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My recent post about Whistler’s long ladies of the six marks featured the famous Du Maurier cartoon, from Punch magazine in 1880, about a couple longing to live up to the blue china of their ‘Six-Mark Tea-Pot’. The cartoon was widely understood to be channeling Wilde because he is reported to have done the same thing in his rooms at Oxford.
But doting couples cradling tea-pots was nothing new even then.
Continue reading “Tea in China”
In my recent article about the Whistler painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I admitted to being no expert in art appreciation. I now realize that was a needless confession.
Apparently, the amateur aesthete can abandon artistic authenticity.
Continue reading “How To View Art”
PURPLE AND ROSE: THE LANGE LEIZEN OF THE SIX MARKS.
J. M. Whistler, 1864.
I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently to see James McNeill Whistler’s 1864 work “Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks”
The painting depicts Whistler’s model (and of course, partner) Joanna Hiffernan in a classic Whistler composition, here given an oriental setting in the sitting-room of his studio. The details in the picture display some of Whistler’s personal collection and reveal his burgeoning interest in East Asian art.
Being no expert on the artistic merits of the painting itself, I thought I would concentrate instead on the terminology of its title, littérateur that I might be.
And as Wildean that I am, I was drawn immediately to the reference to “Six Marks” because the expression The Six-Mark Tea-Pot is the caption to a well-known cartoon satirizing the aesthetic movement, and I was anxious to decipher its coupling with the “Lange Leizen” of the low-country.
Continue reading “Six Marks”
PRIGSBY ON FORM
The image above is a detail from George Du Maurier’s original artwork for a cartoon that appeared in Punch magazine in 1880 featuring a “distinguished amateur” art-critic.
You may be familiar with the cartoon because it is often associated with Oscar Wilde, who had similarly taken to art criticism with his debut piece of journalism—a review of the opening of the Grosvenor Gallery for the Dublin University Magazine in 1877, an exercise he repeated in 1879 for the Irish Daily News. This cartoon appeared some months later and features the character Prigsby who, despite the pince-nez, has a Wildean aspect.
Continue reading “Ilyssus”
WILLIAM SCHWENK GILBERT
Here is W. S. Gilbert, the librettist of the prolific musical partnership of Gilbert and Sullivan, shown in Punch magazine aboard his second yacht, Chloris—a 110 ton yawl.
In April 1881, Gilbert wrote to Lady Katharine Coke about the new boat and his latest opera Patience, both of which were about to be launched that month: 1
Continue reading ““Idi-Yacht-Ical””