View allAll Photos Tagged Liberal
Limousine Liberal.(Linoleum Cut).
Riding thru town,
looking at the plight of many homeless people,
and other unfortunates,
He feels their pain,
perhaps even tosses out a few bills to ease their suffering,
it helps him sleep better tonight.
He throws on a pair of old clothes,
to blend in better while in their mist.
Which really doesn't happen often,
after all,
have you ever smelt (Those People)?
What does happen often is how often he talks about what they need to do to straighten up their lives,
in short to become more like him,
If (They) would only heed his advice,
after he takes another bite from his lobster dinner,
with the greatest of all sauces.
He tells the presses when ever he gives a big check to help others.
What goes unreported is the real reason he gives big,
it is a big tax write-off,
after all,
its just business my friends.
O yes he feels their pain,
as he sleeps on thousand count Egyptian cotton sheets,
while complaining the air conditioner isn't running just right.
He has many ideas to save the planet,
from the so-called mistakes of the (Uneducated Masses).
He allows only yes men into his circle of friends.
His friends are as plastic as his credit cards with no limit.
He tips big when ever someone might notice.
Other wise he just hands out advise for a tips,
like don't bet on the races son.
He smiles large.
He waves his hands,
as if he wants to get elected.
While riding in his limo he pours himself another stiff drink.
Telling his driver what is wrong with today's art world,
O-yes he has all the answers,
just ask him,
After all he or she is the
(Limousine Liberal).
Steve.D.Hammond.
LEFT: 2017 Integrity British Invasion Poppy Parker Ball Chair.
RIGHT - Super Duck Egg Chair (Oval Shape). Inspired by Jacobsen’s Egg Chair from Men In Black.
VITRA
Vitra Miniature Aarnio Ball Chair
$410.00 (and up)
Vitra Miniatures Collection.
Miniature scale model of Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair. Small enough to fit in the palm of your hand!
With its simple, striking shape and its bright colors Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair is a typical symbol of the optimistic, consumer oriented popular culture of the 1960's. Equally apparent is an unconcealed enthusiasm for the technical which also typifies the era: its exposed plastic which allowed even complex shapes to be produced relatively easily, at the time something completely new, and its dynamic shape, reminiscent of a space capsule. The idea of this kind of mobile capsule allowing people to sit where they want within the house also anticipates the kind of living concepts discussed in the 1970's for a young, liberal society.
On the outside, this gleaming, polished sphere seems cold and futuristic, but its inside reveals a space where users can feel cozy and protected. From the inside, outside noise is considerably muffled, allowing users to relax in any number of positions. Mounted on a round metal base just above ground level, the sphere can be completely rotated on its own axis, so that users can vary their view from the "cave". Ball Chair thus represents a special category of household objects. It is something between a piece of furniture and a piece of architecture and at the same time embodies both the mobile and the established, the fixed.
This Vitra miniature chair ships in a small wooden Vitra box which is perfect for storage or display.
Design: Eero Aarnio
Year: 1965
Material: Fiber-glass, aluminum, fabric.
Dimensions: scale 1:6, 8.25" x 7.5" x 6.75
Nyhavn is a harbor district in Copenhagen , which is one of the city's most visited tourist destinations. The harbor was excavated from 1671 to 1673 by Danish soldiers and by Swedish prisoners of war from the Second Carl Gustav War as an alternative to the existing harbor . The "Nyhavnskanalen" was inaugurated by Christian V in the 1670s , but today it is simply called Nyhavn. Worth seeing are the over 300-year-old houses. The oldest house is Nyhavn no. 9 from 1681 . Today, Nyhavn is covered with sidewalk cafes and restaurants , especially on the north-east side, the sunny side.
For many years, Nyhavn was among the city's more sinister quarters, with sailors' taverns and the accompanying prostitutes. But in the 1980s, the area was thoroughly renovated, and Nyhavn today houses a number of nicer restaurants, cafes and bars. Among the best known are Nyhavn 17 and Cap Horn.
The poet HC Andersen lived in three of the houses over the course of twenty years. In 1834 he lived in no. 20, from 1848 to 1865 in no. 67 and from 1871 until his death in 1875 in no. 18.
The Nyhavnsbroen between Holbergsgade and Toldbodgade was originally built in 1874-1875 but was replaced by the current drawbridge in 1911-1912. The bridge divides Nyhavn into an inner part, where veteran ships are now located, and an outer part.
The memorial anchor at the end of Nyhavn was erected in 1951 in memory of the Danish sailors who perished during the Second World War .
Close to Nyhavn is the Inderhavnsbroen .
Copenhagen is Denmark's capital and with 1,363,296 inhabitants (2023) the country's largest urban area comprising 18 municipalities or parts thereof.
The inner city had 809,314 inhabitants on 1 July 2022 and is defined by Statistics Denmark as consisting of Copenhagen Municipality (area: 90.10 km 2 ; population: 647,509 1 July 2022 ), Frederiksberg Municipality (area: 8 .70 km 2 ; population: 104,094 1 July 2022), Tårnby Municipality (area: 66.10 km 2 ; population: 43,042 1 July 2022) and Dragør Municipality (area: 18.30 km 2 ; population: 14,669 1. July 2022.
Copenhagen is also the center of the Øresund region , which is the largest metropolitan area in the Nordic region . The Øresund region covers a total of 20,754.63 km 2 in eastern Denmark and Scania in Sweden and had a population of 4,136,082 on 1 July 2022, of which 2,711,554 lived in the Danish parts as of 1 January 2022.
The city is located on the east coast of the island of Zealand ; another part of the city extends to Amager and is separated by the Øresund from Malmö , Sweden. The Øresund connection connects the two cities via motorway and railway.
Copenhagen's history can be traced back to around the year 700, when there was a small fishing village where the city center is now. Copenhagen became Denmark's capital at the beginning of the 15th century. Originating in the 17th century, it consolidated its position as a regional power center with its institutions, defenses and troops. During the Renaissance, the city was the de facto capital of the Kalmar Union , being the seat of the royal house that ruled a majority of today's Nordic regions in a personal union with Sweden and Norway with the Danish monarch as head of state. The city flourished as a cultural and economic center in Scandinavia during the union for over 120 years, from the 15th century until the early 16th century, when the union was dissolved by Sweden's secession. After an outbreak of plague and fires in the 18th century, the city underwent a period of reconstruction. This included the construction of the exclusive Frederiksstaden neighborhood and the foundation of institutions such as the Royal Danish Theater and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts . After further misfortunes in the 19th century, when Horatio Nelson attacked the Danish-Norwegian fleet and bombarded the city, the reconstruction during the Danish Golden Age brought a neoclassical touch to Copenhagen's architecture. Later, after the Second World War, the Fingerplan fostered urban development along five S-train lines with Copenhagen as the centre.
Since the turn of the millennium, Copenhagen has undergone strong urban and cultural development, facilitated by investments in its institutions and infrastructure. The city is Denmark's cultural, economic and administrative centre; it is one of the main financial centers in Northern Europe with the Copenhagen Stock Exchange . Copenhagen's economy has witnessed rapid development in the service sector, particularly through initiatives concerning information technology, pharmaceuticals and clean technology. Since the completion of the Øresund connection, Copenhagen has been increasingly integrated with the Swedish province of Skåne and its largest city Malmö, forming the Øresund region.
With a number of bridges connecting the different neighborhoods, the urban landscape is characterized by parks, promenades and waterfronts. Copenhagen's landmarks include Tivoli Gardens , The Little Mermaid , Amalienborg , Christiansborg , Rosenborg , the Marble Church , the Stock Exchange , the Glyptoteket , the National Museum , which are significant tourist attractions.
Copenhagen houses the University of Copenhagen , the Technical University of Denmark, CBS , the IT University of Copenhagen . Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is Denmark's oldest university. Copenhagen is home to the football clubs FC Copenhagen and Brøndby IF . Copenhagen Marathon started in 1980. Copenhagen is one of the world's most bicycle-friendly cities.
The name
Elaborating Further article: Copenhagen's name
Before the Middle Ages , the name of the town was probably Havn. In the Middle Ages, the city was called Køpmannæhafn in Old Danish ; a name that translated into modern Danish means merchants' harbor and is an expression of the importance that merchants had for the city at this time.
A number of other names built over the original Danish name for the city are used in different languages. Examples include Swedish Copenhagen , German and Dutch Kopenhagen , English Copenhagen , Italian Copenaghen , French and Spanish Copenhague , Portuguese Copenhaga , Latin Hafnia , Czech Kodaň , Icelandic Kaupmannahöfn and Faroese Keypmannahavn .
In 1923 , the Latin version of the name became the basis for the naming of the newly discovered element hafnium , as the discovery took place at the current Niels Bohr Institute .
Nicknames
As befits big cities, Copenhagen also has nicknames and even several of this kind:
King's Copenhagen : over the centuries, changing kings have left their mark on the capital. This applies in particular to Christian IV , who, in addition to expanding the area within the city walls to three times the size, contributed buildings such as Rosenborg , Rundetårn and Børsen .
The city with beautiful towers : tourist slogan created by brewer Carl Jacobsen in 1910. It alludes to the many towers and spires that then and now leave their mark on Indre By in particular, and to which the generous brewer himself also contributed in the form of the spire at Nicholas Church .
Wonderful Copenhagen ("wonderful Copenhagen"): both a tourist slogan made famous by the actor Danny Kaye , who sang about the city in a 1952 film about HC Andersen , and the name of the city's official tourism organization, Wonderful Copenhagen .
The Paris of the North is also occasionally seen , but unlike the others, this flattering comparison with the City of Cities is not exclusive, as it is shared with both Norway's Tromsø and Denmark's Aalborg .
The name "Copenhagen" is used both for the city as a whole, which includes all or parts of 17 other municipalities, for the city without its suburbs (cf. the image of the road signs, according to which Copenhagen and Vanløse are two different places) and for Copenhagen Municipality . This article covers the city as a whole.
The total urban area is defined geographically by the Geodata Agency (with the so-called polygon method ), where water areas are deducted. The method follows the UN 's guidelines, where in order for an urban area to be considered integrated, there must not be more than 200 meters between the houses (parks and the like not included). However, the Geodata Agency still counts the entire municipalities of Copenhagen and Tårnby , despite the fact that this includes large completely undeveloped areas, e.g. on western Amager , Saltholm and Peberholm . The area occupies a little over 450 km 2 , but the city of Copenhagen itself occupies far from this geographical size. Statistics Denmark then obtains the number of inhabitants via CPR . It is also Statistics Denmark that presents the aggregated information. The extent of Copenhagen – the metropolitan area's urban area – appears from Statistics Denmark's map of urban areas and rural districts . (Zoom in, let the mouse slide over the dark blue areas and see where it says 'Capital area in ... Municipality'). The outermost parts of Copenhagen are thus Kastrup , Tårnby , Karlslunde , Albertslund , Ballerup , Hareskovby , Bagsværd , Holte , Øverød , Søllerød , Nærum and Klampenborg – but with green wedges in between that extend to e.g. Avedøre and Rødovre .
Although the urban area is clearly demarcated by the authorities, they use different designations for it. The Geodata Agency uses Copenhagen, while Statistics Denmark uses the metropolitan area , and on the road signs along the approach roads, the Road Directorate has chosen Greater Copenhagen . However, Copenhagen is the only one of the three designations authorized by the Place Names Committee . [However, in all cases the same area is meant.
Many residents of Copenhagen's suburbs, however, identify to a greater extent with the municipality they live in. This may be to distance themselves from Copenhagen Municipality , which, as by far the largest municipality, naturally often steals the picture. In practice, however, Copenhagen is so densely built-up that in many places it is difficult to see where the borders between the individual municipalities actually go. Outsiders, however, will typically consider the city as a whole, although here and there there is also a tendency to either limit it to the Municipality of Copenhagen or expand it to the entire Capital Region . Therefore, Copenhagen's population is given in some places as approx. 0.6 million (of the municipality) or approx. 2.0 million (of the metropolitan region), where the correct number is 1,363,296 ( as of 1 January 2020 ).
Furthermore, a number of administrative divisions have used Copenhagen or the capital in their name. For example , the Capital Region also includes Bornholm , regardless of the fact that this island is approx. 130 km away, and the former Copenhagen County, despite the name, did not include the Municipality of Copenhagen , although the county seat was located there for a number of years.
History
Elaborating In-depth article: Copenhagen's history
History up to the 12th century
A number of finds from prehistoric times have been made in the Copenhagen area. At the building of Amager Strandpark, one found e.g. remains of a coastal settlement from the Neolithic . Burial mounds in the suburbs indicate human activity in prehistoric times, and many of the town names in the vicinity of Copenhagen also bear witness to the founding of towns in the greater Copenhagen area in the Viking Age .
Until recently, the oldest traces of urban settlement in the Copenhagen area were within the ramparts from around the year 1000, where traces of a small fishing village were found where Copenhagen is today. Fiskerlejet was located just north of Copenhagen's Town Hall around Mikkel Bryggers Gade, which at the time lay by the sea. But in connection with the excavation of the Metro, traces of boat bridges at Gammel Strand have been found, dating all the way back to around the year 700. During the excavation of the metro station at Kongens Nytorv, traces of a farm from the Viking Age have also been found.
1043-1536: The Middle Ages
The first time the precursor to Copenhagen under the name "Havn" is mentioned in the sources, is in connection with a naval battle between Svend Estridsen and the Norwegian king Magnus the Good in 1043. After that, there is silence about the city's fate in the next approx. 120 years.
It is likely that during the 12th century the city was able to profit from its central location between the large cathedral cities of Lund and Roskilde and thus was an important point for traffic and trade between the two cities. The natural harbor and the small island of Slotsholmen , which was easy to defend, probably also gave the city great advantages. In the second half of the 12th century, the silence about the town is broken, when Saxo mentions that Pope Urban III in 1186 confirms that the small town "Hafn", together with a number of other towns that King Valdemar had previously given to Bishop Absalon, must continue belong to Absalom. The exact year of King Valdemar's gift is not known, as the deed of gift that Absalon received has disappeared. From around 1167-1171 , Absalon built a castle and a city wall on the site.
Under Absalon's leadership, the city began to grow. Especially in the 13th century, the city expanded, so that it gradually came to cover a larger part of the area between Kongens Nytorv and Rådhuspladsen . Gråbrødre Kloster and the churches Our Lady , St. Peder (now St. Petri) and St. Nikolai were all built in the first half of the 13th century. The 13th century was a turbulent time in Danish history , which was expressed in the fierce battle between successive bishops and kings for the right to the city. However, in 1251 Bishop Jakob Erlandsen was able to force the pressured King Abel to surrender the city to him, and in 1254 this bishop gave the city its first city court. Five years later, in 1259, the city was attacked and plundered by the Rygian prince Jaromar .
Gradually, the city began to grow into the kingdom's largest and most important, although it had not yet become the capital. Although the city was the largest, there were still less than 5,000 inhabitants, and thus only a few hundred fewer in cities such as Ribe and Århus. The location in the middle of the kingdom with a natural harbor on an important sea trade route was ideal. In 1419, a Danish king, Erik of Pomerania , finally managed to permanently take power over the city from the church, and in 1443 Christopher III made the city a royal residence. In 1479 the university was founded. Copenhagen was now the country's most important city.
Christian IV was of great importance to Copenhagen. Under him, the city's old walls, which had hitherto been along Gothersgade around 1647, were moved, so that they ran along the current railway line between Nørreport and Østerport, bypassing the Nyboder newly built by Christian IV . Copenhagen's ramparts were also expanded with defenses in the newly built area of Christianshavn .
From 1658-1660 during the First Karl Gustav War, Copenhagen was the last area in the kingdom under Danish control, but under siege by the Swedish troops led by Karl X Gustav . In February 1659, the Swedes tried to take the town by storm , but a joint effort by soldiers and the townspeople held them back. After the unsuccessful storming, however, the Swedes kept the city besieged until 27 May 1660. As an offshoot of the Peace of Copenhagen, the monarchy was introduced in 1660 under Frederik III and Copenhagen became an even more important city in Denmark, because it was from here that the increasingly centralist Danish state was governed. As part of this process, in 1660, Copenhagen got a new form of management called the City's 32 men , which was a precursor to the current Citizens' Representation .
In 1711-1712, one of the worst plague epidemics in Copenhagen's history ravaged . The plague killed approximately 22,000 of the city's approximately 60,000 inhabitants. A few years later, things went wrong once again, when just over a quarter of the city's buildings went up in smoke during a city fire in 1728 .
Inspired by European ideas, Frederiksstaden was founded in 1748 north of Kongens Nytorv with Amalienborg as the most beautiful part. In the latter half of the 18th century, during the Florissant period, Copenhagen experienced an enormous boom as a result of the profitable trade with the warring powers, England and France. However, the boom period ended for a time when first Christiansborg burned in 1794 and then a town fire in 1795 ravaged the inner city, and then the British navy came to claim Denmark's navy, which triggered the Battle of the Nest in 1801 , as part of the Napoleonic Wars . Parts of the city were also damaged in that conflict. However, the damage was far from the extent of the damage caused by the landed British army during the English bombardment of the city in 1807 , where large areas of the city burned down, as the British military used rockets. The medieval Church of Our Lady also went up in flames. The challenges for Denmark and Copenhagen end with the state bankruptcy in 1813 and the loss of Norway, and the accompanying trade from Copenhagen to Norway, in 1814.
After the tumultuous events in the years up to 1814, Denmark and Copenhagen had ended up as a small, poor country. It was therefore not immediately possible to rebuild the public buildings that had been destroyed by the bombardment, such as Our Lady's Church and the university , until well into the 19th century. When the economy finally got going, this gave rise to enormous development and most of Copenhagen's inner city is characterized by the reconstructions after the fires and the bombing. Culturally, Copenhagen came to form the framework for one of the most rewarding cultural periods in Danish history, the Golden Age , which was characterized by, among other things, CF Hansen , Bertel Thorvaldsen and Søren Kierkegaard . This was followed by industrialization in the second half of the 19th century. After a major cholera epidemic in 1853, it was finally decided to take down the old ramparts.
It was now allowed to build permanent, foundation-walled new construction outside the ramparts. This release, in combination with very liberal building legislation, led to a building boom in the bridge districts and a significant increase in the population. Around 1800, approximately 100,000 people lived in the capital, and at the start of the 20th century there were almost 500,000.
The new districts became very different: Frederiksberg and Østerbro became neighborhoods of the bourgeoisie ; Nørrebro and Vesterbro, on the other hand, became workers' districts.
As a replacement for the old fortress, the Estrup government adopted the construction of the large fortifications , including the Vestvolden, from 1886 . It was Denmark's largest workplace and was only later surpassed by the Great Belt connection . The construction of large projects such as the Free Harbor (1894), the Town Hall (1905) and the Central Station (1911) also left their mark. Copenhagen had become an industrial metropolis, home to companies on an international scale such as Burmeister & Wain , Østasiatisk Kompagni and the Great Nordic Telegraph Company .
After a weak start ( the Battle of Fælleden ), the labor movement had its breakthrough in the capital of the 20th century, where the post of finance mayor was taken over in 1903 by trade unionist Jens Jensen . In 1901, the municipality incorporated a number of parishes, including Brønshøj and Valby , and in 1902 the municipality of Sundbyernes was incorporated . The municipality's area was thus tripled, leaving Frederiksberg as an enclave in Copenhagen Municipality.
From World War I to the present
This section describes the period from the start of World War I in 1914 to the present day. The policy of neutrality meant that Copenhagen was not particularly affected by the First World War. The so-called goulash barons made a lot of money from stock speculation and from exporting meat products to Germany . After the First World War, there was a shortage of most things, and a great deal of unemployment contributed to a lot of unrest, especially in Copenhagen's working-class neighborhoods. In 1922, the Copenhagen-based Landmandsbanken went bankrupt, dragging many people down with it.
From 1917, the Social Democrats had a majority in the municipality's board. This led to increased public welfare, municipal housing construction, etc. The construction of Fælledparken and other parks was another result of the municipality's new social and health policy programme, which, among other things, as a result of the housing crises of 1908 and 1916 focused on building housing that was not influenced by building speculation. As buildings were built on the lands outside the Søerne and on the areas around e.g. Brønshøj and Valby, which had been merged with Copenhagen Municipality in 1901, approached Copenhagen with surrounding towns such as Lyngby, Herlev and Rødovre. And gradually these became suburbs. Due to a lack of suitable land in the inner city, much of the urban development took place around these cities. This development was also helped by more public transport, i.a. the opening of the S train lines from 1934.
During World War II, Copenhagen, like the rest of Denmark , was occupied by German troops. Several buildings were destroyed during the occupation either by sabotage or by attacks from the allied forces. Among these can be mentioned that the Shell House , which was the headquarters of the Gestapo , was bombed by British planes on 21 March 1945 . During this attack , the French School in Frederiksberg was hit and many children were killed. Many industrial buildings in Copenhagen were also blown up by the Danish resistance movement . One of the biggest popular protests against the conditions under the German occupation was the People's Uprising in 1944
After the war, the increasing use of motor vehicles became increasingly important for the city's development, and this caused the master plan's ideas of a Copenhagen built around collective S-train traffic to become somewhat diluted. Some suburbs grew up away from the S-train network. In the 1960s, development in the Municipality of Copenhagen seemed to have almost come to a standstill, while in the suburban municipalities people were building on life. Gladsaxe Municipality under Erhard Jakobsen and Albertslund are examples of this development in Copenhagen's surrounding municipalities.
Inner Copenhagen, on the other hand, experienced a period of decline from the 1960s with the relocation of industry and residents. This development began to reverse around 1990. Especially with the urban renewal plans from 1991, many run-down neighborhoods slowly but surely became desirable. With the construction of the subway and housing along the harbor, the inner city has become better connected. The construction of the Øresund Bridge in 2000 has connected Copenhagen with western Scania, and the city thus strengthened its status as the center of the Øresund region .
While Ungdomshuset på Jagtvej existed, the Nørrebro area in particular was regularly characterized by violent demonstrations that emanated from here. This culminated in the demolition of the house in March 2007, and subsided in mid-2008, when a new house was built for the young people in North West. Since then, there have been no major demonstrations based on the movement around the Youth House.
During the period, the housing market in the city was approx. 2002–2007, along with the rest of the country, characterized by a housing bubble. This stopped, as in the rest of Denmark, in 2006/2007, when large price drops were experienced. However, Copenhagen recovered quickly and the Copenhagen housing market has been characterized by rising prices since 2009 and today ( 2021 ) prices are higher than prices were at their peak in 2006. At the beginning of the period, it was also possible to assess cooperative housing according to market price. This opened up the otherwise closed co-operative housing market, and instead of being traded through closed lists and sometimes money under the table, co-operative housing is now most often traded in free trade. During the bubble period it was popular to settle in Malmö in Sweden and work in Copenhagen. In 2021, there have been large price increases again and some politicians spoke of further restrictions on the possibilities of borrowing, while others spoke of the fact that it was not necessary.
In 2020, Copenhagen, like the rest of Denmark and the rest of the world, was hit by the Coronavirus pandemic . The authorities recommended homework and shut down entertainment.
Future plans
Until around 2025, four major expansion areas are planned in the Municipality of Copenhagen, which will provide space for 45,000 new Copenhageners; Ørestad south of Field's and on Amager Fælled , Nordhavnen , Valby around New Ellebjerg Station and the Carlsberg plot north of Carlsberg Station are to be developed. Likewise, it is planned that the former freight railway area between Dybbølsbro Station and Hovedbanegården is to be developed, but primarily with business, i.a. hotels and Ikea . All the areas are either old industrial areas or land reclamation, except for Amager Fælled which is originally salt meadow. The municipality of Copenhagen is also planning a very large development in the north-eastern harbor area in the form of Lynetteholmen .
In the preliminary municipal plan 2021, Frederiksberg Municipality plans urban development around e.g. Nordens Plads and the Hospital grounds where Frederiksberg Hospital used to be located. In addition, the focus is on conservation and hollow filling with either new buildings or green areas.
In Rødovre there are three primary urban development areas Rødovre North, the City Core (around Rødovre Centrum ) and Rødovre South. At the City Center, among other things, the possibilities of making a metro stop by extending one of the existing metro lines.
A major challenge with the many additional residents will be to make room for the traffic in the city. The extension in 2019 of the metro with the City Ring and the construction of light rail along ring 3 from Lyngby to Ishøj should create even more coherence in Copenhagen's public transport. There has also been talk for many years about an Eastern Ring Road around the central parts of the city. One possibility is that the eastern ring road can go over Lynetteholmen .
Geography
Geographically, Copenhagen is located in north-eastern Zealand with part of the city on the island of Amager . Western Copenhagen stretches relatively flat further into Zealand, while to both north and south you can experience more hilly terrain. In north-western Copenhagen, e.g. around Søborg and Høje Gladsaxe a larger chain of hills with heights up to 50 meters above sea level. These hilly landscapes in northern Copenhagen are intersected by a number of lakes and Mølleåen . Due to height in the Gladsaxe area, the Gladsaxe transmitter and Copenhagen's water supply have been placed here . In the south-western part of Copenhagen, a calcareous landslide rises at the Carlsberg fault . The more central parts of Copenhagen consist primarily of flatter landscape, alternating in Valby and Brønshøj with less domed hills. Two valley systems follow these small hill ranges from northeast to southwest. In one valley you will find the lakes , in the other you will find Damhussøen . These smaller valleys are crossed by the rivers Harrestrup Å and Ladegårdsåen . Amager and most of the inner city is flat coastal land.
Geologically speaking, Copenhagen, like most of Denmark, rests on an Ice Age bedrock moraine landscape, which in turn rests on a harder subsoil of limestone . In certain places in the area, there is only ten meters down to the limestone layer, which caused considerable problems during the construction of the metro.
Religion
A majority (56.5%) of those who live in the Diocese of Copenhagen are members of the People's Church, and the number is decreasing. The national cathedral, Vor Frue Kirke, is one of numerous churches in Copenhagen. There are also several other Christian congregations in the city, the largest of which is Roman Catholic.
Foreign immigration to Copenhagen, which has increased over the past three decades, has contributed to increasing religious diversity; The Hamad Bin Khalifa Civilization Center opened in 2014. Islam is the second largest religion in Copenhagen, making up an estimated 10% of the population. Although there are no official statistics, it is estimated that a significant proportion of the estimated 175,000–200,000 Muslims in the country live in the Copenhagen area, with the highest concentration in Nørrebro and Vesteggen . There are also up to 7,000 Jews in Denmark, with most living in Copenhagen, where there are several synagogues. Jews have a long history in the city and the first synagogue in Copenhagen was built in 1684. Today, the history of Danish Jews can be experienced at the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen.
Music, theater and opera
The oldest and most famous theater in the capital is the Royal Theater , founded in 1748 , located at the end of Kongens Nytorv. Since its foundation, the theater has been the national stage for theatre , plays , opera and ballet . The theater has a large stage called Gamle scene , which can accommodate approx. 1,600 spectators. Within the last few years, however, opera and plays have been given independent buildings. The opera house was built in 2005 on Holmen opposite Amalienborg and can accommodate up to 1,703 spectators. The theater was built in 2008 at Kvæsthusbroen near Nyhavn. The Royal Danish Ballet can still be found on the old stage of the Royal Danish Theatre. Since it was founded in 1748, it is one of the oldest ballet companies in Europe. It is the home of the Bournonville ballet style .
In addition to the more traditional offerings such as theatre, opera and ballet, which the Royal Theater can offer, there are a multitude of other theaters that offer reinterpretations of classic plays as well as completely new pieces and genres, such as Folketeatret and Nørrebro Teater .
Copenhagen has had a large jazz scene for many years . Jazz came to Copenhagen in the 1960s, when American jazz musicians such as Ben Webster , Thad Jones and Dexter Gordon moved to the city. Musically, they gathered at Jazzhus Montmartre , which in the 1960s was the European center for modern jazz. The jazz club closed in 1995, reopened in May 2010, but is expected to close again in 2020/2021 due to challenges arising in connection with the shutdown due to the corona epidemic. Every year in July, the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is celebrated , which fills venues and squares with jazz concerts.
The most important venue for rhythmic music in Copenhagen is Vega on Vesterbro, which was voted "best concert venue in Europe" by the international music magazine Live Pumpehuset and Den Grå Hal are also popular indoor concert venues. The largest indoor concerts are held in the Park , where there is room for up to 55,000 spectators. The biggest outdoor concerts are often arranged in Valbyparken , including Grøn Koncert , which has ended the tour in Copenhagen since 1985 and since 2017 has also started in Copenhagen.
For free entertainment, you can take a walk up Strøget, especially between Nytorv and Højbro Plads , which in the late afternoon and evening transforms into an improvised three-ring circus with musicians, magicians , jugglers and other street performances.
Museums
As Denmark's capital, Copenhagen contains some of the most important collections of Danish history and culture, but some museums also have collections of great international quality. The National Museum , founded in 1807, is the most important museum in Denmark for culture and history. The museum contains, among other things, a multitude of ancient finds with priceless objects such as The Sun Chariot . New Carlsberg Glyptotek also displays a wide collection of objects from prehistoric times to the present day. The museum has ancient collections from Mesopotamia , Egypt including a large collection of mummies , Ancient Greece with a piece from the Parthenon Frieze that is of international quality, and various artifacts from Ancient Rome . The Glyptotek is completely unique and the only one of its kind in the Nordic countries .
The Statens Museum for Kunst is the country's largest art museum with large collections and often exhibitions of recent art. Thorvaldsen's Museum from 1848 with Bertel Thorvaldsen's many figures was the city's first proper art museum. The Hirschsprung collection contains mostly paintings from the Golden Age and by the Skagen painters . The modern art is presented primarily in Arken in Ishøj and Louisiana in Humlebæk north of Copenhagen.
In addition to Danish art and handicrafts , David's Collection contains one of the ten most important collections of Islamic art in the Western world. The war museum from 1838 contains an enormous collection of military equipment from the Middle Ages until recent times.
The natural history museums are represented by the Botanical Garden , the Geological Museum and the Zoological Museum . The three museums have entered into a collaboration, the Statens Natural History Museum, and are expected to be united in a building at the Botanical Gardens in 2024 as a national natural history museum. Experimentarium and Planetarium deal with general physics and astronomy .
Copenhagen also contains more specialized museums such as the Arbejdermuseet , Frihedsmuseet , Copenhagen City Museum , Storm P Museum and Enigma (expected to open in 2022) which is a successor to the Post & Tele Museum .
Parks, forests, lakes and beaches
Copenhagen has a number of parks, the two largest being Valbyparken and Fælledparken , respectively. 64 and 58 ha. Valbyparken is also surrounded by football pitches and allotment gardens. A beach is being built ( as of 2021 ) at the water's edge facing the Port of Copenhagen. The large lawn in the park lays, among other things, place for Green Concert . The public park on Østerbro is among the most visited attractions in Denmark, with several million visitors a year. The third largest park in Copenhagen is Frederiksberg Have (32 ha). Here you can e.g. enjoy the view of Norman Foster's elephant house in the Zoo , which occupies the western part of the garden.
In addition to parks, the city has some very open natural areas, the largest of which is Amager Fælled at 223 ha. Amager Fælled consists of approx. one quarter original salt marsh and three quarters filled seabed. The community has been continuously reduced and has ceded areas to e.g. Ørestad and ball fields. There are currently being prepared to be built in the southern part. This construction creates ( as of 2021 ) a lot of debate, especially in the Copenhagen media and in Copenhagen politics. In addition, there is the Sydhavnstippen , which is a 40 ha natural area with plenty of wildlife and plant life.
Another very popular park is Kongens Have in central Copenhagen with Rosenborg Castle . The park has been open to the public since the beginning of the 18th century. Centrally in the city along the former ramparts are a number of parks, of which Tivoli is the best known.
Something special for Copenhagen is that several cemeteries also have a double function as parks, although only for quiet activities. Assistens Kirkegård , where HC Andersen is buried, among other things, is an important green breathing hole for Indre Nørrebro . It is official policy in Copenhagen that in 2015 all residents must be able to reach a park or beach on foot in less than 15 minutes.
In addition to parks, Copenhagen also has a number of forests, including Vestskoven (15 km²) in the western part and Hareskoven (9 km²) in the northwestern part. The animal park (11 km²) is located in the northern part and contains both forest, plain and a golf course.
Just west of the ring of parks from the old ramparts are Copenhagen's Indre Søer . Other significant lakes include Damhussøen and i.a. Utterslev Mose and Bagsværd Lake .
Copenhagen has a number of sandy beaches. The largest is Amager Strandpark , which opened in 2005 , which includes a 2 km long artificial island and a total of 4.6 km of sandy beach. In addition, there are e.g. beaches at Bellevue and Charlottenlund along the north coast and Brøndby along the south coast. The beaches are complemented by several harbor baths along the waterfront. The first and most popular of these is located at Islands Brygge .
Media and Film
Many Danish media companies have their headquarters in Copenhagen. The state-funded DR started its radio activities here in 1925. At the beginning of the 1950s, the company was also responsible for spreading television throughout the country. Today, the media company has several television and TV channels, which are controlled from DR Byen , built in 2006/07 in Ørestad . The Odense -based TV 2 has gathered its Copenhagen activities at Teglholmen .
Two of the three major national newspapers, Politiken and Berlingske , as well as the two major tabloid newspapers , Ekstra Bladet and BT, have their headquarters in Copenhagen. Furthermore, Jyllands-Posten has a newsroom in the city. In 2003 Politikens Hus merged with Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten and formed the company JP/Politikens Hus . Berlingske , founded in 1749, is Denmark's oldest newspaper. Berlingske Media , which i.a. publisher Berlingske is owned by the London -based Mecom Group . In addition, there are a large number of local newspapers such as Vesterbro Avis . Other media companies include Aller Media , which is the largest publisher of weekly and monthly magazines in Scandinavia, Egmont , which, among others, is behind Nordisk Film , and Gyldendal , the largest Danish book publisher.
Copenhagen also has a relatively large film and television industry. Filmbyen , located on a disused military base in the suburb of Hvidovre , houses several film companies and studios. Among the film companies is Zentropa , in which the film director Lars von Trier is a co-owner, who is behind several international film productions and who was one of the founders of the dogma movement . Historically, Copenhagen, and especially the company Nordisk Film , was the center of the film industry in Northern Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, with hundreds of annual film productions. Nordisk Film in Valby still produces many films and today has 1,200 employees (as of 2006 ) and is the largest producer and distributor of electronic entertainment in the Nordics.
The largest concentration of cafes is in Indre By, Østerbro and Vesterbro. The first Copenhagen cafe opened in 1831 at the Hotel D'Angleterre , but it was only with the opening of Café Sommersko in 1976 that the cafe culture really came to Copenhagen, and there are now over 300 cafes spread across the city.
Copenhagen's nightlife is centered around Indre by, Nørrebro and Vesterbro, i.a. Laurits Betjent , Nasa , Rust and Vega .
Within the last decade, Copenhagen has really distinguished itself with restaurants that can measure up among the best. Most prominent is Noma , with 2 stars in the Michelin guide since 2007, which has also been named the best restaurant in the world. In addition to Noma, Copenhagen had 11 restaurants that have received one star in the Michelin guide per 2021. With 18 stars, Copenhagen is the Nordic city with the most stars, which has been the case for a number of years. In 2016, Restaurant Geranium was the first Danish restaurant ever to receive three Michelin stars (which is the highest score), which they have maintained ever since.
The sausage cart has traditionally been the favorite place to eat for the little hungry, but is now being challenged by burger bars, pizzerias , shawarma and sushi bars and the like. Smørrebrød restaurants are another type of lunch catering that is characteristic of Copenhagen.
Copenhagen is the capital in the world where organic food has the largest market share. One in ten purchases is organic in Copenhagen.
Sports
Copenhagen represents a wide range of sports and is often a leader in the field in Denmark . Larger sports facilities include The park , but also e.g. Brøndby Stadium , Farum Park and Gladsaxe Stadium for football, Østerbro Stadium for athletics, Ballerup Super Arena for track cycling , Rødovre Skøjte Arena for ice hockey , Brøndbyhallen for handball and Bagsværd Rostadion for rowing .
The largest Danish stadium Parken , located on Østerbro , is both the home ground for the Danish national football team and the football club FC Copenhagen . FC Copenhagen has for a number of years been very dominant in the Danish Superliga with thirteen championships since 2000 . In addition, Copenhagen is, among other things, hometown of football clubs Brøndby IF , AB , B.93 , Frem and Fremad Amager . In addition to the park, larger football stadiums include Brøndby Stadium (Denmark's second largest), Gladsaxe Stadium and Farum Park . Østerbro Stadium is the city's largest stadium for athletics .
Within handball , KIF Kolding København is the biggest Copenhagen team. However, they only have a men's team associated with the handball league . KIF Kolding Copenhagen is a partial continuation of AG Copenhagen , which merged with Kolding IF Handball . Despite great success in the Champions League in the spring of 2012 , AG Copenhagen suddenly fell into financial crisis in the summer of the same year , which led to the club filing for bankruptcy on 31 July 2012 .
Within athletics , it is the club Sparta in particular that has made a name for itself and the men's team has won the Danish athletics tournament 29 years in a row until 2014 and the women's team has won the Danish athletics tournament 17 years in a row until 2014. The Copenhagen Athletics Games were held in the period 2005 –2007, and before that the Copenhagen Games were held (1973-1986). Both aspired to display world-class athleticism.
The DM in ice hockey for men was won many times until the mid-1970s by the Copenhagen clubs KSF and Rungsted IK . Since then, the DM has primarily been won by Jutland clubs, while Rungsted Seier Capital and Rødovre Mighty Bulls have changed to being Copenhagen's best men's ice hockey team. On the women's side, Hvidovre Ishockey Klub has been very dominant in the DM with 8 championships in the 10 tournaments since 2011, often with Herlev IK as the closest competitor.
Copenhagen has a long tradition of rowing and has produced several national team rowers. DSR , which is Denmark's largest rowing club, and Kvik , both located in Svanemøllebugten , have rowed the traditional swan mill match every year since 1895 . In addition, there are a number of other clubs, e.g. Copenhagen Rowing Club and Bagsværd Rowing Club .
Copenhagen can display a number of golf courses , including Copenhagen Golf Club in Dyrehaven and Royal Golf Center in Ørestad . The Royal Golf Center has been built with a view to being able to hold PGA tournaments .
In the Municipality of Copenhagen, plans have been made to make Copenhagen the host of future international sporting events. In 2009 , Copenhagen hosted the World Outgames , which is an international gay sporting event. And the ambition of holding world championships in e.g. handball and ice hockey are currently being strengthened by the construction of the Copenhagen Arena .
For equestrian sports, the Charlottenlund Track , which opened in 1891 and is the oldest in the Nordic region , can be found in the northern suburbs . Likewise, to the north, there is also the Klampenborg Galopbane . From 1922 to 1976, the Amager Trotting Track also existed in Tårnby .
Copenhagen was one of the host cities at the European Football Championship 2020 , which took place in June and July 2021. Three group stage matches and a round of 16 final were played in Parken .
The 1st stage of the Tour de France 2022 was run as a single start in the city center on 1 July .
Economy
Elaborating In-depth article: Copenhagen's economy
As the country's largest urban area, the capital area is a natural economic powerhouse for the country, but also for southern Sweden, the urban area plays an important economic role.
Previously, Copenhagen was characterized by a number of large industrial companies such as Burmeister & Wain and Dansk Sojakagefabrik . Copenhagen was also the starting point for CF Tietgen's extensive network of companies ( Privatbanken , Det Store Nordiske Telegrafselskab , De Danske Spritfabrikker and others). However, since the end of the Second World War, in line with similar trends in the rest of Europe, heavy industry has moved outside the city or completely out of the country, and Copenhagen has increasingly become a city of knowledge.
Politically, most of the central administration is located in Copenhagen, where most ministries have offices on or in the area around Slotsholmen . Likewise, most agencies are located in the Copenhagen area, which together with the many private knowledge workplaces provides a highly specialized labor market with many knowledge-intensive jobs.
The Copenhagen area is home to a handful of strong business clusters in the areas of biotech , cleantech , IT and shipping . The clusters within biotech and cleantech have many overlaps, within e.g. biomass production. Both clusters are supported by cluster organizations for the growth and promotion of the industries. Within biotech, the cluster organization is Medicon Valley and within cleantech/environmental technology, it is the newly founded Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster . Clusters have received a greater focus from the regional political side, as clusters such as the cleantech cluster cover more than 350 companies and approx. 30,000 jobs.
Several of the largest Danish companies have their headquarters in the city area; especially companies within the pharmaceutical industry ( Novo Nordisk , Lundbeck , Ferring and others) and shipping ( AP Møller-Mærsk , Torm , D/S Norden , J. Lauritzen) are important for the area's economy. Likewise, several large financial groups together with the National Bank characterize central Copenhagen, including Danske Bank , Nordea Bank Danmark and Nykredit . Carlsberg , ISS and Skandinavisk Tobakskompagni are other large companies headquartered in the Copenhagen area.
Tourism
According to the tourist organization HORESTA, the number of hotel nights in the capital region in 2018 was approx. nine million, which is approx. 1 million more than in 2012. Most foreign tourists in Copenhagen continue to come from Sweden , Norway and Germany .
Hotels
Elaborating Detailed article: Copenhagen hotels
In Copenhagen, there are five 5-star hotels, which include counts Hotel Nimb in Tivoli and Hotel Skt. Petri in Indre By . An extensive renovation in 2012–2013 of the famous Hotel D'Angleterre on Kongens Nytorv has made the hotel Copenhagen's only 6-star hotel.
Copenhagen has a total of 12 hotels with more than 300 rooms and Europe's largest hostel, Danhostel Copenhagen City at Kalvebod Brygge , with a total of 1020 beds. The city's – and Scandinavia's – largest hotel is the 75 meter high Bella Sky Comwell in Ørestad with a total of 812 rooms spread over two towers. With its 86 meters and 26 floors , the Radisson Blu Scandinavia Hotel at Islands Brygge is Denmark's tallest hotel. 8 out of Copenhagen's 11 largest hotels were built in the 21st century , whereas the Admiral Hotel in Frederiksstaden , which opened in 1978 , is located in a building built in 1787 . The Radisson Blu Royal Hotel by Arne Jacobsen from 1960 is also worth mentioning. It is centrally located at Vesterport .
Cruise tourism
Since the 1990s, cruise tourism – like many other large port cities in Europe and the rest of the world – has seen significant growth in Copenhagen. In the period 2005-2012, the number of calls increased by over 100, and the number of passengers almost doubled as the tonnage increased. In the Port of Copenhagen, cruise ships dock in three different – and from 2014 four – areas : Langeliniekaj , Nordre Toldbod , Frihavnen and Nordhavnen (opens in 2014). In 2012, a cruise ship docked in the Port of Copenhagen 372 times with a total of 840,000 passengers, which was the best season so far in both Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark. Copenhagen is thus Scandinavia's largest cruise port and Northern Europe's second largest, surpassed only by Southampton .
Business clusters
The Copenhagen area is home to a handful of strong business clusters in the areas of biotech , cleantech , IT and shipping . The clusters within biotech and cleantech have many overlaps, within e.g. biomass production. Both clusters are supported by cluster organizations for the growth and promotion of the industries. Within biotech, the cluster organization is Medicon Valley and within cleantech/environmental technology, it is the newly founded Copenhagen Cleantech Cluster . The latter is considered one of the strongest in the world, partly as a result of annual growth rates of over 10% within exports.
Within shipping, the activities are gathered in The Danish Maritime Cluster , which has its center in Copenhagen. It is one of the world's leading maritime clusters, and accounts for 24% of Denmark's exports and 10% of total Danish production. The cluster as a whole employs 80,000 people in the companies themselves and 35,000 in related occupations, the majority of which are found in the large shipping companies in Copenhagen. The cluster has a large number of partners in education and research, including among others CBS , the University of Copenhagen and DTU . The organization of the cluster is led by the Maritime Development Center and Europe , which is also located in the city.
Within financial IT, there is also a business cluster. While finance and IT make up 5% of Denmark's general employment, the figure is 14% for the Capital Region. Since 2009, the organization Copenhagen Finance IT Region has tried to develop and maintain the industry in the region. One of the challenges is that 50% of jobs in the sector are at risk in relation to outsourcing, compared to 25% for the service sector in general. The cluster organization has a number of partners, including CBS , the Swedish Financial Agency , Dansk Metal and DI ITEK .
Retail
Strøget and Købmagergade are the two biggest shopping streets with the biggest and most common shops, while many of the side streets have the more "quirky" shops. On Gammeltorv by Strøget is the Caritas well, which is considered one of the finest memorials from the Renaissance . [169] In the bridge districts, especially the main streets, such as Nørrebrogade , Amagerbrogade and Østerbrogade from the center, function as traditional shopping streets.
In central Copenhagen are the department stores Magasin du Nord , Illum and Illums Bolighus , while shopping centers are found in several different places in the city, with Fields in Ørestad, City 2 in Taastrup and Fisketorvet at Dybbølsbro being the largest. In the central districts, other centers include e.g. Amager Centre , Frederiksberg Centre , Nørrebro City Center and Spinderiet in Valby, as well as Copenhagen Central Station and Copenhagen Airport also contain a number of shops. In the suburban areas there are e.g. Lyngby Storcenter , Glostrup Storcenter and Rødovre Centrum .
Architecture and urban planning
Copenhagen is famous for having a balance between new and old architecture and a homogeneous building mass of 5-6 storeys in height. In 2008 , the Citizens' Representative Council decided that Indre By should be kept free of high-rise buildings . Thus, large parts of Indre By appear quite well preserved despite historic city fires and bombardments, although many of the famous towers and spires are of recent date. However, large city fires have meant that there are not very many buildings older than 1728 left. Contrary to e.g. Stockholm is Copenhagen, characterized by point-by-point renovations of the building stock rather than violent clearances of larger neighborhoods. At the same time, the economy has often put restrictions on the most ambitious projects, which is why knock-on solutions such as at the Statens Museum for Art are widespread. Large parts of Indre By are subject to building conservation .
Some of the oldest buildings in the inner city are Sankt Petri Church from the 15th century and the Consistory House from approx. 1420 . Christian IV occupies a special place in the city's history. Not only did he double the city's area and build Christianshavn and Nyboder, but he was also the capital's first urban planner. Of all the king's many magnificent buildings, Børsen (1619–25) in the Dutch Renaissance style stands out as a unique building in European architecture. Baroque Copenhagen is also represented by the famous twisted staircase spire on the tower of Our Saviour's Church .
The new district of Frederiksstaden , which was started in 1749, was characterized by the Rococo style. In the center, a large square, Amalienborg Palace Square , was built with four noble palaces surrounding the Equestrian Statue of Frederik 5. . The entire neighborhood is included in the Kulturkanonen .
After the city's fire in 1795 and the British bombardment in 1807, large parts of the city had to be rebuilt. It became a house, with corners cut off so that the fire escapes could get around the corners. Most of Indre By is characterized by this architecture.
The fall of the ramparts (1856) was the start of an unbridled era, where new neighborhoods quickly sprung up. In the bridge quarters and on Gammelholm , an abysmal difference arose between the decorated facades facing the street and the dark backyards and small apartments.
One of the greatest architects of the 20th century, Arne Jacobsen, introduced modernism to Denmark and marked the city with, among other things, Royal Hotel (1960) and Nationalbank (1978).
The post-war planning of the capital area was supported by the Finger plan (1947). The finger plan determined that the urban densification in the future should primarily be concentrated in corridors along the S-Bahn network, while the spaces in between should be kept free for green areas.
The 1970s and 1980s were characterized by international modular architecture with no distinctive character and a building zeal that was mainly concentrated around the suburban municipalities, most often in the form of prefabricated concrete construction . In the central parts of Copenhagen during the period, the focus was mostly on urban renovations , this time aimed at the miserable backyard carts in the bridge districts.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the Municipality of Copenhagen was in crisis, but there was still enough money to initiate large conservation urban renewal projects on Vesterbro and Amagerbro . The construction of Ørestad was supposed to help pull the capital out of the doldrums.
Towards the end of the century, a real flourishing in architecture began with the additions to the Statens Museum for Art and the Royal Library. Then followed significant buildings such as the Opera House , the Theater House and the Tietgen College in Ørestad Nord.
High-rises and towers
Copenhagen has long been a densely built-up but not very tall city. This is due, among other things, to a great respect for the city's historic towers and very strict local plans . In the past 100 years, the general maximum building height has been approx. 25 meters. This has meant that the tallest buildings in Indre By to date are the towers and spires of Copenhagen City Hall , Christiansborg , Our Saviour's Church and Nikolaj Kunsthal .
The tallest buildings in Copenhagen are Herlev Hospital at 120 m and the tower at Christiansborg at 106 m. [ source missing ] However, the tallest man-made structure in Copenhagen is the Gladsaxesenderen at 220 metres. With its 267 m (incl. 47 m natural height), the top of the Gladsaxesenderen is the third highest point in Denmark after two other transmitter masts. [ source missing ] Domus Vista in Frederiksberg was, until Turning Torso in Malmö was inaugurated in 2005, the tallest residential building in the Nordic region, but is now only the second tallest.
Famous Copenhageners
Frank Arnesen , soccer player, soccer coach and talent manager
Bille August , film director
Herman Bang , journalist and author
Niels Bohr , physicist and Nobel Prize winner
Aage Bohr , physicist and Nobel laureate (Niels Bohr's son)
Victor Borge , entertainer
August Bournonville , ballet choreographer
Georg Brandes , cultural and literary critic
Helena Christensen , supermodel
Tove Ditlevsen , author
Carl Th. Dreyer , film director
Rune Glifberg , skateboarder
Vilhelm Hammershøi , painter
Gus Hansen , poker player
Iben Hjejle , actor
Peter Høeg , author
Arne Jacobsen , architect and designer
JC Jacobsen , founder of the Carlsberg brewery
Robert Jacobsen artist
CV Jørgensen , singer and songwriter
Søren Kierkegaard , philosopher
Per Kirkeby , painter
Christen Købke , painter
Kim Larsen , singer, guitarist and songwriter
Michael Laudrup , footballer
Bjørn Lomborg , political scientist and author
Lauritz Melchior , opera singer
Mads Mikkelsen , actor
Andreas Mogensen , astronaut
Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller , shipowner
Verner Panton , architect
Dirch Passer , comedian and actor
Peter Schmeichel , soccer player
Julius Thomsen , chemist
Bertel Thorvaldsen , sculptor
Lars von Trier , film director
Dan Turèll , author
Lars Ulrich , drummer and songwriter for Metallica
Jørn Utzon , architect
Mads Dittmann Mikkelsen R. actor
Magnus Millang actor
C-GBIK (FN282)
Airbus A319-113
Air Canada Jetz
Trudeau 2021 - Federal Elections 2021
Montreal-Trudeau (YUL / CYUL)
Ottawa's bakery offers cookies with the image of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is also the leader of Liberal Party of Canada.
This image is a bit old, but I couldn't resist posting. I was originally waiting for someone to walk by on the sidewalk but when I saw this pair pushing their car it seemed perfect.
North Yorkshire Police and trading standards officers from North Yorkshire County Council and the City of York Council joined forces with colleagues across the UK in April 2013 to deliver a concentrated multi-agency crack-down on doorstep crime.
Rogue traders and pushy doorstep sellers who use fraud to con vulnerable people into paying for unnecessary or vastly overpriced work to their homes were targeted as part of the national Operation Rogue Trader week of action.
The week of action ran from 22 to 26 April and was led by Operation Liberal, the national intelligence unit for distraction burglary and associated travelling criminality, and Trading Standards.
In York and North Yorkshire and across the UK, hundreds of officers were out on the streets executing warrants, identifying vehicles used by criminals through Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) and conducting intelligence-led patrols in areas where older or vulnerable people live.
Once upon a time, many moons ago, back in the day, somewhere over the rainbow, way up north where the cottonfields grow, our narrator sold an ounce of hashish, gram by gram, to some of his fellow students at the effete liberal Eastern urban University where he attended classes. Or perhaps it was Play-doh colored with tobacco juice that he sold---no matter---the buyers seemed happy, no one asked for his (they were all male) money back. Trying to recoup some of his investment, the narrator fronted half of the ounce to his friend Dave, a gungho engineering major who had channeled his talents into making elaborate waterpipes, and who all-too-soon (to the chagrin of his blue-collar parents, no doubt) dropped out of school and headed back, or slunk back, to New Jersey. Now Dave found himself owing our narrator his share, when, low and behold, out-of-the-blue, surprise no end, who coulda thunk it, the money was gone. Dave couldn't pay---he had spent all the proceeds. However, he proposed a solution. He didn't have any folding cash, all the cabbage had been cooked, consumed, and excreted, but he had this other item of value, this Italian worldbeater, this exotic Ducati motorcycle. This exotic Ducati motorcycle was worth at least as much as the amount owed, and in lieu of the green, our narrator could be the proud owner of this splendid specimen. Being mucho verde himself, not-overly-worldly-wise, a tad soapy behind the ears, our narrator took the bike.
How the bike actually came into our narrator's possession he doesn't remember. Where and when he discovered that the bike didn't actually run he doesn't recollect. In fact, our narrator never actually got the bike running, our narrator didn't, but he did manage to get it out to the house of his great friend, mentor, father-figure-extraordinaire, Mr. Merrill, and Mr. Merrill the great tinkerer (he once took his Alfa Romeo apart and had it lying out in his front yard, piece by piece) Mr. Merrill got the bike running. This would have been on some weekend, when our narrator had taken the train out to the suburbs, where Mr. Merrill and his lovely wife Stuartie (she had been born in Virginia, and her parents, perhaps disappointed that she wasn't a boy, had nevertheless named her after the local hero, Jeb Stuart) had a house with those hot water heat pipes that creak wonderously as they're coming on. When the exotic Ducati motorcycle was up and running (sputtering, wheezing, fiffully alive after an ether transfusion, if memory serves) Mr. Merrill took it for a spin in the neighborhood, and when he came back to the house, he pronounced it worthy (most probably) and said, (most probably), "Why don't you try it." And so it was, not half-a-mile away, that our narrator found himself over-running a stop sign and landing in a ditch, uninjured, but certainly not ego-fortified.
To make a long story less-long than it otherwise would be, soon enough our narrator found himself dropped out of school and slinking, himself, down to North Carolina, where he helped himself to the hospitality, and discomfort, of his relatives. Somehow, he managed to take the again non-functioning (its odomoter now had an added ten, maybe twenty, at most fifty miles) Ducati with him. And really, by any lights, that should be the end of our story. Our narrator moved about from place to place, Uncle's house to Aunt's house to apartment complex to apartment complex, and everywhere he went, the Ducati with its damaged aluminum cylinder block (it ran on one huge cylinder) seemed to go. When he picked up from Charlotte and lit out for Greensboro (now with college degree in hand), there went the Ducati with him, first to a tree-shrouded older apartment complex where our narrator shot the rat with the 22, and then on to an apartment in a house on Tate Street, not far from the campus of UNC-G, the house from which the well-stoned crew set-out for their skinny-dipping excursion to the city reservoir, where the lightening bugs flashed in the trees on the far shore, not thousands, or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of lightening bugs, flashing on at the base of the trees on the far shore, and then, like bulbs on a theatre marquee, flashing up the string, thousands of strings of lightening bugs, up and up and up, until they peaked at the top of the trees and started over again at the bottom. A more wondorous sight there never was, unless it was Julie, lithesome naked Julie, climbing the ladder of the brick tower where the water ran out on its journey to the filtration plant, where the water was purified, as if it needed to be purified, after lithesome naked Julie had swum in it.
There was an empty spot down in the basement of that house on Tate Street, not far from the furnace, and there the Ducati sat. And by any lights, that really, honest and truly, should be the end of our story, for, as far as our narrator knows, that's where the Ducati still is. Our narrator moved on, first out on the campaign trail with the Carter for President campaign, up to Virginia, over to Kentucky, down to Louisiana, up to Ohio, and then back to Greensboro for a short spell after the primary season, but then, ever peripatetic , moving on to Raleigh, for another year of aimlessness. Finally, at last, applying to various Creative Writing Programs, he got himself accepted by the University of Arkansas (if it was good enough for Barry Hannah, it was good enough for him), signed a contract for a teaching assistantship, loaded up the U-Haul and headed West. And the Ducati, scorned and abandoned, option-not-picked-up, no-place-at-the-mangered, denied, disowned, and left for dead, three times the cocks crowed, stayed behind.
And now our Real Story begins.
When we (the Royal We, i.e., Me, Myself & I, no freaking cat, no damn dog, no significant, or insignificant Other) got to Fayetteville, we knew no one (that tabula rasa thing works okay on occasion, but maybe you don't want to do it too many times). Anyway, however, nevertheless, soon enough, we found a room in a roominghouse (actually it was an old Victorian pile of an almost mansion of a creaking wonder of a columned and big front porched wood-framed three-storied house, one of five (more or less identical in bulk, if not in detail) on the north side of Mt. Nord (a street) on Mt Nord (a modest hill) looking down south to the Fayetteville city square, maybe half-a-mile away. 2 Mt. Nord was the second house from the right, when viewed from that square. J.W. Fulbright, the famous Senator from Arkansas, had grown up in the house that was down on the other end, 5 Mt. Nord (we're guessing at the #). (As an aside to this extended digression, we once saw Senator Fulbright, paying for his sandwich at the Ozark Mountain Smokehouse, a restaurant now long gone, down on Dickson Street. He had a pickle seed (you got a pickle with your sandwich) clinging to his cheek. Sadly, we were too awestruck to alert him to the aberrant pickle seed.)
Anyway, as we say, we got this room in this house overlooking the lovely, not too terribly deliquescent city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, a University town without a lot of other heavy industry, factory conglomerations, or nuclear power plants to mar the landscape. Our landlady at 2 Mt. Nord was Mrs. Huntington, a petite long-time widowed lady of great grace and courtliness. Seems as though she had been a school teacher, but we might be making that up. Regardless, she must have been well-fixed, financially, to be living in that big house and perhaps she took in boarders more for the company than for the dollars. There were three of us living upstairs, all males---Ourself, Bruce (or some other similar name), a mousey little retiring type who broke his bed somehow and slept on it for a week with one corner of the box spring touching the floor and the opposite corner hoisted-up high in the air (all the furniture was of the antique persuasion), and Arnie (we wish we could tell you his last name, because it had a wonderful consonantal chiming lilt to it, most appropriate to his avocation). All of us were graduate students in the English department---Mrs. Huntington had a connection to the department because she was friends with Mrs.Blank, wife of Dr. Blank, who was the great friend of Dr. Kimpel, the Chairman of the English Department . Arnie, of the chiming last name (imagine a doorbell ringing) takes Pride of Place because Arnie was perhaps the greatest Womanizer we have ever known. He had a Gorgeous Melt-Your-Heart-Away Pre-Raphaelite Full-Time Girlfriend (the thought of him ravishing her, on an almost nightly basis, as we knew he did, pained us) and a Hard-Drinking, Hard-Charging, Gungho Party Girl Full-Time Girlfriend, but when he wasn't out with one or the other, he was on the prowl, looking for other conquests. Once, he spent a week primping himself , showering, combing, cologning, carefully choosing his wardrobe, for a nightly trek to the drugstore down on Dickson Street, where the Young Girl (18? Younger?) at the cosmetics counter had caught his eye. How far he got with that project we never heard. Another time he mentioned in passing that he and his buddy, who happened to be the Sports Information Director at the University, had doubleteamed a woman in her shower at her house out in West Fork, a woman we knew, or wanted to know, a woman more beautiful than Raquel Welch, but with a wounded unapproachable look, who worked in the library. We had been too shy to address her.
Arnie, in his second year of grad school, had given up all pretense of attending classes and made his living betting on various sporting events. Say that Penn State was playing Notre Dame----Arnie would call up his friend who happened to be a trainer at Penn State and find out how things were going with the team, and then he would phone his bookie in Las Vegas and bet accordingly. He lasted to the end of the year and then headed back to New Jersey, for, no doubt, greater fame.
Mrs. Huntington had the whole downstairs of the house to herself, a high-ceilinged kitchen (well, all the rooms were high-ceilinged), a rather formal dining room, a front parlor and maybe another living room type room, a back bedroom and an office kind of place where there was a big heavy ponderous Bust or Statue or something, maybe of Mrs. Huntington's husband, that would have brought a heap of coin at the pawnshop, if you and two or three others could have carried it out of there. Better still were the Meissien porcelains in the front parlor, dozens of them, collected by Mrs. Huntington and her husband in their early married years (were there children? We don't remember), hunters and guns and dogs and milkmaids and petticoats and such like, the kind of thing your better pawnshops (in Connecticut, say) would have been ecstatic about. In the dining room, hanging from a plate rail that ran around the room, there was some of Napoleon's china (we know, just about everybody has some) and best of all, up in the attic, there was Rudolph Valentino's deathbed (not the actual mattress, just the bed frame part). The authenticity of this claim was not something we every thought of challenging, as Mrs. Huntington was not a woman to be second-guessed. Was it her mother who put the ropes up, when her sight failed, so that she could move from room to room (were the ropes there, for us to see, or did Mrs. Huntington perhaps just tell us about the ropes). Once, Mrs. Huntington offered in passing that she knew the day of her death. On this one point, we did question her.
"Really?" we asked. Yes, really, she said, and, as if to reassure us, she told us that it was some time off, into the future.
Early on, maybe that first weekend we were in Fayetteville, maybe while we still living in a motel , before we found the room in the house on Mt. Nord, we heard about an Ice Cream Social that was being put on by the Washington County Historical Society at their headquarters house over on Dickson St., east of College (the Main Drag that runs through town, otherwise known as Highway 71.)
We had never been to an Ice Cream Social, but the idea seemed appropriate to our new home of Fayetteville, an exotic burg that felt more nineteenth century than twentieth. Perhaps we would meet some people. Perhaps we would meet some pretty girls. Who knew?
We don't remember meeting anyone at the Ice Cream Social, and certainly we don't remember meeting any pretty girls. The ice cream was plain vanilla, no doubt, perhaps with some fresh strawberries on it. Who we did meet were Richard and Pam, but were Richard and Pam even at the Ice Cream Social, or were they just out on their back porch (their house was on the corner of Washington and Dickson, right next to the grounds of the Historical Society) observing the proceedings? Richard and Pam's house was another Victorian pile, but one even more grandiose than Mrs. Huntington's not so much because of its size, but rather because of its paint job. Their house had been painted in dark shades, browns and maroons and blacks and burnt umber tones, not bright and garish, but somber, even morose. How we got to talking initially we don't remember, but soon enough we had been invited into their kitchen, where they may have been preparing some foodstuff. In memory, they seem to have been the kind of people who had a passion for foodstuffs, but one thing at a time, so there might be thirty ears of corn, or ten gallons of okra, or a new craze for a passel of leeks. Pam, if memory serves, was a health food and folk remedy afficiando, always riding one hobbyhorse or another. The controversial house colors and the fact that many people in town didn't like the house's paint job must have been an early topic of discussion. Pam and Richard were not local people. They had Rocked The Boat by painting their house some other colors than official Standard Victorian White (common to almost every other house in town), but they had done the research, and these were the Real Colors. They didn't care that they had ruffled some feathers. So much the better.
Sometimes we listen to people talking and our silence manifests itself as Assent, so they keep talking, and perhaps, to an extent, that was the case in our friendship with Richard and Pam. They both were highly intelligent people. They didn't work for a living, neither of them. There was inherited money, the source of which was a pencil factory in Chile, if our memory can be believed. Of course we shared a political persuasion: all the Republican/Fascist Oligarchs should be summarily castrated and their womenfolk impregnated on the altar of the Democratic Godhead. The Wal-Marts and the McDonalds should be bulldozed and the Owners and Their Lackeys chained to wheels, where they would live out their days, grinding sorghum into molasses. Of course, Richard and Pam were fanatics, and we were just an ordinary, high-minded, decent American, living out our days.
As the weeks and months in Fayetteville became yet another year, and yet another, we saw Richard and Pam fitfully, now and again. We would be driving by, and stop in.
Pam, we think we remember, had been trained as an architect, but we don't think she had any full-time employment. They had taken some of their money and invested it in some acreage down near Yellville (home of the famouse Turkey Drop. Pam and Richard are the only people we know who ever witnessed the Turkey Drop---it has now, we think, been put out of business by the ASPCA). On this acreage, Pam and Richard had planted walnut trees, and they had high hopes for the future windfall that would come their way, when the trees matured and they could sell the highly-valued wood.
We had heard about the acreage with the walnut trees, and then, on a subsequent visit, we found Pam, and Richard especially, bitterly disappointed---the fences on their acreage were not good, or the fences were breached in some manner, and the hogs from a neighboring farm came on to the land and uprooted all the walnut trees---their hopes were dashed.
How much of a financial setback this was we never knew. Around that time Richard, who had seemed to have no vocation, nor even an active hobby (maybe he had a law degree, or maybe we're dreaming that) applied to the graduate program in the English Department, and came back to school. We want to say that his area of specialization was Critical Theory, but that might not be right. And again, the memories are hazy, but it seems like the return to Academia was not successful---Richard asserted his theories too forcefully, and the powers that be were offended.
Did he drop out of the graduate program? We don't recall. How much did we see of Richard and Pam in those last years? We can't say. We remember a visit towards the end of our friendship when we looked at Richard and it seemed that he had put on a good bit of weight. "Oooooh, Richard," we said, "getting a tad pudgy, aren't we." or words to that effect (we flunked out of Diplomacy School).
On our next visit, maybe two or three months later, we found a much thinner, much heathier Richard. "Wow, Richard, you look great."
"Don't you remember what you said?" (We didn't) Since our admonishing declamation, Richard had been running five miles a day, religiously, every day, and had dropped perhaps thirty pounds. We were amazed that our casual aside could have caused such an alteration in his life. Was that the last time that we saw Richard? Sadly, we don't remember the last time we saw Richard.
Recently, I've been cleaning up my apartment, getting ready (i hope) for a new project that will mark a major turn (towards the light, I hope) in my life. I had a big closet that was packed, floor to ceiling with stuff that only I could want. I had to take it all out, boxes and boxes and boxes, to see what was in there. Some of it I took elsewhere, to get it out of the way (I live in a state of Utter Chaos, but I can only work in a state of Complete Germanic Order) and some of it I put back in the closet. In doing so, I found boxes of photographs that I had half-forgetten about. Naturally, when I come on a box of photographs that has been Half-Forgotten About, I have to look at all of them. This photo, that you're looking at, was in one of those boxes. It is an ordinary snapshot, but it has been made into a postcard (that yellow spec at the top is tape, that folds over onto the back and holds the stamp on, because the developing paper is slick and the stamp wouldn't stick to it.)
Richard took this photograph, and Richard made it into a postcard, and Richard gave it this caption. No doubt he used some kind of fancy camera, a Nikon or a Leica or something like that. He would have had the best. He would have done research.
The photograph was sent to my parents's house in Ohio---the date is late in May, 1979. It was summer vacation. Those years when I didn't teach summer school, I would take a big swing around the eastern part of the country, seeing relatives, stopping in North Carolina, checking out various art exhibits. I must have given him my parents' address and he must have thought it important that I get this card. even if I wasn't back home in Fayetteville.
Where May 1979 falls on the timeline of our friendship I can't say. What I can tell you is that sometime between May of 1979 and May of 1981, Richard sat down on the floor in a room in his house and took a shotgun and put the barrel against his chest and pulled the trigger.
Richard killled himself during the week (well, the exact details are hazy), say on a Wednesday, but the funeral wasn't until the following Monday, because the authorities were suspicious of the circumstances, and they took the body to Little Rock to test his fingers for powder burns. The funeral was at the Episcopal Church, where Richard and Pam were probably not regular attendees (maybe it was that that was his ancestral denomination). All I remember of the funeral was that I was disappointed that no one said anything about Richard---we just read this Pro Forma service out of the Handbook, like generic Funeral Service, and then when I complained about it afterwards, somebody explained that in the Episcopal Church, everybody gets the same treatment, high and low, and that it's like you're being taken back into the body of the Church, and then I saw it in a different way, and I liked it a lot better.
People looked at Pam a little funny after her husband's death, especially when they took the body off to be sure he really killed himself. I never went back over to see her, and, in fact, I only ever once laid eyes on her after Richard's death. It was in a bar somewhere, downtown, I think. She was by herself, and no doubt we exchanged pleasantries. The only thing I remember about that last meeting is the t-shirt she had on: it said, "Make A Widow Happy---Take Her Home Tonight."
When Richard sent me this postcard, I don't remember thinking anything about it. It was just Richard being Richard. I never saw it as a call for help. It never registered as an existential statement. Did Richard imagine that I was someone who might have intuited his pain, his depression? Was this a drowning man throwing me a life-line, and hoping that I would catch it? Did I ever even thank him for the card, or acknowledge that I got it?
I had some friends who owned a bookstore on Dickson Street and I went in there one day after Richard died. I picked up a Dickens novel from the used book section, some Dickens novel that I've never read and probably never will read, Hard Times or Bleak House or Our Mutual Friend, and I took it to the counter and I paid for it and it took it back to my apartment and put it on the shelf, and I never even looked at it (to the best of my recollection). It was only later that I opened the front cover and saw the name, Richard Dean, written inside. Pam had sold some of Richard's books to my friends who owned the bookstore and I had bought one, all unknowing.
And when I found this photograph again, and turned it over, and the memories came flooding back, I thought of the Ducati, and I didn't even know why I thought of the Ducati, the bike that I only ever rode once and then carried around aimlessly for a while and then abandoned. And with my story I give you a gift, to make of what you will, and I pray for absolution.
"...Volví a enamorarme del amor.
Sé que puede que suene raro.
La izquierda liberal destruyó
cada pedazo de nuestra juventud.
Dejándonos desnudos, en los huesos.
Dejándonos a todos llenos de agujeros.
¿Cuándo se torcieron las cosas?
¿A dónde fue el sentimiento?
¿Para qué colonizar la luna
cuando existe una clase distinta
de desesperación en cada hogar?
¿Adónde fue el sentimiento?"
(Manic Street Preachers)
C-FYIY (FN252)
Airbus A319
Air Canada Rouge
2025 Election - Liberal Campaign with Mark Carney
YUL / CYUL
1990 heralded a new decade with momentous change and significant events unfolding internationally and at home in Queensland. German reunification was achieved following the ‘fall’ of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in turn declared their independence from the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years of imprisonment in South Africa, and Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after more than 11 years in office. British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server and web browser, and the Hubble Space Telescope was launched from the space shuttle ‘Discovery’.
The Australian Labor Party’s federal election campaign was launched in Brisbane in early March before Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s government was returned later that month for a historic fourth term. Andrew Peacock resigned the leadership of the federal Liberal Party after the election defeat and was replaced by Dr John Hewson. Earlier in March, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) was founded. The inaugural Cape York Aboriginal Land Conference took place at Lockhart River in September, leading to the formation of the Cape York Land Council.
The nation’s first women Premiers were sworn into office this year, firstly Western Australia’s Carmen Lawrence in February followed by Victoria’s Joan Kirner in August. On the day of Kirner’s swearing in, the Hawke government announced Australia would join the international naval blockade of Iraq in the Persian Gulf. A specially convened ALP national conference in September endorsed the privatisation of Qantas and other assets, ahead of deregulation of the domestic aviation market in November. Near that month’s end, Treasurer Paul Keating declared Australia was enduring “the recession we had to have”.
The 90s was a decade of building infrastructure that connected the state, the Internet changed how we worked, and Agro was a prime-time TV star. We selected highlights from thousands of images captured by Transport and Main Roads, documenting the plans, programs, and growth of Queensland throughout the decade.
The Transport and Main Roads Visual Resource Library collection contains over 200,000 photographs and other resources from the 1920’s to 2005 from the many and varied road, transport and maritime departments over that time. It is mostly the work of the Photographic Branch and Graphic Reproduction Services Unit between the 1930s and the 1990s. Photographers from the 1990s Maureen O'Grady, Ian Williams, Steven Foss, Lewis Young, Yme Yullener, Ian Wilson, Ray Burgess and Debbie Grant recorded these works and events of the Department. Subjects covered include road construction projects, environmental science, road fittings, public transport and road users, people at work, community engagement, official openings, sod turnings, new structures (bridges, dams and Queensland University), awards, department initiatives, safety campaigns, exhibitions and displays.
Find this record in the Queensland State Archives Catalogue:
The Palm Beach County Democratic Professional Council Luncheon, featuring Congressman Robert Wexler who discussed his new book "Fire Breathing Liberal", the current state of affairs and the Barack Obama campaign for President of the United States.
A shitty picture with a great message. I vote... I bitch... I am a Proud American asshole like most of us.
This attractive terracotta building was completed in 1891 as the Leeds and County Liberal Club to the designs of local architects Chorley and Connon. Previously known as Quebec House, it was owned in the 1970s by Norwich Union and later became known as National Employers House. Since 2001 the building has been Quebecs, a boutique hotel of 45 rooms. It is listed Grade II.
Liberale da Verona, Trionfo d'Amore, 1450 -
Phyllis et Aristote - Phyllis and Aristotle
Verona Museo di Castelvecchio
Original photo by courtesy of Bersnev Pavel
Model - Brogen.
I meant to upload this the other day, but I forgot.
Downtown Harrisonburg / random faucet we found on a street.
Ask me questions here: www.formspring.me/breeannaowsley
© Breeanna Owsley
Headshot of Rachel Maddow. A radio host on the liberal station, Air America Radio. Openly gay and a Rhodes scholar, her cheeky and articulate delivery is making her a rising star for the APF left.
SMITH, GOLDWIN, writer, journalist, and controversialist; b. 13 Aug. 1823 in Reading, England, son of Richard Pritchard Smith, an Oxford-educated physician and railway promoter and director, and Elizabeth Breton, and the only one of their seven children to survive to adulthood; d. 7 June 1910 in Toronto.
After attending a private school and Eton College, Goldwin Smith in 1841 went to Christ Church and then in 1842 to Magdalen College, both at Oxford. He was awarded a first class in literae humaniores and obtained a ba in 1845 and an ma in 1848. He also carried off a series of prizes in classical studies, including one for a Latin essay on the position of women in ancient Greece. He both translated and wrote Latin verse, interests he would retain throughout his life. His education was intended as a preparation for the law and in 1842 his name had been entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He was called to the bar in 1850 but he never pursued a legal career.
When Smith was at Oxford the university was racked with religious controversy which focused on John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement. Smith apparently admired Newman’s style but he was repelled by the movement’s ritualistic tendencies and its affinities with Roman Catholicism. Although he was a member of the Church of England, as was required of all Oxford students at the time, his mother’s Huguenot background may have contributed to his developing religious liberalism and dislike of clericalism. He would remain interested in religious issues until the end of his life, but his knowledge of theology was superficial. In addition, his understanding of the scientific controversies that were beginning to arise in pre-Darwinian Oxford was modest and was probably gained at the geological lectures of William Buckland, who upheld William Paley’s view that God’s existence was demonstrated by design in nature. Although Smith would come to accept a version of evolution and to realize, as he wrote in 1883, that it had “wrought a great revolution,” he never fully understood Charles Darwin’s hypothesis.
Smith spent the late 1840s in London and in travels on the Continent with Oxford friends. His growing interest in liberal reforms, especially in reducing the privileged status of the Church of England, was stimulated by events and personalities at home and abroad, though he quickly joined the side of authority during the Chartist disturbances in 1848. His first reformist thrusts were directed at Oxford. A fellow in civil law at University College from 1846, he joined in a demand for a reduction in clerical control over the university. Partly as a result of the agitation, which included letters from Smith to the Times of London in 1850, a royal commission, with Smith as assistant secretary, was struck in that year to investigate the university. The commission reported in 1852 and the Oxford University Act two years later relaxed but did not abolish religious tests.
During his years with the royal commission Smith widened his contacts in the political and intellectual world and turned to journalism, which was to be his permanent vocation. In 1850 he began contributing to the Morning Chronicle and in 1855 to the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, both published in London, reviewing poetry and advocating university reform. In 1858 he was made a member of a new royal commission, chaired by the Duke of Newcastle, to examine Britain’s educational system, and he wrote part of the report which appeared in 1862. Meanwhile, also in 1858, the Conservative government of Lord Derby appointed Smith regius professor of modern history at Oxford. This post carried such prestige that Smith, who was only 35, might have been expected to settle into it for the rest of his life. In 1861 he indicated his intention to withdraw from active journalism and devote himself to his new profession as an historian. He apparently planned to write some serious scholarly works, but this goal proved incompatible with his intense interest in contemporary affairs. Lack of detachment was the most prominent characteristic of Smith’s historical writing. He always knew which side was right. For him history was not an arid, scientific search for objective accuracy. “History,” he argued, “without moral philosophy, is a mere string of facts; and moral philosophy, without history, is apt to become a dream.”
Smith used his chair largely to engage in controversies over political and religious questions. Although he was undoubtedly a stimulating and devoted lecturer and tutor, he showed no interest in original research and published nothing of scholarly merit. His later historical publications and literary biographies, including histories of the United States and the United Kingdom and studies on William Cowper and Jane Austen, were little more than a reworking of secondary sources usually spiced up with a dose of his principles and prejudices. He was a man of letters, not a research scholar, and he also published travel books and Latin and Greek authors in translation. His first book was typical. Of his five Lectures on modern history (1861), three dealt with religious controversies related to rationalism and agnosticism, another with the idea of progress, and only one with a historical topic, the founding of the American colonies. Though denying that history was a science, Smith was quite prepared to draw moral laws from his reading of the past. In the first place, he considered “the laws of the production and distribution of wealth . . . the most beautiful and wonderful of the natural laws of God. . . . To buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market, the supposed concentration of economical selfishness, is simply to fulfil the commands of the Creator.” These laws, discovered by Adam Smith, whom he viewed as a prophet, expressed a tenet of political economy from which he would never deviate: a market economy guided by the “hidden hand” was divinely sanctioned and if faithfully observed would lead to a just social order. Secondly, Smith’s reading of history convinced him that religion provided the cement holding the social order in place. “Religion,” he warned those who contended that progress had made Christianity obsolete, “is the very core, centre, and vital support of our social and political organization; so that without a religion the civil tie would be loosened, personal would completely prevail over public motives, selfish ambition and cupidity would break loose in all directions, and society and the body politic would be in danger of dissolution.”
To these lessons of history Smith added a third which would serve as a permanent guide to his judgements on the way of the world, a conviction that “colonial emancipation” should take place as rapidly as possible because it was – except for India and Ireland – inevitable. This conclusion appeared in a series of articles published in the London Daily News in 1862–63 and then in pamphlet form as The empire in 1863. There he presented a distillation of the opinions of his friends John Bright, Richard Cobden, and others of the so-called Manchester school who believed that Britain’s economic power, under free trade, was so great that the formal, political empire could be disbanded without economic loss. The lesson of the American revolution, for Smith a disaster which had divided the Anglo-Saxon people, was simply that colonies should be allowed to grow naturally into nations. Once they were freed of the yoke of dependency, “something in the nature of a great Anglo-Saxon federation may, in substance if not form, spontaneously arise out of affinity and mutual affection.” Though condemned by the Times and attacked by Benjamin Disraeli as one of the “prigs and pedants” who should make way for statesmen, Smith clung tenaciously to his anti-imperial faith.
A drastic alteration in Smith’s personal circumstances led to his departure from England in 1868. He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was briefly absent, his father took his own life. Doubtless blaming himself for the tragedy – and now without an Oxford appointment – he decided to travel to North America, which he had previously visited in 1864, when Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. Smith was attracted by the determination of its founder, Ezra Cornell, to organize a university that was non-sectarian and open to all classes of society, though he had no sympathy for its commitment to coeducation. He remained at Cornell on a full-time basis for only two years but his connection with the university, which in 1906 named a building after him, continued for life. Whether it was the climate or the presence of women, admitted in 1869, that caused Smith to leave, he decided in 1871 to move to Toronto and to be near some relatives. Four years later that move became permanent as a consequence of his marriage in Toronto on 3 Sept. 1875 to William Henry Boulton*’s widow, Harriet Elizabeth Mann, née Dixon, who was two years his junior, an American by birth, and possessor of a significant fortune which included the estate named the Grange. Smith settled into a late-blooming marital bliss and the Grange’s affluent surroundings with ease: “a union for the afternoon and evening of life,” he told his American friend Charles Eliot Norton. He was, as he remarked after Harriet died in 1909, “finally bound to Canada by the happiest event of my life.”
The marriage, a personal healing of the unfortunate breach of 1776, was an extremely successful one. After years of transiency and a life seemingly limited to male friendships, Smith had found a perfect mate. His new wife was socially sophisticated and apparently utterly devoted to her austere husband who, in contrast to her first, spent his waking hours in reading, writing, and good talk. His circle of friends and visitors, the intellectual élite of the English-speaking world, joined local celebrities and politicians in the drawing-room of the Grange. “Here one is suddenly set down in an old English house,” Albert Venn Dicey wrote, “surrounded by grounds, with old four-post beds, old servants, all English, and English hosts . . . an English mansion in some English county.” For the remaining 35 years of his life, Smith lived in Canada, but he was never quite of it. From his “English mansion,” this talented and acerbic political and literary critic would hurl his jeremiads at a world that irritatingly deviated from the Manchester liberal faith in which he was steeped.
The move to Canada and marriage and domestic tranquillity did nothing to diminish Smith’s intellectual energy or his eagerness to improve public morality. Indeed, what he viewed as the underdeveloped, overly partisan state of Canadian public discussion spurred him on to greater effort. No sooner had he arrived in Toronto than he began reviewing for the Globe, but he quickly fell out with George Brown*, the paper’s proprietor, whose dogmatic righteousness brooked no competition. Smith soon turned to a series of attempts to establish independent organs, though independence usually meant agreement with Smith. First, he assisted Graeme Mercer Adam* in the founding of the Canadian Monthly and National Review (Toronto), where in February 1872 he adopted the nom de plume that would become his most characteristic signature, A Bystander. It was intended to imply that he was an outsider and therefore detached and analytical. In fact, it was soon obvious enough to readers that the author was a committed, often fierce, partisan, even if somewhat of an outsider. When the supporters of the Canada First movement launched the Nation in Toronto in 1874, Smith signed on as one of the principal contributors, both financially and as a writer. Then, in April 1876, he participated in a more ambitious project, the establishment, with John Ross Robertson* as publisher, of the Evening Telegram, a daily to compete with Brown’s Globe. It soon developed Conservative sympathies and Smith departed.
In June 1878 Smith returned to Toronto following an 18-month sojourn with Harriet in England more convinced than ever that the country needed the benefit of his intellectual guidance. Within a year he opened his own one-man show, the Bystander, subtitled “A monthly review of current events, Canadian and general.” The performance was a breathtaking one. For three years Smith’s outpourings filled its pages with brilliant, opinionated comment on virtually every political, cultural, and intellectual development in Europe and North America. He was determined to broaden the mental horizons of Canadians and by 1880 was pleased to admit that “the great questions of religious philosophy are beginning to engage a good many Canadian minds.” He expounded Adam Smith’s political economy, denounced women’s suffrage as a threat to the family, warned of the dangers of Herbert Spencer’s social Darwinism, castigated Bismarck, expatiated on the Eastern Question, and sniped at Disraeli. He even found space, when Sarah Bernhardt visited Canada in 1881, to agree with Bishop Édouard-Charles Fabre* and the Presbyterian (Montreal) in condemning her for her unsanctified liaisons. The Bystander’s suspicious eye frequently detected clerical power in Quebec and Ireland, and Jewish control over the European press. When Smith decided to give his active pen a rest in June 1881, he had established himself as a vigorous intellectual voice in Canada. A second series of the Bystander, this time published quarterly from January to October 1883, began after his return from another lengthy stay in England. The third and final series appeared between October 1889 and September 1890. In the interim he lent his support to another new journal, the Week, edited by Charles George Douglas Roberts*, which began publication in December 1883. Smith’s final venture in Canadian journalism came in 1896 when he acquired a controlling interest in the faltering Canada Farmers’ Sun (Toronto), a paper which, under George Weston Wrigley, had actively supported such radical causes as the political insurgency of the Patrons of Industry. The Bystander promptly put the paper back on orthodox rails by calling for free trade, retrenchment, and opposition to Canadian participation in the South African War. All of this activity still left time for a flood of articles in the international press: the Fortnightly Review, the Contemporary Review, and the Nineteenth Century, a Monthly Review in London, the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and the Sun, the Nation, and the Forum in New York. Indeed, he published in any daily or monthly that would print his articles, reviews, and letters. His output was prodigious, the writing crisp and often epigrammatic.
Smith’s activities were not confined to intellectual labour. A public-spirited person, he devoted both money and energy to a variety of causes. Civic affairs especially concerned him for he believed that local governments should take greater responsibility for the welfare of citizens than was the case in Toronto. He chaired a citizens’ reform committee, advocated the commission system for city government, fought for the preservation and extension of parks for public recreation, campaigned for Sunday streetcars, and opposed free public lending libraries. (“A novel library,” he told Andrew Carnegie, “is to women mentally pretty much what the saloon is physically to men.”) He was distressed by problems of urban unemployment and poverty, and contributed generously to such charities and benevolent societies as the Associated City Charities of Toronto, which he founded, and the St Vincent de Paul Society. He also supported the building of a synagogue. For two decades he urged the appointment of a city welfare officer to supervise grants to social agencies, a cause that succeeded in 1893 only after Smith agreed to pay the officer’s salary for the first two years. Underlying these and other humanitarian endeavours was a philosophy of noblesse oblige, the Christian duty of the fortunate towards their weaker brethren. He feared that the failure of Christian voluntary charity would increase the popularity of those who advocated radical social programs. “Care for their own safety, then, as well as higher considerations, counsels the natural leaders of society to be at the post of duty,” Smith told a conference of the combined charities of Toronto in May 1889.
Education was another concern which Smith brought with him to Canada. In 1874 he was elected by Ontario teachers to represent them on the Council of Public Instruction and he was subsequently chosen president of the Ontario Teachers’ Association. But once again, university reform captured his deepest interest, and as in so many things, he advocated reforms that revealed his Oxford connections. Almost from the time of his arrival he proposed the federation of Ontario’s scattered universities on an Oxford model. He followed progress towards that federation in the 1880s and 1890s, regularly participating in University of Toronto functions and advocating university autonomy. In 1905 he accepted membership on, but not the chair of, a royal commission on the University of Toronto. One outcome was a new act in 1906 establishing a board of governors for the university, to which Smith was appointed. Among the many honorary degrees which Smith received from the great universities of the English-speaking world he must have particularly savoured the one conferred on him in 1902 by the University of Toronto; seven years earlier he had withdrawn his name from nomination for a degree in the face of the furious opposition of George Taylor Denison* and other imperial federationists who protested against the granting of the degree to a “traitor.”
For all of his breadth of knowledge and interest, Smith’s overriding concern was the contemporary world. His reputation rests on that collection of ideas which he regularly, and with remarkable consistency, applied to the issues of his time. Though he has most often been categorized as a “Victorian liberal,” it is not his liberal principles but rather his faith in the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilization that is his most striking trait. That faith not only frequently contradicted his liberalism, but also, in its application to Canada, limited his ability to understand and sympathize with the aspirations of the people among whom he had chosen to take up residence.
Smith’s liberalism expressed itself most fulsomely in his commitment to free market economics, the secularization of public life, and opposition to empire. Though a firm believer in individualism and parliamentary government, Smith showed no special interest in civil liberties, except in his criticism of clericalism, and he favoured neither universal manhood nor women’s suffrage. He distrusted democracy and pronounced the French revolution (an event admired by most liberals) “of all the events in history, the most calamitous.” Inequality, he believed, was mankind’s permanent condition. While he repeatedly professed sympathy for labour and supported trade unions, he abhorred strikes and denounced as “chimeras” those reforms – single tax, currency inflation, public ownership, the regulation of hours of work – which labour radicals began to advocate in the late 19th century; progress he thought possible, but “there is no leaping into the millennium.” Although limited government intervention in the economy might sometimes be justified (he reluctantly supported Sir John A. Macdonald*’s arguments for a National Policy), collectivism and socialism were anathema He opposed income tax, old-age pensions, and even publicly financed education. In his introduction to Essays on questions of the day (1893), he summed up his social philosophy by confessing that “the opinions of the present writer are those of a Liberal of the old school as yet unconverted to State Socialism, who looks for further improvement not to an increase of the authority of government, but to the same agencies, moral, intellectual, and economical, which have brought us thus far, and one of which, science, is now operating with immensely increased power.” Clearly, it was not just “state socialism” that had failed to convert the master of the Grange; the new social liberalism of Thomas Hill Green and Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse was equally heretical to him. Indeed, by the late Victorian era one of Smith’s own adages could reasonably be applied to its author: “There is no reactionary,” the Bystander informed the readers of the Week in 1884, “like the exhausted Reformer.”
Had Smith’s social philosophy become threadbare merely as a result of the passage of time, then he might none the less rank as a significant liberal, if only of the “old school.” But the limits of his liberalism are even more evident when placed in the context of his nationalism – his belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority. In common with most 19th-century political thinkers, especially liberals, Smith believed that “nations” were “an ordinance of nature, and a natural bond.” Like John Stuart Mill, and in contrast to Lord Acton, he defined a nation in terms of the concept of cultural homogeneity. And although he opposed imperialism, he was nevertheless utterly at one with those imperialists who believed that the Anglo-Saxon cultural community, centred in Great Britain with branches around the world, was a superior civilization. Its political institutions, economic system, morality, and culture were all signs of its primacy in a world of diverse nations. In his first, and most famous, critique of the empire, he gave voice to his own form of nationalism, one which verged on cultural imperialism. “I am no more against Colonies than I am against the solar system,” he wrote in The empire. “I am against dependencies, when nations are fit to be independent. If Canada were made an independent nation she would still be a Colony of England, and England would still be her Mother Country in the full sense in which those names have been given to the most famous examples of Colonization in history. Our race and language, our laws and liberties, will be hers.”
For Smith the great failure, even tragedy, of Anglo-Saxon history was the American revolution. “Before their unhappy schism they were one people,” and the healing of that schism through the “moral, diplomatic and commercial union of the whole English-speaking race throughout the world” became the goal to which all else was secondary. He shared that goal with those Canadians who advocated imperial federation – Denison, George Monro Grant, George Robert Parkin* – but because his chosen route began with the annexation of Canada to the United States he found himself in permanent head-to-head combat with those same men.
Smith’s convictions about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon values are most strikingly illustrated in his attitude towards “lesser breeds without the Law.” His advocacy of colonial freedom was limited to those colonies which had English majorities. India, a conquered territory, was exempt; for Britain to relinquish what he called this “splendid curse” would be to abdicate its responsibility and leave the subcontinent to certain anarchy. If India troubled Smith, Ireland infuriated him. He mistrusted Roman Catholicism everywhere; in Ireland he despised it. As an ethnic group the Irish were an “amiable but thriftless, uncommercial, saint-worshipping, priest-ridden race.” He fought Home Rule as though his very life depended upon its defeat. “Statesmen might as well provide the Irish people with Canadian snowshoes,” he declaimed sarcastically, “as extend to them the Canadian Constitution.” His one-time associate William Ewart Gladstone was denounced as “an unspeakable old man” when he took up the Irish cause.
Other non-Anglo-Saxon groups fared little better. Though Smith occasionally expressed sympathy for “the wild-stocks of humanity” – the people of Africa, for example – he saw no reason to lament the oppressed state of the native North American. The doomed state of the native people was not the fault of the British who “had always treated [them] with humanity and justice”; with their disappearance, “little will be lost by humanity,” he concluded callously.
For the Jewish people, Smith reserved a special place in his catalogue of “undesirables.” The critical problem with the Jews was what Smith saw as their stubborn unwillingness to assimilate, to give up their religious beliefs and cultural practices, to become “civilized.” He regularly stereotyped them as “tribal,” “usurious,” “plutopolitans,” incapable of loyalty to their country of residence. The Talmud, the Bystander affirmed, “is a code of casuistical legalism . . . of all reactionary productions the most debased, arid, and wretched.” If the Jews would not assimilate they should be returned to their homeland. In a sentence that reeked with racist arrogance he declared that “two greater calamities perhaps have never befallen mankind than the transportation of the negro and the dispersion of the Jews.” Smith’s extreme ethnocentricity in the case of the Jewish people, as Gerald Tulchinsky has shown, can only be described as anti-Semitism.
Smith’s belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority and the importance that he attached to the reunification of the “race” provided him with both his questions and his answers when he analysed “Canada and the Canadian question.” On his arrival in Toronto Smith had discovered a nascent nationalist movement. He threw his support behind this amorphous group of young men whose platform was set out in William Alexander Foster*’s pamphlet Canada First; or, our new nationality: an address (Toronto, 1871), which called for the promotion of a national sentiment and the clarification of Canada’s status in the empire as well as for a number of political reforms. While Smith believed that the movement would promote Canadian independence, others favoured some form of equal partnership with the other members of the empire. For a time the movement attracted the sympathy of the prominent Liberal party intellectual Edward Blake*, but by the mid 1870s it had disintegrated, and its organ, the Nation, disappeared in 1876. This brief experience apparently convinced Smith that Canada could never become a genuine nation and that its destiny lay in union with the United States. In 1877 he set out these conclusions in an article for the Fortnightly Review and then in the Canadian Monthly, conclusions which he would repeat over the remainder of his life and which found their most famous expression in his Canada and the Canadian question in 1891. At the heart of his case was the claim that Canada could not be a nation because it lacked cultural homogeneity. The principal obstacle to nationhood was Quebec, composed as it was of an “unprogressive, religious, submissive, courteous, and, though poor, not unhappy people. . . . They are governed by the priest, with the occasional assistance of the notary. . . . The French-Canadians . . . retain their exclusive national character.” Confederation had failed to meld the competing “races” and regions into a single community and only political corruption, bribes to the regions, and the vested interests which benefited from the protective tariff kept this artificial country from collapsing. “Sectionalism,” he had written in 1878, “still reigns in everything, from the composition of a Cabinet down to that of a Wimbledon Rifle team.” In Smith’s mind the natural geographical and economic forces of North America worked against the unnatural political and sentimental opinions of Canadians. Like the United States, Canada was a North American nation and once this fact was recognized the two communities would achieve their destiny in unity. “The more one sees of society in the New World, the more convinced one is that its structure essentially differs from that of society in the Old World, and that the feudal element has been eliminated completely and forever.” Everything pointed towards “an equal and honorable alliance like that of Scotland and England” between Canada and her southern neighbour, “Canadian nationality being a lost cause.”
Over the years Smith’s conviction about Canada’s destiny intensified, his observation of French Canada hardening his hostility to that community. By 1891 he was willing to state emphatically that one of the principal benefits of union with the United States would be the final solution of the French Canadian problem. “Either the conquest of Quebec was utterly fatuous or it is to be desired that the American Continent should belong to the English tongue and to Anglo-Saxon civilisation.” Though the opposition of French Canadians to the South African War moderated these sentiments somewhat – Smith even considered joining forces with Henri Bourassa* in an anti-imperialist movement – he continued to fear, as he told Bourassa in 1905, “the connexion of your national aspirations with those of an ambitious and aggressive priesthood.” His ideal of cultural homogeneity left no room for a political nationality based on cultural diversity, the cornerstone of confederation. For him the call of race was irresistible: “In blood and character, language, religion, institutions, laws and interests, the two portions of the Anglo-Saxon race on this continent are one people.”
In all of his pronouncements on politics, economics, and Canada’s destiny, Smith seemed a self-confident, even dogmatic, pundit. But underneath that confidence was a profoundly uneasy man. The unease arose not only from Smith’s personal religious uncertainty but even more from his anxiety about the future of society in an age of religious scepticism. Though Smith does not seem to have experienced that typical Victorian “crisis of faith,” Darwinism and the higher criticism of the Bible certainly left him with little more than a thin deism and a vague humanism founded on Christian ethics. Throughout his life he struggled with religious questions, and his inconclusive answers were recorded in his Guesses at the riddle of existence (1897). But it was always to the social implications of the decline of faith that he returned. In an essay entitled “The prospect of a moral interregnum,” published in 1879, he observed: “That which prevails as Agnosticism among philosophers and the highly educated prevails as secularism among mechanics, and in that form is likely soon to breed mutinous questionings about the present social order among those who get the poorer share, and who can no longer be appeased by promises of compensation in another world.” For 30 years he repeated this gloomy theme, revealing his forebodings about the decline and fall of practically everything he accepted as eternal verities. Everywhere “prophets of unrest” loomed – Karl Marx, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, assorted socialists and anarchists, and the leaders of “the revolt of women” – questioning the established order, no longer satisfied by the opiate of religion. His increasingly shrill polemics signified his alienation from a world that had passed him by. He was simply too set in his ways to admit, as he was urged to do by Alphonse Desjardins*, the leader of the Quebec cooperative movement, “that improvements can be got by recognizing that the old liberal school of Political Economy has not discovered everything.”
Harriet Smith died at the Grange on 9 Sept. 1909. The following March the old man slipped and broke his thigh. He died on 7 June 1910 and was buried in St James cemetery. The Grange, which remained his wife’s property, was willed by her to the city of Toronto to serve as a public art gallery. The £20,000 Smith had inherited from his father had grown to more than $830,000 by the time of his death. He left his excellent library to the University of Toronto. Most of his fortune and his private papers went to Cornell University as a mark, Smith’s will revealingly declared, of his “attachment as an Englishman to the union of the two branches of our race on this continent with each other, and with their common mother.”
This attractive terracotta building was completed in 1891 as the Leeds and County Liberal Club to the designs of local architects Chorley and Connon. Previously known as Quebec House, it was owned in the 1970s by Norwich Union and later became known as National Employers House. Since 2001 the building has been Quebecs, a boutique hotel of 45 rooms. It is listed Grade II.
I live in the electorate of Bass. Someone, quite appropriately, thought it would look better as 'ASS' on this campaign truck for the local Liberal candidate.
Basil Rakoczi
1908 - 1979
JEUNE AVEUGLE AVEC CHOUETTE
signed l.l.: Rakoczi; also numbered, signed, dated '56 and titled on the reverse
oil on canvas
100 by 60cm., 39¼ by 23½in.
Basil Rakoczi and the White Stag Group made a significant contribution to Irish art when they arrived in Dublin in 1940, bringing a radical avant-garde outlook unknown to the artistic landscape of Ireland at that time. The importance of their arrival had been largely overlooked in Irish art history until the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition dedicated to the White Stag Group in 2005.
The defining feature of the group was, as S. B. Kennedy wrote, their ‘combined interest in the artistic avant-garde with an enthusiasm for the newly emerging discipline of psychotherapy’ (IMMA, White Stag Group exh. cat., 2005, p.13). Rakoczi, of Hungarian-Irish parentage and born in London, moved to Ireland at the outbreak of World War II with like-minded friends Herbrand Ingouville-Williams and Kenneth Hall. There the trio formed the White Stag Group to promote the advancement of subjectivity in psychological analysis and art. Their first exhibition was held at Rakoczi’s flat at 34 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin to critical success, and they continued to exhibit throughout the war years with various artists joining them, notably Mainie Jellett. Their most influential exhibition was their Exhibition of Subjective Art in 1944, for which the leading English art critic Herbert Read wrote the catalogue introduction, praising the ‘fresh vigour’ of the works, which he saw as being part of ‘the main stream of European culture’. Included in the show was Patrick Scott who had just emerged on the artistic scene, described by Rakoczi as, ‘the most original, delightful and best artists here in Ireland’ (Rakoczi, Journal, updated entry, 1943) and Hall as, ‘by far the most gifted painter I have ever known’ (Hall to Lucy Wertheim, letter 11 January 1944).
The group disbanded in 1945, following the end of the War and the untimely death of Ingouville-Williams from illness and Hall's suicide the following year. However during their short period in Ireland, they swiftly ingratiated themselves in the Dublin community and their lasting impact was to bring a fresh perspective to a conservative art world. They ‘paved the way for a broader consensus in Irish painting’ and a more liberal artistic atmosphere in the 1950s and 60s under which a new generation of artists could flourish (S.B. Kennedy, op. cit., p.43).
In the present work, the strong pyschological element - the blind man and the owl - and the abstract forms clearly demonstrate Rakoczi's European heritage, absorption of post-war expressionism and his pervading interest in creative psychology.