A boyish artist gazes longingly at the regal woman whose portrait he is painting. The young artist is Alexander the Great's court painter, Apelles, whom ancient writers considered the greatest artist of their time. According to Pliny's Natural History of 77 A.D., Alexander commissioned Apelles to paint a portrait of his favorite concubine, Campaspe. The story illustrates art's transformative powers: Apelles fell in love with his sitter as he captured her beauty on canvas. Alexander so esteemed his painter that he presented Campaspe to Apelles as a reward for the portrait.

 

The tale of Alexander and Apelles, a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters, celebrates the power and nobility of painting. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Venice, 1696 - Madrid, 1770) painted this episode at least three times. For this, the third rendering, he adopted a classic style in which antique architectural elements and relief sculptures evoke a sumptuous palace setting. The background provides a focal area for the gaze of Alexander the Great, who appears handsome and self-confident, yet unaware of the charged glances shared by Apelles and Campaspe.

 

[Oil on canvas, 16.55 x 21.25 inches]

 

gandalfsgallery.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/giovanni-battista-...

just a wrap

is it not?

freeform

freestyle

for divas

divos

self-confident stargods

but,

of course

stargods are always

self- aware

& shining their light on

the core

of divine energy

The construction St. Lorenz started around 1250, replacing a smaller Romanesque church. At the same time St. Sebaldus, another great church in Nuremberg was under construction - only 300 meters east. That probably caused a kind of rivalry.

 

Nuremberg was a "Free Imperial City". The "Golden Bull" (1356) named Nuremberg as the city where newly elected kings of Germany must hold their first Imperial Diet, making Nuremberg one of the three highest cities of the Empire.

 

So it is no surprise, that St. Lorenz, a church that was (financially) cared of by the city council and by wealthy citizens, was a kind of very prestigious object for the city.

 

St. Lorenz was completed ~ 1390, but - following St. Sebaldus - already a decade later alterations started. The side aisles got demolished and were replaced by wider ones. The erection of the Gothic hall-chancel was done 1439 - 1477.

 

Since 1525 St. Lorenz is a (Evangelical) Lutheran parish church. Only 8 years after Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg. Though Lutheran that early St. Lorenz never suffered from an iconoclast, maybe the now Lutheran citizens respected, what their ancestors had created here (by funding!).

 

The about 20 metres high tabernacle is a masterpiece, created by Adam Kraft (and his studio) 1493 - 1496. Donor was Hans IV. Imhoff, a wealthy, prominent merchant and city councilman. The contract between Hans IV. Imhoff and Adam Kraft is in the archives of the "Germanisches Nationalmuseum" in Nuremberg. Imhoff paid more than 77 guldens, the doors were another 20.

 

Three life size figures support the structure. In the center is a self portrait of Adam Kraft. He must have been a very self confident artist. The other figures may depict two of Kraft´s assistants.

  

lorenzkirche.de/

 

East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin / VEB Bild und Heimat Reichenbach, no. 5/F/73, 1973. Retail price: 0,20 M. Photo: Uhlenhut.

 

German actress Heidemarie Wenzel (1945) became known in DEFA films of the early 1970s, such as Zeit der Störche/Time of the storks (1971) and Nemuritorii (1974).

 

Heidemarie Wenzel was born in 1945 in Berlin, Germany. During her youth, she played in the children's theatre and in the movement choir of the Deutschen Staatsoper (German State Opera). From 1963 to 1966 she studied at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch (Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Berlin. After graduation she got her first engagements in Rostock and Greifswald. Very soon she began to work as a freelance actress in film and on television. Her first major role was as Fanny in the film adaptation of Johannes R. Becher's novel Abschied/Farewell (Egon Günther, 1968), starring Rolf Ludwig and Jan Spitzer. The film was heavily criticised by officials in the GDR because of the unusual narrative style. Wenzel had her breakthrough in the role of the self-confident teacher Susanne in Zeit der Störche/Time of the storks (Siegfried Kühn, 1971), opposite Winfried Glatzeder. In Die Taube auf dem Dach/The Dove on the Roof (Iris Gusner, 1973), she was able to show her acting talent properly for the first time, however, the film was banned even before its premiere. The pretty, tall, slender and blonde actress was both open-minded and intelligent as well as introverted. She was often cast for contemporary roles as in Die Legende von Paul und Paula/The Legend of Paul und Paula (Heiner Carow, 1973), starring Angelica Domröse and Winfried Glatzeder. This was the most succesful film of the DEFA in its history.

 

Until the mid-1970s, Heidemarie Wenzel played several more major roles, but then she got less and less good offers, as she was considered politically unreliable. In 1986 she made an exit request and was not occupied in the following years. Therefore, she had to work as an office assistant at the church. In 1988 she was expatriated to the Federal Republic (West-Germany). From 1991, she became a star in both West and East Germany in the TV series Unsere Hagenbecks/Our Hagenbecks (1991-1994) about a family who runs a zoo in Hamburg. When her character died in an accident, it came to public protests. In the 1990s Wenzel also appeared more often in the theatre. Her later series include the popular hospital soap In aller Freundschaft/In all Friendliness (1998) with Rolf Becker. The series follows the staff of the fictional Sachsenklinik hospital in the city of Leipzig. Wenzel lives in Berlin-Tempelhof. She has a son and a daughter. In her first marriage Wenzel was married to the director Kurt Veth, which is why she was also credited at times as Heidemarie Wenzel-Veth. Since 1977, she is married to the director and author Helmut Nitzschke.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.

West-German postcard by Ufa, no. FK 2177. Photo: Joe Niczky / Ufa.

 

Attractive Ruth Niehaus (1925–1994) was a German stage and film actress, who often played the femme fatale or 'the other woman’. She was dubbed the ‘Rita Hayworth of the German film of the 1950s’ and was regarded as a ‘Fräuleinwunder’.

 

Ruth Hildegard Rosemarie Niehaus was born in 1925 in Krefeld, Germany. Her parents were Elisabeth Niehaus, born Nettesheim, and the engineer Fritz Niehaus. Her brother was the Munich surgeon Helmut Niehaus. After completing her high school diploma in Dusseldorf, she attended the drama school there under Peter Esser. Her stage career began at the Stadttheater Krefeld in 1947-1948, followed by engagements at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg (1948-1949), at the Oldenburgische Staatstheater (1949-1950) and in Düsseldorf under the direction of Gustav Gründgebns (1952-1954). She played both in classical and modern theatre. The press called Niehaus a ‘Fräuleinwunder’ a term for young, attractive, modern, self-confident and desirable women of post-war Germany. In 1950 Ruth Niehaus reputedly spurned an offer of marriage from Orson Welles, and with it the chance to work in Hollywood. She did marry Ivar Lissner, a Jewish German journalist and best-selling author, who had been a spy with the German Abwehr during World War II. Niehaus made her film debut in the West-German comedy Das Haus in Montevideo/The House in Montevideo (1951). It was directed by Curt Goetz and Valérie von Martens who also played the leads, while Niehaus played their daughter. The film is an adaptation of Goetz's 1945 comic play of the same name and Goetz and von Martens had already frequently played their parts on stage. Niehaus next played a supporting part in Heidelberger Romanze/A Heidelberg Romance (Paul Verhoeven, 1951) starring Liselotte Pulver, O.W. Fischer and Gardy Granass. She then had the lead in the Heimatfilm Rosen blühen auf dem Heidegrab/Roses Bloom on the Moorland (Hans H. König, 1952). Wikipedia: “This unusually gloomy Heimatfilm, which clearly stood out from the ‘Kinokonfektion’ of the era, is one of the high points in Niehaus's film career.” She then co-starred with Ivan Desny and René Deltgen in the drama Weg ohne Umkehr/No Way Back (Victor Vicas, 1953). It was made at the height of the Cold War. In 1945 following the Battle of Berlin, a Red Army officer (Desny) is able to protect a young German woman (Niehaus) he finds living in a cellar. Several years later he returns to the city as a civilian, finds her again and makes plans to flee from East to West Germany under the noses of the KGB. For this role she won in 1954 the Bundesfilmpreis. Other films followed, such as Rosenmontag/Love's Carnival (Willy Birgel, 1955) with Dietmar Schönherr, and Auferstehung/Resurrection (Rolf Hansen, 1958) starring Horst Buchholz.

 

In 1959, Ruth Niehaus co-starred with Helmuth Schneider in the Argentine film Cavalcade (Albert Arliss, Richard von Schenk, 1960). At the beginning of the 1960s Niehaus largely withdrew from the film business and only sporadically took on roles in film and television productions. In 1980, she played a supporting part in the West German drama Fabian (Wolf Gremm, 1980), based on the novel by Erich Kästner. On television she played guest roles in Krimi series like Der Alte (1978) and Tatort (1983). Her main focus wat on the theatre. At the Festival in Bad Hersfeld, she was celebrated as ‘Das deutsche Gretchen 1959’ in Goethe's Faust under the direction of William Dieterle. In 1961 and 1962, she also played Titania in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Dieterle. From 1964 to 1968 she worked under the direction of Oscar Fritz Schuh at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus Hamburg. In Hamburg, she brought the present author Jean Cocteau to tears with her depiction of Eurydice in his play Orpheus. These years at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg were her most successful stage period. In 1968, she left the house together with Oscar Fritz Schuh and performed further roles in his productions. Until his death in 1984, Schuh was one of her closest friends. In 1987, Ruth Niehaus was able to celebrate her 40th stage jubilee. That year she also directed Rebecca at the Münchner Kammerspielen. She remained on stage until 1992. Sje incidentally played in films, such as in Hard Days, Hard Nights (Horst Königstein, 1989) with Al Corley. Her last film role was in Wir können auch anders/We can also differently (Detlev Buck, 1992). In 1994 she was honoured Ruth Niehaus together with Christa Auch-Schwelk for their documentary Jeffrey – Zwischen Leben und Tod/Jeffrey – Between Life and Death with the media award of the German AIDS-Stiftung. Ruth Niehaus died in 1994 in Hamburg. She was 69. She and her husband Ivar Lissner, who passed away in 1965, had a daughter Imogen (now Imogen Jochem).

 

Sources: Wikipedia (English and German) and IMDb.

Diva/Midge, Barbie BMR1959 #GPF16, juin 2020

Back view of the sign of the fashion shop "Marius et Jeanette" in the Rue des Chapeliers (in English: "Street of the hatters") in the old town of Lannion, Brittany, France

 

Some background information:

 

I found this sign in the old town of Lannion and I like the fact that it has two different sides. The other side can be viewed in this picture: the girl.

 

With its more than 20,000 residents, Lannion is the administrative centre of the arrondissement of Lannion in the French department of Côtes-d'Armor in the very north of Brittany. The town is located on the bank of the Léguer river, just five kilometres (3.1 miles) away from the sea, where the river issues into.

 

Lannion harks back on a long history. Several megaliths in its surrounding bear witness to human habitation as early as in prehistoric times and so do many carved flints and stone axes, which were excavated. In April 2014, archaeologists found traces of three large wooden and mud-walled houses together with pottery fragments and wristbands, whose age was estimated at 7,000 years. Also excavated were the remnants of a round house from the Bronze Age, which was probably built around 1200 BC.

 

Coins and potsherds as well as two Gallic steles bear witness to habitation in Gallic times. In Gallo-Roman times, the spot of Lannion was situated at the road from Yaudet eastbound. The excavations of Gallo-Roman estates show that already then the area was used for agriculture.

 

In 1163, Lannion was first mentioned in a document. In a papal bull of pope Alexander III it is registered that the church Sancte Marie de Lannion is still not brought to completion. At about that time a castle was erected, whose purpose was to protect the settlement against invaders ascending the river. Between 1341 and 1364, the town was involved in the War of the Breton Succession.

 

In 1590, Lannion was heavily affected by events in the course of the French Wars of Religion. The whole area was a patchwork of Catholic and Huguenot parishes. After the nearby Huguenot parish of Plestin had been burned and devastated by the troops of the Catholic French King, the royalist town of Lannion overtook the same fate. In an act of revenge, Huguenot troops, who supported the Protestant Duke of Mercœur, burned and devastated it. Fortuntately in 1598, the wars were ended by the Edict of Nantes, which granted the Huguenots substantial rights and freedoms.

 

In the 16th century, Brélévenez and Lannion were the two most important parishes in the district. Competition raged between the two communes. After Brélévenez had built a spire on its church, Lannion built an even more beautiful and larger reproduction. 158 trees, 10,000 slates and 1,800 kg of metal were needed for its construction. It was installed on the tower of the church, and inaugurated in 1643. But after it had been struck by lightning in 1758, it threatened to collapse on the neighbouring houses. Hence, the Duke of Aiguillon, who was the appointed Commander-in-Chief of Brittany, gave the order to destroy it.

 

Until the French Revolution, Lannion belonged to the bishopric of Tréguier. However, to restrict the power of the bishop in Lannion, the French King constituted the town the place of jurisdiction for the whole area. After the Revolution, the port of Lannion thrived and so did the town. Even after Word War I, Lannion’s economic growth continued, but after World War II, stagnation coursed through and the community became just a drowsy rural town.

 

However, the situation took another turn for the better in the sixties, as in 1960, the National Telecommunications Centre was built there. To install it and to house the families of the technicians, Lannion needed significant land reserves. After a prefectural decree had sealed the merger of Lannion with the municipalities of Buhulien, Loguivy, Servel and Brélévenez, a number of other companies set up in business too, following the National Telecommunications Centre.

 

Today, Lannion is the administrative, commercial and cultural capital of the Trégor region, one of the nine historical provinces of Brittany. The town’s technology park champions cutting-edge technologies from companies like Alcatel and Orange. There are around one hundred high-tech enterprises and research centres and that’s why Lannion is sometimes even described as a French "mini Silicon Valley".

Details best viewed in Original Size.

 

Felines have the stare of the typical predator: Self-confident, sitting atop the food chain and master of all they survey. That look is certainly evident here: no sign of fear, just curiosity.

 

DSLR Autofocus Level 5 - Front Page Cover Photo, Week of April 8, 2021.

Visiting Monster High. It's quite hard to be friendly with vamps for the New Slayer

 

P.S.: Well, yes, I associate Darling with Buffy. They are both strong, self-confident, powerful and beautiful blondies. I believe they for sure may be a very good friends. And partners.

I was struck by this kid walking with a bossy, self-confident attitude through the streets of a village near Mrauk-U, in the poor Rakhine state of Myanmar

Brausemund

Spout Mouth

1979

Schablonentechnik

Stencil technique

Albertina, Wien

 

On the occasion of her 85th birthday, the Albertina dedicates a large-scale retrospective to the Austrian artist Florentina Pakosta.

In the 1960s, Florentina Pakosta reacted with her drawings and prints to the discrimination of women in the art scene. For centuries, it was the male artist who portrayed the woman as an object or muse. Florentina Pakosta now looks at the man and dissects his facial expressions and body language. Her satirical work denounces patriarchal power structures by overemphasizing male behavior and reversing traditional roles.

The self-portrait also plays a central role in the work of Florentina Pakosta - she sometimes portrays herself serious, sometimes self-confident, sometimes combative. In her series Landscape of goods und Masses of people, Pakosta expresses the disappearance of the subject in capitalism. From about the mid-1980s, Florentina Pakosta turns away from the black-and-white and figurative works and turns towards the painting and an abstract language of forms. To this day, arise cycles of characteristic, geometric bar images.

The exhibition can be seen from 30th May to 26th August 2018.

 

Anlässlich ihres 85. Geburtstags widmet die ALBERTINA der österreichischen Künstlerin Florentina Pakosta eine groß angelegte Retrospektive.

In den 1960er Jahren reagiert Florentina Pakosta mit ihren Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken auf die Diskriminierung von Frauen in der Kunstszene. Über Jahrhunderte hinweg war es der männliche Künstler, der die Frau als Objekt oder Muse porträtierte. Florentina Pakosta richtet nun folglich den Blick auf den Mann und seziert seine Gesichtsausdrücke und Körpersprache. Mit ihren satirischen Arbeiten prangert sie patriarchale Machtstrukturen an, indem sie männliches Verhalten überzeichnet und tradierte Rollen umkehrt.

Auch das Selbstporträt nimmt im Werk Florentina Pakostas eine zentrale Rolle ein – sie stellt sich mal ernsthaft, mal selbstbewusst, mal kämpferisch dar. In ihren Serien Warenlandschaften und Menschenmassen bringt Pakosta das Verschwinden des Subjekts im Kapitalismus zum Ausdruck. Ab etwa Mitte der 1980er Jahre wendet Florentina Pakosta sich von den schwarz-weiß gehaltenen und gegenständlichen Arbeiten ab und der Malerei und einer abstrakten Formensprache zu. Bis heute entstehen Zyklen der charakteristischen, geometrischen Balkenbilder.

Die Ausstellung ist von 30. Mai bis 26. August 2018 zu sehen.

www.albertina.at/ausstellungen/pakosta/

www.MizzieMorawez.etsy.com

 

www.mizziemorawez.blogspot.com

Venus looks shyly at a self-confident Paris who challenges her to come closer; .Sculptures (ca. 1822) by Antonio Canova, Italian; Metropolitan Museum of Art.

管樂雅集 - 黑管妹 / 無敵鳳眼妹自信眼睛發亮 - 可愛又有魅力讓我小鹿亂撞

Wind instrument music elegant gathering - The sister with a clarinet / The invincible phoenix eye younger sister self-confident eye shines - Her lovable and charm let me heart littel deer no particular course

Reunión elegante de la música del instrumento de viento-La hermana con un clarinet / El ojo de Phoenix invencible hermana menor auto-confianza brilla el ojo - Su amable y encanto permítanme ciervo pequeño corazón sin rumbo determinado

管楽は風雅に集います - クラリネットの妹 / 敵なしの鳳眼の妹は目が輝くことに自信を持ちます - 素敵な魅力をもう一度、鹿威嚇教えて

Elegante Versammlung der Windinstrument-Musik - Die Schwester mit einem Clarinet / Die unüberwindliche phoenix Auge jüngere Schwester selbstbewussten Blick scheint - Ihre liebenswerten Charme und lassen Sie mich Herz Rehlein keine bestimmten Kurs

 

"無敵鳳眼妹好可愛喔" 用海賊王魯夫的聲音講這一句話

 

Tainan Taiwan / Tainan Taiwán / 台灣台南

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

其實我是黑管妹(愛睏仙)的粉絲

I am a fans of The sister with a clarinet

Soy los ventiladores de la hermana con un clarinet

私はクラリネットを持つ姉妹のファンである

Ich bin Ventilatoren der Schwester mit einem Clarinet

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

{My Blog / 不斷成長與進步的喜悅-管樂雅集}

{My Blog / The joy of the Grows unceasingly and the progress - Wind instrument music elegant gathering}

{Mi blog / La alegría del crece incesante y el progreso - Reunión elegante de la música del instrumento de viento}

{Mein Blog / Die Freude an wächst fortwährend und der Fortschritt - Elegante Versammlung der Windinstrument-Musik}

 

I Receives the Don Don design, The sister with a clarinet manufactures the orchestra lucky baby, I very happy also very much treasures, I want to appreciate for myself. Ha ~

收到冬冬設計,黑管妹製作的樂團幸運娃娃,我很開心也很珍惜,我要自己欣賞哈~~

I recibe el diseño de Don Don, la hermana con un clarinet fabrica al bebé afortunado de la orquesta, tesoros muy felices de I también mucho, yo quieren apreciar para me. Ha de ~

冬の設計を受け取って、クラリネットの妹の製作の楽団の幸運な子供、私はとても楽しくもとても大切にして、私は自分の称賛を要して~~をどなりつけます

I empfängt den Entwurf Don-Don, die Schwester mit einem Clarinet herstellt das glückliche Baby des Orchesters, i-sehr glückliche auch sehr viel Schätze, ich möchten für mich schätzen. Ha ~

 

原圖JPG直出無後製

Original picture JPG is straight has no children the system

El JPG original del cuadro es recto no tiene ninguÌn niño el sistema

原図JPGはずっと跡継ぎがいなくてつくることを出します

Ursprünglicher Abbildung JPG ist hat keine Kinder das System gerade

 

本圖無合成無折射

This chart does not have the refraction without the synthesis

Esta carta no tiene la refracción sin la síntesis

当合成がないことを求めて屈折がありません

Dieses Diagramm hat die Brechung nicht ohne die Synthese

 

可用放大鏡開1:1原圖

The available magnifying glass opens 1:1 original picture

La lupa disponible abre el cuadro de la original del 1:1

利用できる拡大鏡は1:1の原物映像を開ける

Tidal pools by the sea don't look very interesting at a quick glance, instead they are full of life and can reserve quite fun surprises. Little critters like this common prawn thrive in these ponds. This self-confident individual did not hesitate to come and investigate my finger for a free manicure.

 

San Marco di Castellabate, Italy

 

St Mary, Hadleigh, Suffolk

 

Hadleigh is a pleasant, self-important little town. It is one of those places remote enough to be a microcosm of bigger towns - the factories, shops and housing estates all to scale. Its centrality in this part of Suffolk gave it the headquarters of Babergh District Council in 1974, despite the fact that the greater part of the population of the district lives in the Sudbury conurbation and the southern suburbs of Ipswich. Having said that, Hadleigh has expanded greatly in recent years, with characterless new estates now lining the bypass, and in any case Babergh District Council has since merged with Mid-Suffolk District Council and the councillors have all toddled off to Stowmarket. But the heart of the town is still probably the loveliest of any in East Anglia.

 

If Hadleigh is small, however, St Mary is not. This is one of the grand Suffolk churches, the only big one with a medieval spire which is also the only proper wood and lead spire in the county. There are echoes of Chesterfield in Derbyshire, only without the twist. It was built in the 14th century, and the exterior bell, a 1280 clock bell doubling as a sanctus bell, is Suffolk's oldest. The aisles, clerestory and chancel head eastwards of it, equalling Lavenham in their sense of the substantial. It is one of the longest churches in Suffolk.

 

To the south west of the church stands the famous Hadleigh Deanery, more properly the gorgeous red brick Tudor gateway to the now demolished medieval Deanery. It was at this Deanery gateway in July 1833 that the meeting was held which gave birth to the Oxford Movement, and went on to change the face of Anglican churches forever. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern Church of England was born in this building. The Rector here, in one of those anachronisms so beloved of the CofE, is styled 'Dean of Bocking'. Bocking is a village in Essex, and the living is in the gift of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so Hadleigh Rectors are installed in Canterbury Cathedral.

 

The south side of the graveyard is taken up by the former guild hall, and on the fourth side there is a scattering of excellent 18th and 19th century municipal and commercial buildings. With the possible exception of the Bury churches, it is the best setting of any urban church in Suffolk. Hadleigh was one of the great cloth towns, a centre for merchants rather than factories (most of the work was farmed out to self-employed weavers in nearby villages, quite literally a cottage industry). The wealth of those days rebuilt the church, particularly the fine 15th century clerestory and aisles.This is a big church, since it needed to contain the chantry altars of at least five medieval guilds. And it has always been an urban church, as you can tell from the way buildings on the north side cut into it. The east window was clearly always intended to be seen up the gap to the busy High Street.

 

The magnificent south doorway retains its original 15th century doors. It is interesting to compare it with Cotton, barely 50 years older, but from a quite different generation of architecture. Gone are the delicate fleurons, the articulate details that speak of an internal sense of mystery. Here, we enter the realms of self-confident rationalism for the first time. You step into a space that is light and airy, so vast that at once it swallows sound, a feeling accentuated by the sheer width of the chancel arch. Trees close by on the north side gently wave shadows into the nave. It feels that the church is organically part of the town and has been so down the long centuries, although perhaps it is hard at first to see this building as anything other than the rather polite CofE parish church it has become.

 

If you'd been here some ten years or so ago, you might have though that this was a very strange church, for there was the surreal sight of a snooker table and a pool table in the north aisle. They were part of what was called the Hadleigh Porch Project, an attempt to provide something to do for teenagers in the town who had been causing a nuisance in the churchyard and porch. The parish galvanised itself and attracted funding, and the building became used by young people for secular activities, one idea being that the sense of ownership conveyed would give them a sense of responsibility. Coming here in Lent of 2013, I was struck by the Stations of the Cross lining the arcades, each created by a local youth group or organisation. They were radically different from anything I'd seen before, and I'm sure that Maggi Hambling's Christ, looking on from the north aisle, would have approved.

 

Coming back in 2019, the snooker and pool tables have now gone, and so have the run of the mill Victorian benches that filled the nave. Regular users of this site will know that I am an enthusiast of replacing 19th Century pews with modern chairs in medieval churches, but here you can't help feeling that it hasn't really been done very well. The chairs themselves are not the problem so much as the floor, which has been left with expanses of floor boards between the lines of poor encaustic tiles. Perhaps there are plans to replace all of this with a polished wood and pamment floor (Oundle in Northamptonshire is a good example on a similar scale). I hope so.

 

The sheer size of the nave and its aisles stops the stained glass overwhelming it, which is a relief because there is a lot of it and it is by no means all good. To start with the best, there is a 1988 window by John O'Connor for Chapel Studios beside Maggi Hambling's painting, a memorial to John Belton, a former rector. But the glass in the south aisle is mostly by Ward & Hughes, and some of it very poor indeed, from the height of that period when Thomas Curtis was trashing the brand.

 

Of course, there is much here that is older and more traditional. In the south chancel chapel is what has become known as the St Edmund bench end, attached to a modern bench. It appears to shows a wolf, with the Saint's head in its jaws. But a closer look shows that the beast has cloven hooves, and what are either wings and a collar or possibly eucharistic vestments. It is more likely related to those bench ends more common in east Norfolk depicting a mythical beast holding the head of St John the Baptist. There are squints through to the high altar from this chapel, so this was probably the site of a guild altar.

 

There are recent memories of the High Church past of St Mary. In the high sanctuary are not one but two plaques to former Dean Hugh Rose, one commemorating his conference that led to the Oxford Movement, and the other the centenary of that movement, laid by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1935. One of the plaques quotes Pusey's eulogy to Rose, that when hearts were failing, he bade us stir up the gift that was in us, and betake ourselves to our true mother. Another religious figure associated with Hadleigh is the puritan preacher Rowland Taylor, who was burned at the stake on nearby Aldham Common in the brief but unhappy reign of Mary I. One of the Ward & Hughes windows in the south aisle remembers him.

 

Up in the chancel, grinning figures peer down from the roof, and in the east window of the north chancel aisle is a small collection of old glass, including heraldic shields, a Tudor royal arms and haunting fragments of 15th Century English glass, all that survives of what must once have been one of the largest expanses in England, a sobering thought.

Blogged about at roomlust.blogspot.com/.

 

Designer Courtney Coleman painted this library Pumpkin by California Paints. "A red dining room is perfectly acceptable, so why not a deep persimmon sitting room?" she said. "The color is so warm and cozy that it makes you feel as if there's a fire in the fireplace, even when there is none. It reminds me of those Regency period interiors, with all those vivid colors inspired by the excavations at Pompeii. They say people who choose orange are very self-confident and extroverted. For this library, we borrowed the unusual finish from the parlor of the Thomas Everard House in Colonial Williamsburg, where varnish is applied over your base paint."

 

Photo from House Beautiful.

chaos freeform

seamless

tunica dress

asymetric silhouette

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Tombstone of historian Goldwin Smith and his wife. St. James Cemetery, Toronto, Canada. Spring afternoon, 2021. Pentax K1 II.

 

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwin_Smith

 

Goldwin Smith (13 August 1823 – 7 June 1910) was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States.

 

Life and career

Early life and education

 

Smith was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He threw his energy into the cause of university reform with another fellow of University College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to inquire into the reform of the university, of which Stanley was secretary, Smith served as assistant-secretary; and he was then secretary to the commissioners appointed by the act of 1854. His position as an authority on educational reform was further recognised by a seat on the Popular Education Commission of 1858. In 1868, when the question of reform at Oxford was again growing acute, he published a pamphlet, entitled The Reorganization of the University of Oxford.

 

In 1865, he led the University of Oxford opposition to a proposal to develop Cripley Meadow north of Oxford railway station for use as a major site of Great Western Railway (GWR) workshops. His father had been a director of GWR. Instead the workshops were located in Swindon. He was public with his pro-Northern sympathies during the American Civil War, notably in a speech at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester in April 1863 and his Letter to a Whig Member of the Southern Independence Association the following year.

 

Besides the Universities Tests Act 1871, which abolished religious tests, many of the reforms suggested, such as the revival of the faculties, the reorganisation of the professoriate, the abolition of celibacy as a condition of the tenure of fellowships, and the combination of the colleges for lecturing purposes, were incorporated in the act of 1877, or subsequently adopted by the university. Smith gave the counsel of perfection that "pass" examinations ought to cease; but he recognised that this change "must wait on the reorganization of the educational institutions immediately below the university, at which a passman ought to finish his career." His aspiration that colonists and Americans should be attracted to Oxford was later realised by the will of Cecil Rhodes. On what is perhaps the vital problem of modern education, the question of ancient versus modern languages, he pronounced that the latter "are indispensable accomplishments, but they do not form a high mental training" – an opinion entitled to peculiar respect as coming from a president of the Modern Language Association.

 

Oxford years

 

He held the regius professorship of Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866, that "ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the 'best instrument for cultivating the historical sense." As a historian, indeed, he left no abiding work; the multiplicity of his interests prevented him from concentrating on any one subject. His chief historical writings – The United Kingdom: a Political History (1899), and The United States: an Outline of Political History (1893) — though based on thorough familiarity with their subject, make no claim to original research, but are remarkable examples of terse and brilliant narrative.

 

He was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1865.

 

The outbreak of the American Civil War proved a turning point in his life. Unlike most of the ruling classes in England, he championed the cause of the North, and his pamphlets, especially one entitled Does the Bible Sanction American Slavery? (1863), played a prominent part in converting English opinion. Visiting America on a lecture tour in 1864, he received an enthusiastic welcome, and was entertained at a public banquet in New York. Andrew Dickson White, president of Cornell University at Ithaca, N.Y., invited him to take up a teaching post at the newly founded institution. But it was not until a dramatic change in Smith's personal circumstances that led to his departure from England in 1868, that he took up the post. 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. Possibly blaming himself for the tragedy, and now without an Oxford appointment, he decided to move to North America.

 

Cornell years

 

Smith's time at Cornell was brief, but his impact there was significant. He held the professorship of English and Constitutional History in the Department of History at Cornell University from 1868 to 1872. The addition of Smith to Cornell's faculty gave the newly opened university "instant credibility." Smith was something of an academic celebrity, and his lectures were sometimes printed in New York newspapers.

 

During Smith's time at Cornell he accepted no salary and provided much financial support to the institution. In 1869 he had his personal library shipped from England and donated to the university. He lived at Cascadilla Hall among the students, and was much beloved by them.

 

In 1871 Smith moved to Toronto to live with relatives, but retained an honorary professorship at Cornell and returned to campus frequently to lecture. When he did, he insisted on staying with the students at Cascadilla Hall rather than in a hotel. Smith bequeathed the bulk of his estate to the University in his will.

 

Smith's abrupt departure from Cornell was credited to several factors, including the Ithaca weather, Cornell's geographic isolation, Smith's health, and political tensions between Britain and America.[13] But the decisive factor in Smith's departure was the university's decision to admit women. Goldwin Smith told White that admitting women would cause Cornell to "sink at once from the rank of a University to that of an Oberlin or a high school" and that all "hopes of future greatness" would be lost by admitting women.

 

Goldwin Smith Hall

 

On June 19, 1906 Goldwin Smith Hall was dedicated, at the time Cornell's largest building and its first building dedicated to the humanities, as well as the first home to the College of Arts and Sciences. Smith personally laid the cornerstone for the building in October 1904 and attended the 1906 dedication. The Cornell Alumni News observed on the occasion, "To attempt to express even in a measure the reverence and affection which all Cornellians feel for Goldwin Smith would be attempting a hopeless task. His presence here is appreciated as the presence of no other person could be."

 

Toronto

 

In Toronto, Smith he edited the Canadian Monthly, and subsequently founded the Week and the Bystander, and where he spent the rest of his life living in The Grange manor.

 

In 1893, Smith was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society. In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal, The Farmer's Sun, and published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone, while occasional letters to the Spectator showed that he had lost neither his interest in English politics and social questions nor his remarkable gifts of style. He died at his residence in Toronto, The Grange.

 

Political views

 

He continued to take an active interest in English politics. As a Liberal, he opposed Benjamin Disraeli, and was a strong supporter of Irish Disestablishment, but refused to follow Gladstone in accepting Home Rule. He expressly stated that "if he ever had a political leader, his leader was John Bright, not Mr Gladstone." Causes that he powerfully attacked were Prohibition, female suffrage and state socialism, as he discussed in his Essays on Questions of the Day (revised edition, 1894). He also published sympathetic monographs on William Cowper and Jane Austen, and attempted verse in Bay Leaves and Specimens of Greek Tragedy. In his Guesses at the Riddle of Existence (1897), he abandoned the faith in Christianity that he had expressed in his lecture of 1861, Historical Progress, in which he forecast the speedy reunion of Christendom on the "basis of free conviction," and wrote in a spirit "not of Agnosticism, if Agnosticism imports despair of spiritual truth, but of free and hopeful inquiry, the way for which it is necessary to clear by removing the wreck of that upon which we can found our faith no more."

 

Anglo-Saxonism

 

Smith was considered a devout Anglo-Saxonist, deeply involved with political and racial aspects of English nationhood and British colonialism. He believed the Anglo-Saxon "race" excluded Irish people but could extend to Welsh and Lowland Scots within the context of the United Kingdom's greater empire. Speaking in 1886, he referred to his "standing by the side of John Bright against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the West, as I now stand against the dismemberment of the great Anglo-Saxon community of the East." These words form the key to his views of the future of the British Empire and he was a leading light of the anti-imperialist "Little Englander" movement.

 

Smith thought that Canada was destined by geography to enter the United States. In his view, separated as it is by north–south barriers, into zones communicating naturally with adjoining portions of the United States, it was an artificial and badly-governed nation. It would break away from the British Empire, and the Anglo-Saxons of the North American continent would become one nation. These views are most fully stated in his Canada and the Canadian Question (1891). Donald Creighton writes that Smith was most ably rebutted by George Monro Grant in the Canadian Magazine.

 

British imperialism

 

Smith identified as an anti-imperialist, describing himself as "anti-Imperialistic to the core," yet he was deeply penetrated with a sense of the greatness of the British race. Of the British empire in India he said that "it is the noblest the world has seen... Never had there been such an attempt to make conquest the servant of civilization. About keeping India there is no question. England has a real duty there." His fear was that England would become a nation of factory-workers, thinking more of their trade-union than of their country. He was also opposed to Britain granting more representative government to India, expressing fear that this would lead to a "murderous anarchy."

 

His opinion of British activity in the Transvaal was well voiced in the Canadian press and in his book In The Court of History: An Apology of Canadians Opposed to the Boer War (1902). This work is a fascinating articulation of pacifist opposition to the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902. It is important because it is amongst the few expressions of opposition toward from the perspective of an Anglo-colonial settler. His anti-imperialism was intensified and made manifest in his Commonwealth or Empire? (1902), a warning to the United States against the assumption of imperial responsibilities.

 

Antisemitism

 

Smith had virulently anti-Jewish views. Labelled as "the most vicious anti-Semite in the English-speaking world", he referred to Jews as "parasites" who absorb "the wealth of the community without adding to it". Research by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick has studied Smith's writings, which claimed that Jews were responsible for a form of "repulsion" they provoked in others, due to his assertion of their "peculiar character and habits", including a "preoccupation with money-making", which made them "enemies of civilization". He also denigrated brit milah, or circumcision, as a "barborous rite", and proposed assimilating Jews or deporting them to Palestine as a solution to the "Jewish problem".

 

Smith wrote, "The Jewish objective has always been the same, since Roman times. We regard our race as superior to all humanity, and we do not seek our ultimate union with other races, but our final triumph over them." He had a strong influence on William Lyon Mackenzie King and Henri Bourassa.

 

He proposed elsewhere that Jews and Arabs were of the same race. He also believed that Islamic oppression of non-Muslims was for economic factors.

 

In December 2020, the Cornell University Board of Trust voted to remove Smith's name from the honorific titles of twelve professors at Cornell. The Board took this action in recognition of Smith's published misogynistic, racist, and anti-Semitic views. The Board declined to rename Goldwin Smith Hall.

 

Legacy

 

Goldwin Smith is credited with the quote "Above all nations is humanity," an inscription that was engraved in a stone bench he offered to Cornell in May 1871. The bench sits in front of Goldwin Smith Hall, named in his honour. This quote is the motto of the University of Hawaii and other institutions around the world (for example, the Cosmopolitan Club at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign).

 

Another stone bench inscribed with the motto, sits on the campus of Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. It sits with a clear view down onto the city.

 

After his death, a plaque in his memory was erected outside his birthplace in the town centre of Reading. This still exists, outside the entrance to the Harris Arcade.

 

www.biographi.ca/en/bio/smith_goldwin_13E.html

 

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; six 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.”

 

Ramsay Cook

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

French, 1755-1842

 

Although painting in the Rococo era, nothing about her mood or pose speaks of Rococo frivolity. Hers is the self-confident stance of a woman whose art has won her an independent role in her society. She was famous for the force and grace of her portraits, especially those of highborn ladies and royalty.

 

One of the few woman admitted to The Academy, after the French Revolution her membership was rescinded, because women were no longer welcome in that organization. Her continued success after the Revolution was indicative of her talent, wit and ability to forge connections with those in power.

36

   

The exhibition "I, Mary of Guelders" in Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen NL is the first comprehensive exhibition on Mary of Guelders (1380 - after 1427). It tells the life story of this self-confident medieval monarch and ‘power woman’. After 10 years of marriage, Mary of Guelders commissioned between 1415 - 1426 an extraordinary prayer book. With more than 1,200 pages, it is more extensive and elaborate than any comparable prayer book that we know of.

  

More of Mary's Prayer Book at johanphoto.blogspot.com/2018/11/maria-van-gelre.html

The Tugendhats were impressed by the maquette and strongly influenced by Mies' personality. “He had a calm, self-confident certainty which immediately served to convince you. From the manner in which he spoke about his projects, we realised that we were dealing with a genuine artist. He said, for example, that the ideal dimensions of space cannot be calculated, space must be felt.”

 

The Villa of Tugendhat and is a spectacular example of modern architecture and was built in Brno, Czech Republic in 1929. It is widely considered to be one of legendary German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's modernist masterpieces.

circular freeform

crochet & knitting mix

pattern knitting

chunky winter coat

for fashion divas

& self-confident indivuduals

who enjoy to

express their true self

This is the lane where I got changed near Cartgate Services for a date. I have chosen a plastic 1960s style short coat, lacy top, flounced nylon skirt, fishnet stocking and black high heeled boots.

 

Cartgate Services itself was just too busy with lorries now parked all round the picnic area which used to be good for discreet meetings. That is probably what put off my date although she never got in touch again so I will never know - probably just backed off the idea altogether. Taking the step of meeting other gurls was big enough for me and I am quite self confident. It might be a step to far for a lot of people.

 

So I went into Taunton and went for a walk along the canal by Firepool Lock and towards Obridge - which is where the druggies and winos hang out so decent folk tend to stay clear or rush by with their heads down. I know I have just said I am self confident - certainly to the extent I am confident I can handle myself - but I still need to practice walking while dressed and generally behaving in a ladylike manner in public so tend to only go to places where I am not likely to cause offence if "sussed".

Another rather self-confident gopher. And whereas I did "git him," it was only with the camera :).

 

model : www.facebook.com/martina.nappi.754

Non usare questa foto senza il mio permesso.

Do not use this photo without my permission.

VCAD alumni’s Evan Ducharme second fashion collection “Belladonna” was shown at the Eco Fashion Week on April 23, 2013 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

 

Evan’s work was inspired by such people as Ida Rentoul Outhwait, Arthur Rackham, Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis as well as the World War 1 French military clothes and belladonna plant. The collection portrays women as strong and self-confident females.

 

In his collection Evan has used such natural and ecofriendly fibers as hemp, melton wool, silk-cotton blends, reclaimed wool crepe, organic jersey and organic cotton.

 

Turn Your Fashion Dreams into Reality:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJYtwSyxpCc

 

VCAD - Fashion Design Program

500 - 626 West Pender Street

Vancouver, BC V6B 1V9

CANADA

Supremely self-confident couple. Supremely sunburned too.

from the series

"believe me, it´s a scarf "

 

giant luxury

scarf stole

wrap cloak

with 2 sleeves

 

fabric knitting

art-yarn fusion

with lurex & metallic effects

a perfect lagenlook layer

for self-confident fashion divas

VCAD alumni’s Evan Ducharme second fashion collection “Belladonna” was shown at the Eco Fashion Week on April 23, 2013 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

 

Evan’s work was inspired by such people as Ida Rentoul Outhwait, Arthur Rackham, Audrey Hepburn and Bette Davis as well as the World War 1 French military clothes and belladonna plant. The collection portrays women as strong and self-confident females.

 

In his collection Evan has used such natural and ecofriendly fibers as hemp, melton wool, silk-cotton blends, reclaimed wool crepe, organic jersey and organic cotton.

 

Turn Your Fashion Dreams into Reality:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJYtwSyxpCc

 

VCAD - Fashion Design Program

500 - 626 West Pender Street

Vancouver, BC V6B 1V9

CANADA

circular freeform

crochet & knitting mix

pattern knitting

chunky winter coat

for fashion divas

& self-confident individuals

who enjoy to

express their true self

Self confident Dutch city girl

 

Amsterdam, Kinkerstraat, 29 oktober 2011 / October 29, 2011

 

© 2011 Amsterdam RAIL | All Rights Reserved

Women of the Revolution - Russia 1907-1934

 

The avant-garde was feminine! At least, that was the case in Russia before and after the Revolution of 1917. A great number of Russian artists were convinced that their work could contribute to a fair and classless society. In comparison to other avant-garde movements, it is conspicuous just how many women were involved in this movement in Russia. They stood on an equal footing with their male colleagues and collaborated with them in a self-confident manner. Without the powerful vision of figures such as Aleksandra Ekster, Natalia Goncharova and others, the avant-garde movements structured around Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich or Vladimir Tatlin would never have been able to have such an extraordinary impact.

The exhibition illustrates the central role of female artists in Russia in the early twentieth century. Many of the works on display are being presented in the Netherlands for the very first time.

This exhibition in the Groninger Museum has been on show from March 23, 2013 until 18 August 18, 2013.

Berlin war zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts der wichtigste Telegraphen-Knotenpunkt in Europa. Postbaurat Wilhelm Waltger und Architekt Max Lehmann errichteten zwischen 1910 und 1916 das Haupttelegraphenamt, ein prachtvolles Beispiel einer selbstbewussten Industriebauweise im Stil des Neobarocks. Nach dem Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs wurde es technisch hochwertig ausgestattet und beherbergte die modernste Technik, die in den Zwanziger- und Dreißigerjahren des 20. Jahrhunderts verfügbar war. Im Jahr 1916 nahm im Kellergeschoss des Gebäudes die Stadtrohrpostzentrale ihre Dienste auf. Das Gebäude beherbergt heute auf großzügigen modernen Büroflächen eine Anzahl weltweit agierender IT-Unternehmen, zwei moderne Eventflächen und das Lifestyle Hotel "Telegraphenamt".

 

Text einer Informationstafel vor dem Hoteleingang

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Berlin was the most important telegraph hub in Eurpe. Between 1910 and 1916, the postal building supervisor Wilhelm Walter and architect Max Lehmann built the main telegraph office - a magnificent example of self-confident industrial architecture in neo-Baroque style. After the end of World War I, it was equipped to a high techichal standard and housed the most modern technology available in the early decades of the 20th century. Berlin's tube system central office took up operation in the basement of the building in 1916. Today, the building houses a number of international IT companies in spacious and modern office spaces, along with two modern event spaces and the lifestyle hotel "Telegraphenamt".

 

Text of an information panel in front of the hotel entrance

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun film, spectacular from a visual point of view, with some beautiful spaceship scenes, that was sadly lacking in clear direction and focus.

 

Overall, I feel it was a great film by itself, however I think it actually suffers from being a Star Wars film. JJ clearly wanted to put a large amount of fanservice in, and while some of it is beautiful and heartwarming, other parts of it aren't.

 

Some of the new characters are actually really awesome, I personally found Finn to be the most interesting of them, and Poe to be the most fun to watch. BB8 wasn't the jar jar Binks I thought he was going to be.

However, Rey is iritating, and unlikeable in many ways, falling into the trappings of the 'Strong Female Character' archetype, where she comes across as unpleasantly self-confident and far to butch. Equally, Kylo Ren is an unintimidating villian who, while definately better that Maul, Dooku or Grevious, cannot hope to be as impactful or interesting as Darth Vader. Also I didn't like the actor playing him.

 

Returning characters' performances vary, with some being amazingly strong and on point, like Han Solo, and others, Like Leia, being bland and forgettable.

  

The plot itself also suffers from a lack of focus, and though it is coherent, it feels like a draft rather than a final version. There are plot threads that aren't strong enough to bear the weight placed upon them.

  

In summary, The Force Awakens does not deserve a 9 or 10 out of 10. It has too many problems to be the wonderful film people wanted it to be, but the amount of fanservice will probably be mistaken for genuine plot and interesting new characters. I enjoyed it, and I'd be happy for it to be the continuation of the Star Wars saga, if it weren't for the fact that most of it's major story beats are ripped from the existing EU, and the existing EU did it better

I complete my "Frankfurt series".

The weather did not get any better. Storm, rain and cold! No one would like to stand in front of a camera. I decided to go into the big shopping center right behind me. Very futuristic building. Why I do not have any photos of this worth seeing shopping center? The story behind comes a little later.

 

On the top floor was a large area to relax, to look at the pedestrian zone to and over the roofs of Frankfurt.

 

In this area of relaxation there was at the end a large white wall, which was lit from above with various spotlights. A nice background for photos, but of the light somewhat problematic.

 

Well, I wanted to try and looked around if someone seemed to me to have time and leisure for a conversation and a few photos. And actually, almost right next to me was a young couple who, like me, enjoyed the view of Frankfurt. It seemed as if they were in no hurry. So I spoke to the couple, explained my request, my project, and showed my photostream on my smartphone. I could convince Kristin and Jonas, (that was their name) agreed to support me and my project.

I asked both to follow to my white background. Before the conversation began we started the small photoshooting. The background was really nice, just the lighting threw unpleasant shadows. Through more or less skillful posings I tried to avoid the shadows.

 

And now something happened that I had not expected. During our shoot, I was approached by an official security employee at the shopping center, asking if I had a written permission to photograph at the shopping center. This I negated truthfully. Before I could make further photos, I had to first get the written explanation by the management, was explained to me. It should be no problem, I should simply follow him, he takes me there. Of course, I had to comply.

 

I asked Kristin and Jonas please wait until I am back, because not all the photos were taken and I could not talk with them.

 

Taking to the management there was another problem. The photo approval was to be given to me, but I should assign all the rights on my photos to the owner of the shopping center. Of course I did not want that. I had not photographed anything from this shopping center, but merely photographed people who were not directly related to the shopping center. My subject was not about architecture of the shopping mall, but about "my" strangers in front of a white wall. In addition, I should undertake to send all the photos to the management, which then they might use this for advertising.

 

Of course, I did not want that. I explained the project, showed the photos I had taken so far. We discussed until the manager of the shopping center deleted the relevant passages from the approval. OMG!

 

So back to Kristin and Jonas. How overjoyed I was that Kristin and Jonas had been waiting for me. We finished our photoshooting and I finally could speak to this friendly and patient young people.

 

Meeting Kristin: Kristin comes from Düsseldorf, is 18 years old and still goes to school. In autumn, Kristin will start a dual course of studies in Stuttgart. She will study industrial engineering there together with Jonas.

 

What was your biggest challenge so far: That was the application in Stuttgart (at a large automobile group) Jonas and Kristin were selected from a circle of over 500 applicants in a difficult selection process.

 

How would Jonas describe Kristin? Kristin is very structured. She knows exactly what she wants and is very self-confident.

 

Kristin, who would you like to meet? This is Audrey Hepburn, Kristin answered.

 

My lonley island question: On a lonely island, Kristin would take the following three things: 1st: a knife, 2nd: a book (for example by Ken Follett) and 3rd: her best friend.

 

I had to ask, of course, what someone from Dusseldorf at Weiberfastnacht (Weiberfastnacht - marks the transition from the carnival meetings indoors to the street carnival on this Thursday till Ash Wednesday. It is a "high feast" in the German carnival tradition) will do in Frankfurt, and whether Kristin would prefer to celebrate this day in Dusseldorf. Yes, actually, but tomorrow in Frankfurt takes place a study-preparatory event. So Kristin will take part on Sunday to the carnival rumble.

 

Because I had already spent a lot of time with Kristin and Jonas (and my trip to the Centermanagement), I did not want to ask more questionsIt was a very easy going, amusing conversation. I think it was fun to everyone. As a souvenir of this encounter I still had to make a double portrait of Kristin and Jonas. So Kristin and Jonas will have hopefully a nice reminder of this evening. We shook hands, I handed over my card and said good-bye.

 

I am really grateful to Kristin and Jonas for their patience and the time, which both spend to me and my projct. To wait for me was really not self-evident.

 

I wish both success in their future studies in Stuttgart and all the best for their time together. Thank you very much again.

 

If you read these lines, please write me an e-mail, then will send you still the files of our shoot.

 

This is my 39th post to the group "The Human Family". Visit "The Human Family" here and have a look on the photos of the other photographers:

 

www.flickr.com/groups/thehumanfamily/

 

............................................

 

Es geht weiter mit meiner Frankfurt-Serie.

Das Wetter wurde nicht besser. Sturm, Regen! Niemandem möchte ich da zumuten, vor der Kamera zu stehen. Ich beschloss, in das große Einkaufszentrum direkt hinter mir zu gehen. Sehr futuristisch und vor kurzer Zeit erst errichtet. Warum habe ich keine Fotos von diesem durchaus sehenswerten Einkaufszentrum? Die Geschichte dahinter kommt etwas später.

 

Im obersten Stock war eine große Fläche zum Entspannen, um auf die Fußgängerzone zu und über die Dächer von Frankfurt zu blicken.

 

In diesem Entspannungsbereich gab es ganz am Ende eine große weiße Wand, die von oben mit diversen Strahlern ausgeleuchtet wurde. Ein schöner Hintergrund für Fotos, allerdings von der Lichtführung etwas problematisch.

 

Gut, ich wollte es versuchen und sah mich um, ob jemand auf mich den Eindruck macht, Zeit und Muße für ein Gespräch und ein paar Fotos zu haben. Und tatsächlich, fast direkt neben mir stand ein junges Paar, die genau wie ich den Blick auf Frankfurt genossen. Es schien so, als ob sie keine Eile hatten. Also sprach ich das Paar an, erklärte mein Anliegen, mein Projekt und zeigte auf meinem Smartphone meinen Fotostream. Das alles in der Summe war überzeugend und Kristin und Jonas, wie die beiden hießen, erklärten sich bereit, mich mit meinem Projekt zu unterstützen.

 

Ich bat beide zu meinem weißen Hintergrund. Vor dem Gespräch begann das kleine Fotoshooting. Der Hintergrund war wirklich sehr schön, nur die Beleuchtung warf unangenehme Schatten. Durch mehr oder weniger geschickte Positionierung versuchte ich dem entgegenzuwirken.

 

Und jetzt passierte etwas, mit dem ich nicht gerechnet hatte. Während unseres Shootings wurden ich von einem offiziellen Security-Mitarbeiter des Einkaufszentrums angesprochen und die Frage gestellt, ob ich denn eine schriftliche Erlaubnis habe, hier im Einkaufszentrums zu fotografieren. Dies verneinte ich wahrheitsgemäß. Bevor ich weitere Fotos machen dürfe, müsse ich mir zunächst die schriftliche Erklärung beim Management einholen, wurde mir erläutert. Es sei kein Problem, ich solle ihm einfach folgen, er bringt mich dorthin. Dem musste ich natürlich nachkommen.

 

Ich bat Kristin und Jonas bitte bitte zu warten, bis ich zurück bin, da noch nicht alle Fotos gemacht waren und ich mich mit den Beiden auch noch nicht unterhalten konnte.

 

Beim Management gab es ein weiteres Problem. Die Fotogenehmigung wollte man mir durchaus erteilen, allerdings sollte ich sämtliche die Rechte an meinen Fotos an den Betreiber des Einkaufszentrums abtreten. Das wollte ich natürlich nicht. Ich hatte ja nichts von diesem Einkaufszentrum fotografiert, sondern lediglich vor einer weißen Wand, Menschen fotografiert, die nicht in einem direkten Bezug zum Einkaufszentrum stehen. Mir ging es nicht um die Architektur, sondern um „meine“ Fremden vor einer weißen Wand. Außerdem sollte ich mich verpflichten, sämtliche Fotos an das Management zu schicken, die dann ihrerseits eventuell dies zu werblichen Zwecken nutzen wollten.

 

Das alles wollte ich natürlich nicht. Ich erklärte das Projekt, zeigte die schon gemachten Fotos und musste etwas diskutieren, bis der Manager des Einkaufszentrums die entsprechenden Passagen aus der Genehmigung gestrichen hat.

 

Also zurück zu Kristin und Jonas. Wie überglücklich war ich, dass Kristin und Jonas auf mich gewartet hatten. Wir beendeten unser Fotoshooting und ich konnte endlich etwas zu dem Mensch erfahren.

 

Hier traf ich also Kristin: Kristin kommt aus Düsseldorf, ist 18 Jahre alt und geht –noch- zur Schule. Ab Herbst wird Kristin ein duales Studium in Stuttgart beginnen. Ihr Studienfach ist dann das Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen.

 

Was war bisher deine größte Herausforderung? Beide antworteten: das war die Bewerbung in Stuttgart (bei einem großen Automobilkonzern) Aus einem Kreis von über 500 Bewerbern wurden Jonas und Kristin in einem schwierigen Auswahlverfahren ausgewählt.

 

Wie würde Jonas Kristin beschreiben? Kristin ist sehr strukturiert. Sie weiß genau was sie will und ist sehr selbstbewusst.

 

Kristin, wen würdest du gerne einmal treffen? Das ist Audrey Hepburn.

 

Auf eine einsame Insel würde Kristin folgende drei Dinge mitnehmen: 1ein Messer, 2. Ein Buch (zum Beispiel von Ken Follett) und 3. Ihre beste Freundin.

 

Ich musste natürlich noch fragen, was jemand an Weiberfastnacht aus Düsseldorf ausgerechnet nach Frankfurt verschlägt und ob Kristin nicht lieber in Düsseldorf feiern wolle. Ja, eigentlich schon, da aber am Freitag in Frankfurt eine studiumvorbereitende Veranstaltung stattfindet, wird Kristin erst am Sonntag sich so richtig in das Karnevalsgetümmel stürzen.

 

Da ich durch meinen Ausflug zum Centermanagement schon viel Zeit von Kristin und Jonas in Anspruch genommen hatte, wollte ich nicht noch weitere Fragen stellen. Es war ein sehr lockeres, amüsantes Gespräch, ich glaube, allen hat es Spaß gemacht. Als Andenken an diese Begegnung musste ich noch gerne eine Doppelportrait von beiden zusammen gemacht. So haben Kristin und Jonas eine hoffentlich schöne bleibende Erinnerung an diesen abend. Wie schüttelten die Hände, ich überreichte meine Karte und verabschiedeten uns.

 

Ich bedanke mich wirklich recht herzlich bei Kristin und Jonas für die Geduld und die Zeit, die beide für mich erübrigt hatten. Es war wirklich nicht selbstverständlich.

 

Ich wünsche beiden viel Erfolg bei ihrem künftigen Studium in Stuttgart und alles Gute auch für die gemeinsame Zeit. Vielen Dank nochmals.

 

Wenn Ihr diese Zeilen lest, schreibt mir doch eine E-Mail, dann überlasse ich Euch noch die Dateien unseres Shootings.

  

Dies ist mein 39. Beitrag zu der Gruppe "The Human Family". Mehr Fotos von anderen Fotografen der Gruppe findest Du hier:

 

www.flickr.com/groups/thehumanfamily/

  

The history of the Franciscan Church - similar to the history of Salzburg Cathedral - can be traced back to Salzburg's early Christian period. Both churches are distinguished by their contrasting architectural styles: the Cathedral, a dominating Baroque bishops' church and the Franciscan Church, a slender, Gothic church for the middle class. The Cathedral, a stately ecclesiastical structure, the Franciscan Church a place of silent communion.

The church's origins are obscure, it is maintained that it may be older than the Cathedral. Its construction is attributed to St. Virgil. As most of the other churches in Salzburg it was repeatedly ravaged by fire and fell victim to the chastisement of Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa in 1167. The aspiring Salzburg burghers left their mark on the city with their reconstruction of the church at the turn of the 12th century and again at the beginning of the 15th century. The self-confident middle class could afford to have the church renovated by the most famous architect in the Salzburg region, Hans von Burghausen. At that time Hans von Burghausen had gained recognition through his churches in Landshut and Neuötting. His masterpiece is the magnificent hall choir which effectively reflects the fusion of light and darkness, one of the Fransican Church's special features. The original high altar was built by Michael Pacher from 1495-1498 but has, unfortunately, not been preserved. Fortunately, the statue of the Madonna with Child, one of Michael Pacher's masterpieces, was integrated in the high altar designed by Fischer von Erlach 1709/1710 and thus preserved for posterity. The tower holds one of the oldest preserved bells made by the master bell-founder, Jörg Gloppischer, in 1468.

A couple weeks ago, while I was in Piedmont Park, here in Atlanta, for the "My Atlanta" exhibit, I ran into a friend of mine that I play beer league hockey with. I was just standing around minding my own business, when this guy I hadn't seen in about six months, comes walking around the corner wearing a tuxedo and yells, "Hey Joe!"

 

After I realized that I wasn't hallucinating and I didn't need to check myself back into the psych hospital, I greeted my friend and figured out that it was his wedding day. He was having a small ceremony at this gazebo that sits on a small lake in Altanta's largest city park. We exchanged pleasantries and went about our business.

 

A while later, I saw the bride come by. I remembered the wedding was going to begin soon. I also remembered an e-mail that I got from my friend back in the summer asking if I had done any wedding photography and if I would like to shoot his wedding. Being the self-confident guy I am, I ignored the message thinking there was no way I could pull that off. Since I happened to be feeling good this day, I decided to put on the long lens and quietly get some snaps just to see how I did. I figured if I got anything, I would just give them to the happy couple as a nice gesture.

 

Well, much to my surprise, I got a few good shots. I emailed a few and let them know I had more. Yesterday, I got the nicest e-mail from the bride asking to see the others because she loved one of the shots I took. She offered to pay me, but I said no. I didn't shoot this day to get paid. I did it to be nice. Suffice to say, I dropped of the rest of my images at a hockey game last night and saw some other old friends. I was a little nervous, because last time I saw them, I was quite literally going insane and emabarassed myself a good bit with my rage and temper tantrums. Everything went great. We had a few beers and chatted about the next season and if I am going to play. It was like nothing ever happened. They still took me for who I am and none of the other stuff mattered. That felt pretty good. It also felt good to turn over a pack of images that are loved and appreciated.

 

Another of my friends on the team saw this image and insisted I put it on flickr. So here ya go Phil...The day the willows didn't weep...

The area around Lübeck, today a large city with a population of more than 200,000, had been settled by Slavs since the 7th century. Slavs had a settlement north of the present city called "Liubice", which was razed by the pagan Rani tribe in 1128.

 

15 years later Adolf II, Count of Schauenburg and Holstein, founded the modern town as a German settlement on the river island of Bucu. He built a new castle, first mentioned as existing in 1147. Adolf II had to cede the castle to the Duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, in 1158. After Henry's fall from power in 1181, the town became an Imperial city. Emperor Barbarossa ordained that the city should have a ruling council of 20 members. With the council dominated by merchants, trade interests shaped Lübeck's politics for centuries.

 

In the 14th century, Lübeck became the "Queen of the Hanseatic League", being by far the largest and most powerful member of that medieval trade organization. In 1375, Emperor Charles IV named Lübeck one of the five "Glories of the Empire", a title shared with Venice, Rome, Pisa, and Florence.

 

Conflicts about trading privileges resulted in fighting between Lübeck (with the Hanseatic League) and Denmark and Norway – with varying outcome. While Lübeck and the Hanseatic League prevailed in conflicts in 1435 and 1512, Lübeck lost when it became involved in a civil war that raged in Denmark from 1534 to 1536. From then on Lübeck's power slowly declined. The city remained neutral in the Thirty Years' War, but the devastation from the decades-long war and the new transatlantic orientation of European trade caused the Hanseatic League – and thus Lübeck with it – to decline in importance. However, Lübeck still remained an important trading town on the Baltic Sea.

 

In 1160 Henry the Lion moved the bishopric of Oldenburg to Lübeck and endowed a cathedral chapter. In 1163 a wooden church was built, however, at the beginning of the 13th century, it was no longer sufficient to meet the representative demands of the self-confident burghers.

 

St. Marien was built between 1250 and 1350. It has always been a symbol of the power and prosperity of the old Hanseatic city. It situated at the highest point of the island that forms the old town.

 

Gothic cathedrals in France and Flanders made of natural stone were the models for the new construction of Lübeck's three-nave basilica.

 

St. Marien epitomizes North German "Brick Gothic" and set the standard for many churches in the Baltic region. The church embodied the towering style of Gothic architecture using brick.

 

The incentive for the City Council to undertake such an enormous project was rooted in the bitter dispute with the Lübeck bishopric. As a symbol of the long-distance merchants' desire for freedom and the secular power of the city, which had been free of the Empire since 1226, the church building in the immediate vicinity of Lübeck's city hall and the market square was intended to clearly and uncatchably surpass in size the city's bishop's church, Lübeck Cathedral.

 

In March 1942, St. Marien (as well as the Cathedral and St. Peter) was almost completely burned out during the air raid on Lübeck, which destroyed one-fifth of the city centre. Reconstruction of the church began in 1947 and was essentially completed.

 

Some centuries ago an astronomical clock was a very expensive piece of high tec only a few parishes could afford.

 

This astronomical clock was built in 1561–1566, but this is a copy, as the original was completely destroyed in 1942. The "new" astronomical clock is the work of Paul Behrens, a Lübeck clockmaker, who planned it as his lifetime achievement from 1960 to 1967. The clock front is a simplified copy of the original. Calendar and planetary discs controlled by a complicated mechanical movement show the day and the month, the position of the sun and the moon, the signs of the zodiac.

   

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I had a visitor in the back yard this weekend. He announced his presence in a way only a self confident Cardinal can.

just a wrap

is it not?

freeform

freestyle

for divas

divos

self-confident stargods

but,

of course

stargods are always

self- aware

& shining their light on

the core

of divine energy

just a wrap

is it not?

freeform

freestyle

for divas

divos

self-confident stargods

but,

of course

stargods are always

self- aware

& shining their light on

the core

of divine energy

chaos freeform

seamless

tunica dress

asymetric silhouette

intuitive knitting

speed crochet

multi versatile

wearable underwater sculpture

upside-down

flipped

inside-out

asymmetric sleeve

serving as a collar

or hood as well

for the playful insane

who enjoy to surprise themselves

borderless

ignoring all limitations

& conventions

East-German postcard by VEB Progress Film-Vertrieb, Berlin, no. 87/75, 1975. Retail price: 0,20 M. Photo: Uhlenhut.

 

German actress Heidemarie Wenzel (1945) became known in DEFA films of the early 1970s, such as Zeit der Störche/Time of the storks (1971) and Nemuritorii (1974).

 

Heidemarie Wenzel was born in 1945 in Berlin, Germany. During her youth, she played in the children's theatre and in the movement choir of the Deutschen Staatsoper (German State Opera). From 1963 to 1966 she studied at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch (Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Berlin. After graduation she got her first engagements in Rostock and Greifswald. Very soon she began to work as a freelance actress in film and on television. Her first major role was as Fanny in the film adaptation of Johannes R. Becher's novel Abschied/Farewell (Egon Günther, 1968), starring Rolf Ludwig and Jan Spitzer. The film was heavily criticised by officials in the GDR because of the unusual narrative style. Wenzel had her breakthrough in the role of the self-confident teacher Susanne in Zeit der Störche/Time of the storks (Siegfried Kühn, 1971), opposite Winfried Glatzeder. In Die Taube auf dem Dach/The Dove on the Roof (Iris Gusner, 1973), she was able to show her acting talent properly for the first time, however, the film was banned even before its premiere. The pretty, tall, slender and blonde actress was both open-minded and intelligent as well as introverted. She was often cast for contemporary roles as in Die Legende von Paul und Paula/The Legend of Paul und Paula (Heiner Carow, 1973), starring Angelica Domröse and Winfried Glatzeder. This was the most succesful film of the DEFA in its history.

 

Until the mid-1970s, Heidemarie Wenzel played several more major roles, but then she got less and less good offers, as she was considered politically unreliable. In 1986 she made an exit request and was not occupied in the following years. Therefore, she had to work as an office assistant at the church. In 1988 she was expatriated to the Federal Republic (West-Germany). From 1991, she became a star in both West and East Germany in the TV series Unsere Hagenbecks/Our Hagenbecks (1991-1994) about a family who runs a zoo in Hamburg. When her character died in an accident, it came to public protests. In the 1990s Wenzel also appeared more often in the theatre. Her later series include the popular hospital soap In aller Freundschaft/In all Friendliness (1998) with Rolf Becker. The series follows the staff of the fictional Sachsenklinik hospital in the city of Leipzig. Wenzel lives in Berlin-Tempelhof. She has a son and a daughter. In her first marriage Wenzel was married to the director Kurt Veth, which is why she was also credited at times as Heidemarie Wenzel-Veth. Since 1977, she is married to the director and author Helmut Nitzschke.

 

Sources: Wikipedia and IMDb.

 

And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards.