• Ground-breaking research reveals significantly differently original composition in a beloved painting, Fragonard's Young Girl Reading.
• The feline ancestors of Hello Kitty? The cats of Japan's Edo Period.
• Rare Ojibwa Indian coat from the 1780s mixes traditional motifs with European style.
• An early 19th c. Easter miscellany.
• An astonishing 18th c. portrait: the Marquis de Boissy (1765-1840) depicted as a . . . hare.
• Two young British wheelwright apprentices visit Colonial Williamsburg to help keep alive a dying trade.
• Waterloo treasures featured in new interactive video from the Cambridge University Library.
• Stinks, smells, and fumes: Fumigating for health in early modern England.
• Image: Lovely informal portrait of a couple by Danloux, c. 1802.
• Camp followers in the Peninsular War.
• Twelve of NYC's historic ballrooms: grand entertainment venues of another era.
• Beer for breakfast: most 18th c. people began their days with beer.
• "Plus-size": a history of the fashion industry's most troubling term.
• Delicious rottenness: women, sex, and apples.
• The red dead-nettle: a weed from the Bronze Age.
• The old industry of rope-making: hemp from the Philippines, Russia, & Italy transformed in London, 1905.
• Image: the Chelsea Bun House, where supposedly over a quarter million buns were sold on Good Friday, 1829.
• Only full skeleton retrieved from Battle of Waterloo in 200 years identified after being found beneath a car park.
• Propaganda warfare: Benjamin Franklin fakes a newspaper.
• The US Forestry Service made this fantastic cocktail guide in 1974.
• The miracle of the heavens: how Galileo's telescope changed the world.
• Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill: the eccentric house that inspired the Gothic Revival.
• The promenade de Longchamps: horses, hats, and history.
• Eighteenth century stockings: how shocking!
• Image: Giggle Water: cover to 1920s cocktail recipe book
• The Lady's Magazine, 18th c. boarding schools, and other problems.
• This elegant 1890 townhouse is the last sliver of the 19th c. on its block on W. 72nd Street, NYC.
• Just for fun: two medieval monks invent bestiaries. Watch out for that bed-bird tucking you in!
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7 comments:
A propos the Fragonard painting—it's rather like the difference between a printed book and the first draft, isn't it?
Lillian, I think in this case there's something more going on, which is what has art historians all a-buzz. The newly-discovered version fits in with a series of other portraits that Fragonard did - the same costumes, poses, and attitude. For some reason, he repainted the woman's head at least six months' later; so not so much a draft, as a purposeful reworking. It's an entirely different woman's face now. That's the mystery, and a question that will probably never be known - why did he do it? :)
What is a Chelsea bun? A Bath bun?
I went looking for other Fragonard paintings and ran across Visite à la nourrice. That's a sad seeming scene, but I could not find out more about it. Is the baby sick?
I'm not sure what the difference is between a Chelsea bun and a Bath bun. Anyone out there know?
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Karen Anne, I went & found the Fragonard painting you mentoned, Visite à la nourrice, and then hunted about to find out more about it. Fortunately the baby isn't sick; instead, this is supposed to be a sentimental picture of young parents admiring their beautiful baby. One of the articles I read was in French, and my French being a bit rusty, I'm *guessing* that the nurse in the title refers to the wet-nurse who is looking after the child. In any event, it's supposed to be happy and golden, and not sad at all.Whew! :)
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