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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...

“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...

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Art & Design History Travel

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...

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Art & Design Travel

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey do their thing in the sleepy Virgin Islands c. 1950.

....

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Art & Design Travel

Cutting and rickling reeds, shooting snipe and fishing for Pike, catching eels and quanting the marsh. The Norfolk Broads in the mid-1800s as seen thru’ the gentle lens of naturalist, photographer & ex-physician, Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936).

Peter Henry Emerson was born in Cuba and travelled to a remote, low lying marshland in England’s East Anglia. He...

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Travel

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...

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Travel

Heinrich Caesar Berann, the painter who made maps mindblowing. One map took him a decade to paint.

“There’s just something absolutely magical about his panoramas,” said Tom Patterson, a senior cartographer with the U.S. National Park Service. ...

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Art & Design Travel

Inside the Space Cathedral. Cape Canaveral, Florida inside & out by the Historic American Engineering Record program. Late 1960s.

“We’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.” Neil Armstong....

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History Travel

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...

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Art & Design History Travel

Almquist & Cöster’s squeaky clean, fluorescent vision of late 1950s Sweden.

The Swedish National Heritage Board holds in its archives a large collection of photo postcards from the Almquist & Cöster...

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Travel

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey randomly document Deer Lodge, Madison, Powell, Ravalli, Cascade and Park Counties in Montana.

....

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Art & Design Travel

Inadvertent genius. Random 1970s & 1950s Georgia by photographically unknown people from the Historical American Buildings Survey.

Art & Design Travel

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.

“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.

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.

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.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.

Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

The Art of Protest: Albert Hahn was righteous anger manifest. A graphic character assassin that even the mighty Germany Kaiser feared.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Painter & early street photographer. The astonishing early street photography that helped George Hendrik Breitner add social realism to his famous paintings of Amsterdam.

India mid-1800s : Dr John Murray, cholera specialist an photographer. He spent 40 years travelling with gear weighing 400 pounds and a servant. His ever so slightly psychedelic negatives made it all worth it.

Samarkand, early 1900s. The first ever colour photographs of the ancient Persian city by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, an unknown Russian who invented his own colour photography process.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

Around the world with the rare travel drawings by the American painter, Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900). Found in the archives of the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Travel

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.

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

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.

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey do their thing in the sleepy Virgin Islands c. 1950.

Cutting and rickling reeds, shooting snipe and fishing for Pike, catching eels and quanting the marsh. The Norfolk Broads in the mid-1800s as seen thru’ the gentle lens of naturalist, photographer & ex-physician, Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936).

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.

Heinrich Caesar Berann, the painter who made maps mindblowing. One map took him a decade to paint.

Inside the Space Cathedral. Cape Canaveral, Florida inside & out by the Historic American Engineering Record program. Late 1960s.

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

Almquist & Cöster’s squeaky clean, fluorescent vision of late 1950s Sweden.

Inadvertent genius. The Historic American Buildings Survey randomly document Deer Lodge, Madison, Powell, Ravalli, Cascade and Park Counties in Montana.

Inadvertent genius. Random 1970s & 1950s Georgia by photographically unknown people from the Historical American Buildings Survey.