Kristan T.

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Dishing the Victorian Dirt

Kristan T. posted an article on - Apr 25, 2011, 1:12 pm
Imagine living anywhere near this gray mountain of trash in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign. It's the "Great Dust-Heap at Kings Cross" as seen from Maiden Lane (now York Road), painted in 1837 by the watercolorist E. H. Dixon, surrounded by slum housing and adjacent to the Smallpox Hospital...
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"From Mama V.R. to Helena"

Kristan T. posted an article on - Apr 11, 2011, 1:32 pm
A gold, enamel, and garnet bodice brooch from 1830 that belonged to Queen Victoria made fourteen times its pre-sale estimate at auction last week, selling for £11,400.  The intricately worked brooch features two large cabochon garnets in a setting of green and red enamel.   The brooch (shown at ...
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Restored: Ellen Terry's Beetle-Wing Dress

Kristan T. posted an article on - Apr 6, 2011, 7:24 am
"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." This briefest of lines from Act I, scene 5, of Shakespeare's Macbeth inspired one of the most famous stage costumes ever constructed. When the Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving twisted with gold hung to her knees." The result was magnif...
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Representing the Unrepresentable: Portraying Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, on the Victorian Stage

Kristan T. posted an article on - Mar 4, 2011, 11:12 am
As many of you know, I'm writing a PhD thesis at the University of Leicester on (broadly speaking) representations of Islam in Victorian drama. I'm focusing on one play in particular, Hall Caine's Mahomet, which was written for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre but never produced. (You'll see why i...
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Picture Show

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 2, 2011, 11:55 pm
In addition to providing a useful list of nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers, this page from the 6 December 1890 issue of The Graphic is...well, just beautiful. Papers in the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Denmark, Holland, and Russia are represented. Click the ...
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Undershaw Under Threat

Kristan T. posted an article on - Dec 31, 2010, 4:37 pm
I previously posted about the threat to Undershaw, the Surrey home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2007. As I noted then, quoting The Guardian, it was at Undershaw that Doyle "wrote the 'Hound of the Baskervilles' and a patriot defence of Britain's Boer War; resurrected Sherlock Holmes, having previ...
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Portraying Poverty

Kristan T. posted an article on - Sep 12, 2010, 10:41 am
More news from the art world... Four paintings by Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1904) are to be sold at Bonhams' Nineteenth-Century Paintings sale on 29 September in London. Mulready's works frequently highlighted the social issues of the Victorian era -- particularly the poverty experienced by ...
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"Eadweard Muybridge" at Tate Britain

Kristan T. posted an article on - Sep 10, 2010, 9:33 pm
The pioneering Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) is the focus of a new exhibition that opened earlier this week at Tate Britain. Bringing together more than 150 works, the exhibition demonstrates how Muybridge broke new ground in the emerging art form of photography.  B...
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"A New Land at Last to Be Seen": William Morris and Iceland

Kristan T. posted an article on - Sep 5, 2010, 11:42 pm
Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen; Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea, And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green: And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea, Foursquare from b...
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Restoration of Tennyson's Farringford Continues

Kristan T. posted an article on - Aug 17, 2010, 12:16 pm
I last wrote about Farringford, Tennyson’s Isle of Wight retreat, one year ago, when the poet laureate’s library there was the site of a small but exquisite exhibition of manuscripts, printed works, paintings, photographs, and furniture celebrating the bicentenary of his birth. Since then, there...
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Lewis Carroll and Xie

Kristan T. posted an article on - Aug 15, 2010, 5:56 pm
This charming photograph is one of three albumen print portraits of Alexandra ("Xie") Rhoda Kitchin (Wiki bio here) by Lewis Carroll that were sold recently by Bonhams for £24,000. Alexandra (1864-1925) was the daughter of Rev. George William Kitchin, who for 15 years held a theological pos...
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"Victorian London" on Facebook!

Kristan T. posted an article on - Aug 8, 2010, 1:10 pm
Hello Peepers: I hope you'll be as excited as I am about "Victorian London," the new Facebook counterpart to this blog. While "The Victorian Peeper" will continue to focus on a full range of topics in British cultural history during the reign of Queen Victoria, my Facebook page will narrow the foc...
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Playing with Pictures

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jul 23, 2010, 4:42 pm
Constance Sackville-West (English, 1846–1929) or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane Baillie (English, 1853–1913), untitled page from the Sackville-West Album, 1867/73; collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 9 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (24.5 x 30 cm); courtesy of George Eastman House, In...
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How I Would Spend £18 Million

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 23, 2010, 10:30 am
J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino (1839), to be sold by Sotheby's in London on July 7. Read more... Overview of the sale at artdaily.com Sotheby's exquisite sale catalogue [PDF] Update via The New York Times... LONDON, July 8 — A world record was set for Turner on Wednesday night when ...
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Notes on Faraday Lectures Come to Light

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 20, 2010, 12:11 pm
Notes taken during Michael Faraday’s groundbreaking Royal Institution lectures on the nature of light and magnetism were sold last week by Bonhams for £5,400.  The notes, bound in one volume, were compiled by Maria Herries, daughter of the politician and financier John Charles Herries, and c...
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Victorian Things: Galleon Tile Panel by William De Morgan

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 20, 2010, 4:28 am
Galleon Tile PanelWilliam De Morgan (1839 - 1917)Medium: painted earthenware tiles in oak frame Dimensions: 60.5 x 153 cm Created: De Morgan's Sands End Pottery in Fulham, London Consisting of 40 handpainted six-inch-square tiles backed by unglazed stoneware tiles, this gorgeous panel depicts a co...
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In the Footsteps of Leighton and Carlyle

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 14, 2010, 4:39 pm
I admit it: I'm a house museum junkie. (I'm guessing you are, too.) Visiting the homes of the individuals I'm researching never fails to give me a frisson of pleasure at the thought that I'm walking where they walked (more or less) and seeing what they saw (more or less). They often provide int...
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Rescued!

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 13, 2010, 11:20 pm
Speaking of Lawrence Alma Tadema (see "Victorian Masterpieces at Auction" below), his original autograph stock book, found earlier this year nestled in a box of discarded 1960s girlie magazines, was sold in May for £25,000 at the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock's in Ludlow. The morocco-bound ledge...
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Victorian Masterpieces at Auction

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 13, 2010, 3:38 pm
(Via artdaily.org) Works by some of the most important British painters of the nineteenth century will be auctioned at Christie's later this week, including Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema's Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather (1901) (shown above), which is expected to fetch at least £1,000,000. The mar...
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Kevin Bacon and the Pre-Raphaelites

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jun 12, 2010, 7:56 pm
The literary magazine Lapham's Quarterly has an interesting take on the "Six Degrees of Separation" idea, which posits that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in the world by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. One popular version of this idea is a game in which players link...
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Full Steam Ahead

Kristan T. posted an article on - Mar 11, 2010, 8:03 am
To accompany its spectacular exhibition on Steampunk, which closed in February after drawing more than 70,000 visitors in four months, the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University published a mini-website that continues to provide the perfect introduction to the genre. A well-organized ...
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Snippets #2

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 26, 2010, 8:30 pm
An early Victorian tea set of unglazed red earthenware mounted in silver by Josiah Wedgwood that may have belonged to Queen Adelaide (above) is featured in "A History of the World in 100 Objects" organized by the British Museum and the BBC... John Galliano channels Sherlock Holmes... The racy love l...
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Coloring the Victorian World

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 25, 2010, 9:46 pm
An absolutely unique and precious visual record of the Victorian era came to light last autumn as it was readied for sale. A set of photographs and hand-tinted magic lantern slides created by Henry Harrison, a paymaster-general in the Royal Navy, was the star of an auction by Duke's in Dorchester. H...
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Royal Art from the Heart

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 24, 2010, 7:15 pm
If you enjoyed the recent film "The Young Victoria," which centered on the early years of the queen's reign and her marriage to Prince Albert, be sure to put this exhibition on your "must see" list. From 19 March, the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace presents "Victoria and Albert: Art and Love,"...
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Victorian Entertainers Honored by English Heritage

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 23, 2010, 4:41 pm
Two Victorian entertainers were honored by English Heritage with blue plaques last year. Fred Russell (1862-1957; born Thomas Frederick Parnell) is generally acknowledged to be the father of modern ventriloquism. Unlike other ventriloquists of the era, who worked with many dolls, Russell worked with...
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Stitching Lives

Kristan T. posted an article on - Jan 22, 2010, 10:06 pm
Victorian artistry will be front and center in “Quilts 1700–2010,” an exhibition opening on 20 March at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. "Quilts evoke the past – they stimulate our earliest memories of security and comfort and resonate with historical and cultural references challenging...
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