Your little handful of facts

"I like biography far better than fiction myself: fiction is too free. In biography you have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down and say damn, and go out for a walk. And it's real soothing; and when done gives an idea of finish to the writer that is very peacful. Of course it's not really so finished as quite a rotten novel; it always has and always must have the incurable illogicalities of life about it, the fathoms of slack and miles of tedium. Still, that's where the fun comes in; and when you have at last managed to shut up the castle spectre (of dulness) the very outside of his door looks beautiful by contast."

Robert Louis Stevenson, 18 June 1893
warm acknowledgements to Michael Caines for finding this gem (fathoms of slack!)

Black Lives

just one, in fact

FANNY EATON 

drawn by 

Joanna Wells

Albert Moore

Walter Stocks

Simeon Solomon 

Janey Morris in PPE

one to make you smile.

but would Jane have chosen that exact shade of turquoise?

one more disgusting thing about Bristol and Edward Colston

R J Lewis The Death of Colston Bristol City Art Gallery

is this painting, commemorating Colston's death, where the artist, inexplicably has placed an African maidservant kneeling to kiss the enslaver's hand.

The artist R J Lewis is utterly obscure. It appears that the painting was commissioned or purchased by Bristol city council in the 1840s, to hang in a civic space like the town hall. About a century later it was transferred to Bristol City Art Gallery, probably because Victorian painting was so outmoded by then. 

Bristol people have been protesting and denouncing Colston and his slaving for decades now.

Helen Muspratt Photographer

Helen Muspratt, triple self-portrait : copyright Jessica Sutcliffe

I'm really hoping the current covid crisis will have lifted from museums as well as everywhere else by the autumn, because the Bodleian Library in Oxford is scheduling an exhibition of original photographs from the Helen Muspratt archive there.   Due to open 16 October 2020.   

Helen Muspratt, Eileen Agar, copyright Jessica Sutcliffe

It will include all aspects of Muspratt's work, from  pioneering images of fellow artists like Eileen Agar and Paul Nash, 

through commercial university-town portraits  of eminent figures, to documentary accounts of the Soviet Union and Welsh valleys in the 1930s. 

Something from her daughter Jessica Sutcliffe about Muspratt's work here :  OUP blog

Gossip about Effie Millais

William Bell Scott to William Michael Rossetti
21 June 1855

"Millais's marriage is not a pleasant event.  What do you think of it?  a lady whose complaint against her husband is that reported of Mrs Ruskin is not an actress who will set much store by either good taste or the affections, and one may fear notoriety has got the better of the man who shares her role.  However other men  may see the matter in quite another light.  Were there any stolen waters in Millais's cup last [sic] year in the Highlands?  Were there any crim.con elements in that summer trip?'

Ms in Durham University Library

Tom KcKellar: Sargent's model

new information from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.  i'll try to attach image later

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnmdEARSSwE&feature=emb_share&fbclid=IwAR08-jYKOBeFSnK8zxfFITqBm2QDLDya-HukC8tlRcu38EnBcWAGpzcZiz0