Dali House

Relax, kids, it’s only Granddad’s gas mask from the Great War!

Halloween was a lot more fun back in the olden days when they could make scary stuff out of such authentic materials as elephant ivory, not that the elephants ever raised any objection to plastic once it was invented.

This ivory model of a skull has a cylinder at the base that family physicians pushed to activate the eyes, tongue and lower jaw and demonstrate what was wrong with family members’ heads — and to scare the daylights out of everyone.

It’s one of those historical artefacts now regarded as grin-inducing curiosities, and is owned by Britain’s Science Museum, where every day is Halloween.

Once the 18th-century doctor had calmed his patients down again, he whipped out the wax vanitas seen below and popped off the abdominal lid, gave them a minute to catch their breath, and showed them which of their internal organs he was going to cut out with his scary knife.

Actually, the wax vanitas was a common device to signify the brevity of human existence. A model gravestone or an hourglass was even better at reminding you that, no matter how old you are, time’s nearly up.

Children fond of playing with sharp sticks might be more easily cautioned with this display. You see the point?

Werewolves! Seen ‘em with my own eyes!

Unless you read Russian, Alex Andreev may be destined to be one of those modern artists who thrives on cyber-fame, but on the strength of his images alone.

Someone, most likely the busy webmaster at the photo factory EnglishRussia.com, posted a pile of Andreev’s pictures and they went viral, but unfortunately no one’s been able or willing to produce more information about the artist or his technique.

Andreev’s very clever website is packed with creativity in several genres, but it’s resolutely in Russian, and who’s going to trust the online translators to tackle Russian when they can barely manage French?

The image titles are given in English at least, but not all of the images seen elsewhere are represented. So for now, all I know is that the title of the piece above is “Private Party”, and that Andreev does acknowledge a debt to Magritte.

I see the City of Baltimore is burying Edgar Allan Poe again today, which might confirm the common wisdom that you can’t keep a good man down except that it’s the city that keeps digging him up every year. He’s still decent tourist bait in that economy-throttled town.

And who could blame them even if it were just for fun (which it also is)? Poe is dear to many readers’ hearts, including mine. Last year I tracked his final meanderings up and down the US Eastern Seaboard on Google Earth, wrote it all up and posted it on my personal blog, Dorseyland, with my own illustrations, a few of which appear here.

This is a specially good year for Baltimore’s perennial spadework, 2009 being the 200th anniversary of the great man’s birth.

Poe’s Funeral is the annual “Nevermore” anniversary re-creation of the original ill-attended event for the benefit of all who missed it. Today there are two afternoon services to accommodate the crowds at Westminster Hall, where Poe really is interred, with actors portraying his few friends and supporters and, strangely, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Hitchcock and HP Lovecraft.

Another actor, John Astin, will again officiate, though he no longer looks anything like Poe, as he certainly did in “The Addams Family”.

The burial followed last Wednesday’s open-casket viewing of “Mr Poe’s body” at his former home on North Amity Street, the all-night vigil that ensued at the Poe Monument outside Westminster Hall and a funeral procession involving an antique horse-drawn hearse.

Meanwhile the Baltimore Museum of Art is presenting “Edgar Allan Poe: A Baltimore Icon” through January 17, a collection of prints and drawings depicting him and his tales — with a bit of a surprise, for me at least: Among the artists who dabbled in Poe were Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet and René Magritte.

Odilon Redon and Robert Motherwell are also represented, as are illustrations for Poe’s stories by Alphonse Legros, Alfred Kubin and Arthur Rackham.

The museum notes that Henri Matisse did a portrait of Poe too, though that one’s evidently not in the show.

“Storm Clouds over Hampstead”

When last we saw John Constable, he was sitting nervously in the waiting room at Sotheby’s this past July, next to JMW Turner, both of them fingering paintings of theirs that were up for bids. Turner had every reason to lack confidence in his unsaleable watercolour, as explained in this post, but it sold for a very handsome price.

No one wanted Constable’s cloud study, though — at least not for the envisioned haul of £300,000 to £500,000.

A shame: His views of clouds, though never intended for exhibition, are pensive yet full of emotion, fine examples of his readiness to experiment in sketches. Sotheby’s had hopefully compared “this recently discovered work” to another it auctioned in 1991, which sold for £264,000.

Art accumulator Barbara Piasecka Johnson, married to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, liked “Storm Clouds over Hampstead” a great deal, but now she’d joined her husband in death and Constable’s painting, done about 1822, was an orphan.

The mood following its failure to find a new home just as nice must have been as dark as the skies depicted, which in their day had scowled at the imminence of another awful death, that of Constable’s wife Maria.

The Constables’ Camden Town home was on Well Walk, which you can see here thrusting onto Hampstead Heath.

Maria lay in bed at their house in Hampstead, gasping for air, so John went out for a walk on the broad heath and collected a pair of lungfuls of it for her. His thoughts at times must have harked back to breezy East Bergholt in Suffolk, almost 100 kilometres to the northeast, where he was born and raised in the aroma of ground corn.

Young John helped out at his father’s mill and watched the River Stour, forming the frontier against Essex, idle along and past the Lotts’ thatch-capped house next door. He’d paint both places and make them famous one day, immortalising Willy Lott’s Cottage, as it’s now known, in “The Hay Wain”, a picture the Britons came to love after it inspired the French, notably Géricault and Delacroix.

Still besotted of Constable’s brush, Flatford Mill and Lott’s home. The Stour runs deeper now thanks to land subsidence.

“The Hay Wain”

Constable always sold more paintings in France than England but declined to “do a tour”. “I would rather be a poor man here than a rich man abroad,” he declared.

The sky was the same, no matter the place. His father had taught him to watch the clouds for signs of shifts in the weather that would help or hinder the mill’s work. All his life Constable was a keen amateur meteorologist. In the end he was able to say, “I have done a great deal of skying.”

Maria Constable’s long suffering ended in November 1828 and the sky grew darker, as did her husband’s wardrobe of grief as he set to the task of raising seven children alone. When he died on March 31 seven years later, “apparently from indigestion”, he was buried next to Maria outside St John-at-Hampstead. Peter Cook and Kay Kendall are among their soilmates.