Is there any gentler set of children’s book characters than A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and the other inhabitants of Hundred Acre Wood? Now a hundred years old, they are still ubiquitous and loved today, and justifiably so. Alan Alexander Milne (1882–1956) was primarily a playwright before he wrote his children’s books and was a modestly successful one at that, but it is unsurprising that his plays have been somewhat overshadowed by his later success in children’s literature. The story of his characters’ inception is quite well-known but interesting nonetheless, so if you’re comfortable, I’ll begin…
Milne was of course the father of Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based, and he enjoyed writing poetry inspired by his son. One day they visited London Zoo and out of all the animals there, young Christopher was particularly taken by the tame and amiable Canadian black bear Winnipeg, or Winnie for short. Christopher had a stuffed bear, originally named Edward, like a million other stuffed bears, but now he renamed him Winnie. A future star was born. The “Pooh” part came later from a nickname the very young Christopher had adopted for a local swan.
Not yet known as Pooh, the character made his first appearance in a poem, Teddy Bear, published in Punch magazine in February 1924 and republished the same year in Milne’s book of poetry When We Were Very Young. Illustrated by E H Shepard (1879–1976) we can see the recognisable character for the first time.
When We Were Very Young, First Edition
Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. A second collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, was published in 1927. These three books were also illustrated by E H Shepard, who was of course a hugely important part of the Pooh story. Christopher Robin, meanwhile, seems to have had quite the knack for naming toy animals: his collection also included the perfectly-named Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. Indeed, it was only Owl and Rabbit that A A Milne himself contributed to the final grouping, though of course it was his genius to imbue all the animals with their unique characters.
The fictional Hundred Acre Wood of the Pooh stories derives from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, where Milne went on walks with his son. Shepard drew on these landscapes to the point that the grown-up Christopher Robin would comment: “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical”. You can visit the forest today, and look out for such spots as the Heffalump Trap, Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place, and the wooden Pooh Bridge where Pooh and Piglet invented Poohsticks.
The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), fought between General Franco’s Nationalist forces and the Loyalist/Republican faction, was a pivotal conflict shaping Spain’s political landscape but also having a profound impact on the arts, given the involvement of an array of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were compelled to take a stance on this cause célèbre. Perhaps most famously, Picasso’s Guernica was a powerful anti-war painting made in response to the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica by Nazi Germany in support of Franco. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia was a memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Miguel Hernández spent most of the war in prison and wrote a collection of poems now considered one of the finest pieces of Spanish poetry of the 20th century.
In 1936 Ernest Hemingway travelled to Spain to cover the war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. He had already fallen in love with Spain over a decade earlier when he attended the famous bull run at Pamplona, but now he moved from being a cultural observer to an active participant in Spanish history. Three years later he completed his great novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains during a Republican guerrilla operation, the novel follows Robert Jordan, a young American demolitions expert, in the International Brigades, assigned to blow up a bridge during the Segovia Offensive.
Broad in scope, the novel deals movingly with themes of loyalty and courage, of love and defeat, of identity and the complexities of moral action. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” his editor Maxwell Perkins wrote, “no one ever so completely performed it.” The novel was published in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and is regarded as one of Hemingway’s best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea. It stands as one of the best war novels of all time, and here are its opening lines:
He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.
“Is that the mill?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I do not remember it.”
“It was built since you were here. The old mill is farther down; much below the pass.”
He spread the photostated military map out on the forest floor and looked at it carefully. The old man looked over his shoulder. He was a short and solid old man in a black peasant’s smock and gray iron-stiff trousers and he wore rope-soled shoes. He was breathing heavily from the climb and his hand rested on one of the two heavy packs they had been carrying.
“Then you cannot see the bridge from here.”
“No,” the old man said. “This is the easy country of the pass where the stream flows gently. Below, where the road turns out of sight in the trees, it drops suddenly and there is a steep gorge — ”
“I remember.”
“Across this gorge is the bridge.”
“And where are their posts?”
“There is a post at the mill that you see there.”
The young man, who was studying the country, took his glasses from the pocket of his faded, khaki flannel shirt, wiped the lenses with a handkerchief, screwed the eyepieces around until the boards of the mill showed suddenly clearly and he saw the wooden bench beside the door; the huge pile of sawdust that rose behind the open shed where the circular saw was, and a stretch of the flume that brought the logs down from the mountainside on the other bank of the stream. The stream showed clear and smooth-looking in the glasses and, below the curl of the falling water, the spray from the dam was blowing in the wind.
“There is no sentry.”
“There is smoke coming from the millhouse,” the old man said. “There are also clothes hanging on a line.”
“I see them but I do not see any sentry.”
“Perhaps he is in the shade,” the old man explained. “It is hot there now. He would be in the shadow at the end we do not see.”
“Probably. Where is the next post?”
“Below the bridge. It is at the roadmender’s hut at kilometer five from the top of the pass.”
“How many men are here?” He pointed at the mill.
“Perhaps four and a corporal.”
“And below?”
“More. I will find out.”
“And at the bridge?”
“Always two. One at each end.”
“We will need a certain number of men,” he said. “How many men can you get?”
“I can bring as many men as you wish,” the old man said. “There are many men now here in the hills.”
“How many?”
“There are more than a hundred. But they are in small bands. How many men will you need?”
“I will let you know when we have studied the bridge.”
“Do you wish to study it now?”
“No. Now I wish to go to where we will hide this explosive until it is time. I would like to have it hidden in utmost security at a distance no greater than half an hour from the bridge, if that is possible.”
“That is simple,” the old man said. “From where we are going, it will all be downhill to the bridge. But now we must climb a little in seriousness to get there. Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” the young man said. “But we will eat later. How are you called? I have forgotten.” It was a bad sign to him that he had forgotten.
“Anselmo,” the old man said. “I am called Anselmo and I come from Barco de Avila. Let me help you with that pack.”
Now, Voyager is a 1942 American movie Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains, and directed by Irving Rapper. The screenplay by Casey Robinson is based on the 1941 novel of the same name by Olive Higgins Prouty, who borrowed her title from the Walt Whitman poem The Untold Want:
The untold want by life and land ne’er granted, Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.
Walt Whitman, being one of America’s national treasures, is oft-quoted on screen and in music: O Captain! My Captain in Dead Poets Society springs to mind, and more recently Bob Dylan’s I Contain Multitudes is a line borrowed from Song of Myself. “Now, voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find” fits the storyline well, as we’ll see.
Now, Voyager movie poster
Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) is a shy, neurotic and overweight young woman who is in thrall to her domineering harridan of a mother (Gladys Cooper). The verbal and emotional abuse dished out to her daughter has created a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Indeed, fearing just that, Charlotte’s sister-in-law Lisa introduces her to psychiatrist Dr Jaquith (Claude Rains), and Charlotte spends some time in his sanitarium. This proves to be a turning point, and away from her mother’s clutches, Charlotte blossoms, loses weight and gets herself a whole new wardrobe. Both Lisa and Dr Jaquith encourage Charlotte not to go home yet but to instead go on a cruise.
Charlotte agrees, and although initially too shy to mix with the other passengers on the ship, she meets and becomes friendly with Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), a married man traveling on business. Jerry is sympathetic to Charlotte’s new-found but still inchoate confidence and opens up about his own young daughter Tina and her struggles with shyness. Charlotte learns that it is only Jerry’s devotion to his daughter that keeps him from divorcing his wife, who is a manipulative and jealous woman. On an excursion from the ship in Rio de Janeiro, Charlotte and Jerry are stranded on Sugarloaf Mountain. They miss the ship and spend five days together before Charlotte flies to Buenos Aires to rejoin the cruise. Although it is clear they have fallen in love, they decide not to see each other again.
When she disembarks from the ship, Charlotte’s family is stunned by the dramatic changes in her. The formerly quiet and shy Charlotte is inundated with fond farewells from fellow passengers. Back home, her mother tries to browbeat her daughter all over again, but this time Charlotte remains resolute, empowered by her experiences aboard the ship and the memory of Jerry’s love. This time, she can fight back and when later she delivers some home truths, Mrs Vale, perhaps robbed of her raison d’être as effective virago, dies of a heart attack. Guilty and distraught, Charlotte returns to the sanitarium but is quickly diverted from her relapse by meeting Jerry’s daughter Tina and taking her under her wing.
When Tina’s condition improves, Dr Jaquith allows Charlotte to take Tina to live with her at her home to Boston, on the condition that her relationship with Jerry remains platonic. Jerry is delighted to see the improvement in his daughter, but the love he and Charlotte share must seemingly remain in check. Charlotte tells Jerry that she sees Tina as her way of being close to him. When Jerry asks her if she is happy, she delivers the classic line at the very end of the movie: “Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the Moon. We have the stars.”
Well, it’s that time of year when we look for the seasonally sublime, and this year let’s visit a nativity scene by one Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco (1470s-1510) – better known simply as Giorgione. Giorgione was the Italian painter who founded the Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting along with his younger contemporary Titian. He is one of the more mysterious characters in European art; little is known about him other than the brief biographical sketch in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. His work seems to elude critics too, and in fact there are only six surviving paintings that are firmly attributed to him.
Take his Adoration of the Shepherds, for instance. Art historian and Renaissance specialist Bernard Berenson was firmly of the belief that this was by Titian, though earlier had attributed it to Vincenzo Catena, and later hedged his bets somewhat by attributing it partly to Giorgione but finished off by Titian. Roger Fry, meanwhile, had it down as a Giovanni Cariani (“the landscape and the foliage in the foreground leaves little doubt”). These things matter when you’re selling a painting, of course, and this one has an interesting provenance. The painting had come up for sale, as a Giorgione, in 1847 at Christie’s in London and was purchased for £1544 by Thomas Wentworth Beaumont of one of my local stately homes, Bretton Hall in West Yorkshire.
The painting got passed down through several generations of Viscounts Allendale (hence the painting’s alternative name the Allendale Nativity) ultimately to Beaumont’s great grandson, Wentworth Beaumont, who then sold the painting to legendary art collector Lord Duveen in 1937. Duveen’s resident expert was none other than the aforementioned Bernard Berenson. Sadly, the men fell out over the attribution and their long-term partnership ruptured, all because Berenson insisted it was a Titian and Duveen thought it a Giorgione. Duveen sold it on – as a Giorgione (if he’d have seen Titian’s selling power today, perhaps he would have gone along with Berenson) — to department store magnate Samuel Henry Kress who displayed it in the window of his store on Fifth Avenue over the Christmas period 1938. It’s now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
Giorgione – or Titian, or whoever (though certainly someone Venetian) – places his Nativity in front of a dark grotto rather than a stable, while on the left a bright Venetian landscape recedes into the distance. Joseph and Mary are opulently dressed, and the baby Jesus lies on a white cloth on the ground rather than in a manger – even in the sixteenth century artists sought to be different. You would be forgiven for missing the putti (winged heads) who hover ethereally above the entrance, or the angel surreptitiously floating amid the treetops top-left. Merry Christmas!
The rich heritage of African-American music has been written about in this blog several times; we’ve looked variously at The Ink Spots, Sam & Dave, Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, Nina Simone and Louis Jordan. Of course, there are many notables missing from that list but there is only so much time and space, and we’re a blog not an encyclopaedia. Nonetheless, there is one notable name for whom omission would constitute a crime and that is the Queen of Jazz herself, Ella Fitzgerald.
Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917, Ella Jane Fitzgerald’s early life was a tumultuous one: her mother died from injuries sustained in a car accident in 1932, leaving the fifteen-year old Ella in the care of her step-father, who was rumoured to have abused her. Ella began skipping school and running around with the wrong sorts of people, and when the authorities caught up with her she was sent to the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronx. But throughout this time, of course, Ella sang, and on a November night in 1934, she got herself onto the bill of one of the Amateur Nights at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. She took first prize and her life changed.
Ella was soon to meet bandleader Chick Webb who tried her out with his band at a dance at Yale University. Met with approval by audience and musicians alike, Webb signed her up and she became a popular fixture at the band’s regular performances at legendary Harlem venue, the Savoy Ballroom. When Webb died, Ella took over as bandleader and they became Ella Fitzgerald and her Famous Orchestra. Thus began a long career spanning sixty years, in which she made music as a solo artist but also collaboratively with such greats as Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie (not to mention the already-mentioned Inkspots and Louis Jordan).
In 1993, she gave her last public performance, and three years later she died at age 79 after years of declining health. Whilst I might have picked a well-known song from so many she recorded such as Dream a Little Dream of Me, Cheek to Cheek, Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall, and It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing), today let’s listen to her exquisite rendering of Cole Porter’s masterpiece, Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.
Disinformation, misinformation, distraction, misdirection…pertinent to everyone in today’s pitfall-ridden world of the Internet and social media, but particularly pertinent to people in the spy game. Spooks love devising stings to disrupt their enemies’ networks by planting fake information. Take Operation Mincemeat for example: this was the successful British deception operation of the Second World War to disguise the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily.
British intelligence obtained the body of a recently deceased tramp, dressed him as an officer of the Royal Marines (and presumably also gave the corpse a haircut and a shave?), and dumped him into the sea off the southern coast of Spain, knowing that the body would inevitably come to the attention of the Spanish government. Suspecting also that the nominally neutral Spanish government might spill the beans to the Germans (which they duly did), they planted personal items on him identifying him as the fictitious Captain William Martin and included fake documents suggesting that the Allies planned to invade Greece and Sardinia instead of Sicily. The ruse worked: the Germans shifted their reinforcements to Greece and Sardinia and the Allies successfully invaded Sicily.
One young intelligence officer involved in that operation was one Ian Fleming, working in the Naval Intelligence Division; we needn’t go far to find the sources of his inspiration for a certain 007. However, today we’re visiting another writer for whom the spy game inspired literary gold: Graham Greene and his 1958 novel Our Man In Havana. Greene was an MI6 man, joining in August 1941 and despatched to the Iberian peninsula where he learnt about a group of double agents who fed misinformation to their German handlers. One such was “Garbo”, a Spanish double agent in Lisbon, who pretended to control a ring of agents all over England and was a past master at disinformation. Garbo was the main inspiration for Wormold, the protagonist of Our Man in Havana.
Greene wrote a first version of his story in 1946, having a film script in mind and setting it in Estonia in 1938, though soon realising that Havana, which he had visited several times, would be the better location. The black comedy novel follows the life of Jim Wormold, an English vacuum cleaner salesman living in Havana during the Fulgencio Batista regime, who is recruited into MI6 to spy on the Cuban government. Finding no useful dirt, Wormold takes to fabricating reports; just as his confidence grows so too grows the excitement and drama of his tall tales.
Greene builds his plot using comically sketched scenes of espionage escapades, in an atmosphere of a Cuba on the brink of communist revolution and the Cuban Missile Crisis. In this excerpt, Wormold is having his daily constitutional in Sloppy Joe’s bar when he is met by his recruiter.
Wormold led the stranger through a door at the back, down a short passage, and indicated the toilet. ‘It’s in there.’ ‘After you, old man.’ ‘But I don’t need it.’ ‘Don’t be difficult,’ the stranger said. He put a hand on Wormold’s shoulder and pushed him through the door. Inside there were two washbasins, a chair with a broken back, and the usual cabinets and pissoirs. ‘Take a pew, old man,’ the stranger said, ‘while I turn on a tap.’ But when the water ran he made no attempt to wash. ‘Looks more natural,’ he explained (the word ‘natural’ seemed a favourite adjective of his), ‘if someone barges in. And of course it confuses a mike.’ ‘A mike?’ ‘You’re quite right to question that. Quite right. There probably wouldn’t be a mike in a place like this, but it’s the drill, you know, that counts. You’ll find it always pays in the end to follow the drill. It’s lucky they don’t run to waste-plugs in Havana. We can just keep the water running.’ ‘Please will you explain…?’ ‘Can’t be too careful even in a Gents, when I come to think of it. A chap of ours in Denmark in 1940 saw from his own window the German fleet coming down the Kattegat.’ ‘What gut?’ ‘Kattegat. Of course he knew then the balloon had gone up. Started burning his papers. Put the ashes down the lay and pulled the chain. Trouble was – late frost. Pipes frozen. All the ashes floated up into the bath down below. Flat belonged to an old maiden lady – Baronin someone or other. She was just going to have a bath. Most embarrassing for our chap.’ ‘It sounds like the Secret Service.’ ‘It is the Secret Service, old man, or so the novelists call it. That’s why I wanted to talk to you about your chap Lopez. Is he reliable or ought you to fire him?’ ‘Are you in the Secret Service?’ ‘If you like to put it that way.’ ‘Why on earth should I fire Lopez? He’s been with me ten years.’ ‘We could find you a chap who knew all about vacuum cleaners. But of course – naturally – we’ll leave that decision to you.’ ‘But I’m not in your Service.’ ‘We’ll come to that in a moment, old man. Anyway we’ve traced Lopez—he seems clear. But your friend Hasselbacher, I’d be a bit careful of him.’ ‘How do you know about Hasselbacher?’ ‘I’ve been around a day or two, picking things up. One has to on these occasions.’ ‘What occasions?’ ‘Where was Hasselbacher born?’ ‘Berlin, I think.’ ‘Sympathies East or West?’ ‘We never talk politics.’ ‘Not that it matters. East or West they play the German game. Remember the Ribbentrop Pact. We won’t be caught that way again.’ ‘Hasselbacher’s not a politician. He’s an old doctor and he’s lived here for thirty years.’ ‘All the same, you’d be surprised… But I agree with you, it would be conspicuous if you dropped him. Just play him carefully, that’s all. He might even be useful if you handle him right.’ ‘I’ve no intention of handling him.’ ‘You’ll find it necessary for the job.’ ‘I don’t want any job. Why do you pick on me?’ ‘Patriotic Englishman. Been here for years. Respected member of the European Traders’ Association. We must have our man in Havana, you know.’
The Ambassadors is a 1533 painting by German-born Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543). To put things into context, 1533 was the year that Elizabeth I was born, and was slap bang at the dawning of what historians would come to call the Scientific Revolution (conventionally launched by the publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543). Whilst at first sight, the painting is a double portrait (of French diplomat Jean de Dinteville and bishop Georges de Selve), closer inspection shows so much more. There is a meticulously rendered array of scientific devices, books and a lute, as well as one of the best-known examples of anamorphosis in art (a distorted projection of a skull that can only be properly viewed from a specific vantage point).
I’m not a fan of the anamorphic skull to be honest, it’s kind of jarring…but the rest is spectacular. I’ve seen this up close and personal at the National Gallery and it is remarkable in its detail. Let’s see some of those details. There are two globes (a terrestrial one and a celestial one), a shepherd’s dial, a quadrant, a torquetum, and a polyhedral sundial, each exquisitely painted.
The lute can be seen to have a broken string, interpreted as a symbol of discord, perhaps between science and religion. Near the lute is a Lutheran hymnal, in which the words and music can be read, and an arithmetic book with minute equations depicted.
Holbein was pretty good with fabric, too. The upper shelf is lined by an Anatolian carpet, a feature that pops up in many a Holbein. The chap on the left is in secular garb, the one on the right is in clerical clothing, both rendered finely, and perhaps, again, a symbol of religious strife. The backdrop, meanwhile, is a richly green, thickly folded curtain (to the top left of which a small crucifix is peeping out).
Holbein moved to England in 1526 and welcomed into the humanist circle of Sir Thomas More. He soon built a strong reputation which is why you can see scores of his painting in the National Portrait Gallery too.
In another life I could easily see myself as an antiquarian, cycling around remote villages in search of ancient churches to take brass rubbings and explore wind-bent, lichen-covered gravestones, and the hum of summer insects or a distant tractor the only sounds gently reaching my ears. Ah my! Then back to my cloistered chambers at the University to study medievalism and write beautifully enigmatic ghost stories for friends and select students. Perhaps an aged brandy to sip before bed. Oh wait, it seems I’m M R James!
Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) was an English medievalist scholar who served variously as provost and Vice-Chancellor at Kings’ College Cambridge, the University of Cambridge and Eton College. His lifetime was dedicated to education and in good old Mr Chips’ fashion, he died whilst still teaching, at Eton in 1936. His scholarly work was very highly regarded but his enduring legacy is his collections of ghost stories which he wrote originally as Christmas Eve entertainments. He remains the master ghost story writer.
James’s stories were published in the collections Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925), and the hardback omnibus The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James (1931). In these, he redefined the ghost story by grounding his stories in realism and dry humour. His stories often featured a mild-mannered academic turning up at some quaint seaside resort or old French village and accidentally acquiring a cursed artefact which unleashes some dark force. His ghouls were not overt: James was well aware that the greatest horrors lie within the human imagination and that one only needs to stimulate that imagination to conjure up the most frightening apparitions.
M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Have you heard of the ‘M R James Test’? The rules are simple: you must read one of his ghost stories by the light of a single candle in a deserted house in an empty room, with your back to an open door. You succeed if your nerve holds and you don’t need to turn around and look over your shoulder! I haven’t tried it myself but having read several of his stories I can well imagine the potential for goosebumps…Happy Halloween!
One of my earliest music loves was the Irish hard rock band Thin Lizzy. Like many of my generation, my introduction came in the song that would become their all-time classic, and the one you hear most on the radio (along with Whiskey In The Jar), namely The Boys Are Back In Town. This led me to go out and buy the album, Jailbreak, which I found out was their sixth studio album (released in March 1976) and thus I began my journey of discovering earlier albums and then subsequent albums as they came out. Phil Lynott was the creative force that led the band through their fourteen-year career, with drummer Brian Downey also a constant figure.
Formed in 1969, Thin Lizzy initially comprised Lynott, Downey, and guitarist Eric Bell (and to be technically correct, organist Eric Wrixon, though he left after a few months, leaving the band as a three-piece). The band’s music reflected multiple influences from blues and psychedelic rock to traditional Irish music through a solid hard rock lens, and adorned by Phil’s evocative lyrics that always have a story to tell; witness these poetic lines from the lead song of their second album, Shades Of A Blue Orphanage:
When we were kids we used to go over the back wall into old Dan’s scrapyard Into the snooker hall where most us kids were barred An’ into the Roxy and the Stella where film stars starred That’s where me and Hopalong an’ Roy Rogers got drunk and jarred And we might have been the saviour of the men The captured captain in the devil’s demon den And we might have been the magic politician in some kind of tricky position Like an old, old, old master musician we kept on wishin’ We was headed for the number one hit country again
Eric Bell left in 1973 and was briefly replaced by Gary Moore, but it was the decision to replace Gary with two guitarists, Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson, that the classic line-up of my youth was formed. The twin guitar sound that Scott and Brian brought to the table would lead them to their greatest successes and break them in the US, that holy grail of band ambition. And it was Jailbreak that did it. Packed with great songs like the eponymous Jailbreak, The Boys Are Back In Town, Cowboy Song, and Emerald, the album was also thematically coherent As demonstrated so iconically by Jim Fitzpatrick’s great cover artwork, the album exudes themes of escape and rebellion, of the disenfranchised breaking free from the shackles of, well, you get the drift…
You can listen to the song Jailbreak here:
Brian Robertson, Phil Lynott and Scott Gorham of Thin Lizzy
Pieter de Hooch is not as well-known these days as fellow Dutch masters Rembrandt or Vermeer (both of whom have appeared in these pages) but he was nonetheless a big hitter in the Dutch Golden Age and one of my favourite artists. The Dutch Golden Age, so called, was the period roughly spanning the 17th century in which the newly independent Dutch republic flourished to become Europe’s most prosperous nation and a leading light in European trade, science, and art.
The upheavals of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648), in which the Dutch secured their independence, entailed a break from the old Monarchist and Catholic traditions under the Habsburgs, and a shake-up in the arts as well as in other areas of life. Out went religious painting and in came a whole new variety of secular subjects from still lifes, landscapes and seascapes, to kamergezichten, or “room-views”, showing glimpses of everyday domestic life, the latter being specialities of Vermeer and this week’s subject, Pieter de Hooch.
Pieter de Hooch was born in Rotterdam to a bricklayer and a midwife, and was brought up in a modest working-class home. He went on to study art in Haarlem under the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem and became known for his special affinity for figures in interiors. Beginning in 1650, he worked as a painter and servant for a linen-merchant and art collector in Rotterdam, and his work took him to The Hague, Leiden, and Delft, providing him with ample inspiration to pursue his speciality. His paintings capture delightful domestic scenes such as this one from 1658, The Courtyard of a House in Delft, which you can see in London’s National Gallery.
The painting depicts a quiet courtyard scene in which a young maid holds the hand of a small girl. An archway leads from the courtyard into a passageway and through to the other side of the house. Through the archway, a woman stands in the passageway, looking out to the street. The textures and details of the house, such as the tile pattern of the courtyard, the brickwork of the archway and the stone tablet above it, are rendered in detail. Simple but exquisite.
Pieter de Hooch, The Courtyard of a House in Delft
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