Yesterday at the library, a book came past my desk with a cover that made me chuckle. It was an old edition, but I finally found an image of the cover online.
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As you can probably already tell, this cover is a total rip-off of Dicksee's La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Flip the image, put the guy in an anachronystic white poet shirt, and the girl in a 1970s Gunne Sax dress. Voila!
I finally could resist no longer, and contacted Mary Philpott of Verdant Tile Co. to order the Mucha brooch. And what a great buying experience! Mary was really nice, and prompt in replies. She ended up firing three brooches, and gave me a choice of my favorite of the three. The package arrived less than a week later (even though it was international from Canada) and the item was wonderfully packaged.
The tile is gorgeous, and I had planned to wear it as a pin, but then as we were sitting on the couch that night watching a movie, I looked over at the fireplace and noticed that the tile was almost exactly the size of the strange middle brick on my fireplace. Since we rent, I couldn't do a total installation, but the brooch is now adhered to the fireplace with temporary putty. I think it looks pretty!
Every time I return to the website for WAG Screen's production of The Lady of Shalott, there are more breathtakingly beautiful images to admire.
The premiere of this remarkable film took place on the 15th of May, and I know we're all eager for the DVD release, which will hopefully happen in the next couple of months.
Clicking on the WAG Screen News link will bring up access to the latest newsletter, with neat articles about different aspects of filming.
Today I wanted to share with you a blog I've been greatly enjoying. Jim first posted a comment to one of my blogs here, and I enjoy following links to peek at the blogs of the people who comment. His was so delightful, (and on-theme) I have to share it.
Jim is an art student, and in an effort to better study the work of John William Waterhouse, he's painted studies/reproductions of some of his work. His latest completed project has been A Naiad.
Jim has also had the opportunity to see several of Waterhouse's paintings in-person, and his descriptions of them are captivating. I admit that I would be right next to him, enthralled by every detail of the canvas, if I ever got to see a Waterhouse myself.
The other day I was perusing ebay randomly to search for any garden statuary with an elegant, Pre-Raphaelite feel that I might be able to use outside my apartment, when I came across this auction for a decidedly too-expensive and too-enormous set of beautiful garden statues that I am smitten with.
They remind me very much of Walter Crane's Masque of the Four Seasons, one of my favorite artworks of all time, and the image on the business cards of Midnight Muse. In the statues, as in the painting, each figure holds a symbol of her season.
Spring with her basket of flowers Summer with wheat and a sickle Autumn with her ripe fruits Winter, hooded, with a torch
I just finished reading an excellent book called The Light of the Home: An Intimate View of the Lives of Women in Victorian America. It not only details what it was like to be a woman in Victorian times, but what it was like in the daily life of all people in general. Of course the book is about Americans, but still, prevalent moral codes and philosophies in those days I'm sure transcended borders. Two quotes especially made me think of the Victorian contemporaries of these women...the Pre-Raphaelites...specifically our man, William Morris.
This home was to be the opposite of the man’s world; rather than an environment that bespoke commerce and trade, it was a miniature universe of culture and education for family and visitors.Here the arts and sciences of the museum, concert hall, and schoolroom were translated into the shells and other curios adorning the parlor, the prints and paintings on the walls, the piano or organ in the parlor, and the books in the library.Women were the organizing force and marshals of this domain.Defined as more emotional and sensitive than their male counterparts, they were charged with transforming the rude brick, stone, and wood of the exterior and the blank walls and empty rooms of the interior into places which would both communicate a family’s status and provide it with repose and moral uplift.
The style of interior decoration in the late nineteenth century was emblematic of the separate realms and responsibilities of middle-class life.Visual complexity and intricacy characterized popular decorative taste in the home, as could be seen in both the massing of discrete objects in a given space and the juxtaposing of different patterns and textures.This celebration of asymmetry and visual surprise served as more than mere display of worldly goods: it was an evocative and feminine counterpoint to the increasingly bureaucratic, machine-straight lives of middle-class men.The volume and variety of objects and textures in a typical house, when properly arranged, were supposed to alter immoral and unchristian behavior by the power of “influence,” rather than by direct confrontation.The woman’s “sphere of influence” was passive and limited, both by her culturally prescribed role as helpmate and by her husband’s control of the family finances.His economic power placed her in a position of dependency.
The segment on interior decorating fascinated me, because it explained not only the way a woman decorated her home in those days, but why. It wonderfully explains why William Morris' radical concept of simplicity in one's home was so incredibly revolutionary, and difficult to catch on among middle-class women. The way in which a woman decorated her home wasn't just based on aesthetic preference. There was an entire society of reputation and morality to consider when choosing how one portrayed onself in one's home.
This also made me ponder how difficult it must have been for Jane Morris. An outsider from another class, she married William Morris and really had much less say in the interior decor of her home than most wives. The decor of their homes was much more a collaborative process, involving not only the two of them, but friends and loved ones. Although the result was amazing (of course you know I think so), it was certainly *not* the norm in those days, and would cause further ostracism between Jane Morris and other ladies of her new social status. She was put on a pedestal by Morris, Rossetti, and those hangers-on who would visit the house and gawp at her...But I digress. The general point is that the above quote, and indeed the entire chapter of the book on decor, solidifies just how very revolutionary William Morris was in his ideas of decorating in the Victorian times. White walls? Relatively few fabrics draping the windows? A total lack of tchockes? Who had heard of such a thing?
Red House interior shots. Imagine how revolutionary this was in his day.
Redheads were definitely a popular choice in Pre-Raphaelite art, and perhaps that's why as I look around this blog devoted to modern redheaded models, so many of the shots look utterly Pre-Raphaelite to me.
My favorite model featured is Katerina Martinovska, but there are many lovely women on this blog.
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