lady of letters & Gucci

 AGATHA

 MS. BRONTE

 DU MAURIER

  ELINOR GLYN

ELIZABETH BARRETT

 JANE

Inventing the Modern World

Can we begin to imagine the excitement surrounding a visit to the World's Fairs of the day?
It's a difficult leap to make-but imagine-none of the technology-where every day we are tossed to the winds of the net.

 the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations

 the Crystal Palace showed off London's architectural genius as well being host to the first fair.

When the first world's fair opened in London,1851- it dazzled. The newest advances in living and design were showcased and within the pages of  Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs- one can still be dazzled.
I can myself in the moment with the aid of this book and Wonder.

Brainchild of Prince Albert-patron of the arts, the First World's Fair saw over six million visitors enter Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace triumph made of iron and glass.

Dickinson's comprehensive pictures Scenes from the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace.

We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. 

It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. 

 The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.-Charlotte Bronte, from The Brontes' Life and Letters, by Clement Shorter (1907)

 (more of what Charlotte saw that day here)

  Jean Valentin Morel Cup made of bloodstone with gold, enamel, emralds, rubies,sapphires and cameos, 1854-55

 attributed to Adrien-Louis-Marie Cavelier for Jean Valentin Morel

 Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA / The Bridgeman Art Library

In 1893, the World's Fair was in Chicago and my great grandfather Toby attended- returning with a doll-imagine that-a doll for his little son-my grandfather Louis. The doll was indeed a whirligig with a shrill whistle for the rowdy boy-but that whirligig was dressed in pink and ivory satin and silk and possessed the most beautiful china face and golden locks of hair ever to behold.

I'm sure Toby walked along the midway-and though the doll was a pittance to the likes of the decorative artistry of Tiffany-that doll held many a mystery for me on visits to my grandfather's house over the years. I have it tucked away upstairs.

the Midway in Chicago, 1983.

 Tiffany Coffeepot, 1893. Silver with enamel, ivory, and jade

Tiffany & Co. United States (New York, NY), 1837–present

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Decorative Arts

Photo: Peter Harholdt

The May 1937 fair was held in Paris at a tenuous time in Europe. Dictators had seized power -at the fair the exhibition pavilions of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were blatant displays of monumentalism and nationalism. As a counterpoint -the Spanish pavilion held Picasso's most brilliant work to date “Guernica,” in protest to war.

the Soviet Union Pavilion, at l., the Spanish Pavilion at r.

Settee, 1937. Josef Hoffmann, silvered wood legs and stylized botanical-wool upholstery is original

Museum of Applied Arts-Contemporary Art, Vienna

 Nothing about the Hoffmann chaise gives it away as a creation dating back over 75 years-it is thoroughly modern and-glamourous.



Because of technology developed by the time of the fair- we can be in Paris for a glimpse.

The Book-captures brightest and best of the world,detailing over 200 objects spanning the most prestigious years of the fair. Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fair is written by Jason T. Busch,curatorial chair for collections and the Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at Carnegie Museum of Art and Catherine L. Futter ,the Helen Jane and R. Hugh “Pat” Uhlmann Curator of Decorative Arts at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. It's accompanied by an exhibition that was at the Nelson-Atkins this summer and just opened at the Carnegie Museum in New York. In the fall of 2013 the Mint Museum in Charlotte will host the exhibition. I'm sure to see it-but til then this wonderful book will suffice.


the book-available at Rizzoli here

Bronte & Beaton

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“I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, 

and changed my ideas;

they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.”  

Emily Bronte

 

 

 

 photograph by Cecil Beaton

 

 

tasting

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I often thought it-

now I know

you are what you read.

The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness of her beloved instructress, or, perhaps, more than all these, something in her own unique mind, had roused her powers within her...

I am moody. 

Brooding even.

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love"

I am reading an enthralling book Jude Morgan's
the Taste of Sorrow

while reading, again-  

"My bride is here... because my equal is here, and my likeness"

Jane Eyre

What crime was this that lived incarnate in this sequestered mansion, and could neither be expelled nor subdued by the owner?—what mystery, that broke out now in fire and now in blood, at the deadest hours of night? What creature was it, that, masked in an ordinary woman’s face and shape, uttered the voice, now of a mocking demon, and anon of a carrion-seeking bird of prey?

Now you know.

I am shades of Grey.

Fog

& all muffled sighs.

"I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; 
I am a free human being with an independent will."

Jude Morgan's book is the story of the Brontes. Oldest living sister Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre-her own experience at  a charitable boarding school at Cowan's Bridge- mirrored the harsh Lowood School of Jane Eyre. While boarding with three of her sisters, her moorings away from home- sisters Maria and Elizabeth- died. Her emotionally remote  father found the charity of Cowan's Bridge too costly with the loss of his two oldest children and took Charlotte and a younger Emily home. So began the secretive, the foreign world ,the haunting language of all the Bronte children. From it came the novels.

Hilary Mantel writes 'as soon as I saw a Jude Morgan book I tossed aside the twenty other books I should have got to, and sat down to read it... completely involving, absorbing. Jude Morgan-  on writing the Taste of Sorrow. It was precisely that question of the familiarity of the Brontes’ lives that posed the challenge in writing a novel about them. Part of the answer was perhaps to go back to sources, try to forget what I knew (or thought I knew) about them and study their lives as if it was an entirely new experience – above all, trying to clear away the legend and myth that has grown up about them. My own conviction about the Brontes was that they were not these fey ‘children of the moors’ who somehow happened to write great novels. They were very driven, very conscious as artists. In terms of narrative style I wanted above all not to try and reproduce a nineteenth-century style – you can’t compete with the Brontes! – but to give a contemporary feel without any anachronism. And above all to strive for empathy, to subsume yourself as a writer in the consciousness of these living characters.

 Don't hesitate to read the Taste of Sorrow, 

but 

prepare for a mood swing.

"I resisted all the way: a new thing for me."

It may be the winter of our discontent.

"A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway."

"I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."

 I am planning to read them all-

the novels of the Bronte Sisters, Charlotte, Emily & Anne
originally published under the names Currer, Acton, & Ellis Bell

 

 "There was a reviving pleasure in this intercourse, of a kind now tasted by me for the first time—the pleasure arising from perfect congeniality of tastes, sentiments, and principles."

 

 

all photographs are by PAOLO ROVERSI

all quotes from Jane Eyre

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Catherine Earnshaw at Christian Dior

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"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, 

and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, 

like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."

"Heaven did not seem to be my home; 

and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; 

and the angels were so angry that 

they flung me out into the middle of the heath 

on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. 

That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other"

 "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. 

Time will change it, 

I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - 

my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - 

a source of little visible delight, but necessary."

The collection of Christian Dior by John Galiano presented in Paris-

evoking Catherine Earnshaw Linton, the Heights, the moors, the heath-

 "I sought, and soon discovered, 

the three head-stones on the slope next the moor — 

the middle one, gray, and half buried in heath — 

Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss, 

creeping up its foot — Heathcliff's still bare.

   I lingered round them, under that benign sky; 
watched the moths fluttering among the heath, 
and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; 
and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, 
for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

All quotations from Wuthering Heights-Emily Bronte Here

All about Wuthering Heights Here

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Classic PENGUINS

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She is too fond of books,and it has turned her brain. 

Louisa May Alcott

There are times when I just think- BOOKS. Actually-It's a lot of time. I do love them, and if nothing else comes from these posts I present to you-it will be I AM NOT ALONE. Books are tactile- the book cover is ART, is Design. I am drawn to a beautiful book cover- Are You?

On my 10 birthday I received my first real CLASSIC- LITTLE WOMEN. It is still one of my favourite books. When thinking about Holiday Gifts (is it time?), I suggest starting a beautiful treasured collection of books for a young lady or gentleman. It is never too early to start a life long love for books with children. PENGUIN has reinvented the CLASSIC with its charming covers.

PENGUIN commissioned Ruben Toledo to design several covers for CLASSIC LITERATURE- this being one. This Penguin LITTLE WOMEN edition is the one that introduced me to the March family.

 Louisa May Alcott- You've come a long way baby!

A fabric cover by designer Coralie Bickford-Smith.-Little Women.

& So has Jane Austen- another Ruben Toledo creation.

Ruben Toledo’s breathtaking drawings have appeared in such high-fashion magazines as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Visionaire. Now he’s turning his talented hand to illustrating the gorgeous deluxe editions of three of the most beloved novels in literature. Here Elizabeth Bennet’s rejection of Mr. Darcy, Hester Prynne’s fateful letter “A”, and Catherine Earnshaw’s wanderings on the Yorkshire moors are transformed into witty and surreal landscapes to appeal to the novels’ aficionados and the most discerning designer’s eyes- from PENGUIN'S site

Here are two more Toledo covers for PENGUIN

PENGUIN has selected  the best of literature's CLASSIC works,freed them of their stuffy jackets for embossed canvas covers designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. Read the wonderful interview on the PENGUIN blog with Bickford-Smith here


 “As e-books take off as a convenient way for people to read, books are going to have to work harder to justify their existence as physical objects, which is where designers come in.” Bickford-Smith

all the books are available on Amazon and a number at Anthropologie . Of course the Little Women editions will find a place on my shelf with other collected copies.