March 27, 2006
Up Against the Wall
English has been taught as a core subject at Swedish schools for many years, and it is seldom that one meets with a Swede below a certain age who is unable to speak the language. A command of idiomatic English expressions is even evident among the authors of the graffiti in the town where I live: Riot, don’t Diet! exhorts one, My Art is Better Than Your Art! declaimed another, recently effaced; I Hate This Place! laments a third. There is one particular graffito slogan which I see from the bus every day on my way home from work: it has been there for months. One day it occurred to me that I wanted to get my picture taken against that particular wall. This weekend, I went there armed with a tripod, and my new camera’s delayed-action exposure function, and succeeded in capturing the kind of picture I’d had in mind (click on the details below to see the full images)…
The snap above was my fourth and most successful attempt at the shot. I would had a few more goes at it, only it was decidedly cold in the brisk northwesterly breeze. The awkward grin on my face betrays my uncertainty as to when exactly the shutter would click. Below is my first attempt at the same shot, with added protective clothing and no attempt at a happy face: I am just wondering if I even pressed the right buttons. The pictures weren’t black-and-white to begin with, but the natural colours were drab, and the light rather dull, so it seemed to me that they could be made to look a little better with all the colour washed out.
At my feet there is snow, and there has been at least some snow on the ground here every day since December 26th: we have felt a ‘late and long-continuing cold’ this year. A little more snow fell yesterday evening, although, thankfully, it turned to rain: I hear a thaw is forecast for the coming week. The picture below is a detail from one of a few photos I took from the offices where I work on the 21st (taken from the same vantage-point as this one from two years ago): the sea still under snow & ice on the vernal equinox.
In the centre of town there is an ornamental fountain in the shape of a sculpted fish, which squirts water from its mouth. The final image below shows this the week before last, masked and bearded with ice…
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March 18, 2006
Bellange
Jacques Bellange (ca. 1575-1616) was a painter and a decorative and graphic artist who was employed for the majority of his career at the court of the Dukes of Lorraine, at Nancy. While numerous commissions for murals, portraits and other paintings by Bellange are documented in the court archives, none of these works are known to have survived, and today there are only a few canvases in the world’s museums that have more or less tentatively been attributed to the artist. In his last years, Bellange produced several dozen etchings—it is thought that he may have adopted the technique as a way of publicising and of disseminating his work internationally. Forty-eight of Bellange’s designs are thought to have survived as prints, with most of these displaying such a strongly distinctive style that their attribution is hardly in doubt.
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A quarter of the surviving prints belong to a single series devoted to individual depictions of Jesus and his apostles. The present images are details from a selection of these as reproduced in Antony Griffiths and Craig Hartley’s 1997 book about Bellange. They exemplify the deep strangeness of Bellange’s fluid and expressive strain of Mannerism. He portrays St. John (the image immediately below) as ‘a softly androgynous creature with a corona of frizzy hair, small breasts like a teenage girl, and the round belly of a mature woman.’
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A figure variously identified as St. Jude or St. Matthias (the one following below), is shown, unconventionally, as wearing a turban: perhaps hinting at apocryphal legends of Jude’s having preached in Mesopotamia and Persia. St. Simon (the final image) is posed in such a way that it seems as though he is waiting to hear the punchline of a joke. His near-comical attitude strikes a disconcerting note considering he is juxtaposed (like most of the other apostles) with the instrument of his martyrdom—in his case, a large saw.
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While Bellange’s etchings do seem to have won him an international reputation among connoisseurs (John Evelyn and Cassiano del Pozzo, among others, are known to have acquired prints of his), changing tastes ensured that his work exerted little or no influence on succeeding generations of artists. The notable 18th-Century critic and collector Pierre-Jean Mariette wrote of Bellange’s paintings that ‘one cannot bear to look at [them] so bad is their taste.’ It was not until the 1920s that Bellange’s reputation was rehabilitated.
March 14, 2006
Gallows Literature
In 1871, a London bookseller named Charles Hindley published a ‘large and curious assortment’ of ‘“Cocks,” or “Catchpennies,”’ in other words, miscellaneous ‘Street-Drolleries, Squibs, Histories, Comic Tales in Prose and Verse, Broadsides on the Royal Family, Political Litanies, Dialogues, Cathechisms, Acts of Parliament, Street Political Papers, a Variety of “Ballads on a Subject,” Dying Speeches and Confessions,’ etc., etc. All these he collectively entitled Curiosities of Street Literature. Hadley’s book was issued in a limited edition of fewer than 500 copies, but it has since been reprinted, and, courtesy of the Etext Center at the University of Virginia Library, it has, in part, been published on-line. Only one of the book’s four ‘divisions’ has been posted so far, that concerned with ‘the “Gallows” Literature of the Streets.’ These accounts of Public Executions, Dying Speeches, and Confessions, range from ‘the Execution of Sir John Oldcastle in 1417, to the Trial and Execution of F. Hinson, who suffered the extreme penalty of the law, at the Old Bailey; Monday December 13th, 1869, for the wilful murder of Maria Death.’ Hindley writes that ‘Executian Ballads’ for notable murders could command ‘a most enormous sale,’ the reports of two 1849 cases achieved estimated sales of some two and a half million. The present images are snipped from Hindley’s reproductions of these publications: some of the crude and generic woodcuts, such as the one immediately below, were used to illustrate accounts of several different executions. The image above left is more specific, and represents Alice Holt, who was hanged in Chester in 1863 for having poisoned her own mother: ‘The drop fell, and the culprit was launched into eternity before a great many people, particularly women-folks.’
The image above was used to illustrate the trial, confession and execution of Joseph Richards (in 1786), for ‘the cruel and wicked murder of Walter Horseman,’ a milkman of Kentish Town: the 19-year-old Richards had administered such a severe beating to Horseman that he died ‘a shocking spectacle’ a few days later. The same woodcut adorns the account of the 1797 execution of Martin Clinch and Samuel Mackley: Clinch had shot a man to rob him of his watch, and some money. The woodcut was used again in the case of John Gleeson Wilson, who murdered four people (two of them young children) in the course of a robbery in 1849…
The image above is a detail from another woodcut that was used at least twice: once to illustrate the grisly account of the ‘Barbarous execution and burning of Phœbe Harris,’ in 1786: Harris had been found guilty of ‘coining silver.’ We see the same image again used to complement some ‘Verses on Daniel Good,’ a gentleman’s coachman who had slain his pregnant lover Jane Jones with a hatchet, in 1842.
The woodcut above is unusual among those collected by Hindley in that it illustrates a crime rather than its punishment. It depicts an unnamed ‘Italian boy’ being attacked by one of either John Bishop or Thomas Williams, the ‘Burkers of 1831.’ Burkers, so called after William Burke, of Burke & Hare notoriety, were ‘resurrection men’ who obtained cadavers for anatomists by the simple expedient of murdering people. Aptly, at their sentencing, the judge directed that Bishop’s and Williams’s bodies ‘be delivered over for dissection and anatomization.’ Lastly, the illustration below shows the triple execution of Allen, Gould and Larkin, three Irishmen who swung for treason, and for the murder of a Sergeant Brett, in 1871.
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