A review of The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox

During the oppressive heat wave of 1976 a young journalist, Ed Peters, finds an Edwardian photograph in a junk shop in the Brighton Lanes. It shows an alluring, dark-haired girl, an actress whose name was Leda Grey.

Enchanted by the image, Ed learns Leda Grey is still living - now a recluse in a decaying cliff-top house she once shared with a man named Charles Beauvois, a director of early silent film. As Beauvois's muse and lover, Leda often starred in scenes where stage magic and trick photography were used to astonishing effect. 

But, while playing a cursed Egyptian queen, the fantasies captured on celluloid were echoed in reality when Beauvois suspected a love affair between Leda and her leading man. A horrific accident left Leda abandoned and alone for more than half a century - until Ed Peters finds her and hears the secrets of her past, resulting in a climax more haunting than any to be found in the silent films of Charles Beauvois.

Paperback, 360 pages

Expected publication: November 3rd 2016 by Orion

Title:  The Last Days of Leda Grey

ISBN:  1409146251

Theda Bara

Since, The Last Days of Leda Grey by Essie Fox is soon to be published it makes my review a bit difficult. I cannot go into as much detail as I want to. It will be hard to hold myself back but understand in order for the reader to completely get lost in this gorgeous story, I must refrain from gushing. It will be a first for me!~   

 

 Theda Bara

 'Leda Grey' is told from the male perspective of journalist, Ed Peters who in 1976 walks into a shop to look around when he sees an old photograph of a silent film actress. He falls instantly in love with this coal black eyed, raven haired beauty. When the store owner tells him that Leda Grey is still alive and living nearby in a cliff-top house called, White Cliff he is off in a shot to find his enchantress.  

There is much more to the store owner and his relationship with recluse, Leda Grey. As for Ed Peters, well, his curiosity to find this beauty, now old, grey haired and withered by time, will change both their lives forever. 

 Theda Bara

What I just adored about this story was meeting old recluse Leda Grey.  What must have happened during this young, teenage girl's short film career to result in her locking herself away for years? Why would a young woman choose to live alone, isolated in her crumbling abode with rarely any human contact instead of venturing out into the real world? Even with the past of a brief acting career, some secrets should be left alone undisturbed only to be viewed on celluloid or on a movie screen in a crowded movie house stinking of stale oiled buttered popcorn with nothing but the echoes of the hum of the projector running upstairs in a locked room. 

 Theda Bara in The She Devil, 1918

Author, Essie Fox has done something truly impossible. She has taken the persona of a well-known movie actress, transported her back into 1976 aged and mentally effusive. Having three male counterparts, one an old ghostly lover, Charles Beauvois to tell aspects of her film career.  It is brilliant I tell you.  Also, Leda Grey herself unlocks her past secrets through clues hidden within her silent films made with Charles Beauvois. Journalist, Ed Peters is along for the ride as he pieces together this once beautiful woman's hidden past. Now, what is discovered and what occurs is beautifully written through journalistic interviews between Ed Peters and Leda Grey. 

The Last Days of Leda Grey is Essie Fox's best written work yet!  I cannot convey this enough how much I fell in love with her characters, the setting, the music of the nineteen seventies, her descriptions, her words, the story is ethereal in nature, Gothic in tone and dripping with gorgeous prose.   

Theda Bara film

To purchase your copy of The Last Days of Leda Grey in the United Kingdom,  Amazon UK

If you live in the U.S., and want to buy The Last Days of Leda Grey visit,  Book Depository

 

Visiting Kate Keown and May Prinsep: Sitters to Julia Margaret Cameron: Swann Galleries Auction

Swann Galleries is a small auction gallery on the Upper East Side of New York City. On Tuesday, October 25th, 2016 two photographs by nineteenth-century photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron will be included in this auction, Art & Storytelling: Photographs & Photobooks, an auction featuring examples of the medium from its inception in the early nineteenth century through contemporary works.

I was lucky enough to be able to visit Swann Galleries yesterday on my lunch break at work before the gallery closed. I expected to see  Kate Keown's albumen print by Mrs. Cameron. However, I was happily surprised to see May Prinsep dressed as Cenci staring right back at me. Well, we meet again future, Lady Tennyson! 

        From Art & Storytelling: Photographs & Photobooks catalogue.

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879)
Portrait of Kate Keown. Circular albumen print, the image measuring 11 3/8 inches (28.9 cm.) in diameter, the mount 20 3/4x16 7/8 inches (52.7x42.9 cm.), with a gilt rule and an embossed Colnaghi stamp on mount recto. 1866

Estimate $50,000 - 75,000

From the Neikrug Gallery, New York, New York; to Frances and Donald Werner, New York, circa 1975.

A stunning print by Cameron in a scarce circular format. Cameron's circular prints were known as "tondos" (from the Italian rotondo or "round") and reference both Renaissance work and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of her contemporaries.

This poetic work was the one of the first "life-sized heads" Cameron executed with a new larger-format camera and trimmed to the circular shape. Although Cameron's pictorial style continued to embody an inherent romanticism, this enlarged print size allowed her to render a subject more dramatically and pursue an investigation of the effects of sculptural lighting on her subject's faces. Her reliance on soft focus, intimate perspective, and slight movement imbue these portraits with startling life and spiritual resonance. She wrote in 1866, "I have just been engaged in that which Mr. Watts has always been urging me to do. A Series of Life sized heads--they are not only from the Life, but to the Life, and startle the eye with wonder & delight." (Cox 64-65).

In Julia Margaret Cameron: The Complete Photographs (J. Paul Getty Museum, cat. no. 875), scholar Julian Cox locates a carte-des-visite version of this portrait, a reduced albumen print in the Isle of Wight County Council Miniature Album, a print at the Yale University Beinecke Library, and a large-format print in the Gilman Collection (which is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).

JULIA MARGARET CAMERON (1815-1879)
A Study of the Cenci. Albumen print, 

the image measuring 14 1/4x11 5/8 inches (36.2x29.5 cm.), 

flush mounted to the original board. 1870

Estimate $3,000 - 4,500

From the Neikrug Gallery, New York, New York; to Frances and Donald Werner, New York, in 1975.

Interesting to note that the gallery does not include any mention of the sitter by name.

She was May Prinsep a niece, on her father's side, of photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron.

To learn more about the young woman posing as Cenci, you can read my article on, May Prinsep Tennyson

 Guido Reni painting the portrait of Beatrice Cenci at prayer in prison

by Achille Leonardi (Italian, 1800-1870)

Oil on Canvas

 

Cameron based the pose, drapery, and sad expression of her model on a painting attributed to Guido Reni. The subject is the 16th-century Italian noblewoman Beatrice Cenci who was executed for arranging the murder of her abusive father. One review admired Cameron’s soft rendering of ‘the pensive sweetness of the expression of the original picture’ while another mocked her for claiming to have photographed a historical figure ‘from the life’. (Victoria and Albert Museum)

When in Rome, in 1819, a friend put into our hands the old manuscript account of the story of The Cenci. We visited the Colonna and Doria palaces, where the portraits of Beatrice were to be found; and her beauty cast the reflection of its own grace over her appalling story.
--Mrs. Percy Shelley

Julia Margaret Cameron often directed female models to represent tragic heroines whose sorrow made them beautiful. Cameron composed this image around the sitter's downcast eyes and scrolling hair--which spills out from under a turban. Cameron's niece, May Prinsep, plays the role of Beatrice, the central figure of Percy Bysshe Shelley's play, The Cenci (1819). Prinsep's sorrowful expression conveys the character's resignation to her fate.

Beatrice Cenci, the daughter of a Roman count, lived in Florence during the late 1500s. After Beatrice conspired with her mother and brother to have her father killed, the trial brought to light his cruelty, which included an attempt to rape her. Although the story won public sympathy, the family was nonetheless executed. Cameron was fascinated by this true story and made several photographic studies based on it  (Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California). 

To learn more about the entire auction and photographers, Swann Gallery

Happy U.S. publication day and review of Julia Margaret Cameron By Herself, Virginia Woolf And Roger Fry

This book reprints Virginia Woolf's witty and moving biographical essay of her great-aunt, and Roger Fry's pioneering study of the photographs published together in 1926 under the title Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. To these are added Julia Margaret Cameron's own auto-biographical fragment, Annals of the Glass House, and her only surviving poem, On a Portrait. They are introduced by Tristram Powell. Tristram Powell is a film-maker and historian of photography.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, is best known for the nonlinear narrative of her novels, and for her feminism.

Roger Fry (1866-1934), painter and critic, was another member of the Bloomsbury Group. He was a leading champion of Post-Impressionism.

Daguerreotype portrait of Julia Margaret Cameron and her daughter, Julia Hay Cameron by Unknown, 1845, National Media Museum

The photographer is unknown but it is possible that the image was made in Calcutta as both mother and daughter were there until January 1845, after which 'Little Julia' returned to England for three years. The case is inscribed by the daughter 'Feb 10th 1845. This for me to keep', and probably at a later date by her mother 'Given to my Julia by her request - her own choice.' Julia Hay Cameron died in childbirth in her early 30s, at which point the portrait appears to have been returned to her mother. (This portrait is now housed at Dimbola Lodge, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, home of Julia Margaret Cameron. This image is not included in the book. I added it because its beautiful)

At the age of forty-eight, Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) was given a camera by her daughter when she moved to the Isle of Wight:  'It might amuse you, Mother, to try to photograph during your solitude at Freshwater.' The gift was to begin Mrs.Cameron's short but prolific career as one of photography's first great artists.

Cameron's long exposures and softfocus portraits were criticised by photographers of the time as lacking skill, but these evocative manipulations were in fact early realisations of photography's true poetic potential. Such expressiveness was something more readily understood by the Pre-Raphaelite painters with whom Cameron became associated, and who gave her encouragement.

Her portraits capture some of the most famous intellectuals and artists of the Victorian era, all made to follow Mrs. Cameron's famously exacting direction.

 PRODUCT DETAILS

Julia Margaret Cameron By Herself,Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY
128 Pages, 4.5 x 5.75
Formats: Trade Paper
Trade Paper, $16.95 (US $16.95) (CA $22.95)
Publication Date: October 2016
ISBN 9781843681212
Rights: US & CA

Pallas Athene (Oct 2016)

 In a letter to Sir Edward Ryan she says, 'Lastly as to spots, they must, I think remain. I could have them touched out, but I am the only photographer who always issues untouched photographs and artists for this reason, amongst others, value my photographs. So Mr. Watts and Mr. Rossetti and Mr. du Maurier write me above all others'. (Julia Margaret Cameron's letter, pg. 18). 

Dear Reader, if you are in search of first-hand accounts from Mrs. Cameron herself, her family members, closest friends, scholars, and the like then look no further.  For this small booklet is quite intimate and charming.  There are myriads of biographies on photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron's life and work. However, I am so in love with this beautiful yet introspective look beyond the lens into Mrs. Cameron's world in Ceylon and Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight. 

It is as if her closest friends have gathered together all of Mrs. Cameron's surviving writings (Annals of the Glass House), excerpts from her letters to colleagues, family, and friends, as well as critiques of the day written by family members and scholars of photography and history. There is no better research than personal artifacts from the subject. Yes, we have her photographs but there was so much more to the woman behind the standing box camera lens. 

 

 Julia Margaret Cameron with sons Henry Herschel Hay and Charles Hay, 1857-8

by an unknown photographer, Harry Ransom Center

I was shocked when I read the story of Julia's father in his coffin returning home with his widow and young children (including a very young child named Julia Margaret) when his coffin exploded with him in it!  Apparently, James Pattle was something of a liar and a scoundrel with a temper!  There are several fascinating stories about young Julia Margaret Pattle's childhood and family; yes, she was born  a Pattle before marrying Charles Hay Cameron later in life and having her family.  So many wonderful mentions of Mr. Cameron, his viewpoint on living on their coffee plantation in Ceylon, his thoughts on his wife, Julia Margaret, their life together, etc. It is worth the money for learning about that rare aspect of her personal life alone!  

If you want to learn more about the poets and scholars of Freshwater Bay on the magical Isle of Wight, all her friends are gathered within these pages. Focus is put on the famous laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson but deeper exploration into Julia Margaret's earlier friendship with great men such as poet and essayist, Sir Henry Taylor and astronomer, chemist, polymath Sir John Herschel just to name a few!  Wonderful descriptive stories of dinners and parties at her sister Sarah Prinsep's Little Holland House. I could have stayed there forever.  

There are fifty of Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs numbered and labeled as plates. Next to each photograph is a story and anecdote of that particular friend and sitter. However, some wonderful stories of the famous visitors who met Mrs. Cameron and didn't exactly like or get on with her! Very funny tidbits indeed. 

One of my favorite quotes from the book is one I often remember and know to be true even to this day. I should know because I am blessed to have visited Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight and most of my very dear 'friends' remain there...

Everybody is either a genius, or a poet, or a painter or peculiar in some way. 

Is there nobody commonplace?  

 

I am forever grateful to Trafalgar Square Publishing, Independent Publishers Group as well as Pallas Athene for mailing me a beautiful hardcover edition of, Julia Margaret Cameron By Herself, Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry for review. I will cherish it always. 

Now published in the United States and available for purchase, Amazon US

Already published in the United Kingdom and available for purchase, Amazon UK

America finally meets Charlotte Brontë at The Morgan Library & Museum's Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will exhibition September 9, 2016 through January 2, 2017

Photograph taken by Kimberly Eve of Victorian Musings

Charlotte Brontë's dress and pair of shoes 

The Morgan Library & Museum

A close-up photograph of Charlotte Bronte's dress taken by Kimberly Eve/Victorian Musings

Who would have ever thought you could fill the Bronte family into one room! No, not the Parsonage but a room on the second floor of The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.   You see, this is an exhibition focused upon third born sibling Charlotte Bronte. However, father, Patrick Bronte, sisters Emily and Anne are present as well along with brother Branwell and maybe a husband, too!  Perhaps the greatest author of the nineteenth-century can be discovered, re-discovered, adored and revered right here in the city of my birth.

I am not sure if every little girl discovers Jane Eyre in their pre-teens as I did but I have carried that orphaned girl who became Mrs. Rochester with me all my life. I know her, she is real to me and always will be. I always thought I would have visited Haworth by now but alas it hasn't happened yet. I made it to the dales but that was all.  So, when news of this exhibit finally reached social media I was beyond thrilled to see it; for I thought it would be her manuscript of Jane Eyre, her letters, her drawings perhaps. This would have been enough for me until The Morgan released that photographic image of her blue dress...Absolutely impossible I thought to myself. In no way would Haworth release the Bronte family items; especially not across the pond!  I am so glad to have been wrong.  

The minute you step out of the glass elevator from the lobby to the second floor you make a sharp right turn and open the glass doors. There it is! Dead center encased in glass was the dress Charlotte Bronte 'supposedly' wore to that party when she met her literary idol, William Makepeace Thackeray.  Just cast your eyes to the left and you will see the smallest pair of flat shoes I have ever seen. Even at her 4'9 height (though I thought her height was 4'11) her shoes were indeed tiny, flattened thinned soles with laces on either side. I know because I bent down almost sitting on the floor to take the photographs in order to see both sides. They look to be fabric material on top small brown polka dots. The bottom of her shoes leather maybe or is it plastic imitation still thin with no support. How in the devil did she and her sisters walk forty miles across the moors through all sorts of rough terrain and weather?  Goodness, I get a charley-horse if I try to walk more than one mile! 

On the first wall of the exhibit was Charlotte Bronte's baptismal record. Next to it was the famous carte-des-viste of the father of the Bronte's himself. I gasped audibly not expecting to see it. Everyone recognizes this image I am sure. It is smaller than I thought but the white cropped framing makes it look larger than it is.  Interestingly, there was no drawing or image of their mother, Maria at all.  The focus remained on the Rev. Bronte as leader and guide of his daughters and son's lives most probably because he outlived them all and his letters survive. 

Carte-de-viste photograph of a woman, 

possibly Charlotte Bronte but more likely 

Ellen Nussey, ca. 1856 

The Morgan Library and Museum Catalog note

Photograph by Kimberly Eve/Victorian Musings

I was not prepared to see this photograph. I just never gave it much thought but I am so glad I have. It is one of the most curious photographs to survive within the Bronte family archive. If it is Ellen Nussey, can you believe what all the fuss is about? I hope you and Charlotte are having a good laugh over us all down here engaging in such silliness. Now when it comes to portraits there are two almost sacred ones and both of them can be found here in the exhibit. 

Branwell Bronte was about seventeen when he began this unfinished portrait, depicting his teenage sisters over a decade before they published the novels that made them famous. During the 1950s, infrared photography confirmed the presence of a fourth figure-presumably a self-portrait that Branwell had chosen to efface-beneath the central pillar. As the oil paint has faded over time, the ghostly image has become ever more apparent to the naked eye.

The painting's condition reflects its history. Arthur Bell Nicholls, Charlotte's widower, took the work from Haworth parsonage to his new home in Banagher, Ireland, after Patrick Bronte's death. In 1914, Nicholls second wife, Mary Ann, discovered the painting on top of a wardrobe in their farmhouse, where it had apparently lain folded for over fifty years. It was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery that year and placed on display, to the public's great fascination. A century later, it is on view here for the first time in North America. (The Morgan Library & Museum Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will exhibition catalog note)

Look!  There it is!  Oh, it is iconic isn't it?   By now, everyone knows this painting and perhaps even the story painted by their brother Branwell.  I couldn't believe I was standing in the same room with all of these treasures that I have seen photographed in every Bronte biography printed since the dawn of time.  It is a large enough portrait in size and hard to describe the feeling of being able to freely walk up to it, for it is not roped off or behind glass. You can breath on it, touch it (they hate that) or just gaze at it imploringly as I did right before I heard in my mind a whisper, "Kimberly, hurry up"  What was that? The room is filled with people walking around this room. So, I did what any rational woman does when they hear an imaginary voice, "Alright, Charlotte I'm coming! You're almost as impatient as I am". 

On the other side of the wall of the family portrait was the independent willed one herself, Charlotte Bronte captured by George Richmond in his beautiful drawing from 1850. His signature can be seen in the left hand corner. Again, it was as if the noise in the room softened, crowded voices hushed; almost stilled and all I could focus on was the fact that I was actually able to walk up to this drawing and take my time studying every detail. Of course, the folks around me hated me because I took forever but I didn't care for I had waited a lifetime for this moment. No, I'm not breaking into song but if I ever make it to Yorkshire I just might!  (Watch out Nick) 

In 1850, publisher George Smith commissioned this portrait of his celebrated author as a gift for her father, Patrick. Sitting for a professional artist was traumatic for the self-conscious Bronte, but none of her discomfort is evident in George Richmond's graceful rendering. This is the only professional portrait for which she sat during her lifetime and the only surviving life portrait except for her brother Branwell's painting of his sisters, which is on view in the rear of the gallery.

The portrait hung in the dining room of Haworth parsonage during Patrick Bronte's lifetime and an engraving of the work served as the frontispiece to the first volume of Elizabeth Gaskell's 1857 Life of Charlotte Bronte. It has appeared in countless studies of the Brontes since then and is on view in North America for the first time. (The Morgan Library & Museum Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will catalog note). 

 

Charlotte Bronte letter to Ellen Nussey dated Brussels, 6 March, 1843

Bronte Parsonage Museum 

I was so happy to find that The Morgan included Charlotte's friendship with Ellen Nussey as part of the exhibit. It is so important to include not only spouses but lifelong friends of the subject as it provides a much different and needed perspective on someone who has reached an iconic status in literature and the world. 

I wrote an article about Ellen Nussey and her friendship with Charlotte Bronte. If anyone would like to learn a bit about Charlotte's dear friend Ellen Nussey 

Charlotte Bronte's younger sister, Anne Bronte was also included in this exhibit. Her notebook, her poetry was displayed and Charlotte's portrait of Anne is here as well. 

Anne's Poetry Notebook rebound later by Riviere & Son, 1838-41

Anne Bronte made neat copies of nine compositions in this notebook but eventually selected only one for inclusion in the 1846 volume of poems she published with her sisters. Her narrative poem, "The Parting" shown here, bears no resemblance to Charlotte's sentimental poem of (almost) the same title. (The Morgan Library & Museum)

Charlotte Bronte's portrait of her sister, Anne Bronte

17 June 1834, Watercolor drawing,

Bronte Parsonage Museum

There were so many treasured personal items belonging to Charlotte and her siblings that I couldn't possibly share them all. These are just some of the special ones that touched my heart that I have been longing to cast my eyes upon. I am so grateful to Bronte Parsonage Museum for loaning their belongings to The Morgan for lucky ones such as I.  One day I will walk through the doors of the parsonage, hopefully accompanied by a friend (you know who you are) and I will see much more!!  

Discover Charlotte Bronte: An Independent Will for yourself,  The Morgan Library & Museum

Upcoming exhibition: Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy-Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, 20th September 2016 to 22nd January 2017

Word from the Missing by James Clarke Hook RA, (1819-1907), 1877

The 150th anniversary of the first communications cable laid across the Atlantic Ocean, connecting Europe with America will be celebrated in a new and free exhibition entitled ‘Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy’.

This exciting collaboration between Guildhall Art Gallery, King’s College London, The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Institute of Making at University College London will explore how cable telegraphy transformed people’s understanding of time, space and speed of communication. Never-before-seen paintings from the City Corporation’s art gallery and work by prominent Victorian artists will be on display as well as rare artefacts such as code books, communication devices, samples of transatlantic telegraph cables and ‘The Great Grammatizor’, a specially-designed messaging machine that will enable the public to create a coded message of their own.

 Echoes of a far off storm by John Brett (1831-1902), 1890, Guildhall Art Gallery

Paintings by Edward John Poynter, Edwin Landseer, James Clarke Hook, William Logsdail, William Lionel Wyllie and James Tissot will be displayed, all of whom registered a changing world. Four themed rooms; Distance, Resistance, Transmission and Coding will tell the story of laying the heavy cables which weighed more than one imperial ton per kilometre across the Atlantic Ocean floor, from Valentia Island in Ireland to Newfoundland in Canada.

A new future
It took nine years, four attempts and the world's (then) largest ship, the Great Eastern, to complete. The cable enabled same-day messaging across the continents for the first time and sparked new opportunities as businesses were suddenly able to respond to world markets with breath-taking speed.  Governments and military forces were the first to use it. The first 'official' transatlantic telegraph was from Queen Victoria to President James Buchanan.

‘The Great Grammatizor’
Central to the exhibition will be an interactive messaging machine that will produce personal 'coded' poems for the public to enjoy. Three rotating buttons represent 'genre', 'feelings' and 'driving force' and when each is turned to one of seven options and a lever 'cranked' it will produce a one-of-a-kind text for visitors to decipher. Imagined by UCL PhD student Alexandra Bridarolli, it was inspired by 'The Great Automatic Grammatizator' a story by Roald Dahl from his collection Someone Like You (1953).

William Averst Ingram's 'Evening' (1898)

 William Lionel Wylie's 'Commerce and Sea Power' (1898)

Distance
The long-distance cable completely revolutionised communications; rather than weeks by ship, messages took minutes (approximately one minute for eight words) to transmit. The cables challenged ideas of space and time and completely transformed the way the Victorians did business and thought about communications. This room features samples of transatlantic cables, William Ayerst Ingram’s ‘Evening’ (1898) and William Lionel Wyllie's ‘Commerce and Sea Power’ (1898).
 

Edwin Landseer’s ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1864)

Resistance
The resistance in the 2,754 km of copper cables was huge and engineers barely understood it, making the passing of signals very difficult. Damage from vessels and the elements also hindered transmission.  Edwin Landseer’s ‘Man Proposes, God Disposes’ (1864), will take pride of place and depicts a British shipwreck and scavenging polar bears. Two never-before-seen paintings will be on display, Thomas Hope McLachan’s ‘The Isles of the Sea’ (1894) and Peter Graham's ‘Ribbed and Paled by Rocks Unscalable and Roaring Waters’ (1885).
 

James Clarke Hook's 'Caught By the Tide' (1869) 

William Logsdail's 'The Ninth of November, 1888' (1890)

Transmission
The telegraph companies desired speed but the line needed to clear between signals. To speed things up smaller signals were sent requiring ever more sensitive detectors. Paintings including James Clarke Hook’s ‘Caught By the Tide’ (1869) and William Logsdail ‘The Ninth of November, 1888’ (1890) explore old and new ways of transmitting messages.

Coding
To shorten messages and hide secret content from telegraph clerks people used code books and ciphers. Transatlantic code books will be on display alongside paintings that reflect the concept of coding through human interaction. These include James Tissot’s ‘The Last Evening’ (1873) and Solomon Joseph Solomon's ‘A Conversation Piece’ (1884).

'The Last Evening' by James Tissot (1873)

I know I shouldn't say this but James Tissot is one of the most masterful painters when it comes to depicting nineteenth-century, Victorian era cultural and societal norms.  Go to this exhibit if for no other reason than to stare at The Last Evening by Tissot. His works are true beauties to behold.  All the paintings included in Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy are beauties in their own right whether you are looking at the true rough and rugged life of the sea faring captains and fishermen or the washer women and housewives caring for their babies.  I truly wish I could visit this exhibit. There are artefacts as well as paintings, so if this catches your eye then I truly hope you visit Guildhall Art Gallery and I would be most obliged if you would post me an email and let me know how it was!  

I am always happy to share the  news of upcoming UK exhibits.  

For exhibition information, Guildhall Art Gallery