed the crumbling steps of the pyramids in the Maya city of Copán. The pair were the first to do so for centuries, the pyramids, overgrown by jungle, their origins long forgotten by...
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Art & DesignHistoryTravel

“The art of illuminating as practised in Europe from the earliest times – illustrated by borders, initial letters, and alphabets”, 1860. 6th – 16th Century letterforms by the British architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt.

The extremely prolific English architect,Digby Wyatt was the younger brother of another, much less interesting architect, Thomas Henry Wyatt and related to the huge Wyatt dynasty. He was Secretary to the Executive Committee for the Great Exhibition (1851) and “orientalized” the architectural detailing of London’s Paddington Station, London (1852–4), for Brunel....
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Art & Design

All Hail Satan! A French foodie and an Italian Art Nouveau artist collaborate to bring us an unlikely artistic tour de force. Orazi Manuel’s Calendrier magique of 1896.

The obscure art nouveau illustrator, Emmanuel Joseph Raphaël Orazi, known as Manuel Orazi, was probably born in Rome in 1860 and definitely died in Paris in 1934. Information on Orazi is scant. Yet another “very little is known of” artist. We can however, know just a little more and get a feeling...
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Art & Design

“Mr. Gustave Moreau is an extraordinary artist, unique.” wrote the French author Huysmans, “He is a mystic locked up in the middle of Paris in a cell into which even the noise of everyday life that nevertheless beats furiously at the doors of the cloister does not penetrate. Thrown in ecstasy, he sees resplendent fairy-like visions, the apotheoses of other times.”

Gustave Moreau (1826-1898), was an enigma. He was many other things, things known mostly only to himself; a 19th century mystic for one: a man who created hundreds of extraordinary paintings behind the façade of an ordinary looking house in an ordinary Parisian street for another; a progressive and a herald;...
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Art & Design

Sex, science & sumptuous flowers in Dr. Robert John Thornton’s 1807 epic, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus: The Temple of Flora.

With its exotic flora from foreign climes, their genitalia turned provocatively, suggestively toward the viewer, Dr. Robert John Thornton’s romantic floral opus, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus; Part III, Temple of Flora, was very sexy science. Sumptuous flower porn at the turn of the 18th century.  The...
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Art & DesignNature

Magic Lantern journal. Art from the original Russian Revolution of 1905. The pages are yellowing and brittle but the revolutionary fervour in the art they carry is still as raw, fresh and angry as the day they were printed.

Before the Russian Revolution(s) of 1917 there was another; the First Russian Revolution of 1905. Lenin later called it “The Great Dress Rehearsal,” without which the “victory of the October Revolution in 1917 would not have been possible.” The years 1904 and 1907 saw mass movements, strikes and protests decline and...
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Art & DesignHistory

Owl vs. Rabbit. Just one of many strange scenes from Eduard Hallberger’s bizarre, late 1800’s Illustrated World.

In the late 1800s, Eduard Hallberger (1822-1880), claimed to be bringing Germany all the latest “from nature and life, science and art for entertainment and instruction for the family” in his Illustrierte Welt, (Illustrated World). Instead, the magnificently bearded publisher/editor presented readers with a bizarre smorgasbord of fighting animals, fairies, sultry...
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Art & Design

Part #1 : 1900. “Nonsense, carelessness and Kneipsinn”. The fantastic graphics of German satirical magazine, ULK. Minus the politics.

ULK, Illustriertes Wochenblatt für Humor und Satire, (Illustrated weekly paper for humour and satire), was a German satirical magazine based in Berlin & the North German counterpart of the South German magazine Fliegende Blätter (Flying Leaves).  The abbreviation “ULK” stands for the three departments “nonsense, carelessness and Kneipsinn” of the well known...
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Art & DesignObscurity

The state-of-the-art futurist design of the Finnish Suomen Yleisradio national radio station operation circa 1927-1956.

Yle is Finland’s national public broadcasting service. Suomen Yleisradio (Finland’s General Radio) was founded in Helsinki on 29 May 1926. By 1928 Yle’s broadcasts became available to the whole country. After this the broadcasting network was developed and by the beginning of the 1930s, 100,000 households were able to listen to Yle programmes. Cut...
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Art & DesignHistory

Hubertus Salomon Hordijk, the former army captain known as “Steel Bart”, spent a decade in the 1900s as Amsterdam’s autocratic Chief of Police. All that time he was taking photos.

Not the most likely canditate for artistic photographer, Hubertus Salomon Hordijk (1862-1930) kept his passion to himself for a decade. No-one was going to argue. He was the police chief. On April 22 1903 and by Royal decree an infantry captain by the name of Hubertus Salomon Hordijk succeeded the outgoing...
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Art & DesignHistory

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...
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Art & DesignHistory

Dutch photographer Chris de Ruig worked for 3 years in the 50s on a book about Amsterdam’s rough tough Jordaan quarter. The book was never published & he stopped taking pictures.

The life of the Dutch photographer, Chris de Ruig (1930-2013), is sketchy and elusive. Here’s what little we have. De Ruig discovered photography as a boy in the darkroom of his father, a man who sold photo products and traded cigars as well as developing and printing for customers in the...
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Art & DesignTravel

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,...
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Art & Design

The strange contents of Frédéric’s mind exploded all over his most ambitious painting, All Things Die, But All Will Be Resurrected through God’s Love”. Psychedelic and apocolyptic, it was 30 feet long, consisted of seven panels & took 25 years to paint. It celebrated a loving god who took his young daughter while he painted it. Still he painted on.

Léon-Henri-Marie Frédéric (1856-1940) was born too late. Centuries too late for the 16th century Flemish school and Renaissance art of the 1400s he so admired. The mythical scenes of Botticelli with their creamy nude goddesses and floating sky babies, the richly epic, stoic biblical scenes of Domenico Ghirlandaio. These two were by...
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Art & Design

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