Yves Paradis

The Photography of Yves Paradis

Born in Brittany in 1955, Yves Paradis is a French photographer known for his softly rendered black and white photographs which presented an idealized, timeless vision of gay life that differed from the prevailing gay photography of the period. During the 1980s, his work appeared regularly in the most popular gay periodicals of Europe.

The son of a farming family, Yves Paradis spent his formative years in rural France. He was introduced to photography at the age of thirteen by one of his teachers who recognized his struggles with writing. Given a space in the family’s attic by his father for a studio and dark room, Paradis was able to experiment with different techniques and develop his own images. His first photographs were portraits of his friends taken on holidays and, later, fellow soldiers during his national service in the army.

Paradis worked during the 1970s as a photojournalist with a focus on reportage-styled images of current events. Although he still experimented with homoerotic compositions, Paradis did not at this time considered art photography an option for a career. In 1979, France’s first commercially published gay magazine, “Gai Pied”, began its publication. Founded by journalist and activist Jean Le Bitouz, the magazine derived its title from a multilayered French pun that came from the word “guêpier”, meaning hornet’s nest. Paradis submitted a series of photographs he had taken of two soldiers kissing on an army tank; these images were accepted and published as a spread in the magazine.

Beginning in the 1980s, Yves Paradis worked regularly with “Gai Pied” and other European gay publications. His work featured images of sexually attractive men, not necessarily physically perfect, portrayed in realistic and romantic settings. Paradis did not champion the bar and club scene but rather found models through the gay press and random visits to the French provinces. In 1991, the first collection of Paradis’s photography, “Jois de Vivre (Joy of Life) was published in London by Aubrey Walter. Soon after the volume’s publication, Paradis stopped photographing images and concentrated on individually printing his compositions. In 1998, a second edition of “Jois de Vivre” was published by Éditions Aubrey Walter, GMP Publications.

After a thirty-year hiatus, Paradis produced a new series of photographs in 2021, a collection that continued his original sense of design and disposition. His work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the National Museum of Wales and the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, United Kingdom. Individual works by Paradis are available through East London’s Henry Miller Fine Art as well as auction house Barbarossa Maison de Ventes, both which are focused on masculine art.

Notes: The Gay Men’s Press, founded in 1979 by Aubrey Walter, David Fernback and Richard Dipple, was the forerunner and the source for the Editions Aubrey Walter imprint which published Yves Paradis first collection of photographs. A short history of the GMP can be found at: https://gmppubs.wordpress.com/a-short-history-of-gay-mens-press/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Yves Paradis”, Portrait for Henry Miller Fine Art

Second Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Jean-Paul et l’Acropole”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Henry Miller Fine Art

Bottom Insert Image: Yves Paradis, “Le Jeune Homme aux Pied Nus”, 1986, Gelatin Silver Print, Private Collection

John Horne Burns: “That City in the Middle of the Sea”

Photographers Unknown, That City in the Middle of the Sea

Hal walked around the Galleria. He stuck his hands into his pockets, swaggered a little, and tried to smile at everyone. Often his smiles were returned. But he didn’t follow them up. His was the disinterested smile of God the Father surveying the world after the sixth day. And Hal had never seen so many soldiers whose free time hung like a weight on their backs, as their packs had hung in combat. They sat at the outside tables of the bars and drank vermouth. They wore shoulder patches of three divisions. Their faces were seamy or gentle or questioning or settled or blank. No other people in the Galleria Umberto had so many nuances on their lips as the Americans Hal saw there.

After looking in all the shop windows and all the posters and traversing both sides of the X-shaped pavement that bisected the Galleria, Hal sat down at one of the tables. He knew that he was in the tiniest yet the greatest city of the world. But it hadn’t the fixed pattern of a small town. It was a commune of August, 1944, and its population changed every day. These people who came to the Galleria to stand and drink and shop and look and question were set apart from the rest of the modern world. They were outside the formula of mothers and wives and creeds. The Galleria Umberto was like that city in the middle of the sea that rises every hundred years to dry itself m the sun.

John Horne Burns, The Gallery, Excerpt: Third Portrait (Hal), 1948, Harper & Brothers, New York

Born at Andover, Massachusetts in October of 1916, John Horne Burns was an American writer who, in his short life, published three works of which the best known was the 1947 best-seller “The Gallery”, An author whose first publication was well-received by critics, Burns  and his work eventually became largely forgotten.

The eldest of seven children of an upper middle-class Irish Catholic family, John Horne Burns was educated at St. Augustine’s School by the Sisters of Norte Dame and later at the Phillips Academy where he studied music. At Harvard University, Burns studied and became fluent in French, German and Italian; he also wrote several fictional works, none of which were published. Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1937 with a Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude. After his graduation, he became a teacher at the Loomis School, a private boarding and day preparatory school in Windsor, Connecticut.

Although opposed to America’s decision to enter World War II, Burns was drafted as a private into the United States Army in 1942. He attended the Adjutant General’s School in Washington D.C. and received a commission as Second Lieutenant. Sent overseas in 1943, Burns served as a military intelligence officer in the cities of Casablanca and Algiers. Later transferred to Italy, he spent a year and a half censoring mail sent by prisoners of war. Burns lived during this period of service near the Galleria Umberto I, a partially destroyed shopping arcade frequented by soldiers, prostitutes and beggars. This galleria would provide the setting for his first novel. Burns was discharged from military service in 1946, at which time he returned to his teaching position at Loomis School. 

A man of both isolationist tendencies and an intense competitive nature, John Burns completed his first novel “The Gallery” in 1946 while teaching at the Loomis School. Published in 1947, the novel is composed of nine portraits of local women and soldiers interspersed with eight recollections narrated by an anonymous American soldier. Issues raised in the novel include economic and social inequities, homosexual experiences in the military, the impact of the Allied occupation on the population of Naples, and the assertion of individuality within the war effort. “The Gallery”, an unconventionally structured literary work, received high praise from critics and such writers as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Edmund Wilson, and Gore Vidal.  

Burns became a man sought for his views on literature and would occasionally write a complimentary review. However, he became well-known for his strong, often caustic, reviews of both his peers and more established writers including such prominent men as Thomas Wolfe, Somerset Maugham, and James Michener. In 1949, Burns published his second novel, the satirical “Lucifer with a Book” that was based on his life experiences at the Loomis boarding school. He expected better reviews than those received by his first novel; however, the critical response to this work was dismal. 

Disheartened by the reviews, John Burns returned in 1950 to Italy where, designated a famous author by the local paper, he settled in Florence’s Hotel Excelsior, a famous expatriate gathering place along the Arno River. Burns wrote and published his third novel, the 1952 “A Cry of Children”. In this novel, he told the story of a man with a brilliant career as a concert pianist who is led by his mistress into a bohemian world of vice and depravity, only to be redeemed later by the very things he left behind. Although Burns’s third work also received uniformly negative reviews, some critics still thought that Burns was a writer of future distinction.

While working on a fourth novel, Burns supported himself by writing an article on the city of Florence for the American travel magazine “Holiday”. He eventually gained a reputation in Florence as a person who drank to excess and complained of rivals, critics and both friends and enemies. At the end of July in 1953, the publishing firm Harper & Brothers rejected Burns’s fourth book “The Stranger’s Guise”. In August while sailing with his Italian boyfriend just south off the port city of Livorno, Burns had a seizure. Five days later on the eleventh of August, he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-six. 

Tom Burns, John’s younger brother, hired a well-connected American lawyer in Rome to investigate Burns’s death; however, nothing suspicious was found. Originally interred in Italy, John Burns’s body was later exhumed by his family and buried at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts. His short stories, poems, articles, photographs, and novels, including his final unpublished “The Stranger’s Guise”, are housed in the collections of the Boston University.

Notes: Writer Jerry Portwood has an interview with essayist David Margolick, author of “Dreadful”, a biography on the life of John Horne Burns, at the online July issue of Out magazine: https://www.out.com/entertainment/art-books/2013/07/18/john-horne-burns-gay-icon-david-margolick-gallery-military

The Lambda Literary also has a 2013 interview with author David Margolick that covers  John Burns’s life and legacy: https://lambdaliterary.org/2013/07/david-margolick-john-horne-burns-and-the-dreadful-life/

A dissertation by Mark Travis Bassett entitled “John Horne Burns: Toward a Critical Biography” can be read as a free PDF download from MOspace, an online thesis extension of the University of Missouri: https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/35623

An online version of John Horne Burns’s 1948 “The Gallery” can be read for free at the Internet Archive site located at: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.168101/page/n5/mode/2up

For those interested, author David Margolick’s 2014 biography on John Burns, “Dreadful”, was published by Other Press and is available as both an ebook and paperback through various retailers.

Přemysl Koblic

The Photography of Přemysl Koblic

Born in July of 1892 in Prague, Přemysl Koblic was a Czech avant-garde photographer and educator whose theoretical findings and photographic practices significantly influenced the development of photography in Czechoslovakia. In addition to his experiments in photographic chemistry, Koblic promoted the emergence of new black and white photographic materials with such firms as Foma, Ako, and Neobrom.. 

The son of a chemical engineer, Přemysl Koblic began his studies in 1911 at Prague’s Czech Technical University; however, his education was  interrupted by the onset of World War I. After basic training, Koblic was sent at the end of 1915 to the Isonzo Front in Slovenia where he served as an army photographer with the 91st Infantry Regiment. Koblic finished his military service in the summer of 1918 and returned to his studies at the Czech Technical University. He graduated in 1919 and initially worked as an assistant at the university’s sugar-manufacturing department. Two years later, he became an administrator at Czechoslovakia’s Patent Office, where he managed patents covering photography, prints and food until 1935. 

Přemysl Koblic, who used his own small-format cameras, was a lifelong experimenter. He published his first technical texts prior to the First World War and, by 1920, was already a member of the Amateur Photographers’ Club in the Prague neighborhood of Královské Vinohrady. Among its members were such notable photographers as Alois Zych, Robert A. Šimon, Augustin Myška, František Oliveriusand, and Stanislav Krofta who joined upon his return from the United States. In 1923, Koblic joined a rival Prague photographic club that was later known as the Nekázanka. 

While post-war photographic work in Czechoslovakia during the early 1920s tended to create beautiful images, Koblic was interested in photographing the civilians of Prague during their daily work routines, the wait for trains, and travel through the bustling city streets. He felt that the essence of photography was found in the depiction of movement, life and activity. For him, the presentation of personal movement in the city, surrounded by its shapes, colors, lights and tones, was the highest form of photography as it depicted man in his own creation. Koblic was a pioneer in photography of the modern city, a theme that was further developed by others in the early 1940s.

When the country was affected by an economic crisis in the early 1930s, Přemysl Koblic collaborated with the Brno Film-Photo group of the Left Front which was led by economic theorist Lubomir Linhart. However, his work differed from the emerging photojournalism of the Communist periodicals that often published anonymous images by photo reporters. In the 1930s, Koblic published two books, the 1937 “Fotografování Vidí Svêt (Photography Sees the World)” and “Zvêtšování (Enlarging)” in 1938. Both of these volumes contained perfectly arranged photo appendices and samples of recent photographic work.

In 1936, Koblic became editor-in-chief of “Fotoografický Obzor (Photographic Horizon)” magazine and compiled the 1937 almanac edition for “Československá Fotografie (Czechoslovak Photography)”. He also closely collaborated with “Fotografie” magazine led by photographer and theorist Karel Hermann, a long-time friend. Koblic shared his photographic discoveries in numerous articles and through courses and lectures at local photo clubs and public venues. His photographic work and the technology he used greatly influenced the generation of magazine photographers in the late 1930s, including such artists as Josef Voříšek and Jan Lukas, as well as those of the later 1950s. 

For his entire life, Přemysl Koblic was connected with the Vršovice section of Prague; he converted his apartment on Ruskâ Street into an experimental photographic and chemical laboratory. Although he focused on other Prague locations, he depicted Vršovice in all its seasons and published many of these photographs equipped with texts. Koblic’s photographs were unique in their spontaneity; he could, without any hesitation, effortlessly shoot his subject within a second. Beginning in the 1930s, Koblic worked with a motion blur that gave a unique dynamic to his photographs. The most famous and frequently published of these works was the series done in 1948 at the Sokol Festival, entitled “Čtvrtá Dimense (The Fourth Dimemsion)”, for which he used a wide-angle camera. 

In the early 1950s, Koblic became involved in the Czechoslovak Union of Socialist Photography and the “Nova Fontografie (New Photography)” magazine that began publication in 1950 and promoted socialist realism in Czech photography. His photographs were quite distinctive from the average productions of that period. Although Koblic tried to comply with magazine’s desire for images with a socialist presence, his life-long interest in the documentary depiction of reality, including social relations, continued to be prevalent in his work.

Perceived by the general public as a clerk with a hard-earned status, Přemysl Koblic was involved in many hobbies and obsessions. His involvement in photographic chemistry led to the creation of the developer Pextral which became a standard for many years. He also constructed a series of photographic apparatuses including the Pohotovka, a prompt device. Koblic was interested in the chemistry aspect of the food industry and patented a process for yogurt production. He researched natural medications, made astronomical observations, and studied early European linguistics. All these interests, added to his homosexual orientation, made Koblic an eccentric figure for his time. 

Přemysl Koblic died in Prague in November of 1955 at the age of sixty-three. Due to the efforts of Czech photographer and historian Rudolph Skopec, the Moravian Gallery in Brno acquired part of Koblic’s work and Prague’s National Technical Museum became the guardian of a substantial collection of Koblic’s positive and negative images. 

Notes: For the research on this article, I am indebted to authors Jan Mlčoch, Pavla Vrbová, and Romana Kmochová for their informative articles on the photographic history of Czechoslovakia and Přemysl Koblic’s life and work. Their introductory article and “Prague in Pictures by Přemysl Koblic” are located at: https://eshop.ntm.cz/static/_dokumenty/1/6/2/8/8/00350_premysl_koblic-aj_m21_ukazka.pdf

An 2017 article on Czech Avant-Garde photography by Mariana Holá can be found on the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism located at: https://www.rem.routledge.com/articles/overview/photography

Top Insert Image: Jan Beran, “Přemysl Koblic”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print, 30 x 32.8 cm, Moravská Galerie

Second Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Praha-Vršpvoce Depot”, circa 1930s, Vintage Print

Third Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “View of a Village from Above”, 1939, Vintage Print

Fourth Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “The Jewish Cemetery”, 1930-1939, Vintage Print, 29 x 39 cm, Moravská Galerie 

Bottom Insert Image: Přemysl Koblic, “Prague Street Scene”, 1946, Vintage Print, Moravská Galerie

Sir Francis Cyril Rose

The Artwork of Sir Francis Cyril Rose

Born at the grand English estate of Moor Park, Hertfordshire in September of 1909, Sir Francis Cyril Rose, 4th Baronet of the Montreal Roses, was an English painter who received strong support throughout the 1930s from his patron, American novelist and art collector Gertrude Stein. Although he created many works of art, Rose’s artistic output was as erratic as his lifestyle was audacious and extravagant. Despite Stein’s endeavors to generate a sustained interest in his work, Francis Rose remained one of the more obscure artists of his generation.

Descended from Spanish nobility, Francis Rose inherited his British baronetcy while still a child. He received his initial education from the Jesuits at Beaumont College in Old Windsor, Berkshire, as well as lessons from private tutors abroad. In 1926 at the age of seventeen, Rose relocated to Paris where he resided as an expatriate until 1936. He studied under avant-garde painter and typographic artist Francis Picabia, an early figure in the Dada Movement, and Spanish muralist and theater set designer Josep Maria Sert.

In 1930, Rose had his first exhibition, alongside Salvador Dali, at the Paris  gallery of modern art patron Marie Cuttoli. By this time, he had already designed costumes and scenery for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe, some of which were in collaboration with artist Christopher Wood. Rose would design theater sets and costumes again in 1939 for Lord Berners’s ballet production “Cupid and Psyche” at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theater. During the 1930s, he spent several years studying Chinese poetry and art in China; he later traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa with his future wife, Frederica Dorothy Carrington. 

While traveling in France in his early twenties, Francis Rose became a close acquaintance of author Gertrude Stein who helped launch his painting career by commissioning several of his works, including a portrait of herself, for her own art collection. Stein had discovered Rose’s paintings in a Parisian gallery in the late 1920s and eventually bought one hundred-thirty of his works. Through Stein’s support, Rose was able to exhibit his work in Paris, London and New York. He  also created illustrations for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”, a publication by Stein’s lifetime partner, Alice Babette Toklas. Although the friendship between the three personalities wavered at times, Alice Toklas asked Rose to design Gertrude Stein’s grave site memorial.

In 1938, Rose completed what is considered one of his most successful paintings, “L’Ensemble”, an oil on canvas mural that depicted his circle of friends which included Jean Cocteau, Gloria Stein,  Alice Toklas, Christian Bérard, Pavel Tchelitchev and Natalie Barney, among others. This mural was exhibited in the following year at the  Petit Palais Musée des Beauz Arts in Paris. Called to military service at the beginning of World War II, Rose served as a disciplinary sergeant in the Royal Air Force. In 1942, Francis Rose exhibited his work at the “Imaginative Art Since the War” exhibition held in London’s Leicester Galleries; this exhibition was organized by Frederica Dorothy Carrington, one of two daughters to Sir Frederick Carrington.

Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington were married in 1942; however, as Rose was a noted homosexual, the marriage eventually ended. By 1954, Carrington had permanently settled, without Rose, on the Corsican island of Ajaccio; their divorce was finalized in 1966. Carrington became one of the twentieth-century’s leading scholars on the island’s culture and history. In 1971, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and, in the next year, a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Carrington became a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1995.

In 1938, Rose gave an American stockbroker the power of attorney to manage his fortune; however, this stockbroker was involved in, and later convicted of, an embezzlement scheme. Rose lost most of his fortune and was nearly destitute by the end of the second World War. He spent his final years in a state of poverty, helped financially by friends foremost among whom was photographer Cecil Beaton. In an attempt to achieve some financial success, Rose published a memoir in 1961 entitled “Saying Life: The Memoirs of Sir Francis Rose”. This memoir discussed both his exploits, many which had factual issues, and his associations with the famous and artistic personalities of the time. “Saying Life”, however. was not the financial success that he needed. 

Sir Francis Cyril Rose died in London on the nineteenth of November in 1979 at the age of seventy. He had exhibited in London and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s with major retrospective in London and Brighton in 1966. Another third retrospective of Rose’s work was given at London’s England & Co in 1988. In addition to private collections, his work is included in London’s England & Co Gallery, the Stein-Tolkas Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

Notes:  The Nick Harvill Libraries has a biographical article with quotes entitled “Lord Chaos: The Life of Sir Francis Rose” at:  https://www.nickharvilllibraries.com/blog/lord-chaos-the-life-of-sir-francis-rose

Time Magazine has an archive review of Sir Francis Roses’s July 1949 exhibition of new work at London’s Gimpel Fils Gallery. The review is located at;   https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,888553,00.html

Top Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose”, Date Unknown, Bromide Print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Second Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Cecil Beaton, Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose”, 1939, Bromide Print, 24 x 23.8 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Third Insert Image: Cecil Beaton, “Sir Francis Rose and Gertrude Stein, Bilignin”, 1939, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Bottom Insert Image: Francis Goodman, “Emma Tollemache and Sir Francis Rose”, 9 December 1947, Gelatin Silver Print from Original Negative, National Portrait Gallery, London, England

Emma Tollemache (née Manasseh) wrote the poetry collection “In the Light”. A limited edition of 250 copies with illustrations by Sir Francis Rose was published by Marlowe Galleries.

Feliciano Centurión

The Textile Art of Feliciano Centurión

Born in the city of San Ignacio, Misiones in March of 1962, Feliciano Centurión was a Paraguayan artist known for his painting and textile work that incorporated painting, knitting, crocheting and embroidering. He was raised in a matriarchal household where he was taught the traditional crafts normally associated with women’s work.

Feliciano Centurión’s family fled to Formosa, Argentina to escape the military dictatorship of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner. He received his initial art education in the visual arts at Formosa’s Oscar R. Albertozzi School of Fine Arts. Centurión permanently relocated to Buenos Aires where he studied painting at the Ernesto de la Cárcova Superior School of Fine Arts and the Prilidiano Pueyrredón School of Fine Arts. He earned the National Professor and Superior Professor of Painting degrees. 

Centurión incorporated ordinary household items into his artwork, such as blankets (frazadas), handkerchiefs, and pillowcases which he purchased at local street markets. His textile work followed the weaving traditions held by the indigenous Guaraní people of the interior regions of South America, particularly those of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia. Centurión also integrated the technique of ñandutí, an intricate method of lace weaving that was traditionally taught from mother to daughter. His design motifs included images of both flora and fauna as well as diaristic texts. 

After surviving the dictatorships in both Paraguay and Argentina, Feliciano Centurión thrived in Argentina after the collapse of the country’s authoritarian regime in 1983. He became associated with the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, a cultural center operated by the University of Buenos Aires, where he became acquainted with the work of other young artists. Centurión incorporated the kitsch references and queer aesthetics of these artists into his painting and embroidery work now being done on inexpensive, patterned blankets. Established as an artist, he participated in thirty-one solo exhibitions in Argentina and Paraguay between 1990 and 1996. 

Diagnosed with HIV in 1992 at a time when no accessible treatments were available, Centurión began chronicling his declining health by weaving texts into increasingly smaller and more intricate fabrics. At a time when government policies and media reports stigmatized the virus and its victims, he expressed humanizing, sentimental notions of comfort and intimacy into his fabric work. Centurión’s works were composed of bright colors and animals, such as snails and crocodiles, remembered from his childhood. His blankets celebrated both his matriarchal upbringing and Paraguay heritage; he used his embroidered work to express his queer identity and elevate the status of textile art. 

Feliciano Centurión had his first solo exhibition in 1982 at the Estimulo del Belles Artes in Asunción, Paraguay, and represented Paraguay at the fifth Havana Biennial in 1994. His final works, a series of embroidered pillows, were made while he was hospitalized. Centurión died on the seventh of November of 1996 at the age of thirty-four in Buenos Aires. 

A retrospective of Centurión’s work was exhibited in 2018 at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. The Americas Society/Council of Americas (AS/COA) held the first solo exhibition of his work in the United States from February to November of 2020. Held at its Park Avenue gallery in New York City, this exhibition received the support of the WaldenGallery, Galeria Millan, and Cecilia Brunson Projects as well as the City of New York. Centurión’s work is included in the current 2024 exhibition, “The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art”, at London’s Barbican Art Gallery until the 26th of May.

Notes: The exhibition catalogue “Feliciano Centurión: Abrigo” from the Americas Society/Council of Americas’s 2020 exhibition, which contains the exhibited work and an extensive biography, can be located at: https://www.as-coa.org/sites/default/files/archive/FelicianoCenturionPocketBook.pdf 

The Visual AIDS site has a tribute page to Centurión which contains a short biography and an online collection of over fifty images of his work: https://visualaids.org/artists/feliciano-centurion

Second Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Flamencos”, circa 1990, Acrylic on Blanket, 42 x 53 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Feliciano Centurión, “Surubí”, 1992, Acrylic and Varnish on Blanket, 200 x 190 cm, Private Collection

Jacques de Lalaing

The Paintings of Jacques de Lalaing

Born in London on the fourth of November in 1858, Jacques de Lalaing was an English-Belgian painter and sculptor who worked in a realistic, naturalistic style both as a portrait artist and creator of historical scenes. As a sculptor, Lalaing produced both allegorical and animal bronzes as well as memorial monuments. Along with sculptors Léon Mignon and Antoine-Félix Bouré, he established a distinctively Belgian tradition of animal art.  

Jacques de Lalaing was the younger son of Belgian diplomat Count Maximilien IV de Lalaing, a member of a noble southern Flanders family which played an important role in the history of the Netherlands. Jacques’s older brother, Charles Maximilien de Lalaing, became an important diplomat who served as Belgian Ambassador to four countries from 1899 to 1917. 

Lalaing received his academic training in England until 1875 at which time he relocated to Brussels, Belgium. He studied at the city’s Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts under genre and portrait painter Jean-François Portaels, the founder of the Belgian Orientalist school; historical and portrait painter Louis Gallait; and portrait painter Alfred Cluysenaar, best known for his monumental decorative works.

As a sculptor, Jacques de Lalaing trained under sculptor and medalist Baron Thomas Jules Vinçotte, sculptor to the court of King Leopold II, and sculptor Josef Lambeaux, known for his large bronze statues and marble bas-reliefs. Lalaing created the British Waterloo Campaign Monument in Brussels, a large edifice of bronze figures on a plinth of rusticated stone blocks, below which lies the bodies of seventeen fallen soldiers from the battles at Quatre Bras and Waterloo. He also designed the bronze horseman battle group at the Bois de la Cambre in Brussels as well as the twenty-two meter bronze pylon in Schaerbeek, originally made for the 1913 Ghent Exposition.  

To ensure the accuracy of his work, Lalaing extensively used the medium of photography; he also enlisted the services of renowned photographers in Brussels to compile a photographic record of his work. Lalaing accumulated a large collection of “Academies”, images produced for artists by Parisian photographers and publishers to serve as sources for inspiration. He also photographed thousands of reference images  in his Brussels studio. These photos served as a simple work tools, the preparatory sketches from which to produce the initial plaster or charcoal study. In his vast Brussels studio, Lalaing staged his subjects facing the camera: celebrities whose portrait he had been commissioned to paint, as well as professional models, children and animals selected to inspire a future composition.

Jacques de Lalaing was commissioned for interior decorative scenes for the town hall of the Belgian commune of Saint-Gilles which bordered the city of Brussels. Other artists commissioned for this project included Fernand Khnopff, Albert Ciamberlani, and Emile Fabry, among others. Lalaing created six allegorical oil on canvas panels depicting the themes of commerce and industry; these panels were placed around the allegory “Truth, Goodness and Beauty”, a collaboration between painter Alfred Cluysenaar and himself.

In 1896, Lalaing was elected a member of the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels; between 1904 and 1913, he served as its director. Lalaing died on the tenth of October in 1917 at the age of fifty-eight. In addition to private collections, his works are represented in the museum collections of Antwerp, Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Tournal. A collection of Lalaing’s photographic studies are housed in the Musée d’Orsay, France where an exhibition of these images was held from September of 2022 to March of 2023. . 

Notes: The website for L’Hôtel de Ville de Saint-Gilles, now a museum in the commune of Saint-Gilles, can be found at: https://hoteldeville.stgilles.brussels/fr/

Top Insert Image: Alexandre de Lalaing, “Jacques de Lalaing”, Date Unknown, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Jacques De Lalaing, “Shirtless Model Sitting”, 1980, Albumin Print, Musée d’Orsay

Third Insert Image: Philip de László, “Comte Jacques de Lalainig”, 1931 (Paris), Oil on Board, 90 x 72 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Jacques de Lalaing, “Model with Mannequin”, circa 1884, Albumin Photo, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

 

Wilfred Owen: “The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought”

Photographers Unknown, The Greatest Glory Will Be Theirs Who Fought

Head to limp head, the sunk-eyed wounded scanned
Yesterday’s Mail: the casualties (typed small)
And (large) Vast Booty from our Latest Haul.
Also, they read of Cheap Homes, not yet planned;
“For,” said the paper, “when this war is done
The men’s first instinct will be making homes.
Meanwhile their foremost need is aerodromes,
It being certain war has just begun.
Peace would do wrong to our undying dead,–
The sons we offered might regret they died
If we got nothing lasting in their stead.
We must be solidly indemnified.
Though all be worthy Victory which all bought.
We rulers sitting in this ancient spot
Would wrong our very selves if we forgot
The greatest glory will be theirs who fought,
Who kept this nation in integrity.”
Nation?–The half-limbed readers did not chafe
But smiled at one another curiously
Like secret men who know their secret safe.
(This is the thing they know and never speak,
That England one by one had fled to France
Not many elsewhere now save under France).
Pictures of these broad smiles appear each week,
And people in whose voice real feeling rings
Say: How they smile! They’re happy now, poor things.

Wilfred Owen, “Smile, Smile, Smile”, Poems, 1920, Chatto and Windus, London

Born on the eighteenth of March in 1893 at the Oswestry villa Plas Wilmot, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was an English soldier and one of the leading poets during the First World War. His poetry, in contrast to the patriotic verses of earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke, focused on the horrors of war, its tenches, the traumatic sufferings, and the deaths. 

The eldest of four children to Thomas Owen and Susan Shaw, Wilfred Owen was born at the comfortable home of his grandfather Edward Shaw. After Shaw’s death and the sale of his home in early 1897, Thomas Owen relocated the family several times due to his employment as a railway stationmaster before settling in Shrewsbury in 1907. Wilfred Owen received his initial education at the Birkenhead Institute and then, for his last two years, at Shrewsbury’s Wyle Cop School. 

Raised as an evangelical Anglican of the Church of England, Owen was a devout believer in his youth, in part due to his strong relationship with his mother. He discovered poetry in 1904 and was early influenced by the Bible and the English Romantic poets, particularly the works of William Wordsworth and John Keats. In 1911, Owen passed his matriculation exam at the Wyle Cop School; however, he did not achieve the first-class honors necessary for a scholarship to a university. 

In return for free lodging, Wilfred Owen became a lay assistant to the Vicar of the village of Dunsden from September of 1911 to February of 1913. This support enabled him to attend classes in botany at the University of Reading and, with later endorsement from the head of its English Department, receive free lessons in Old English. In 1913, Owen obtained the position of a private English and French tutor at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France; his experience at the school led to private tutorage for a local French family. Through this family, Owen met the French satirical poet and essayist Laurent Tailhade with whom he would maintain frequent correspondence. 

At the outset of war between France and Germany in August of 1914, Owen considered his options and made the decision to enlist in the British war effort. He felt that military life afforded him the opportunity to leave the confines of study and develop a sense of honor and bravery, in essence it was a reconciliation of his impulse to art and action. After recovering from diphtheria, Owen returned to England in the autumn of 1915 and enlisted in the Artist’s Rifles, an officers’ training camp. On the twenty-ninth of December in 1916, Second Lieutenant Owen of the 2nd Manchester Regiment and his men left London aboard ship for France and the Western Front, . 

Beginning in January of 1917, Wilfred Owen spent almost four months with his regiment in various sections of the front line. On the second of May, Owen returned home with a diagnosis of shell shock that made him unfit to lead troops. By June, Owen was being treated at Craiglockhart Hospital located just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. It was during period that he emerged as a true poet with a burst of creative energy that lasted several months. Owen edited “Hydra”, the hospital journal, and wrote such poems as “The Sentry”, “The Show”, and “Dulce et Decorum Est”. 

After one month at the hospital, Owen met his fellow patient, the well-published poet Siegfried Sassoon who had been serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in France. Owen regularly began showing his poetry to Sassoon who introduced him to other writers and poets in Edinburgh’s artistic circles including Sassoon’s close friend, poet and fellow Fusilier Robert Graves. Convinced that the war ought to be ended, Owen had by this time found his creative stimulus in a compassionate identification with both the wounded and the soldiers still in combat..

Discharged and judged fit for light regimental duties, Wilfred Owen spent the winter in North Yorkshire and was later posted in March of 1918 to the Northern Command Depot in Ripon where he composed a number of poems including “Futility” and “Strange Meeting”. In spite of a strong desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, Owen returned to his comrades in the French trenches at the end of August. On the first of October in 1918, he led units of the 2nd Manchester Regiment to storm enemy strong points near the village of Joncourt in northern France. Owen was awarded the Military Cross for his courage and leadership in these battles.

On the fourth of November while leading his men on a crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal, Wilfred Owen was shot and killed. His body was buried in a corner of the Communal Cemetery of Ors, between two of his men, W. E. Privates Duckworth and H. Topping. One week later, the Armistice became official and World War I was ended. The War Department telegram announcing Owen’s death reached his parents in Shrewsbury on Armistice Day as the town’s bells were ringing. After the war’s end, Siegfried Sassoon had waited in vain for word from Owen, only to be told of his death several months later.

Having personally experienced the horrors of war, Wilfred Owen was keenly  aware of the fragile balance between the days spent mending fears and the remembered war experiences that occurred during sleep. His own dreams seemed to undo whatever progress was made each day, a fact he believed that was shared by many of his fellow soldiers. For Owen, his writing depended on the honesty of describing his own war experiences. He felt his duty as a writer was to educate the public to the true nature of combat and its endless, unforgiving ramifications.

Notes:  Wilfred Owen only published five poems before his death; these appeared in critically acclaimed literary journals during the first half of 1918. Although he had started preparing his first poetry collection for publication, he was killed in battle before he finished the work. “Poems” was published posthumously, with an introduction by Sassoon, in December of 1920. 

The Poetry Foundation has an extensive biography on Wilfred Owen which includes  twelve poems and related articles. This article can be found at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wilfred-owen

On the Warfare History Network site, writer and historian Philip Burton Morris has an interesting article entitled “WWI Author: The Writings of Wilfred Owen” which discusses Owen’s life and poetry during the war years. The article is located at: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-writings-of-wilfred-owen/ 

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen’s Last Portrait, August 1918”, 1931 Reprint, The English Faculty Library, Oxford University, The Wilfred Own Literary Estate

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Manchester Regiment Officers, Wilfred Owen (Center), circa 1915-1918, Detail, Gelatin Silver Print, Warfare History Network

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Wilfred Owen”, 1915-1918, Vintage Photo, English Faculty Library, Oxford University, Wilfred Owen Literary Estate

Alfred Kubin

The Artwork of Alfred Kubin

Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin was born in Litoměřice of the Czech Republic, formerly Leitmeritz of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in April of 1877. An important representative of Symbolism and Expressionism, he was an Austrian printmaker, illustrator and author known for his dark, spectral and symbolic fantasies, often assembled into a series of thematic drawings. 

In 1892, Alfred Kubin began a four-year apprenticeship under landscape photographer and painter Alois Beer. After attempting suicide on his mother’s grave in 1896, he served one year in the Austrian Army before his release due to a mental breakdown. In 1898, Kubin studied at the atelier of German naturalist painter Ludwig Schmitt- Reutte which was followed by a short period of study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. 

During his studies, Kubin became acquainted with the works of such Symbolist artists as Odilon Redon, Henry de Groux and Félicien Rops as well as the works of painter Edvard Munch and printmaker Max Klinger. His early works, mainly ink and wash drawings of fantastical or macabre subjects, were influenced by the aquatint techniques of Klinger and Francisco de Goya. Between 1902 and 1910, Kubin produced a small amount of oil paintings; however, his oeuvre consists mainly of watercolors, pen and ink drawings, and lithographs. 

Beginning in 1906 until his death, Alfred Kubin lived a withdrawn life at Schloss Zwickledt, the manor house of an eleventh-century estate in northern Austria near the German border. He was joined by his wife, translator Hedwig Kubin, the sister of noted German writer Oscar Schmitz, until her death in 1948. By 1911, Kubin had exhibited his work at Berlin’s Galerie Paul Cassirer and at both Vienna and Berlin Secessionist exhibitions. He was also associated with the Blaue Reiter group, a loose confederacy founded by Wassily Kardinsky and Franz Marc for Expressionist artists’ exhibitions and publication activities. Kubin showed his work at the 1913 Blaue Reiter exhibition in Berlin that was sponsored by the German avant-garde art and literary magazine “Der Strum”.

Kubin became well established professionally by the 1920s. Represented by Otto Kallir’s Neue Gallery in Vienna, he worked as a printmaker and book illustrator with such major German dealers as Hans Goltz, J. B. Neumann and Frita Gurlitt. Kubin created illustrations for works by American author Edgar Allan Poe, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, and German fantasy author Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffman, among others. He also supplied illustrations for the German fantasy magazine “Der Orchideengarten”. Founded in 1919 by freelance writers Karl Hans Strobl and Alfons von Czibulka, “The Orchid Garden” is considered the first fantasy magazine. 

Alfred Kubin worked on a series of illustrations intended for Austrian novelist Gustav Meyrink’s upcoming novel “The Golem”. However due to an extended printing delay, Kubin used the completed illustrations for his only literary work, the 1908 “Die Andere Seite (The Other Side)”, a fantasy novel set in an oppressive society. These illustrations introduced a more realistic style, executed with intense pen strokes and sometimes heightened with watercolor, that would characterize his work for the remainder of his career. 

Due to his isolation at Schloss Zwickledt, Kubin was able to live through the German Reich’s war years relatively undisturbed. He was able to exhibit some of his work; however, there was little demand for his drawings during the war years. In 1941, Otto Kallir’s Galerie St. Etienne in New York City held Kubin’s first American solo exhibition and would regularly exhibit his work after that show. Once the war had ended, Austria honored him with a retrospective in Vienna and later awarded him the Grand Austrian State Prize for Visual Arts in 1950. 

Hailed as a national treasure by Austria, Alfred Kubin was given a section for his work, known as the Kubin Kabinett, at the prestigious Neue Galerie in the city of Linz. He was awarded the Austrian Medal for Science and Art in 1957. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Alfred Kubin died at his Zwickledt home in August of 1959 at the age of eighty-two.

Notes: The Kallir Research Institute, a nonprofit foundation, was established to expand upon the scholarship of art dealer and historian Otto Kallir. Primarily focused on Austrian and German expressionists, the Institute also specializes on artists who were sponsored by Otto Kallir. On its site, there is a short biography of Alfred Kubin and links to his work: https://kallirresearch.org/bio-alfred-kubin/

Top Insert Image: Nicola Perscheid, “Alfred Leopold Isidor Kubin”, 1898, Vintage Print

Second Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Büffel (Prehistoric Buffalo)”, circa 1907, Gouache and Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Alfred Kubin, “Prähistorische Vögel (Prehistoric Bird)”, circa 1906-07, Tempera on Kataster Paper, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Eric Schaal, “Portrait of Alfred Kubin”, 1958, Gelatin Silver Print, 9.4 x 7.4 cm, Private Collection

Jan Mankes

The Artwork of Jan Mankes

Born in August of 1889 in the city of Meppel, Jan Mankes was a Dutch painter whose restrained, detailed work included self-portraits, landscapes and detailed studies of animals and birds. Although he developed a reputation as an ascetic, Mankes was well acquainted with both events and artists in the Netherlands. 

The son of tax inspector Beint Jans Mankes and Genty Hartsuyker, Jan Mankes began his initial education in 1902 at Meppel; however, after his father received a new assignment, the family moved in 1903 to Delft, a city in South Holland. Beginning in 1904, Mankes studied at the Delft workshop of painter and stained glass artist Jan Lourens Schouten. In his free time, he also trained in stained glass techniques at the workshop of Hermanus Veldhuis and often assisted Veldhuis in his work. There is evidence Mankes participated in the restoration of stained glass panels at Sint Janskerk, a Gothic-styled church in the city of Gouda. 

Mankes often traveled to The Hague where he attended evening classes at its Academy of Fine Arts and studied the painting collections in the Mauritshuis Museum. He was particularly influenced by the work of sixteenth-century German artist and printmaker Hans Holbein the Younger as well as seventeenth-century Dutch painters Carel Fabritius and Johannes Vermeer. In 1908 at the age eighteen, Mankes showed his first paintings to his friend, Delft engraver Antoine van Derktsen Angers, who advised him to leave the glass works and devote himself to a career as a painter.

After the retirement of his father in 1909, Jans Mankes moved with his parents to the village of Bovenknipe in the northern province of Friesland. Inspired by its landscapes, he decided on the main themes for his work: portraiture and depictions of the natural world’s fauna and flora. From 1909 onwards, Mankes was supported financially by his patron from The Hague, tobacco merchant and major art collector A. A. M. Pauwels. His letters to Pauwels expressing gratitude for both money and materials were published in 2012 by the Netherlands Institute for Art History; Pauwels’s letters did not survive. 

In 1911, Mankes created a portrait of Anne Zernike, a progressive Mennonite woman and Netherlands’ first female minister with a doctoral degree. This portrait is now housed in the collection of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden. In the same year, Mankes painted one of his most famous self-portraits, “Self-Portrait with an Owl”. His exposure in 1912 to the work of Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, best known for his woodblock prints, created a lasting impression on his work, especially in regard to simplicity of composition. 

On the thirtieth of September in 1915, Mankes married Anne Sernike and the couple lived for several years in The Hague. After a diagnosis of tuberculosis, he and his wife relocated in 1916 to the city of Eerbeck in the central-eastern province of Gelderland. Two years later, the couple had their only child, a son named Beint after Mankes’s father. However by this time, Mankes’s health was steadily failing due to his tuberculosis. He died on the twenty-third of April in 1920 at the age of thirty. 

In addition to private collections, Jan Mankes’s work is housed in the Netherland’s Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, the Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, the Rijksmuseum, and the MORE Museum in Gorssel as well as other international museums.

Top Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Self Portrait”, circa 1915, Pencil and Charcoal on Paper, 21 x 17.5 cm, Private Collection

Second Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Zelfportret met Uil (Self Portrait with an Owl)“, 1911, Oil on Canvas, 20.5 x 17 cm, Museum Arnhem, The Netherlands

Bottom Insert Image: Jan Mankes, “Annie Zernike”, 1918, Oil on Canvas, 34 x 32.5 cm, Museum for Modern Realism (MORE), Gorssel, The Netherlands

Music History: Angela McCluskey

Angela McCluskey, “Times Square”, 2001, “The Things We Do”, Manhattan Records/Blue Note

Born in Glasgow in February of 1960, Angela McCluskey was a Scottish singer and song writer who performed both as a solo artist and a founding member of the Wild Colonials, an alternative rock band formed in Los Angeles, California. She began her music career at London’s EMI Records, first as a publicist and later employed in its video department. In London at an Indian  restaurant in 1989, McCluskey met pianist and composer Paul Cantelon, whom she married. 

McCluskey and Cantelon relocated to the Hollywood area of Los Angeles, California. An impromptu 1992 jam session at the Irish coffee house Café Beckett  brought together McCluskey, her husband Paul on violin and piano, guitarist David “Shark” Shaw, and Scott Roewe on bass, keyboards and saxophone. They were later joined by Ian Bernard on drums and percussion. This jazz session evolved into the Wild Colonials with future performances at Molly Malone’s Irish Pub and Café Largo, a popular nightclub and cabaret. 

The Wild Colonials’s regular appearances at the Café Largo venue led to a contract with Geffen/DCG. Both their first two albums, the 1994 “Fruit of Life” and the 1996 “This Can’t Be Life” were released to critical acclaim. As a result of these successful releases, Wild Colonials became a headliner at the 1997 Lilith Fair. During this period, McCluskey also worked with many musical artists including Malcolm John Rebennack Jr (Dr. John); Cyndi Lauper; Michel Sanchez and Éric Mouquet (Deep Forest); and Joseph Lee Henry. In 2000, she released “Curio”, an album of torch songs recorded with Paul Cantelon, violinist Lili Haydn and cellist Martin Tillman. 

Angela McCluskey relocated to Paris in 2001 and sang with the French electronic music trio Télépopmusik. She provided the vocals on Télépopmusik’s 2001 album “Genetic World” which included the successful “Breathe”, co-written with Stephan Haeri and Fabrice Dumont. Later reissued as a single in 2002, “Breathe” became a dual UK/US chart hit, a 2004 Grammy nominee, and a memorable theme song for Mitsubishi, Peugeot, and Visa Europe. McCluskey also lent her vocals to several songs on the Télépopmusik’s second studio album, the 2005 “Angel Milk”. 

In 2004, McCluskey released her debut solo album “The Things We Do” through the Manhattan Records/Blue Note label. Photographer and filmmaker Bruce Weber featured McCluskey and Paul Cantelon in his 2007 short film “Wine and Cupcakes” shot in New York’s Central Park. In this film, she does a spoken voice-over of “If I Ruled the World” and sings the 1934 jazz standard “Autumn in New York”. McCluskey released her second solo album in 2009, the “You Could Start a Fight in an Empty House” which included the song “Handle with Grace” backed by Télépopmusik. This album was followed by the 2011 “Here Comes the Sun” and two extended-play albums “Handle with Grace” and “Lambeth Palace”, all three recorded through New York’s Bernadette Records. 

In 2014, Angela McCluskey wrote and performed “Catch a Falling Star”, a one woman play that focused on her Scottish upbringing and a brief encounter with Nina Simone. Having heard McCluskey’s vocals on Pandora in 2016, the electronic hip hop/jazz duo Big Gigantic featured her on their 2017 song “ The Little Things”. In the same year, McCluskey released through Bernadette Records “The Roxy Sessions”, a solo album recorded at New York City’s Roxy Hotel that featured a wide range of vocal styles. Her last recorded work was the January 2021 four-song EP “Between Ourselves” released exclusively on Bandcamp.

Through her career, Angela McCluskey worked with such artists as the electronic swing band Parov Stelar; rapper and songwriter Kendrick Lamar Duckworth; DJ and producer Morgan Wolf Page; Nigerian duo Kehinde Hassan and Taiwo Hassan (Christian Rich); Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber (Delirium); singer and songwriter Ambrosia Nicole Parsley; and Guns N’ Roses guitarist Richard Fortus. Angela McCluskey died at the age of sixty-four on the 14th of March in 2024 after falling into a coma following an emergency operation for a torn artery. 

The Angela McCluskey website can be found at: http://www.angelamccluskey.com

Michiel Sweerts

Michiel Sweerts, “Wrestling Match”, 1649, Oil on Canvas, 86 x 128 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany

Born in Brussels, Michiel Sweerts was a Flemish painter and printmaker of the Baroque period. known for portraits as well as genre and historical paintings.. During his stay in Rome, he became linked to the Bamboccianti, an informal association of Dutch and Flemish artists known for their paintings and etchings of peasant subjects in Rome and its countryside.

Michiel Sweerts, the son of a Catholic linen merchant, David Sweerts, and Martina Ballu, was baptized at Brussel’s St. Nicholas Church on the twenty-ninth of September in 1618. Nothing is known of his training or any other aspect of his life before 1646 when Sweerts, at the age of twenty-eight, registered as a resident of the Rome’s Santa Maria del Popolo parish. In 1647, Sweerts became an associate of the Accademia di San Luca, a prestigious artist association approved by Papal brief in 1577. 

In Rome, Sweerts painted genre paintings in the style of the Bamboccianti and a series of canvases depicting the training of painters in studios and classes. He also was the teacher of William Guglielmo Reuter, a painter from Brussels who was influenced by the Bamboccianti. Having gained a solid reputation for his work, Sweerts was invited to enter the service of Rome’s ruling papal family under the patronage of Prince Camillo Pamphilj, the nephew of Pope Innocent X. Through Prince Pamphilj’s influence, the pope bestowed upon Sweerts the papal title of Cavaliere di Cristo, a honorary title of knighthood. 

During his time in Rome, Michiel Sweerts developed a lifelong relationship with the Deutz family, one of the most prominent Amsterdam trading families. In 1651, merchant and financier Jean Deutz gave Sweerts the power of attorney to act as his representative at the local customs house and as an agent on the Italian art market. Despite these patronages, Sweerts left Rome for unknown reasons between 1552 and 1654; he is recorded in Brussels in July of 1655 at a baptism. In 1659, Sweerts joined the local Guild of Saint Luke which represented the trades of local artists. He also opened an academy in Brussels where his students could work from live models.

During his time in Brussels, Sweerts became more devout and joined the Missions Étrangères, a Catholic missionary organization that was committed to proselytizing in the Far East. Between 1658 and 1661, he spent several periods in Amsterdam where he supervised the construction of a ship for the transport of the Missions Étrangères group to the Turkish city of Alexandretta and then to the Far East. By December of 1661, Sweerts had arrived in Marseilles, France; he departed by ship for Palestine in January of 1662. 

Michiel Sweerts met the Étrangères delegation of Bishop François Pallu and seven priests in Palestine and sailed with them to Syria. In the Syrian city of Aleppo, he painted and proselytized; however, Sweerts was dismissed from the mission after only two years because of his unstable and undisciplined character. He traveled overland through Persia and eventually reached the Portuguese Jesuit community in the Indian city of Goa, According to missionary records, Sweerts died at Goa in June of 1664 at the age of forty-five. 

Sweerts’s surviving works were mostly created during his residency in Rome. As he rarely signed his paintings, the total number varies from forty to one hundred. Due to Sweerts’s popularity at the time, many copies were made by his contemporaries, both pupils and followers. None of Sweerts’s Biblical compositions, mentioned in contemporary inventories, or the work he produced after his departure from Europe are known to have survived.

Among the genre scenes attributed to Michiel Sweerts are two that reprised the popular subject of game players, the 1652 “Damspelers (Draughts Players)” and the 1646-1652 “De Kaartspelers (Card Players)”, both of which are housed in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. Between 1646 and 1649, Sweerts produced a series of seven Biblical scenes, “Seven Acts of Mercy”, which display his masterly use of chiaroscuro to create dramatic lighting effects. He also developed new themes such as that of Roman street wrestlers in his 1649 “Wrestling Match”, again a strong example of his use of chiaroscuro. 

Michiel Sweerts painted the majority of his portraits in Brussels and Amsterdam between 1655 and 1661. He was interested in depicting ordinary people and explored their distinctive characters through their curious expressions and sideway glances. Among these portraits are the 1654 “Head of a Woman” with its downward gaze, the simply-dressed maidservant in the 1660 “Portrait of a Young Woman” and the 1656 pensive “Portrait of a Young Man”, now in the collection of the Hermitage. Sweerts’s most ambitious work in terms of composition and technical achievement was the 1652-1654 “Plague in an Ancient City”, a dramatic depiction in the classical style of the devastation caused by the bubonic plague. This epic work is now housed in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

In July of 2023, Michiel Sweerts’s long-lost painting, “The Artist’s Studio with a Seamstress”, sold at Christie’s London for a record of 21.6 million Pounds, four times the previous auction record for an artist little known outside the Old Master world. Thought to have been painted around 1646-1649 in Rome, this signed work was discovered in untouched condition at a house in France.

Notes: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has an informative article entitled “Michiel Sweerts and Biblical Subjects in Dutch Art” written by Walter Liedtke for the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. This article can be found at: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/swee/hd_swee.htm

Top Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Self Portrait with Skull”, circa 1660, Oil on Canvas, 78.7 x 60.9 cm, Agnes Etherington Art Center, Queens University, Canada

Second Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Clothing the Naked”, 1646-1649, “Seven Acts of Mercy” Series, Oil on Canvas, 74 x 99 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Third Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Mars Destroying the Arts”, 1650-1652, Oil on Canvas, 69 x 51 cm, Private Collection

Fourth Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Hommes se Baignant (Bathers)”, 1655, Oil on Canvas, 109 x 164 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg, France

Bottom Insert Image: Michiel Sweerts, “Boy in a Turban Holding a Nosegay”, 1658-1661, Oil on Canvas, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Julien Green: “A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing”

Photographers Unknown, A World He Brushes Past Without Seeing

Paris est une ville dont on pourrait parler au pluriel, comme les Grecs l’a fait avec Athène. Car il y a beaucoup de Paris et celui des touristes n’a qu’une relation superficielle avec celui des Parisiens. Un étranger qui traverse Paris dans en voiture ou en autobus et qui va d’un musée à l’autre n’a aucune idée de ce monde qu’il ne voit pas, bien qu’il soit dans elle.

Personne ne peut affirmer de connaître bien une ville s’il n’a pas perdu son temps dans elle. L’âme d’une grande ville ne laisse pas se comprendre légèrement. Pour qu’on se familiarise vraiment avec elle, on doit dans elle, on a dû s’ennuyer et pâtir un peu dans elle. Bien sûr, chacun peut s’acheter un guide de la ville et constater que tous les monuments indiqués sont là. Mais, à l’intérieur de la frontière de Paris, une ville qui est accessible autant dure que Tombouctou l’était autrefois se cache. 

Paris is a city that might well be spoken of in the plural, as the Greeks used to speak of Athens, for there are many Parises, and the tourists’ Paris is only superficially related to the Paris of the Parisians. The foreigner driving through Paris from one museum to another is quite oblivious to the presence of a world he brushes past without seeing.

Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well. The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult to access as Timbuktu once was. 

Julien Green, Paris, 1987, Illustrator: Jean William Hanoteau, Publisher: Les Bibliophiles du Palais, Paris 

Born in Paris in September of 1900, Julien Hartridge Green was an American writer who spent most of his life in France. Over a seventy-year career as an author, he wrote novels,  essays, several plays, a journal written daily from 1919 to 1998, and a four-volume autobiography. In 1971, Green had the honor of being the first non-French national to be elected a member of the Académie Françoise. He had been awarded the Académie’s grand prize for literature in the previous year.

Julien Green was the youngest of seven children born to American parents Edward Green, a native of Virginia, and Mary Adelaide Hartridge from Savannah, Georgia. The family had emigrated and settled in Paris seven years before his birth. Raised in a traditional Protestant home, Green received his education in French schools including the city’s distinguished Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. After his mother’s death in 1914, he became a Roman Catholic two years later. 

After sitting for the French baccalaureate in 1917, Green served as an underage volunteer ambulance driver during the first World War, initially for the American Field Service and then for the American Red Cross. He entered the French Army in 1918 and served in an artillery unit until the end of the war. At the invitation of his uncle Walter Hartridge, Green studied from 1919 to 1922 at the University of Virginia, his first direct contact with the United States and its Southern culture. 

Julien Green returned to France in 1922 and began his career as a writer. His first published work in French was a critique entitled “Pamphlet Contre les Catholiques de France”, written under the name of Théophile Delaporte. In 1926, Green published his first novel “Mont-Cinère (Avarice House)” through philosopher and publisher Jacques Maritain who later published Green’s 1927 novel “Adrienne Mesurat (The Closed Garden)”. Until his death in 1973, Maritain remained a loyal friend, supporter and regular correspondent to Green

In the early 1930s, Green returned to the United States and began work on a novel set in the American South during the 1800s, an effort he abandoned after learning that Margaret Mitchell was nearing publication on her 1936 “Gone with the Wind”. Green’s Southern epic would be a three-volume saga written in France. The first volume “Les Pays Lointains (The Distant Lands, Dixie I)” was published in 1987. “Les Étoiles du Sud (The Stars of the South, Dixie II)” was published two years later. Both of these were reprinted in English in 1991 and 1993, respectively. The third volume of the saga, “Dixie (Dixie III)”, was published in both French and English in 1995.

In 1938, Julien Green began the publication of journals that provided a chronicle of his personal, literary and religious life as well as the atmosphere and events in the French capital. He extensively edited each of the journals to suppress accounts of his and others’ sexual adventures as well as the opinions he had expressed candidly to others. Of the nineteen volumes in the series, only two were published before the German invasion in 1940. Publication resumed after the war with volume three, “Devant la Porte Sombre (1940-1943)”, in 1946. The final volume, “Le Grand Large du Soir (1997-1998)”, was published in 2006.

After France’s surrender in July of 1940, Green fled Paris for the city of Pau in southwest France near the Spanish border. He was able to obtain visas for himself and his long-time partner, journalist Robert de Saint-Jean, for passage to Portugal from which they sailed on the 15th of July to New York City. After a brief stay with a cousin in Baltimore, Green was mobilized in 1942 by the United States Office of War Information to serve as a French-speaking broadcaster for the Voice of America. While in New York, he wrote his first English work, the  1942 memoir “Memories of Happy Days” and gave lectures at both Mills and Goucher colleges. Green also translated two works by French poet and essayist Charles Péguy into English and wrote articles for periodicals. 

After his return to Paris in late September of 1945, Julien Green continued the editing and publication of his journals. In the next fifteen years, he published four major novels: the 1947 “Si J’Étais Vous (If I Were You)”; the 1951 ““Moïre” set in Charlottesville, Virginia; the 1956 “Le Malfaiteur (The Transgressor)”; and the 1960 “Chaque Homme dans sa Nuit (Each in His Own Darkness)”, a novel of a young Catholic troubled by homosexual urges. Between 1963 and 1974, Green published four volumes of memoirs that had been written before his published journals. In the third volume of this set, the 1966 “Terre Lointaine (Love in America)”, Green described how he became aware of his homosexuality while at the University of Virginia. These four memoirs were reissued in 1985 under the title “Jeunes Années”. 

Julien Hartridge Green died in Paris on the thirteenth of August in 1996, shortly before his ninety-eighth birthday. His remains were entombed in a chapel designed for him at St. Egid Church in Klagenfurt, Austria. After his death, Green’s adopted adult son, novelist and playwright Éric Jourdan, served as executor of Green’s estate. Controversy surrounded Jourdan’s attempts to control and censor Green’s publications. After Jourdan’s death in 2015, his executor Tristan Gervais de Lafond supported the publication of an uncensored edition of Green’s journals; the first volume of this set was published in 2019.

Notes: Julien Green had been for many years the companion of author and journalist Robert de Saint-Jean whom he met in November of 1924. They lived together in an intimate and physical open  relationship for most of the inter-war years. Green and Saint-Jean frequented Paris’s popular gay clubs, traveled together in the 1920s and 1930s through Europe, Tunisia, and the  United States, and spent months together in London during the mid-1930s. For his body of work, Robert de Saint-Jean received in 1984 France’s literary award, the Prix Marcel Proust. He died in Paris at the age of eight-five in January of 1987.

The National Endowment for the Humanities’s online magazine “Humanities” has a feature article entitled “Julien Green: The End of a World”, written by NEH research fellow Francis-Noël Thomas. This article on Green’s life in Paris can be found at: https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2012/julyaugust/feature/julien-green-the-end-world

A complete list of Julien Green’s hundred seventy-two published works can be found at the GoodReads site located at: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/36431.Julien_Green

Top Insert Image: George Hoyningen-Huene, “Julien Green”, 1930, Gelatin Silver Print, Vanity Fair 

Second Insert Image: Julien Green, “Journal (1928-1939)”, January 1958, Limited Edition, Volume Nine of Ten, Publisher Librairie Plon, Paris

Third Insert Image: Carl van Vechten, “Julien Green”, 1933, Gelatin Silver Print

Fourth Insert Image: Julien Green, “Les Pays Lointains”, 1987, Publisher Éditions de Seuil, Paris

Bottom Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Julien Green”, circa 1971, Gelatin Silver Print

Bernard Picart

Bernard Picart, “The Fall of Icarus”, 1730-1731, Etching, From “Metamorphosis of Ovid”, Published 1733, 23 x 17.7 cm, Museum of Fine Art Boston

Born in Paris in June of 1673, Bernard Picart was a prolific French engraver, draftsman and book illustrator. He was the son of Étienne Picart, a noted engraver that trained under the highly skilled Académie engraver Gilles Rousselet.

In 1689, Bernard Picart entered the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, the premier art institution in France where he studied drawing and architecture. He trained under painter and theorist Charles le Brun, perspective teacher Sébastien Leclerc, and painter Antoine Coypel, the director of the Académie Royale. After graduating, Picart spent the winter of 1696 in Antwerp, Belgium where his work was well received. 

Picart resided from September of 1696 to December of 1698 in the Netherlands where he fulfilled commissions for his work. In 1698 upon his return to Paris, he began the management of his father’s printing workshop and became both a playwright and an editor for his work and the work of members from the Dutch Nil Volentibus Ardum literary society. In 1702, Picart married Cloudina Pros, the daughter of a local bookseller, who gave birth to four children. Tragedy, however, struck the family; Cloudina Picart and all four children were deceased by 1709. 

Bernard Picart and his family were Huguenots, French Protestants who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin. Persecuted by the government after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes that guaranteed the rights of French Protestants, many Huguenots fled France; this included Picart and his elderly father. In January of 1710, they fled for Holland where they settled in The Hague with their friend, Fremch bibliographer Prosper Marchand. After accepting a commission to draw prints for an edition of the Bible, Picart and Marchand relocated to Amsterdam in 1711 and were joined later by Picart’s father.

In April of 1712, Picart married Anna Vincent, the daughter of wealthy Haarlem paper supplier Ysbrand Vincent. Bernard and Anna Picart had twin sons, both of whom died within a few weeks, and three daughters who survived. Anna Picart became her husband’s agent in sales, known for the high prices she charged as well as her determination to hold all Picart’s original illustrations after their printing. In 1718, Picart collaborated with Dutch artist Cornelis de Bruyn on the frontispiece for “Voyages de Corneille le Brun par in Moscovie, en Perse, et aux Indes Occidentales”, a illustrated travelogue by de Bruyn. In the same year, he opened an engraving school in Amsterdam with such students as Pieter Tanjé, Jakob van der Schely, and François Morellon la Cave. 

In 1724, Bernard Picart created seventy engravings that depicted carved gemstones for a collaboration with Prussian antiquarian Philipp von Stosch. The published “Gemmæ Antiquæ Cælatæ” is today considered by historians to be a classic work. Picart’s most famous work is his twenty-year collaboration with author and publisher Jean Frédéric Bernard, the ten-volume  “Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses de tous les Peuples du Monde”. Picart created two hundred sixty-six engravings for this collection; the first volume was published in 1727. He also collaborated from 1728 to 1739 with academic painter Louis Fabricius Dubourg on prints of medallions and monuments for an edition authored by former Prussian ambassador to England, Baron Freiherr von Spanheim.

The majority of Picart’s work was book illustrations which he produced in collaboration with local artists. These illustrations were used in various publications including the 1720 “Figures de la Bible” and the 1728 “Taferelen der Voornaamste Geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament”, a pictorial bible of Old and New Testaments that contained two hundred-fourteen large, engraved biblical scenes. Picart was also one of several artists selected to produce engravings for a 1733 Dutch edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, which was later reprinted in both English and French editions.

Bernard Picart died in Amsterdam in May of 1733 survived by his wife and three daughters. His wife, Anna Vincent Picart, ordered her daughters to keep Picart’s collection of drawings together but allowed them to sell prints and the copper plates at auction. A catalogue of Picart’s work, “Impostures Innocents”, was published posthumously in 1735 with a discourse on engraving written by Picart and a biography of his life written by Anna Picart. Contained with the boxed volume was a list of his work compiled faithfully over the years by Anna Picart. More than two thousand works by Bernard Picart are available online from Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. In addition to the many private collections, a substantial number of works by Picart are housed in Haarlem’s Teylers Museum. 

Top Insert Image: Nicolass Verkolje, “Bernard Picart”, 1715, Mezzotint, 33 x 24 cm, The British Museum, London

Second Insert Image: Bernard Picart, “Charles, King of Sweden on Horseback”, Date Unknown, Etching on Paper, 31.3 x 20.6 cm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco

Third Insert Image: Bernard Picart, “Allegory of Time”, 1690-1733, Engraving on Paper, 39 x 27 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Bottom Insert Image: Bernard Picart, Academic Drawing and Engraving, “Impostures Innocents” Collection, Published 1735, Private Collection,

Severin Falkman

Severin Falkman, “Antonio”, 1870, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 74 cm, Finnish National Gallery

Born in Stockholm in April of 1831, Severin Gabriel Falkman was a Swedish-born painter who was one of the pioneers of Karelianism, a late nineteenth-century art and literary movement in the Grand Duchy of Finland. In 1835, Finnish author Elias Lönnrot published his compilation of oral folklore and mythology from the Karelian and Finnish traditions. The cultural sections of Finland’s society became curious about the heritage of the historical, eastern province of Finnish Karelia. Gradually, this interest in Finland’s heritage  developed into the Karelian movement, a Finnish version of European National Romanticism. 

The youngest of four children born into the merchant family of Hans Johan and Sofia Falkman, Severin Falkman relocated with his family to Finland in the 1840s. He received his initial education at the private Helsinki Lyceum and, in 1848, became one of the first students of the Finnish Art Association’s school of drawing. From 1857 to 1861, Falkman studied in Paris under French history painter Thomas Couture who taught such artists as Édouard Manet and William Morris Hunt.

After beginning an extended art study tour of Europe, Falkman studied at the University of Helsinki and the city’s Academy of Fine Arts. For a period, he was also a student of painter and printmaker Christian Forssell, who held the position of Professor of Drawing at Stockholm’s Academy of Art. Between 1864 and 1870, Falkman worked and painted in Rome, Paris and Munich. 

In 1870, Severin Falkman returned to Finland where he settled in Helsinki. He was given permission in 1872 by the Helsinki City Museum to build a studio for himself within its structure; it is now the oldest remaining artist studio in the museum and currently open for public viewing. After undertaking a photographic trip to the eastern area of Finland, Falkman published an account of its people and ethnographic objects in his 1885 “I Östra Finland (In Eastern Finland)”.

During his lifetime, Falkman painted in several genres including portraiture, still life, and scenes, both interior and exterior, that portrayed both local and medieval figures. His most important painting is the 1880-1886 historical painting “Karl Knutson Bonde Leaving Vyborg Castle for the Royal Election in Stockholm 1448”, now housed in the Finnish National Gallery. An example of the Finnish Karelianist movement, the painting conveyed the national romantic message  of Finland’s important role in the political history of Sweden. 

Severin Falkman was a recipient of the Imperial Order of Saint Anna, awarded for a distinguished career in civil service or for valor and service in the military. It entitled recipients to either hereditary nobility or personal nobility. Falkman died in the Finnish city of Helsingfors in July of 1889. His work is in both private and public collections including those of the Helsinki City Museum, the Pori Art Museum of Finland, and the Finnish National Gallery.

Second Insert Image: Severin Falkman, “Easter Procession in Rome”, 1866, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 87 cm, Finnish National Gallery

Bottom Insert Image: Severin Falkman, “Nature Morte (Eurasian Woodcock)”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 41 x 32.5 cm, Pori Art Museum, Finland

 

Frank Sargeson: “It Was Well On Into Autumn”

Photographers Unknown, It Was Well On Into Autumn

Nobody lived on the island. There were a few holiday baches but they were empty now that it was well on into the autumn. Nor from this end could you see any landing places, and with the wind blowing up more and more it wasn’t too pleasant to watch the sea running up the rocks. And Fred had to spend a bit of time manoeuvring around before he found his reef.

It was several hundred yards out with deep water all round, and it seemed to be quite flat. If the sea had been calm it might have been covered to a depth of about a foot with the tide as it was. But with the sea chopping across it wasn’t exactly an easy matter to stand there. At one moment the water was down past your knees, and the next moment you had to steady yourself while it came up round your thighs. And it was uncanny to stand there, because with the deep water all around you seemed to have discovered a way of standing up out in the sea.

Anyhow, Fred took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and his trousers as far as they’d go, and then he hopped out and got Ken to do the same and keep hold of the dinghy. Then he steadied himself and began dipping his hands down and pulling up mussels and throwing them back into the dinghy, and he worked at a mad pace as though he hadn’t a moment to lose. It seemed only a minute or so before he was quite out of breath.

It’s tough work, he said. You can see what a weak joker I am.

I’ll give you a spell, Ken said, only keep hold of the boat.

Well, Fred held the dinghy, and by the way he was breathing and the look of his face you’d have thought he was going to die. But Ken had other matters to think about, he was steadying himself and dipping his hands down more than a yard away, and Fred managed to pull himself together and shove off the dinghy and hop in. And if you’d been sitting in the stern as he pulled away you’d have seen that he had his eyes shut. Nor did he open them except when he took a look ahead to see where he was going, and with the cotton-wool in his ears it was difficult for him to hear.

Frank Sargeson, Excerpt from A Great Day, 1940, A Man and His Wife, Christchurch, New Zealand

Born in the New Zealand city of Hamilton in March of 1903, Frank Sargeson was a novelist and short story writer. One of New Zealand’s greatest literary innovators, he broke from colonial literary traditions and developed a style that expressed the rhythms of his native country’s speech and experience.

Born Norris Frank Davey, Frank Sargeson was the son of prosperous businessman Edwin Davey and his wife Rachel, both committed Methodists. He had a secure early life but later regarded it as limited in scope. Sargeson attended Hamilton High School and enrolled in 1921 as an extramural law student at Aukland University College. He worked in the offices of solicitors during the day and studied law in the evenings. Sargeson also stayed for a period at the Ōkahukura sheep farm of his uncle Oakley Sargeson. 

After an argument with his mother in 1925, Sargeson relocated to Aukland to continue his studies; he received his qualification as a solicitor in 1926. Sargeson left New Zealand at the beginning of 1927 and spent two years in Europe where he  explored London’s museums and theaters as well as the countrysides of England, France, Italy and Switzerland. While abroad, Sargeson  made a failed attempt at a novel and had his first homosexual relationship in London.

Upon his return to New Zealand in 1928, Frank Sargeson took the position of clerk in the Public Trust Office at Wellington and concentrated on writing short stories.. A series of homosexual encounters in 1929 led to his arrest and a two-year suspended sentence on the condition that he live with his uncle at the Ōkahukura farm. For eighteen months, Sargeson worked on the farm and wrote continuously. By May of 1930, he had successfully published an article on his European travels in the New Zealand Herald and completed his first novel, though it was rejected by several publishers.

In May of 1931, Sargeson took permanent residence at his parents’ well-worn beach cottage (bach) in Takapuna, a northern suburb of Aukland. He adapted the pseudonym of Frank Sargeson at this time to distance himself from his earlier conviction and as a tribute to his uncle. Sargeson never obtained employment as a solicitor and ultimately relied on homegrown food to sustain himself as he experimented with his writing. Registered as unemployed to be eligible for relief , he sheltered people who were struggled financially or lived on the fringes of society. On of these was Harry Hastings Doyle, a suspended horse trainer ten years his senior, who became his life-partner. Doyle lived at the cottage for extended periods over a span of thirty years, the last being his illness from 1967 until his death in 1971.

Although he had published one story and several articles in Aukland newspapers, Frank Sargeson considered the publishing of the fictional, five-hundred word “Conversations with My Uncle” in a July 1935 issue of the weekly magazine “Tomorrow” to be his first success in the literary world. In 1936, publisher Robert Lowry’s newly established Unicorn Press printed Sargeson’s first book, “Conversations with My Uncle and Other Sketches”. The short stories in this collection displayed the features that would characterize Sargeson’s style: austere, minimalist narration and characters as well as the use of everyday New Zealand spoken English.  

By 1940, Sargeson had established a significant reputation as a New Zealand writer with the publishing of more than forty stories. In the same year, his story “The Making of a New Zealander” won a prize at a New Zealand centennial competition and “A Man and His Wife”, his second short story collection, was published by Caxton Press. Sargeson’s writing had also reached the international market and appeared in journals and anthologies in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. His 1943 novella “That Summer” dealt with the dynamics of male friendship in the isolated New Zealand environment and, as in much of his fiction, contained implicit homoerotic elements. 

In 1946, Frank Sargeson formally changed his birthname to Frank Sargeson so his father could transfer ownership of the Takapuna cottage and its property to him. In the same year, New Zealand’s Internal Affairs changed his benefit allowance into a literary pension which continued until his eligibility for an old-age pension; this extra income allowd him to finance  a new cottage. His friend George Haydn, a Hungarian who had emigrated to New Zealand in 1939 to escape the Nazi invasion, designed a simple, economical dwelling and, with the help of his partner George Rollett, built the new cottage at cost. 

In the 1950s, Sargeson published the 1954 novella “I for One”, two stories and a short autobiographical essay. The majority of his time was spent writing plays, two of which,”The Cradle and the Egg” and “A Time for Sowing”, were staged in Aukland and later published in 1964 as “Wrestling with the Angel”. Sargeson had a burst of creative energy in the 1960s. His novel “Memoirs of a Peon”, based on the sexual adventures of a friend, was published in 1965, “The Hangover” in 1967, and his “Joy of the Worm” in 1969.

After the death of long-time partner Harry Doyle, Frank Sargeson published several collections of earlier works, among which were the 1972 “Man of England Now” which included the novella “A Game of Hide and Seek”,  and the 1973 “The Stories of Frank Sargeson”. Sargeson also chronicled his life in a set of three memoirs: “Once Is Enough” in 1973, the 1975 “More Than Enough”, and “Never Enough: Places and People Mainly” in 1977. These autobiographies were published in 1981 as a single volume entitled “Sargeson”. 

By 1980, Sargeson’s health had begun to decline. He was suffering from diabetes and congestive heart failure; he also had a mild stroke shortly before his seventy-seventh birthday. The onset of prostate cancer and senile dementia added to his deterioration. Frank Sargeson was admitted to the North Shore Hospital in December of 1981 and died there on the first of March in 1982. The Frank Sargeson Trust was formed to preserve his Tukapuna home as a museum and maintain a literary fellowship. Sargeson’s ashes were spread under a loquat tree in the newly renovated property’s garden in June of 1990.

Notes: The Frank Sargeson Trust website, which contains a chronological biography of Sargeson as well as the history of his Takapuna house, can be found at: https://franksargeson.nz

The essay introduction to Sargeson’s 1964 “Collected Stories: 1935-1963” is available through the Victoria University of Wellington’s Electronic Text Collection located at: https://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-PeaFret-t1-body-d12.html

Frank Sargeson’s “A Great Day” in its entirely can be found at: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/great-day-sargeson/

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Frank Sargeson”, 1927, Gelatin Silver Print

Third Insert Image: John Reece Cole, “Harry Doyle and Frank Sargeson, Cottage at Takapuna, Aukland”, early 1950s, Gelatin Silver Print

Bottom Insert Image: Dave Roberts, “Frank Sargeson”, circa 1970-1980, Gelatin Silver Print, Flickr Images