Collages

I happened upon the webcollage page, by way of metafilter, and have been returning to it at intervals, ever fascinated, for the last couple of days. The page displays a continuously updated collage, automatically constructed from images found through random web-searches. ‘This is what the internet looks like’ promises the site’s blurb. Here, then, is what the internet looked like ca. 11:00 local time this morning:

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to buy a couple of collages last year: the work of Portland-based artist Eva Lake, an on-line acquaintance of mine whose work, I recently discovered, is amongst that featured at an admirable site by the name of collagetown. Here are a few of Ms. Lake’s compositions:

I’d find it hard to explain exactly why I like these collages so much: besides that they strike me as having an harmonious coherence about them; the work of a clear vision and a sure hand. I’ll let the artist’s own words (also excerpted from the collagetown site) do the rest of the talking…

I have a fluctuating stack of things I have ripped out, stashed in an old flattened Bloomingdale’s bag and this is the source, sort of the pantry. Everything with potential gets tunneled through here, for the most part. Sometimes I am just working on feeding that bag and the collection in that bag is very important. I’ve got stuff in that bag, in that holding area, which I’ve had for already at least 20 years. You never know when it will be the right time to use it.

This is why collage for me is not only extremely personal and private but also sort of priceless. For how do you put a price on these things you’ve carried around from coast to coast, which cannot be repeated once they are glued down? A painting I might be able to repeat but a collage, never. It’s a strange situation. I know they are only pieces of paper.

…I find a moon that glows so beautifully next to his face, I think yes but a sun might be better, since he wrote about it. And while you’re at it, what about a dark horse somewhere for Mr. Harrison?

But it just never works that way for me. The images find me, they talk to me, not the other way around. You can search all day for the sun, you’re never gonna find it. Because the moon already looked at you and told you it was perfect.

The four images above are Copyright © Eva Lake, and are reproduced here with permission.

Leaves from a Bookshelf

By clicking on the spines of the volumes in this virtual bookshelf, we are haphazardly presented with a wonderful selection of leaves from old books: title-pages in many cases, or folios with noteworthy plates or illustrations.

It’s exactly the sort of site that makes us forget what we were searching for in the first place… I’ve picked out just a few of the pages there that caught my eye.

The information on the site seems to be exclusively in Dutch, but the images made a visit well worthwhile for this non-Netherlandish speaker.

I’ve trimmed these images slightly. Click on each one to open a larger, pop-up version of the same.

Vomitoria

Mr. H_____ and I once postulated that wealthy Romans designated rooms in their villas and palaces to be used for communal puking between their banquets’ monumentally indigestible courses. These rooms, we decided, would have been known as vomitoria. Neither of us were aware that this was a genuine term used for exitways from public buildings…

When one drinks alcohol to excess and with unthinking abandon, one can end up inadvertently creating ad-hoc vomitoria wherever one staggers. Such outpourings were an unfortunate commonplace for me during my student years, a time when I entertained sporadic pretensions of being a big drinker; delusions, alas, which almost invariably ended up with me coughing up some lumps, somewhere inopportune.

My First Hangover

Aged 15, on New Year’s Eve at home with family and friends I tried and enjoyed strong alcohol for the first time in the shape of Southern Comfort, a favourite of my father’s. I drank about half a bottle of it, plus a few beers and glasses of wine. Halfway through some party games in my mother’s friend’s house, I threw up into a plastic bowl. I threw up again whilst lurching homewards up the street, then again on getting home, on getting into bed, on waking, and so on about another six times, dry heaves, throughout the next morning and into the early afternoon. I hardly ever felt so ill: I wanted to die and everyone was laughing at me. I’ve never drank Southern Comfort since.

Peculiar Injuries

My first year at University saw innumerable ugly hangovers full of bad beer and cheap wine. I would wake up with peculiar injuries and indistinct recollections of having leapt off high walls. On one occasion I ‘accidentally’ punched my hand through a window, cutting my right wrist to within a quarter inch of the artery. I continued my carefree revelry with a bloody rag tied around my forearm, until, having certainly vomited at some point, and hence sobered up a little, I was persuaded to stroll to the hospital to get it looked at. I was still drunk enough that I barely felt the needle as the cut was stitched up. The scars have faded, but remain as a tangible memento of my folly.

The ‘Diggers’ Club’ Annual Dinner

The College drinking club to which I belonged held an annual dinner for members past and present to get together and eat, in addition to the usual drinking. The Diggers’ Club was an organisation dedicated to the consumption of as much beer in as many locales as possible. The second such dinner I attended went badly for me. I began my preparations too early and too earnestly, consuming nearly half a bottle of good whisky before even setting out. Barely ten minutes, and a few sips of wine into the dinner, I was overwhelmed by uncontrollable nausea, and hurled over the table, into my soup and that of Mr. G_____, the affable Australian geologist seated opposite me. After that I remember very little, until waking an hour or so later on a tube-train, coated with cooling vomit, in Richmond, many miles from my intended destination of Wimbledon.

The Eyes

After a heavy night’s drinking at a local bar in Roman suburb of Tor Sapienza, celebrating a colleague’s departure, I woke feeling dreadfully unwell, and decided a coffee might make a good start to my recovery. After a few mouthfuls I had to rush to the bathroom, whereupon I vomited with such violence that a great many capillaries in and around the whites of my eyes burst. Afterwards, I looked in the mirror and was appalled by what I saw: the whites of my eyes must have had a faintly poisoned yellowish taint to begin with, but this yellowness had since been overlain with a repulsively blotchy pink patina. Coupled with the pink blotches around my eyes, the result was one that a horror-movie special-effects guru would have been pleased to accomplish. I resembled a diseased albino panda. I took this as a wake-up call, and have moderated my drinking much more strictly since.

The Green Fairy and I

Nevertheless, I still forget myself sometimes. Like a few summers ago in England, after a get-together with friends invited from various parts, having uncorked the wine we went out to the pub, and then the other pub, where there was beer. On coming home it was too tempting to sample the bottle of absinthe I’d bought at the supermarket. Absinthe from Tesco: something was very wrong from the outset and I should have known it. Mr. G______, my colleague, a semi-professional drinker of some repute, had admonished me in the wake of his own encounter with the stuff, concluding that it was a bad poison, best avoided. I found the liquour’s flavour pleasant enough, but shortly after downing a couple of glasses I was sprinting to the toilet on my way to a reprise of the diseased-albino-panda scenario. Green fairy my ass, absinthe is a noxious green troll that tried to kill me…

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On Books that are Too Wide…

In his short essay On Books that are Too Wide, Too Large, or Square, typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) justly characterises volumes wider than the depth of the average shelf (which he reckons at about 24cm, or 9½ in) as ‘irksome’.

On the whole one should not make books unduly large. One seldom encounters the reverse case: books that are too small.

Dr. Frank Zöllner’s monograph on the paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, recently published by Taschen, is a beautiful, but an unwieldy book. It is not only too wide to fit on our shelves without protruding awkwardly, but is in any case too tall for them too. This is a tome of a height and a heft that could most comfortably be read at a lectern. As it is, the book stands on the floor, against a bookshelf, from where it must be manhandled with no little effort onto its reader’s lap.

Such inconveniences can readily be forgiven, however, as one loses oneself in the numerous sequences of full-page details lovingly reproduced from da Vinci’s major works. Even Tschichold acknowledges that exceptions may be made for outsize books with ‘large and valuable plates’, although he goes on to remark that:

…most of our books are much too heavy. Often the reason is art paper. Thick tomes of art paper should therefore be divided into two volumes.

This is certainly an opus where such a division would have been a worthwhile ergonomic concession to the reader. Tschichold, in the essays collected under the title The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design is a fascinating source on all aspects of book and type design, most especially with regard to the ideal proportion, size and layout of the printed page.

About six weeks ago I posted some woodcuts culled from a 16th-Century alchemical work by one Giovanni Battista Nazari. I’d found the pictures at Adam McLean’s Alchemy web-site. McLean, I noticed soon afterwards, also operates a publishing venture, through which he prints, binds and sells a whole series of obscure alchemical works. One of the recentest of these publications was, I noticed, Nazari’s Three Dreams on the Transmutation of Metals.

Intrigued by McLean’s blurb, and in admiration of his endeavours as a one-man publisher-printer-bookbinder, I ordered a copy of Three Dreams…. On reading the book, alas, it struck me that the reason this work had languished, largely unread, for centuries, was because it just wasn’t particularly well-written, and could thus be of little interest except to the specialist, or the would-be adept of the Spagyric Art.

More disappointing than that, however, was the physical form of the book, which would have surely made Tschichold shudder: its fake-leather binding hit a wrong note, as did the bleached-white photocopier-paper on which it appeared to have been printed. Besides that, the A5 format in which this volume was made is one that is, in Tschichold’s words ‘unpleasant when hand-held’, ‘too wide, too unwieldy, and inelegant.’ In short, for all its publisher’s good efforts, and admirable intent, this was an ugly book, one that could easily have been a desirable object (setting aside its literary shortcomings), had it been printed in a handier format, on écru-toned paper, and bound in cloth.

The Life of Insects

From Jacob Sturm’s 1796 Insecten-Sammlung come these entomological illustrations. I found them via a link at iconomy.

In the Admiralty park, on a fine & fresh Easter Sunday afternoon: the first butterfly I’ve seen this year. The Swedish word for butterfly is, I learn, fjäril.

Yesterday I finished Victor Pelevin’s novel The Life of Insects, which strings together a series of imaginative fables whose protagonists - inhabitants of a run-down Crimean resort-town - are human one moment, then insect the next: there are, for example, a trio of mosquitoes, two scarabs, a pair of moths, and various ants, flies and cockroaches. This premise yields a rich crop of metaphors which Pelevin deploys, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly, to great satiric, literary and philosophical effect.

One human-insect pairing not delineated by Pelevin in this book (but which does feature, if I recall it right, in his later novel The Clay Machine-Gun) is that arising from Chuang Tzu’s famous dream about a butterfly, often quoted by Borges (amongst others), from which he awoke not knowing if he was a man who had dreamt of being a butterfly or a butterfly that was now dreaming of being a man.

Click on the images to see the bugs in a larger than life size…

Theatrum Cometicum

From an on-line exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, come the following images, drawn from a coloured copy of Stanislaus Lubinetski’s 1667 treatise Theatrum Cometicum.

Lubinetski’s book compiled European accounts of the comets of 1664 and 1665, and provided a general history of cometary phenomena. Counter to the widespread belief that comets were ill-omens, Lubinetski (variously spelled Lubieniecki, Lubienetz, Lubienitzky, etc.) contended that their appearance portended good events as often as evil ones.

Samuel Pepys wrote of his frustrated endeavours to see the 1664 comet:

Mighty talke there is of this Comet that is seen a’nights; and the King and Queene did sit up last night to see it, and did, it seems. And to-night I thought to have done so too; but it is cloudy, and so no stars appear. But I will endeavour it. - Dec. 17th

My Lord Sandwich this day writes me word that he hath seen (at Portsmouth) the Comet, and says it is the most extraordinary thing that ever he saw. - Dec 21st

Pepys finally caught a disappointing glimpse of the Comet larger and duller than any other star on the 24th, the day after a young Isaac Newton recorded his first sight of it in his notebook: a Comet whose rays were round her, yet her tayle extended it selfe a little towards east.

The only comet I ever saw was the inelegantly-named Hale-Bopp, which I first caught sight of from the north-facing terrace of my apartment on via di Tor Sapienza on the evening of March 27th 1997. Here are some extracts from my Giornale Vecchio, written that night:

…I’ve been experiencing dreams & seeing images of places elsewhere, maritime places, cool & breezy, distant but present & bright. It’s not a homesick feeling exactly… but almost a lure ‘come away’ I’m trying to tell myself perhaps… I’ve seen the comet! just like predicted, there it was after dusk, to the north-west, tail facing up & to the right, hazy blob at the head… It sounds like there’s a houseful of rejoicing Catholics downstairs. But then it is nearly Easter & they’re probably very devout.

Come In!

A couple of CDs arrived in the mail on Friday. One comprises three works by contemporary Russian composer Vladimir Martynov (b. 1946). The disc, like the first and longest of the pieces thereupon is entitled Come In! This work in six short movements, scored for string orchestra, solo violin and celesta, sounds, at first hearing, rather like an exercise in retro-romantic kitsch, and a repetitious one at that, but, with repeated listening, one can begin to hear considerably more. Certainly the melodies seem syrupy and old-fashioned at times, but then there is also an insistent tapping-on-the-door motif, where a chiming celesta accompanies a clapping of woodblocks, which has no such nostalgic connotation, and, as one listens all the more, the piece’s rapturous yet patient exploration of a few themes yields a different sweetness, one of delicately reiterated bliss.

In connection with a different piece, Martynov wrote the following:

It feels ridiculous trying to be a composer when you exist in a post-composition era, writing and pretending to ignore the fact that the age of the composer has already passed. But it's not that simple to deny the composer in oneself. Not everyone has had the luck to meet one's own Vanya Rublow.

The reference to Vanya Rublow, we learn, by way of a footnote, comes from a work of Daniil Kharms’ (1905-1942) entitled Four illustrations on how a new idea disconcerts someone who is not prepared:

Composer: I am a composer.
Vanja Rublow: I think you are shit!
Composer, barely breathing, falls to the floor and is carried out.

In fact I hadn’t ordered this disc for its title-track, which I’d heard before, on Gidon Kremer’s release Silencio. I was more interested in hearing the other two pieces, intriguingly titled Autumn Ball of the Elves and L'après Midi du Bach respectively. On initial acquaintance, I’m none too sure what to make of either piece: the former work juxtaposes a rather heavy-handed minimalism with more straight-faced classical lyricism, whereas the sawing violins in the latter piece at times almost resemble sitars, at least to my uneducated ears. My first impressions were of fascination and impatience mixed.

The other CD that arrived on Friday, was, not very coincidentally, Kremer’s latest release Happy Birthday, a collection of, amongst other things, sets of variations on hackneyed musical themes such as Happy Birthday itself, God Save the King, and Auld Lang Syne. The works are variously frivolous and witty, but are all performed with affection and virtuoso panache by Kremer’s ensemble. Coincidentally, the CD booklet contains a brief text on the subject of coincidence by Daniil Kharms entitled Connection which ends thus:

… 18. After the concert, they went home in the same tramcar. But driving the tramcar right behind them was that very same conductor who had once sold the violinist’s coat at the flea market. 19. So there they are, riding late one evening about the city - in the car ahead are the violinist and the delinquent’s son; right behind them is the tramcar driver, the former conductor. 20. They all ride on but none of them know what connection there is among them, nor will they know until they die.

In Memoriam

A year ago today my brother-in-law was killed in a car-crash. I never, sadly, got to know him very well: separated by many time-zones we met only once. Through my wife’s words about him, however, I carry with me a vividly-painted portrait of a well-loved man.

R.T.S.T. 1970-2002.

He is seldom out of his sister’s thoughts: she misses him so.

His wife was three months pregnant with their first child at the time of his death. Here is his daughter, our niece, born last October:

E.P.T.

The Senses in Mezzotint

Here is a series of mezzotints illustrating the five senses, by Dutch graphic artist Jacob Gole (1660-ca.1737).

Gole was, I gather, best known for his striking genre prints depicting daily life, but his emotive images of peasants earned him his reputation, and they remain some of his best work.

He was also a caricaturist, and a copyist, making portrait-prints after painted originals.

I lifted these images from the print room of the Spencer Museum of art at the University of Kansas. Clicking on the images above will open larger, pop-up versions of the same.

Adventures in Hungarian Literature

I finished reading László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance (previously mentioned here), over the weekend. It took quite a while for me to get into it, what with all those very long, serpentine sentences, strung into chapter-length paragraphs, punctuated ‘here and there’ by little islands of cliché, quotation, or reported speech in inverted commas, making for blocks of text that often presented a smooth, hard, uniform surface, the traversal of which could feel disconcertingly like a tiring (but rewarding) kind of ‘literary rock-climbing’. This is indeed a text which is, in its translator’s words, a slow lava flow of narrative; a vast black river of type. The book traces the strange events that follow the arrival of a circus troupe to a run-down provincial town in Eastern Hungary, the circus’ principal attraction, indeed its only ostensible attraction, being the preserved cadaver of ‘the biggest whale in the world’…

Here are some further remarks about the book by the translator of the English edition, George Szirtes, taken from a web-page which also includes an excerpt from its first chapter:

The characters whose fortunes we follow […] are the widow Mrs. Pflaum, a woman utterly fraught with chintz, operetta, houseplants and conserves; her son Valuska, to whom she refuses to speak, he having brought disgrace upon her by his simpleton nature, his hopeless nocturnal wanderings, his idolization of the planetary system and his general vagrancy […] György Eszter, once head of the music school but now bedbound in an Oblomov-like withdrawal from the futilities of the world and, indeed from music too, with its impossible system of imperfect harmonies, […] and, above all, the monstrous Mrs Eszter, Eszter’s ambitious wife, whose moral zeal is indivorcible from her massive will to power…

…The book is a vision. A dark entertainment. A diving bell at the bed of the black river situating itself in the drift of its extraordinary plankton, its weird, dying creatures. Though its theme is disharmony, it itself is constructed harmoniously, every part echoing every other part with a rickety efficiency that amplifies the dumb noises made by the vision’s underwater life. As the book begins, we are at a railway station with Mrs. Pflaum. Once we board the train, we enter the godforsaken town never again to leave it.

I couldn’t put it any better than that. Oddly enough I’m sure that Mrs. Pflaum was called Mrs. Plauf in the book that I read: maybe the name was changed to seem less alarming to those English-speakers unnerved by unfamiliar consonant-clusters. I can recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone with a taste for heavyweight Central-European literature. I could add that it’s the best novel from the Hungarian I’ve ever read, but that would mean almost nothing, as the only other such I can recall reading is Sándor Márai’s over-rated book Embers.

It has occurred to me that I’ve read more of Hungarian poetry than prose, although there too my acquaintance is slight, and doubtless superficial, and the impressions I have of it skewed. Some brief fragments of it remain embedded in my unreliable memory, even though years have elapsed since I last read them:

To be Repeated Over and Over Again
I glance down at my shoe - and, there’s the lace!
This can’t be jail then, can it, in that case.

- György Petri.

Cold Wind
Unpeopled rock
My spine lying without memories,
Without me
In the extinct ashes of millions of years

Cold wind still blowing.

- János Pilinszky.

Not to mention the one by Tibor Zalán that begins the wind the night the endless snowfall which, as much as I have been unable to forget it, I can’t, alas, recall in its entirety. Instead, I offer here another example of this poet’s work, found at a further page courtesy of the Hungarian Quarterly:

Madam Today the Sky Is Starshooting…
madam today the sky is starshooting today once more
too much clotted blood in my mouth while you
dance to happy music I sink into thirsty sand
and dream of our endless lovemaking.
things could be bleaker that's for sure
by the time this poem's finished the day will have broken
you'll be already in a swooning sleep under tousled-hearted
cypresses death drills its tool between your parted thighs
the sky is starshooting madam today the woodland strays
from beneath our window the sad warmth from beneath our heads
my identity card expired my last extension expired too.
for police for love I'm the villain free to be whipped. like
murderers--dilettanti cast their dice on my cloak
on faraway shores dead listless girls strip and cover
my face with their shirts. just fine to be someone's memory
the tram soars above trees sleepily you fly there
and burst into tears when you casually glance down

- Tibor Zalán.

Costumes Grotesques

There follows a selection of images from a series entitled Les Costumes Grotesques: Habits des métiers et professions…

They were published in 1695 by one Nicolas de Larmessin, although I’m not exactly sure which Nicolas was responsible for them, as there seem to have been four generations of Nicolases in the de Larmessin family.

Although Nicolas II (d. ca. 1694) or III (d. ca. 1725) would seem the likeliest suspects.

These light-hearted images seem to carry just a faint aftertaste of Arcimboldo’s grotesques.

Unusually for a series of late 17th century prints, they seem to be widely-available in poster form. I lifted the present images from the allposters site.

Misdirection

One man sins, the other is punished.

As a young dog picks up a stone and worries it with his teeth, inflicting no damage in return on the one who tried to strike him with it, so men let their real enemies elude them, and with bared teeth hunt down those not charged with any crime.

Reading W.G. Sebald’s book On the Natural History of Destruction last week, my mind was drawn, despite itself, into thinking about the current war, and its injustices. I wondered how important among its causes was misdirected revenge; and I speculated on the kinds of revenge it may, in turn, inspire, and how these, likewise, would likely be misdirected. Typically, my thoughts tangled themselves into knots before any worthwhile conclusions could be approached.

On the subject of injustice, I can’t forget this little poem:

Injustice
My wise little dog
Has ended his short life
Without even realising
The world’s a riddle.

- Leopold Staff.

Character Heads

I first read about the work of 18th century Austrian sculptor Franz Xavier Messerschmidt (1736-1783) in Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s book Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe 1450-1800. Frustratingly, while the text praised this artist’s singularly eccentric works, there were only a couple of small black-and-white photographs of them.

I was delighted then, when I found a web-page yesterday displaying dozens of Messerschmidt’s ‘Character Heads’ (Charakterköpfe), a type of work he produced almost exclusively in the wake of a psychiatric crisis of some kind (possibly paranoid schizophrenia) which overtook him in the 1770s.

It has been argued that these works are a ‘divergent contribution to the progressive study of physiognomy’, intended as illustrations of the passions in the manner of Le Brun.

Just as plausible, to my mind, would be that Messerschmidt became genuinely fascinated with representing extreme states-of-mind, such as those to which his illness, if that’s what it was, may have subjected him. It’s interesting that another famously mentally-ill artist, Richard Dadd, also composed an eccentric series of Sketches to Illustrate the Passions…

Dream Anatomy

Although it’s been there for several months, I’ve only just discovered the marvels on display at the Dream Anatomy exhibition at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Almost everything there is fascinating: I’ve picked out just a few of the images that captured my attention.

from Isagogae breves per lucidae ac uberrimae in Anatomiam human corporis…; Bologna, 1523. Woodcut. National Library of Medicine. Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, (ca.1460-ca.1530) [anatomist].

from Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams…; Amsterdam, 1690. Copperplate engraving with etching. Govard Bidloo (1649-1713) [anatomist]. Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711) [artist].

from Alle de ontleed- genees- en heelkindige werken…van Fredrik Ruysch …. Vol. 3; Amsterdam, 1744. Etching with engraving. Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731) [anatomist].

from Tabulae Sceleti e Musculorum Corporis Humani; London, 1747. Copperplate engraving with etching. Bernhard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) [anatomist]. Jan Wandelaar (1690-1759) [artist].

from Elementi di anatomia fisiologica applicata alle belle arti figurative; Turin, 1837-39. Lithograph. Francesco Bertinatti (fl. mid-1800s) [anatomist]. Mecco Leone [artist].

Click on the images to see larger versions of the same. The links under each image go back to the appropriate pages in the exhibition. Note also the gallery page featuring thumbnails of all of the works on show.

Primo-Avrilesque

Art-historians have traced the origins of monochrome painting to the early part of the last century, specifically to Malevich’s 1918 canvas Black Square, acquired last year by the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg. A whole generation before that, however, the unheralded French artist Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) had already created an entire monochromatic oeuvre…

Negroes Fighting in a Cave by Night.

In fact, it is arguable as to whether Malevich’s canvas, with its white border, is monochromatic at all. More problematic is the question as to whether a canvas not completely filled with a single colour is more or less minimalist than than one like Allais’…

The Stupor of Young Recruits, on Perceiving for the First Time your Azure, o Mediterrenean!

Certainly the pieces in Allais’ Album Primo-Avrilesque afford a simple purity scarcely matched in subsequent art-history. Perhaps only the work of Yves Klein has surpassed it in this regard, although Klein cannot match Allais in his versatile deployment of a whole spectrum of tints.

Some Pimps, known as Green Backs, on their Bellies in the Grass, Drinking Absinthe.

Subsequent explorations of the monochromatic have seen almost every imaginable permutation of canvas-size and surface-texture. Many of Lucio Fontana’s pieces are monochrome, apart from the slashes that perforate them. And Robert Ryman, for example, has painted dozens of white, or nearly-white canvases: although in his case, the results can seem more polymicrochromatic than homogenously monochromatic.

Tomato Harvest by Apoplectic Cardinals on the Shore of the Red Sea.

One can only hope that Allais is promoted from his relatively obscure position in art-history, and is given all due credit for his pioneering work. My source for these nicely-framed images of Allais’ work was this German page.

Band of Greyfriars in the Fog.

My apologies, by the way, for any mistranslations in the titles of these paintings: any corrections would be gratefully received.