Gone Fishin'—Spring Break

Susan and Loretta report:

Spring is officially here, although it doesn't feel much like it in some parts of the U.S.—and, from what we've seen—elsewhere in the world.

But it's spring break time for the Two Nerdy History Girls. We're going to take the week off from blogging, and look determinedly for signs of spring, in between working on our books. And maybe goofing off a little.

See you next week!

Image: John Singer Sargent, Two Girls Fishing, 1912, Cincinnati Art Museum, Eden Park, via Wikipedia.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.

Breakfast Links: Week of March 19, 2018

Breakfast Links are served - our weekly round-up of fav links to other web sites, articles, blogs, and images via Twitter.
• Secrets of a 19thc brothel privy.
• Preserving a remarkably original Regency townhouse.
• Image: A 19thc sack that held a dress, pecans, braid of hair, & "love always" from enslaved Rose to her nine-year-old daughter Ashley when she was sold away form her.
• This newly-restored Georgian water pump in London was partially paid for by the East India Company.
• Published and damned: the shocking life of Harriette Wilson.
• Poison and protest: Sarah Bassett and enslaved women poisoners in the early modern Caribbean.
• The Dark Man: an 1893 story of an Irish changeling.
• Image: 415-year-old corset (or "pair of straight bodies") from funeral effigy of Elizabeth I prepared for display at Westminster Abbey; follow thread for more photos.
• The world's oldest decorated eggs pre-date Christianity.
• A transcribed recipe for 17thc Apple Snow to try at home.
• The British Newspaper Archives have digitized several newspapers linked to women's suffrage movement to read online.
• Videos, broadsides, letters, & artifacts: highlights of The Irish Atlantic exhibition from the Massachusetts Historical Society to view online.
• Image: In 1951, a columnist complained that Marilyn Monroe was "cheap & vulgar" and would have looked more decent in a potato sack; Marilyn's response was these photos.
• Bobbi Gibb, the woman who crashed the Boston Marathon in 1966.
• A walk through time, Spitalfields Market, London.
• Catharine Macaulay, the 18thc author of The History of England.
• A 1790s French neoclassical woman's slipper, resplendent with sequins.
• Image: Pre-modern artists imagined female superheroes in functional armor: Penthesilea, a brave woman, detail of medieval tapestry in the Angers Castle.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.
Above: At Breakfast by Laurits Andersen Ring. Private collection.

Friday Video: A Moving Panorama of the Mississippi Valley

Loretta reports:

Many of the 1830s magazines I peruse include reviews of recently installed panoramas (please scroll down for the review about Niagara Falls). The moving panorama is also a large painting, but where the panorama requires the viewer to move around a room, the moving panorama is an early "moving picture." Using spools, it scrolls across a stage, creating the illusion of traveling along a scenic route.

Before photography and movies, both the still and the moving paintings offered Londoners as well as Americans views of distant locales. Since the Londoners seem to have been especially curious about the U.S. and its wildernesses, I’m sure they would have enjoyed John J. Egan’s “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley”—all 348 feet of it, and a very rare survivor.


Video: John J. Egan's "Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley"

Credits Animation: Paul Caro Photography: Saint Louis Art Museum © 2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image is a still from the video.
Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be. To watch the video, please click on the title to this post or the title of the video.

Lustrous Luxury: Eighteenth-Century Coque de Perle Earrings

Susan reporting,

One of the very best parts of blogging and social media in general is the opportunity to share images and inspiration with other like-minded folk. Last week, I saw the earrings upper right with a short explanation on the Instagram page of Taylor Autumn Shelby, a friend of this blog as well as the creator of replicas of historic jewelry.

I had never heard of 18thc coque de perle earrings before, but I realized I'd seen them in portraits like the one upper left: earrings with oval-shaped pearls that were far too large to be real, but were clearly prized enough to be featured in portraits. Pearls have been in fashion since ancient times, but before the invention of cultured pearls in the early 20thc, true pearls were rare and prohibitively expensive except for the very rich or very royal. I knew about Roman pearls, another kind of 18thc faux pearl that were glass beads lined with a pearly coating (see my earlier posts here and here), but coques de perle was new to me, and off I went to hunt for more information.

According to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who owns the earrings lower right, each coque de perle (literally "pearl shell") is cut from the East Indian nautilus shell; the result is similar to a blister or mabe pearl. They are not rounded, but flat or hollowed on one side, and can be made quite large in size. The shape is usually oval (often described as olive) to follow the natural curve of the shell. The hollowed curve could be filled with wax or resin to give the finished coque de perle more of the weight of a true pearl, or left hollow to keep it light; I'm guessing that is the case of the pearl swinging from the large hoop earring in the Vigée Le Brun portrait, lower left. Some coques de perle were set in gold or silver like true pearls, while others were set in a base metal to make them more affordable.

I also found this description of coques de perle in the 1814 edition of A History of Inventions and Discoveries by Johann Beckmann, who in turn quotes 1762 French expert Jean Henri Prosper Pouget:

"Coque de perles are flat on one side, and are used for ornaments, one side of which only is seen. By Pliny they are called physemata. Artificial pearls of this kind have, for some time past, been employed in making ear-rings. Our toymen [jewelers], after the French, give these pearls the name perles coques; but the following account of Pouget in Traité des pierres precieuses et de la manière de les employer en parure [A Treatis on precious stones and how to use them for adornment] makes me dubious respecting them. 'La coque de perle,' says he, "is not formed in a pearl-shell like the pearl; it is procured from a kind of snail found only in the East-Indies. There are several species of them. The shell of this animal is sawn in two, and one coque only can be obtained from each. The coques are very small, and one is obliged to fill them with tears of mastic to give them a body, before they can be employed. This beautiful snail is found generally in the sea, and sometimes on the shore.'"

A beautiful snail, and beautiful earrings as well.

Upper left: Ritratto de Caterina Sagredo Barbarigo by Rosalba Carriera, 1741, private collection.
Upper right: Coque de Perle Girandole Earrings, 18thc, image via Bonhams Auctioneers.
Lower left, Detail, The Marquise de Pezay, and the Marquise de Rougé with Her Sons Alexis and Adrien by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun, 1797, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Lower right: Girandole Style Earring (one of a pair; gold metal and coque de perle) English, about 1780, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Lord Rivers Drowns in the Serpentine—Was It an Accident?

Lord Rivers as a boy

Loretta reports:

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was addicted to gambling. The first Lord Holland’s sons ran up enormous gambling debts. Beau Brummell fled England to escape his. A lot of that going around.

The third Baron Rivers is another example I happened on. The trail started with the following in La Belle Assemblée for March 1831:

“The first act of the Duke of Sussex, on being appointed to the Rangership of Hyde-park, has been to give directions for the placing an adequate protection against the spot where the late Lord Rivers lost his life."

This was intriguing. Who was Lord Rivers and how did he die?

Wikipedia’s short entry only tantalized, sending me to the 1 April 1831 Gentleman’s Magazine obituary.

LORD RIVERS.
Jan. 23 Drowned in the Serpentine river, aged 53, the Right Hon. Horace William Pitt, third Baron Rivers, of Sudeley Castle in Gloucestershire (1802).
 ... As Mr. Horace Beckford he was for many years a distinguished member of the haut ton; and it was only after his succeeding to the title on the death of his maternal uncle, July 20, 1828, that he took the name of Pitt ... .

“Lord Rivers was first missed on the evening of Sunday Jan. 23 ... On Tuesday the Serpentine river was dragged, and in the afternoon his Lordship's body was found at the east end, near the waterfall.”

At the inquest, his steward and a footman insisted he’d been in good spirits: He was nearsighted and must have fallen into the river by accident. The superintendent of the Humane Society's Receiving House said the footpath there was so dangerous that ten people fell into the river on a recent foggy night.

“The Jury returned this verdict: ‘Found drowned near the public path at the head of the Serpentine River, considered very dangerous for want of a rail or fence, where many persons have lately fallen in.’—The rail has been since erected by direction of the Duke of Sussex, the new Ranger of Hyde Park.

Subsequently to the inquest ..., there has been considerable discussion in the newspapers regarding the cause of the occurrence; and it has been stated, with what truth we cannot say, that when the body was taken out of the water, his Lordship's hat was secured with a handkerchief under his chin, and that his umbrella was found on the bank, both which circumstances are considered indicative that his immersion was intentional; and it is added that on the Saturday night he had lost considerable sums at a gaming-house; and that this passion for play had for some years so far possessed him, that his uncle bequeathed to him only 4000l. a year, leaving the bulk of his property, amounting to 40,000l a year, to trustees for the benefit of his son, the present Peer.”

Nigel Cox, Serpentine Waterfall

It’s important to remember that suicide, being self-murder, was a capital offense. One could be tried and hanged for the attempt, and a suicide’s property was forfeit to the Crown. Up to a certain point in the early 19th C, those who’d committed suicide were buried at midnight at a crossroads without the offices of clergy. This is why coroner’s juries tended to find the deaths accidental or, when this was impossible, the victim of unsound mind.

Image: A print of the “youthful portrait of Mr. Horace Beckford, at full length in a Vandyke costume, painted by R. Cosway, R.A. and engraved in stipple by John Conde, 1792", courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Photo of Serpentine Waterfall by Nigel Cox. Another image here.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.