The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

This shower of vituperation affected the fortunes of the brethren, and Woolner, who had unsuccessfully competed for a commission to execute a Wordsworth Memorial, abandoned sculpture for a time and set sail for the gold diggings in Australia. There eventually he returned to sculpture, and in later years he had a modest success in Australia and England with his portrait busts. Holman Hunt, who could not lean on his parents, as Millais and Rosetti could, had a desperate struggle with poverty, and was compelled to take on the job of washing and restoring the wall paintings by Rigaud (1659-1743) at Trinity House. Stephens was employed with Hunt on this work, and William Rossetti got a place in the Inland Revenue Office. Millais, though the most abused, was the best off of the band, for a dealer named Farrer had the courage to pay him £150 for his picture and showed his faith in the artist by pasting all the adverse criticisms on the back of the canvas. Late in the year a purchaser was found also for the picture by Hunt, who then abandoned his restoration, and set to work on his splendid picture ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona,’ now in the Birmingham Art Gallery. Millais at the same time began painting his ‘Woodman’s Daughter’, and in these pictures the artists obtained a greater brilliancy of color than they had yet secured by painting upon a wet white ground. They prided themselves on having rediscovered one of the secrets of the early Italian masters, and later on Hunt communicated the ‘secret’ to Madox Brown, whose pictures certainly gained much in luminosity and brightness of color immediately after 1851.

Rosetti had begun an oil painting of a subject from one of Browning’s poems, but he did not get it finished, so that Millais and Hunt alone had to sustain the renewed attack which was made when their pictures were exhibited in the Academy of 1851. In addition to ‘The Woodman’s Daughter,’ Millais exhibited ‘Mariana, or the Moated Grange’ and ‘The Return of the Dove to the Ark,’ and again he and Hunt were told that their paintings were ‘offensive and absurd productions,’ displaying nothing but ‘puerility,’ ‘uppishness,’ and ‘morbid infatuation.’ This year, however, they were not without defenders. William Rossetti had begun his career as an art critic and upheld Pre-Raphaelite aims and ideals in the columns of the Spectator. Still more important were two letters of chivalrous and whole-hearted appreciation which appeared in The Times, signed by ‘An Oxford Graduate,’ and everybody knew that the writer was the great John Ruskin. In the same year appeared a new volume of Modern Painters, in which Ruskin wrote of Millais and Homan Hunt:

Their works are, in finish of drawing and splendour of color, the best work in the Royal Academy, and I have great hope that they may become the foundation of a more earnest and able school of art than we have seen for centuries.

It is difficult to exaggerate the revulsion of feeling produced by Ruskin’s prouncements, for at that time he was almost a dictator of taste in England. Slowly the tide began to turn in favor of the brethren, but it was very nearly too late for Hunt. His picture returned to him unsold from the Academy, he was absolutely penniless and had nothing to tide him over until better times; indeed, he was on the point of abandoning painting and seeking his fortune as a sheep farmer in Australia when Millais and his parents came to the rescue. Millais ahd made a little money, and with his parent’s consent, he gave it to his comrade in order that he might make one more attempt. This generous help bound the two ‘Brothers’ still more closely together, and they spent the late summer and early autumn in the country near Surbiton, searching and backwaters of Thames to find just the right background for the picture of ‘Ophelia’, which Millais had decided to paint, and studying the meadows for the scene of Hunt’s crucial picture ‘The Hireling Shepherd’. But Hunt did not have to wait till this, perhaps his most perfect picture, was finished and exhibited before learning that the tide was turning; for while he and Millais were painting in the fields a letter was brought then announcing that the Liverpool Academy had awarded a prize of £50 to the painter of ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona.’

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)

Synthetic Green Jadeite

I found the info on synthetic green jadeite @ http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6908674-description.html useful + I always refer to Alan Hodgkinson techniques for its simplicity/affordability.

Here is what Alan Hodgkinson has to say about filter results + other tests:
The Chelsea Filter shows synthetic green jadeite as bluish gray in either tungsten or halogen light + the few synthetic green jadeites studied showed a lack of consistent color throughout each stone + the swirled color eccentricities were accompanied by what can best be described as 'cotton wool' inclusions + synthetic green jadeite looked grey under longwave, but fluoresced a distinct green under the shortwave.

If you are doubtful, always consult a reputed gem testing laboratory.

Random Thoughts

Freedom is delicious.

Here Comes Everybody

The book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky is about social technologies and their impact + it's delightfully readable book with brilliant insights + I liked it.

Useful link:
www.shirky.com

Unique Furniture Designs By Architects

Alice Rawsthorn writes about a new generation of architects producing limited editions of furniture that are increasingly popular with contemporary art collectors + other viewpoints @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/29/style/DESIGN03.php

Useful links:
www.aalto.com
http://mies.iit.edu
www.future-systems.com
www.zaha-hadid.com
www.adjaye.com
www.glform.com
www.establishedandsons.com
www.vitra.com

I think the expressive pieces are appealing to collectors + I liked it.

A Fine Collection Of Printed Handkerchiefs

I found the article on Printed Handkerchiefs via Economist @ http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/artview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789185 interesting + educational.

Chemistry Videos

Top 10 Amazing Chemistry Videos by Aaron Rowe @ http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/03/top-10-amazing.html was really educational + I enjoyed it.

The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

By the time the Academy of 1850 opened the existence and doctrines of the Brotherhood had become more widely known, and this year there was no opportunity to complain of any want of public attention. The three pictures aroused a storm of criticism which fell with particular fury on the head of Millais. The true meaning of ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ was not very well understood, and the popular view was that a group of young painters had set themselves up to be ‘better than Raphael’ and deserved to be trounced for their vanity and impudence. And trounced they were. ‘Their ambition,’ wrote one newspaper critic, ‘is an unhealthy thirst which seeks notoriety by means of mere conceit. Abruptness, singularity, uncouthness, are the counters by which they play the game.’

The tile ‘The Carpenter’s Shop,’ by which Millais’s picture is now generally known, was contemptuously applied to it by enemies of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The artist originally exhibited it at the Academy with no other title than an extract from Zachariah (xiii.6):

And one shall unto Him, What are these wounds in Thine hands? Then He shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of My friends.

The very humanity which endears the picture to us today and makes it irresistibly winning was that time a cause of offence. Millais was accused of dragging down the Saviour to ‘the lowest of human levels, to the level of craving human pity and assistance.’ The picture was described as ‘a pictoral blasphemy’ from which right-minded people would ‘recoil with disgust and loathing.’ Even Charles Dickens took part in the general attack, and denounced the picture in Household Words as follows:

In the foreground of the carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering red-haired boy in a nightgown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand from the stick of another boy with whom he had been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman so horrible in her ugliness that (supposing it were possible for a human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a monster in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England.

Since the famous novelist’s abuse was directed far more at the persons than the painting, it is interesting to recall that the ‘blubbering boy’ was little Noel Humphreys, the son of an architect, while the ‘monster horrible in ugliness’ was Mrs Henry Hodgkinson. Not one of the people in the picture was painted from a professional model, and though the body of St Joseph is that of the carpenter the head is a portrait of the father of Millais.

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)

The New World

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

As English rule began to grow intolerable to American colonies and the Revolution approached, it was considered a fitting sign of American patriotism to discontinue to use foreign importations. Men and women were expected to leave off wearing the finery which came from abroad and to patronize their own manufacturers and craftsmen.

One of these craftsmen was Paul Revere, of the famous Midnight Ride. The poet failed to mention what Paul Revere did by day. According to records he was both silversmith and goldsmith, with a somewhat startling, sideline which, expressed with conscientious particularity, we find advertised in The Boston Gazette, December 19, 1768:

Whereas many persons are so unfortunate as to lose their Fore-Teeth by Accident, and otherwise, to their great Detriment, not only in looks, but speaking both in Public and Private:- This is to inform all such that they may have them replaced with artificial ones, that looks as well as the Natural, and answers the end of speaking to all Intents by Paul Revere, Goldsmith, near the head of Dr Clark’s Wharf, Boston.

All Persons who have had false teeth fixt by Mr John Baker, Surgeon-Dentist, and they have got loose (as they will in time) may have them fastened by the above who learnt the Method of fixing them from Mr Baker.

Surely that advertisement must have brought results. Here is another, inserted by an importer:

Imported in the Neptune (Capt.Binney) and to be sold by Daniel Paker, Goldsmith. At his Shop near the Golden Ball, Boston. An Assortment of Articles of the Goldsmith’s and Jeweller’s Way, viz. brilliant and cypher’d Button and Earing Stones of all Sorts, Locket Stones, cypher’d Ring Stones, Garnetts, Amethysts, Topaz and Sapphire Ring Stones, neat Stone Rings sett in Gold, some with Diamond Sparks, Stone Buttons in Silver, by the Card, black ditto in Silver, best Sword Blades, Shoe and Knee Chapes of all sizes.

Let the modern jeweler try to match that advertisement!

During the Revolution, of course, the jeweler’s trade did not meet with much encouragement in America, yet the custom of distributing mourning rings survived even that upheaval. At the death of Washington the country was flooded with a deluge of lockets, rings and brooches, each bearing a lugubrious little painting of Grief, symbolized by a dejected damsel mourning over his tomb. In his will Washington himself left directions for the giving of memorial rings:

To my sister-in-law, Hannah Washington and Mildred Washington, to my friends, Eleanor and Elizabeth Washington of Hayfield, I give each a mourning ring of the value of one hundred dollars.

At an earlier date, the mourning rings worn on this side of the Atlantic were as ornamentally gruesome as those of Europe, but by this time skeletons and death’s heads had been discarded in favor of less grim designs. Gold rings inscribed with the name and date of death were in general use. Sometimes a miniature or a lock of the deceased’s hair decorated the bezel.

For the most part such rings, buttons, buckles, etc. as were actually made in this country were made to order by the freelance goldsmith. It was not until after the war of ’76 that the manufacturing of jewelry as a business, with shops where one could buy ready-to-wear jewels, was established. At least we find no earlier records of them.

It is believed that the first shop of the kind was opened in Newark, New Jersey, sometime between 1790 and 1795 by a man named Hinsdale. There one could buy stock rings already inscribed with the words ‘In memory of,’ followed by a blank space where the name of the departed could readily be added according to order.

The New World (continued)

Selling Colored Gemstones

I think the most important factors are product knowledge + good service + disclosure + documentation, which may provide adequate confidence to the consumer who may/may not know enough about colored stones.

Innumeracy

Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos is an easy to read book + he points out what lack of number intimacy can do to a person + I liked the anecdotes.

Art Market Update

Souren Melikian writes about record sale (s) of contemporary art at Sothebys + other viewpoints @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/28/arts/melik29.php

David Hockney

David Hockney is an English artist, based in Los Angeles, California, United States + he has been an important contributor to the British Pop art movement of the 1960s + he is considered one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century + I like his realistic narrative style/vibrant colors in portraiture works.

Useful links:
www.hockneypictures.com
www.davidhockney.com

The New World

(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:

As Colonial America rapidly grew, wealth did indeed come from the land, but not at first in the guise of gold mines. All luxuries and many necessities were shipped from overseas. The arts and crafts of skill, even when and if, practised on American soil, were considered inferior to foreign work. Fine furniture, mirrors, glassware in general, clothing and jewelry were imported for the use of the rich.

In the South especially, the wealthy planter, selling his cotton and indigo abroad, spent money with a free hand, importing for his own use gems, jewelry adn silverplate. Many an old will lists, ‘My diamond rings and other jewelry.’ In most cases the jewelry itself has disappeared or, more likely, has suffered the same fate as so many jewels of the past and been reset in unrecognizable forms. We are therefore largely dependent for information concerning it on old records.

One record, dated 1733, contains an inventory of goods belonging to Cesar Ghiselin, evidently a jeweler who actually made jewelry in America. At the time of his death he possessed:

85 pwt. And 10 grs.of gold at 6s. = £25-13-0
24 Gold rings and six links of Gold Buttons = 20-5-8
5 pcs.of Corol = 10-0-0
6 necklaces = 15-0-0

In the course of the next few years records increase. Orders for gold lockets, silver buckles for shoes, and gold ones for girdles and stocks are listed; most frequent of all is the mention of gold buttons. ‘Three dozen Gold Wrought Vest Buttons’ cost one customer over a hundred dollars, but doubtless they served to fasten not only his own vests but after his death the vests of his next of kin, for buttons did not accompany an old garment into the ragbag. They were carefully preserved to be sewed to the new vest or coat.

Much of the Colonial metalwork was patterned after that made in France. One treasured gold girdle buckle of 1752 is embellished with shellwork and scrolls in the true rococo fashion of the period. However, it was not France alone that set the fashions of Colonial American jewelry. For example, colonists had followed the English custom of distributing gifts at a funeral. Gloves, scarves (said to be a length of cloth sufficient to make a shirt) and memorial rings. These particular gifts had early become the customary and expected consolations to mourners.

Rings, to be worn in token of respectful and affectionate memory of the dead, are in some degree understandable, but gloves (several pairs) and scarves seem curiously irrelevant.

With unconscious humor, Mr Pepys in his innocently candid diary gives us the English version of the custom; and on this side of the water, Judge Samuel Sewall of Boston, who likewise kept a diary, was equally literal minded concerning profits to be gained from the thrifty practice of attending funerals. His entries are eminently matter-of-fact.

Novermber 12, 1687. Mrs Eliza Scoffin is intombed. Rings given at the house after coming from the grave.

July 15, 1698. John Ive—a very debauched atheistical man—buried today. I was not at his funeral—Had Gloves sent me—I staid at home and by that means lost a ring—but hope had no loss.

The good judge writes a list of thirty-one funerals at which he has been a bearer, but only thirteen funerals yielded him rings, gloves and scarves. The rest nothing better than scarves, or scarves and gloves. Very inadequate returns he seems to have thought them.

Judge Sewall should have been born later, for the custom of giving funeral rings grew to such extravagant proportions that finally, here as well as in England, it became necessary to curb it by law.

The New World (continued)

The Pre-Raphaelites

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The trouble with Rossetti, owing to his teeming, poetic imagination, had been that he had always wanted to paint things ‘out of his head’ a time when his hand and eye needed to be educated by an endeavor to paint truly what was before him. With infinite tact Holman Hunt let him set to work on a romantic subject, the choice of his heart, but he took care that every detail in this imaginative scene should be painted truly and carefully from facts. In Madox Brown’s studio Rossetti had rebelled at painting so prosaic an object as a pot. Holman Hunt led him to paint the same object with delight because it held the symbolical lily needed by his subject. For the first time in his life Rossetti became passionately interested in things, because he had been made to see that they helped him to express his ideas. He borrowed big books from his father and window curtains from his parents’ house in Charlotte Street. His sister Christina sat for the Virgin, and his mother for St Anne. He borrowed a child’s nightgown and painted that on a small lay-figure, which probably explains why the figure of the little angel is not so convincing as the head; but when we remember that Rossetti was painting every object in the picture for the very first time we are compelled to stop fault-finding to marvel at the wonder of his achievement.

‘Rienzi’ and ‘Lorenzo and Isabella’ were exhibited in the Academy of 1849; ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’ in the Hyde Park Gallery known as the ‘Free Exhibition’; but somewhat to the disappointment of their authors they attracted very little public attention. Even the ‘P.R.B’ after Rossetti’s signature on his picture appears to have escaped comment. Undismayed, if a trifle disappointed, the young revolutionaries set about more vigorous propaganda by means of new pictures, and a periodical, The Germ, in which they could ventilate their opinions and doctrines.

It was with the idea of writing a journal for this magazine that during the summer Hunt and Rossetti made a tour in France and Belgium, and this journal was duly written, though later it was considered too personal to be published in The Germ. In their judgments of the pictures they saw abroad the young artists were terribly severe. Van Eyck and the early Flemings they admired intensely, but the works of the later painters from Rembrandt to Rubens were dismissed in two words as ‘filthy slosh’.

After what they had seen abroad they held more firmly than ever before that it was not enough for a picture to be correctly drawn and well painted, it must also enshrine a worthy idea. In accordance with this doctrine, now added to the rules of the Brotherhood, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti all chose serious subjects for the pictures they intended to exhibit in 1850. Hunt painted ‘An Early Christian Missionary escaping from Druids,’ Millais his famous ‘Christ in the House of His Parents,’ and Rossetti ‘The Annunciation’ or ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’ as it was originally called. Curiously enough Rossetti, who in the previous year had been the most, was now the least Pre-Raphaelite of the three. His strangely beautiful work is not a vision of things seen, but a reverie, the romantic rendering of a mood. Again his sister Christina sat for the Virgin, and Thomas Woolner posed for the head of the Archangel.

Millais, on the other hand, had now thoroughly grasped the principle of Pre-Raphaelitism, and no longer giving a clever imitation of an Italian Primitive, he outdid Hunt himself in the thoroughness with which each detail in his picture was studied from Nature. In order to get absolute truth, Millais took his canvas to a carpenter’s shop to paint the details; he painted the figure of Joseph from the carpenter because that was, he said, ‘the only way to get the development of the muscles right.’ He was not able to get sheep, but he purchased two sheep’s heads from a butcher and painted the flock from them; and it will be observed that the sheep in the picture only show their heads, the bodies being tactfully concealed by wickerwork.

The Pre-Raphaelites (continued)

State Of The Market

You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out.
- Warren Buffett

Stunning Design

The construction of Beijing Capital International Airport, Terminal 3 started on March 28, 2004 + it opened for trial operations on February 29, 2008 and will be fully operational on March 26, 2008 + it will also become the largest airport in Asia in land size + one of the worlds' largest in capacity and land size + the designs are stunning with many traditional Chinese elements.

Amazing!

Useful links:
http://en.bcia.com.cn
www.fosterandpartners.com
www.naco.nl

Brook Silva-Braga

Brook Silva-Braga traveled the world for a year + videotaped parts of his experience + produced a documentary of the trip + I wish I could do the same + Bravo!

Useful links:
www.amapforsaturday.com
www.budgettravel.com

Improv Everywhere

The group Improv Everywhere is really stunning + I thoroughly enjoy their stunts + it's like a work of art + I love it + if I have the time I would volunteer.

Useful link:
http://improveverywhere.com

For Consumers

The Jewelers Vigilance Committee (JVC) has developed a new consumer brochure to help shoppers understand the difference between natural diamonds + laboratory-created diamonds + simulated diamonds + I think its educational and useful.

Useful links:
www.jvclegal.org
www.moissanite.com