Breakfast Links: Week of May 11, 2015

Ready for your weekend browsing pleasure - our weekly round-up of fav links to other blogs, web sites, articles, and images, collected via Twitter.
• Bearded hipsters, beware: denouncing excessive facial hair through history.
• The use of the saber in Napoleon's army.
• Known for his innovative, exotic, and shocking designs, Paul Poiret was an early self-proclaimed "King of Fashion."
• The remarkable 19thc. butter sculptures of Caroline S. Brooks.
• Image: Surprisingly beautiful 18thc. barber's apron.
• Seventy years ago, Queen (then Princess) Elizabeth secretly partied in the street with commoners during VE Day celebrations.
• How the 1834 novel Tylney Hall by Tom Hood is an everyday story of black people of Georgian Wanstead.
• Viking fashions rock the catwalk.
• Solving an art history mystery: identifying the 18thc. portrait of Solomon Brigden, carter, in the service of the 3rd Duke of Dorset.
• Has there ever been a women-only army?
• Wigging out: a 17thc. recipe for extracting earwigs from the ear.
• Image: Belle Gordon, Champion Lady Bag Puncher of the World, c. 1900
• Bounce, the devoted Great Dane of Alexander Pope, who not only served as the poet's literary muse, but saved his life as well.
• How taking Mom out for a Mother's Day brunch is a feminist tradition.
• Georgian concern: can drinking tea turn you into a whore?
• Image: Child's striped knitted sock from Roman Empire, 1800-2000 years old.
• From Milton to Keats: five Cockney poets.
• Retroactive erasure: the Black Madonnas of Europe.
• Visions inside the 19thc. Mughal harem: three memorable portraits.
• The remains of a Irish immigrant woman, murdered in Pennsylvania in 1832, finally identified  & begin the long trip home for burial.
• Image: Trade card from 1896 for Ajeeb, the Wonderful Chess Automaton.
• How informal ex-pat networks helped build early modern empires.
• The A,B,C's of slavery and abolition.
• How nylon stockings changed the world seventy-five years ago.
• New research into what makes the Highland identity.
• Image: 1880 census page proves that at least one child really did run away to join the circus.
Hungry for more? Follow us on Twitter @2nerdyhistgirls for fresh updates daily.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Historical Shoes!

Isabella reporting,

Since one of the purposes of this blog is to talk about shoes (we say it right up there on our masthead), it seems only fitting to mention a shoe-related exhibition and symposium for you lucky folks in the Northeast.

Fellow shoe-fanatics and nerdy-history-folk: can you say "road trip"?

Cosmopolitan Consumption: New England Shoe Stories 1750-1850 is the name of the exhibition, now on display through June 5 at the Portsmouth, NH Athenaeum. Not only does the exhibition include stunning historical shoes - many from small collections that are seldom on view - but also explores how the owners prized, celebrated, and displayed their shoes as markers of fashion and genteel sensibility. Click here for more information as well as directions.

The symposium connected with the exhibition takes place on Friday evening, May 29 - Saturday, May 30. Experts will discuss historical shoes, their manufacture, and their places in the wearers' lives. While I'm not a scholarly expert, I am definitely a shoe consumer and devotee, and as such on Friday night I'll be speaking on why shoes have always occupied such a much-loved place in the wardrobe. I hope you'll join us, and if you're a TNHG reader, please don't be shy - introduce yourself!

Click here for more information.

UPDATE: Sadly, the symposium has been cancelled. If you have already registered, you will receive a refund check shortly in the mail. However, the exhibition is still running until June 5, and I hope all you shoe-fanatics in the northeast will be able to visit!

Above: The Shoe Peddler, or The Shoemaker's Wife, by Martin Engelbrecht, c. 1750. Bavarian State Library.

Friday Video: A View of the Peak, in Derbyshire

Matlock Dale

Loretta reports:

Following up on Miss Wonderful’s recent audio release, here’s a short, very atmospheric video that I think captures the beauty of the Peak. Background is a little hazy, but I think you’ll understand why this part of England has attracted visitors for hundreds of years, as well as playing an important part in Pride & Prejudice.

However, you may wish to turn off the music, which seems to me a peculiar choice.

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Dale, looking toward Black Rock Escarpment (alternate title: View of the Boathouse near Matlock), between 1780 and 1785, courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

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

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.

Keeping Time with an 18th c. Jewel Cabinet

Isabella reporting,

We've shared some of the fantastic work by James Cox (c. 1723-1800), a jeweler, goldsmith, watchmaker, and all-around showman-entrepreneur. The silver swan and these golden elephants are representative of the workmanship from his London shop (in the early 1770s, he claimed he had nearly 1,000 craftsmen working for him), and samples of what he displayed to the wide-eyed paying public in his Spring Gardens museum. Most of his work was destined to become luxurious gifts for foreign rulers, who were amused by the clockwork mechanisms of Western "toys."

This cabinet is made of agate, mounted in gilded copper and brass, with painted enamel plaques. The plaques feature fashionably dressed ladies personifying Winter and Summer, part of the Four Seasons series by British painter Robert Pyle, with additional panels based on works by François Boucher and Jean-Antoine Watteau. On the top of the cabinet is a removable watch, and in addition to the drawers in the front, a secret drawer opens in the back with a spring-loaded jeweled button.

But as lavish as the cabinet appears, there's a chance that it's only a fragment of a much more elaborate piece. On the website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which owns the cabinet, curator Clare Vincent speculates that this might have been part of a larger cabinet described in Cox's A Descriptive Inventory of the Several Exquisite and Magnificent Pieces of Mechanism and Jewellery, published in 1773 and 1774:

"If so, the Museum's miniature cabinet has lost the revolving sphere on its top described in the inventory, and it has been parted from a stand consisting of a 'gilt rock, in front of which is a cascade and running stream of artificial water, where swans are seen swimming in contrary directions; at the corners of the rocks are Dragons with extended wings.' This extravagant assemblage was in turn displayed on a crimson velvet pedestal with a silver-mounted glass cover keep out the dust."

And I was impressed by the cabinet as it stands today!

Above: Jewel Cabinet with Watch, watch signed by James Cox, c. 1766. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photographs © 2011 by Susan Holloway Scott

A Pair of 18th c. French Lovers Finds a Home in a New England Garden

Isabella reporting,

Like most historical societies, the Massachusetts Historical Society is filled not just with books, diaries, and letters, but also with the unexpected, such as silk dresses and intimidating military banners. It's also home to these lovely 18th c. French garden statues.

Cast from lead and painted, this pair is almost life-sized. They would have been the height of garden fashion when they were made in the late 18th c., for they represent the hero and heroine of Paul et Virginie, a romantic novel by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

Paul et Virginie was an international bestseller when it was published in 1788, with fans that included both Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's the ultimate novel of the Enlightenment: the innocent friends-turned-sweethearts are raised on an idyllic Caribbean island, the Île de France (now Mauritius.) Here all the inhabitants live in a paradise of equality and harmony as true creatures of Nature, reflecting the popular writings of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

But of course there is A Conflict. Just as the young couple declare their love, a rich aunt entices Virginie to travel to France, where she will be educated as a French lady and inherit a fortune. On her return voyage, Virginie's ship founders just off the coast of her home island. Paul swims out to rescue her, but because of her newly-learned modesty, she refuses to shed her layers of Parisian clothing before the sailors, and she drowns, weighed down as much the false values of civilization as by her clothes. Bereft, Paul dies of a broken heart, and readers everywhere wept in delicious agony. (If that spoiler didn't ruin the story for you, you can download it or read it online for free here.)

Commercial tie-ins to popular fiction are hardly new, and 18th c. readers could buy prints, paintings, porcelain, and even clocks with a Paul et Virginie theme. These graceful garden statues would have been at the higher end of the market for memorabilia, and with their romanticized versions of bucolic dress, they must have added a charming touch to a country garden.

And thanks to a rare bit of luck, we can see exactly how they looked in such a garden. While it's unknown how or when the statues arrived in America, the MHS has the account books of Peter Chardon Brooks III, who purchased these statues (plus a third that is now lost) for $75 in 1842 for the the family estate in West Medford, MA. Summer, the 1864 painting of the estate, lower left, includes the statues standing near the pond (the detail, lower right, shows Paul with a red coat) - a spot that was the perfect idyllic setting for Paul and Virginie.

Many thanks to Anne E. Bentley, Curator of Art & Artifacts, Massachusetts Historical Society, for her assistance with this post.

Above left: Paul, statue, cast lead, polychromed, France, c. 1787-1790. Massachusetts Historical Society.
Above right: Virginie, statue, cast lead, polychromed, France, c. 1787-1790. Massachusetts Historical Society.
Lower left & right: Summer, by George Loring Brown, 1864. Massachusetts Historical Society.