Bute & Montmirail

This is a portrait of John, Lord Mountstewart, later 4th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bute. The portrait is now in the Getty and was one of the works in today's Artle. I hear "Bute" in the voice of Michelle Fairley who plays Princess Augusta in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. Another of today's Artle works was a portrait of Charles Benjamin de Langes de Montmirail, Baron de Lubières. "Montmirail" was the noble name of the man who was obsessed by Dowager Countess Violet (Maggie Smith) in the second Downton Abbey film. He left his villa in the South of France to her. Perhaps I'm living too much in historical spaces as manifested in popular culture. Or perhaps the real world needs to be escaped from.
 

the subject of the Artle work

Marie Harriman, 1903-1970, gallerist and second wife of W. Averill Harriman, is the subject of the portrait in today's Artle. The portrait, in the National Gallery of Art, does not seem to me like a predictable work by the artist. Joe Biden borrowed the painting to hang in his Vice Presidential office in the Old Executive Office Building from 2009-2015, according to the NGA exhibition information on the page for the painting.

Marie Harriman's Wikipedia page is a master lesson in name dropping: Averill Harriman, Peter Duchin, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (son of Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt), Hall Roosevelt (brother of Eleanor), Babe Paley, Pamela Beryl Digby Churchill Hayward, Randolph Churchill (son of Winston), Leland Hayward, and Miss Spence's School. I guess this is what happens when you are in the New York upper crust.

 

Lady Croft by Philip de László

 The Hon. Nancy Beatrice Borwick, Lady Croft (1884-1949)

Portrait by Philip Alexius László de Lombos

(viewed in email from the Royal Oak Foundation,

the American affiliate of the National Trust of England,

Wales and Northern Ireland)

Never having heard of Philip Alexius László de Lombos, I naturally (it being me) checked the LC/NAF authority file for the painter. I picked "lombos" as my entry word for a left-anchored browse and found nothing. Not Lombos at all. Never give up too early. Searched "laszlo" and found him:

010	__ |a no2004037532
035	__ |a (OCoLC)oca06327328
040	__ |a ICU |b eng |e rda |c ICU |d DLC |d FU
046	__ |f 1869 |g 1937 |2 edtf
100	1_ |a László, Fülöp, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a De László, Philip Alexius, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László de Lombos, Philip Alexius de, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Fülöp Elek, |d 1869-1937
400	1_ |a László, Philip de, |d 1869-1937

What? No reference from Lombos??

The Royal Oak Foundation email was about the "National Trust Property of the Week" -- Croft Castle in Herefordshire. The Crofts had settled there by the time of the Domesday Book and the castle dates to the 14th and 15th centuries. The Crofts lost the house in 1746 but were back in 1923. The house went to the National Trust in 1956, not that we'll be able to visit it any time soon.

the beginning and the end

In the greater middle portion of your life, you like to feel like you're in at least partial control. You may make mistakes but you may have some influence over the next thing to happen or tomorrow. You sometimes seem to have only yourself to blame when things don't go right, whatever that is seen to be. And then there's when you are really young or dead. It all just is. You can holler or struggle or just be still.

I'm reading The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai. There are plenty of good sentences but this one on page 16 stood out: "Being on an airplane, even in coach, was the closest an adult could come to the splendid helplessness of infancy." You're just there, for the duration of the flight you cannot move a whole lot, you can't pick from a variety of food and drink and activity. You can prepare but you're mostly helpless beyond a certain point. It's only good if you let the helplessness be splendid. My mom said I'd just happily sit in my playpen when I was an infant, probably running a little car back and forth. Her friends wondered if something was wrong with me, if I were perhaps a little "slow."

On the other end of life, we are often equally as helpless though maybe have too much awareness of our helplessness. There was an article in the New York Times on Thursday (February 20, 2020) entitled "Final moments for all to see" about taking pictures of people who had recently died. The online version of the story is called "The iPhone at the deathbed." The article also talks about the preparation of the body for the picture. There are various terms for the folks who will help you but I think I like "death doula" best. Amy Cunningham, a funeral director in Brooklyn, describes how she was talking to a group of Unitarians in Albany and said that she thought the dead person would want to look their best. A nonagenarian in the back of the room yelled out "You'll get over that!" Her reflection on that experience was that it "got [her] thinking. Wouldn't it be wonderful to die unfettered and free from worrying about how [you] look?" More splendid helplessness, even if you don't know about it.

You do know about how worried you have been all your life about how you looked. Another article in Thursday's paper, entitled "Paramedical tattooos: when ink is the Rx," was about tattoo artists who do healing tattoos like fingernail images on the tips of fingers which have been cut off in an accident. They also might do scar or blemish covering, the point being a subtle blending in with the rest of the person's skin. My nose reconstructions have left me not wishing to have my photograph taken and worried about the misshapen nose. Still I don't feel helpless (most of the time) and I'd rather tell the story about the scars than go through a bunch of operations to smooth it all out, especially since they'd probably not succeed. So the lesson is to do the best you can with what you've got and be patient if you're riding in coach. It will soon be over ... or not.

Dick Ket

I was cruising about on Flickr and came across a picture of the cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Thief's Journal by Jean Genet.

The illustration was the same painting that caught my fancy at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in 2016. It's a self portrait from 1932 by Dick Ket.

And Emma Raben used to have a couple blog entries with a young man emulating this self portrait. But the blog has evaporated.

Flemish farmhand

Rose and Anna went to a thé dansant in York. Rose danced with Sam Thawley, a gardener at an estate near Downton Abbey. He was smitten with Rose. I was rather smitten with the actor that played the role, Jonathan Howard, and couldn't figure out exactly why when I watched the episode. And, then, aha. He's a candidate for a portrait by Hans Memling or Hugo van der Goes or Dirk Bouts.

The scene at the thé dansant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaowBaLkjNc
The scene in the kitchen yard, in which Sam visits Rose and she plays the maid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIiSYwJaKh4