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Wandering Eye: Of Swindlers and Sealing Wax Editorial Staff
Courtesy of the Weiss Gallery, London.
CURIOUS OBJECTS
Strongly influenced by William Morris and the arts and crafts movement, and best known for his vibrantly colored ceramic tiles,
William De Morgan was a prolific artist whose work adorned many residences and public buildings throughout England. While tiles earned him steady commissions, his work in three dimensions is just as important. Here’s an introduction. (
Pardon our delay this week: we’ve been struggling to tear ourselves away from a fascinating article about
phenakistoscopes. The 1832 invention derives its name from the ancient Greek word for deceit, and produces an optical illusion that makes static images appear to move. A similar concept is at work in spiral spinners and flip-books, but the patterns and whimsy of phenakistoscopes is nothing short of spectacular . . . if sometimes creepy. (
Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Sketch of conductor, attributed to Alfred Edward Chalon, 1840. Art Institute of Chicago, Leonora Hall Gurley Memorial Collection.
In 1557 the legal printer Richard Tottel published an auspicious volume of English poetry:
Songes and Sonettes written by the ryght honorable Lorde Henry Haward late Earle of Surrey, and other, or as Thomas Warton, who wrote the first modern literary history in the late eighteenth century, called it, “the first printed miscellany of English poetry.” According to Warton, Tottel salvaged “many admirable specimens of antient genius” when he “collected at a critical period, and preserved in a printed volume” poems that had previously “mouldered in manuscript.”