Tag Archives: weather

Bellevue in the Rain

28 Saturday Mar 2015

Posted by in Living History, personal, Philosophy

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Marble House, Newport, R.I. Bain News Service, Glass plate negative, 1910-1915. Library of Congress. LC-B2- 3547-5 [P&P]

Marble House, Newport, R.I. Bain News Service, Glass plate negative, 1910-1915. Library of Congress. LC-B2- 3547-5 [P&P]

Bellevue Avenue: in Newport, that’s a fancy street. I don’t spend much time on fancy streets anywhere I go, but I had a meeting at a museum on Bellevue so there I was, curving out onto the point on a wet, grey day that made everything look like a WPA photograph.

Newport, R.I.: Ochre Point, Cliff Walk. Library of Congress, LOT 9192. It can feel like Rebecca.

Newport, R.I.: Ochre Point, Cliff Walk. Library of Congress, LOT 9192. It can feel like Rebecca.

Bellevue runs down the eastern side of Aquidneck Island; the houses look out onto the water of Easton Bay, or across the street at each other, in the rare cases where they’re even close to facing.

It was a kind of mysterious trip; the rain curtained the street, hiding facades better than fences, and even listening to the kind of music I like, I could have slipped into an afternoon of pre-code films on TCM.

CALLBOX IN MRS. BERWIND'S BATHROOM - The Elms, Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Newport County, RI. Library of Congress, HABS RI,3-NEWP,60--29

CALLBOX IN MRS. BERWIND’S BATHROOM – The Elms, Bellevue Avenue, Newport, Newport County, RI. Library of Congress, HABS RI,3-NEWP,60–29

There was a for sale sign on one property (Sotheby’s Realty, of course), and for an instant, I imagined walking into the house and owning it, starting a life completely different from the one I live, with different people and places.

Isn’t that what we do, or try to do, when we dress in these funny clothes and inhabit these historic places? We’re trying to slip the bonds that tie us to the mundane, quit the quotidian, and live a different life and time.

I wouldn’t want to live in the Elms or Marble House, but moments of imagining, and truly inhabiting, a different world are what make living history so appealing for interpreters and visitors alike.

Lighting Out for the Territories

10 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by in Art Rant, History, personal

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I don’t know about you, but the end of winter often seems harder than the beginning: will this ever end? The snow begins to melt, the dirt turns to mud and you’re walking on ice suspended in pudding. It’s claustrophobic.

George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811–1879). Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1979.7.15

George Caleb Bingham (American, 1811–1879). Boatmen on the Missouri, 1846. Oil on canvas. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1979.7.15

The weather turns here and the lid finally comes off the sky and reveals that blue above and I think of the vistas of the west, the fields that open up along the rivers of the center of this continent, the fields rough with corn stubble punctuated by trees that pass your car window like drum beats in a song, so regular.

I wonder about the people in the past, wonder what they thought and knew about. Of course it was different for the uneducated and the poor then as now, but if you were wealthy, oh, the places you could go.

Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809-1893), White Castles on the Missouri , 1833 watercolor on paper, 9 x 16 3/8 in.; 22.86 x 41.59 cm gift of Enron Art Foundation, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.176

Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809-1893),
White Castles on the Missouri , 1833
watercolor on paper, 9 x 16 3/8 in.; 22.86 x 41.59 cm
gift of Enron Art Foundation, Joslyn Art Museum, 1986.49.176

At the dawn of time back in Missouri, I never had the pleasure to hold but I did get to order 8×10 color transparencies* of things as wonderful as the Karl Bodmer watercolors of the trip he took up the Missouri River, and George Caleb Bingham’s Fur Traders Descending the Missouri.

Art history classes will teach you to recognize painters and images, styles and eras, but they won’t teach you the kind of seeing you can only get by being in the same place at the same time in the same light.

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1845. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.61

Fur Traders Descending the Missouri. Oil on canvas, George Caleb Bingham, 1845. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 33.61

Far from the wide Missouri, I have to be content with images in books and the internet, but I can tell you from looking: Bingham got it right. The sky really does look like that above those rivers and plains; the light is rosy and grey at once, the river swift and glassy. I don’t know how it works, I only know how happy it makes me.

Come, spring: bring us the river and the light.

*Yes, and we had the printers run separations and then FedExed them to other museums for approval. Can you imagine!

And, if you’re handy to the place, the St Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is having a Bingham show. 

Winter Amusement

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Clothing, History, Making Things

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Winter Amusement: A View in Hyde Park from the Sluice at the East End.Aquatint, printed in color and colored by hand, 1787.Print made by James Tookey. YCBA B1985.36.609

Winter Amusement: A View in Hyde Park from the Sluice at the East End.Aquatint, printed in color and colored by hand, 1787.Print made by James Tookey. YCBA B1985.36.609

I count myself among the people sick of winter in New England, but the piles of snow and wretched driving have prompted some comments from the Young Mr, including “Well, it would be worse in the 18th century, right?”

16314413949_fca9e1de44_zHaving recently walked on a combination of cleared, partially cleared, and uncleared walks, I’m not so sure…but I was in modern boots, and not my leather-soled repro shoes, which I prefer not to expose to the variety of modern snow-melting chemicals, though they can be cleaned.

Still: the partially cleared and unsalted walk was easier to walk on than you might imagine, and I suspect that the 18th century tasks of clearing steps and paths to make room to walk or drive carts, wagons and carriages was probably reasonably effective– though the melting must have been more annoying and messy when mud season arrived.

In all this cold and snow, how did people keep warm and stay fashionable? For gents, of course, greatcoats were an option, and cloaks or mantles for women, both in the last quarter of the 18th century and into the 19th. I found documentation for women’s Spencers and greatcoats in the first decade of the 19th century, but what about earlier?

detail, Winter Amusement, 1787

detail, Winter Amusement, 1787

While I cannot (yet) place the coat at right in New England, you know I covet one.

Tail pleats with back buttons, a possible shoulder cape? I love the menswear styling of this coat, and the drab-and-black color combination of coat, gown and accessories. I don’t have much call for 1787 clothing in my life (actually none whatsoever) but by the time I’ve patterned and made this coat (after many other things to finish), perhaps I will also have created a reason.

Winter frolics, New Year’s Eve party, 1788? Anything is possible, and time is better spent imagining fun than complaining about snow.

What Snow Day?

13 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in History

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Benjamin West, 1738-1820, American, active in Britain (from 1763), Page Boy Asleep, undated, Brown wash with pen and brown ink on medium, slightly textured, cream laid paper, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.B1975.4.786

Just because the Young Mr had a snow day and slept in didn’t mean the rest of us did.  So what did we do?

We went to work, just as they would have in the 18th century. We joke that the streets in our town are better after ice and snow, because the potholes are filled in and the ride is smoother.  You can see the principle at work here, in a watercolor by Benjamin Henry Latrobe.  Sleighs and sleds will run more smoothly on snow-packed roads, and sometimes I think a sled would be better than a Subaru in the city of Providence.

Still, I’m grateful for furry boots and buckets of salt, central heat and an electric tea kettle. Every winter, one or more of us falls on the ice, and when I went out to salt the paths this morning, I could see where Mr S had slipped on snow-covered ice.

In the Morland below, the scene revolves around the central figures, a man who has fallen on the ice despite his stick, the woman, black bonnet thrown back, who has witnessed his fall. We haven’t reached this point yet, and snow has become sleet that will freeze later, with more snow to come, so our vista is not nearly as attractive. But it’s clear that we, as humans, have never enjoyed snow and ice very much, and I think the donkeys are unimpressed as well.

George Morland, 1763-1804, British, Winter Landscape with Figures, ca. 1785, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1993.30.23

Wintery Mix

09 Thursday Jan 2014

Posted by in Making Things

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Frozen lavender cleaning solution

Yes, it has been cold here.

Pewter buttons on plush

The buttons came from Roy Najecki earlier this week, which was exciting. They aren’t for the plush breeches currently under construction, but rather for the green wool frock coat I’m making for Mr S to wear with the breeches. And, luckily, there is enough plush for me to screw up and recut select portions of the breeches should I need to. That’s always a relief, and not a luxury I always have. The pockets won’t be plush, though– or he’d always have a hand stuck!