Harriet Devine's Blog

Women Reading

Group of young women reading in library of normal school, Washington, D.C.

This very evocative photo, which was found on here, comes with the following caption:

Late in the spring term of 1899, Frances Benjamin Johnston photographed these young women pursuing an education with the intention of becoming educators themselves. Johnston had been commissioned to make a photographic survey of Washington, D.C., schools to show the public what was meant by the new, “progressive” education. Her photographs were displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900 and were also used to illustrate a series of publications titled The New Education Illustrated. I hope they all did well in their future careers.

New Banner

A new picture for the banner. It's called Reading by the Shore. This is what I hope I'll be doing before too long (well, ever hopeful). The painter is Charles Sprague Pearce (1883-1885).

Woman with Books

Sent to me by Dark Puss, this somewhat strange photo makes a change from my usual pretty pictures of women reading. But it does feature a woman and several books. Thanks, DP, for keeping things lively.

Woman Reading Music

Sent to me by  Dark Puss, this lovely photo is from Life magazine and taken in the 1950s. But who is she, and what is she reading?  I tried to find out by exploring the Life archives with total lack of success but DP is obviously cleverer than I am because this is what he managed to find out:

October 1950: Model reading while waiting her turn at fashion show. (Photo by Eliot Elisofon/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images). Probably from the Fashion Guild Awards, October 10th 1950.

I'm still curious to know why she is reading music, or I think so anyway. And sorry to see she has a cigarette in her hand. But it is a truly lovely picture, as I hope you agree.

 

Marilyn

I've just been browing Life magazine website in the vain hope of finding a picture I'm putting on here later in the week and I ran across some lovely early pictures of Marilyn Monroe.  She's been much in my mind since I saw My Week with Marilyn a few days ago. It's a great film and everybody in it does a terrific job of impersonating the various famous people they are playing. But nobody, however beautiful and talented, can match the real Marilyn -- that's my opinion, anyway. In these early photos she hasn't yet become a star and Life did not even publish them at the time as they didn't know who she was, though the photographer was clever enough to have spotted something really special. Beautiful. 

The Cult of Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy forever, said Keats, and he never spoke a truer word. And how he would have loved the exhibition I've just been to at the V&A -- The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. In fact, as well as enjoying the many luscious painted women on show, he'd probably have felt very much at home with some of it, because the Pre-Raphaelites, who figure largely here, were very much influenced by his late Romantic pseudo medievalism. (Sorry -- off with the mortarboard). 

The V&A certainly knows what its doing when it puts on these major exhibitions. I've never been a huge fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, but after seeing the best of them on display today -- Watts, Burne Jones and many more -- and seeing them in context, with their intelligent, informative and mercifully brief descriptions attached, I felt like I'd got the point at last. The star of the show for me, as far as painting was concerned, was the wonderful James McNeil Whistler, many of whose delicate, subtle portraits are on display -- three of the series called Symphony in White, an extraordinary portrait of Thomas Carlyle looking, I thought, desperately sad, and many many more. The Museum has even rustled up a life-size digital replica of Whistler's famous Peacock Room, which I was lucky enough to see in it's full glory in the Smithsonian many years ago.

But there's far more here than just paintings. Photographs, sculpture, pottery, jewellery, wallpaper, household objects, books, furniture, clothes -- you name it, the whole world of the bohemian late nineteenth-century is here on display. If you stand still beside some of the exhibits you can even hear some poems being read -- my eyes filled with tears listening to Yeats' poem He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. 

In fact I found the whole thing an amazingly emotional experience -- I felt almost sick at times, if you can understand that, from the sheer glorious intensity of it all. And how I long now for a house to decorate in the style of the Aesthetic Movement -- how about a Peacock frieze, some William Morris   wallpaper, a Christopher Dresser teapot on a little bamboo table...and me dressed in ivory silk, artfully draped so that I don't need my corsets...

I don't suppose this is going to happen in a hurry. But I am so glad I went -- and if you get the chance, please go too. You won't regret it.

The images comes from the exhibition website -- I hope the V&A won't mind.

Where Children Sleep

Just one of a series of wonderful paired images taken by photographer James Mollison as part of a project on human rights. Click here for more of these fascinating and moving photos of children and their bedrooms, which are taken from a book of the same title which sadly seems to be out of print at the moment.