2020-12-19:
Monstrous Heads | Face it! | Tweets
Category: bycatch
Lorenzo and Isabella
Bycatch from my Snark hunt:
The, well, ambiguity of that “shadow”is known. Also there were some Freudian assumptions regarding what the salt could stand for. But so far I didn’t find any remarks on the impossibility of having a shadow being covered by white salt which isn’t covered by that shadow. To someone who learned physics that is a quite obvious question.
2017-12-17, update: 2020-04-11
Big Head in a Mess
Playing with Pareidolia
From Rule 42 to Rule 51 in Germany
At this moment the King, who had been for some time busily writing in his note-book, cackled out ‘Silence!’ and read out from his book, ‘Rule Forty-two. ALL PERSONS MORE THAN A MILE HIGH TO LEAVE THE COURT.’ Everybody looked at Alice.
‘I’m not a mile high,’ said Alice.
‘You are,’ said the King.
‘Nearly two miles high,’ added the Queen.
‘Well, I shan’t go, at any rate,’ said Alice: `besides, that’s not a regular rule: you invented it just now.’
‘It’s the oldest rule in the book,’ said the King.
‘Then it ought to be Number One,’ said Alice.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, chapter XII
In the 1952 German dubbed version of Disney’s 1951 Alice movie, “Rule 42” had been replaced by “Paragraph 51”. Nobody can really know what “42” stands for, but in Germany “he has the article 51” (“Er hat den Paragraph 51“) meant “He is mad”. It was until the year 1975 that the article 51 of the German penal code provided the legal base for insanity defense.
Lewis Carroll’s “Rule 42” might not have been plain nonsense.
The Bard
- [main image]: John Martin, The Bard (ca. 1817); by GIMP: contrast enhanced in the rock area & light areas delated.
- [inset] Henry Holiday (engraver: Joseph Swain), Illustration (1876) to the chapter The Beaver’s Lesson in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, detail
Bycatch (found in 2013) from my Snark hunt:
- [left] from Maurits Cornelis Escher’s Cimino Barbarano, 1929.
- [right] from John Martin’s The Bard, ca. 1817.
2017-09-26, update: 2018-05-26
Alice in the Woods
Bycatch from my Snark hunt:
- [background]: Sir John Tenniel: Alice & Cheshire Cat (1866 or 1869?)
vintageephemera.blogspot.de/2010/08/book-illustration-cheshire-cat-alices.html - [center right]: Magic lantern slide by William Robert Hill: Alice in Wonderland (1876)
twitter.com/Bonnetmaker/status/525660964700848129 - [bottom center]: Bonomi Edward Warren: Sportsman and dog on a wooded path (1868, watercolor)
- [bottom right]: Bonomi Edward Warren: Woodland Scene in Summer with Children on a Path (1871, oil on canvas)
I don’t know who borrowed from whom. And there are more paintings by Bonomi Edward Warren where he recycled that forest scene.
The King’ s Bedpost
Alice on the Train
Bycatch (but not mine):
[left]: John Tenniel: Alice on the Train (1872)
[right]: Augustus Leopold Egg: The Travelling Companions (1862)
I found the comparison in preraphaelitesisterhood.com. If it is a pictorial reference at all, it might be a nice pun by Tenniel, but not as challenging as Henry Holiday’s conundrums.
Playing with the work of other artists could have been fun for John Tenniel too. (Of course another reason for such similarities always could be, that Holiday and Egg both referred an image by a third artist.)
Sphinx
Four Artists’ Collaboration
The Carpenter
Bycatch from my Snark hunt:
- [left]: John Everett Millais: Detail from Christ in the House of His Parents aka The Carpenter’s Shop (1850).
Location: Tate Britain (N03584), London. - [right]: Philip Galle after Maarten van Heemskerck: Detail from redrawn print Ahasuerus consulting the records (1564).
Location: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Of course this could be incidental. It is said, that Joseph’s head was modelled after the head of Millais’ father.