The Crossroads archive is officially open! I have made the decision to indefinitely pause paid subscriptions and make this newsletter free to all readers.

As many of you know, I’ve been incredibly busy establishing my YouTube channel Fireside Fables, and I have a secret project I’ve been working on that will (hopefully) be ready to launch sometime this fall. While I have absolutely no intention of leaving Substack, I no longer have the time to publish weekly essays, and thus the closed archive doesn’t make sense.

It will take me some time to make sure all the links and pathways are working as they should, but for now, here are two series I published last summer that may interest you. First is my series on the life of Édouard Manet; you can read the first essay below:

And for the history buffs, this series on the eruption of Mount Tambora and its reverberations around the world, from the birth of Frankenstein to the invention of the bicycle:

Thank you as always for your continued support of Crossroads. More soon! -N

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Green Man

Have you seen the Green Man? All over the United Kingdom, tucked away in medieval churches, mysterious faces covered in leaves stare down at parishioners. Is the Green Man a legacy of Catholic architecture, or something far older? In this episode of Fireside Fables, we explore the shadowy history of the Green Man and all his manifestations over the centuries.

In case you missed it, Crossroads has received a small makeover, including new logos and a revised name. You can learn more about it here.

Red House stood in an orchard of apple trees. The land surrounding the estate was once wild, a fairytale setting of rolling hills and meandering streams. Long ago, pilgrims would have passed near the village of Upton on their journey to Canterbury. Peasant farmers would have led their flocks to its meadows.

When the first bricks of the house were laid in 1859, much had already changed. A railway station stood just three miles away. The city of London, ten miles southeast, was ever-expanding, its suburbs steadily encroaching on the countryside like a low-hanging fog.

The city would win in the end. Today, Red House is no longer in Kent but Bexleyheath, a suburb of Greater London. It’s an outcome that its original owner would have abhorred.

William Morris purchased the land in 1859 after marrying his wife, Jane “Janey” Burden. It was a controversial union; Morris came from a wealthy family (his father was a financier) and Burden was the working-class daughter of a stableman. Burden’s striking looks made her an ideal art model, so she met Morris through their mutual network of artist friends.

Morris, of course, would eventually become one of the most celebrated artists of the Victorian era. His textiles, prints, and illustrations would cement his legacy as the leading figure of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. But when construction began on Red House, Morris was still early in his career and full of idealism.

Morris commissioned his friend, the architect Philip Webb, to build a home that reflected the artistic sensibilities that Morris had developed at Oxford. As a first-year student, he had befriended Edward Burne-Jones, who would later become a prominent artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Like many Victorians disillusioned by the rapaciousness of the Industrial Revolution, they had grown passionate about the craftsmanship of bygone eras, particularly the chivalric values, rural communities, and detailed aesthetics of the (highly romanticized) Middle Ages.

Over the years, Morris grew ensconced within a world of rebellious, eccentric artists who rejected the sterility of mass-produced items and elevated the imagery of Britain’s medieval past. The cohort included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Arthur Hughes, and other artists and writers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

Morris applied those ideals to the design of Red House: with its unique, asymmetrical structure, steeply pitched roof, and red-brick walls, the house both embraced the increasingly popular Neo-Gothic while using traditional methods of construction, something that Morris and his fellow artists and craftsmen valued a great deal. The final result was the very first building in the Arts and Crafts style. (Philip Webb is now considered the father of Arts and Crafts architecture.)

Morris had big dreams for what the house could represent. While decorating the home, Morris and his wife quickly discovered the challenges of achieving the Arts and Crafts-look in the age of industrialism. They commissioned friends like Rossetti to paint interior murals, and Morris designed most of the decor. Webb contributed his own furniture designs and created stained-glass windows. As a whole, the house was a revolutionary feat: the artists who made it were not just copying Gothic styles, but adapting historical building techniques for the Victorian world.

Having worked first as an architectural apprentice and then as a painter for several years, Morris decided that now was the time to take these principles beyond Red House. In 1861, he founded his own decorative arts firm: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., co-founded with the civil engineer P.P. Marshall and Oxford mathematician Charles Faulkner, who served as the firm’s financial manager. In partnerships with Morris’s Pre-Raphaelite friends, they resolved to produce everything from stained-glass windows to textiles and wallpapers with hand-crafted, traditional techniques.

Morris envisioned a future in which his country estate could serve as the site for an artists’ community, a romanticized take on a medieval village of craftsmen laboring together. With any luck, he and Janey (along with their young daughters, Jenny and May) would spend the rest of their lives surrounded by the warmth and tranquility of Red House.

It didn’t last. In 1865, the Morrises would relocate their family to London—a move that reveals much about the challenges of being an idealist in the age of industry.

I’m fascinated by Morris, not just because of his extraordinary talent as a designer, but because his own circumstances contain strong parallels to the difficult decisions that artists, designers, and craftspeople must make today in our “second” Industrial Revolution.

Red House only took a year to build, but shortly after moving in, Morris learned that his fantasy of medieval communitarianism quickly clashed with the realities of modern life. He was commuting two to three hours a day into London, taking time away from his wife and girls. (Not to mention that Janey, a favorite artist model for the Pre-Raphaelites, was growing a bit too close to Rossetti…) The idea of establishing the workshop in the countryside was soon abandoned. From a financial perspective—not to mention, the constraints on available labor and lack of exposure to potential clients—made it a difficult prospect at best.

Morris was also facing some personal financial difficulties due to his declining income from his investments and the high costs of maintaining the estate. One has to wonder if some of his earlier naïveté was the result of his inherited wealth; it’s easy to romanticize medieval villages when one is safe in the assumption that they would not have been a serf. The great country estates of England’s past subsisted on land rents and peasant labor. Already by the mid-19th century, upkeep of these properties required great financial investment. Morris had no choice but to sell his home in 1865. He would never set foot in Red House again.

With his family now established in London, Morris and his colleagues faced a critical juncture in their business. Morris’s aspirations of running a rural, medievalist workshop would not come to fruition. But could he find a middle-ground between that ideal and the urban factories he loathed?

In the late 1860s, two major commissions bolstered the firm’s reputation—the dining room in what is now the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the wallpaper for several rooms in St. James’s Palace. These commissions helped to expose Morris’s beautifully designed, hand-printed wallpapers to an affluent London audience.

As the company grew, so did internal disputes over its structure and leadership, culminating in its dissolution in 1875 and reorganization under Morris’s sole ownership. The newly-dubbed Morris & Co. could move forward with centralized leadership, another practical reality further removed from the medieval workshop Morris had once envisioned.

By 1881, Morris & Co. was producing wallpaper, carpets, woven textiles, printed fabrics, and tapestries; the company now had enough capital to relocate to a textile factory in South London called Merton Abbey Mills. Despite the industrial setting, Morris & Co. continued to use hand-block printing and natural dyes. The firm provided employment for skilled weavers, embroiderers, glassworkers, and other artisans. Morris succeeded in preserving craftsmanship and dignity of labor while still maintaining a profitable commercial enterprise.

Of course, there was a catch, one that would brush up against his increasingly socialist politics: Morris & Co. products were prohibitively expensive, and the only people who could afford to purchase them were the same Victorian elite whom Morris critiqued in his political writing. Morris believed that beauty should belong to everyone, but not everyone could swallow the price.

It’s this contradiction that lies at the heart of his work. The same could be said for the hand-printed, limited-edition books he created with Kelmscott Press, the imprint he co-founded towards the end of his life. Inevitably, these books were luxury items for affluent collectors.

Morris struggled a great deal over this. Ultimately, he believed that in a world of shoddy industrial products and horrific working conditions, maintaining high production standards and a positive environment for his employees was more important than producing affordable goods.

Over a century later, designers and consumers face similar issues. Clothing made ethically is often very expensive; fine pottery and knitwear and artworks made by hand are out of reach for most people. The makers of these pieces need to charge what their time and labor are worth, even when the price is more than what most can pay.

Even so, by clinging to his ideals in a hostile world, Morris had a long-lasting impact. Morris & Co. kept traditional crafts alive in the face of mounting industrial pressure, and its workers made an elegant case for slow production—a conversation we’re still having and still wrestling with to this day. Morris did not succeed in making his wares accessible to all, and he did not realize his vision of the artist’s village. But his legacy is in shifting the public’s perception of industry, and helping to highlight not just what we make, but how and why we make it.

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Voynich Manuscript

In the year 1912, a rare books dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a spectacular find: a manuscript, late medieval in appearance, written in an unknown language. Today, that text is known as the Voynich Manuscript, and no one has been able to decode it. What secrets might it contain?

Fireside Fables is a YouTube channel dedicated to exploring folklore, strange and forgotten history, supernatural creatures, and historical mysteries. From witch trials and ghost stories to cursed objects and strange legends, each video brings a new tale to mystify and inspire. Join us around the hearth for new episodes every week!

In case you missed it, Crossroads has received a small makeover, including new logos and a revised name. You can learn more about it here.

In 1911, Gustav Klimt debuted Death and Life at the International Art Exhibition in Rome. The painting won first prize, and to any outside observer, it appeared that Klimt had reached the peak of his career: the artist had navigated the rise and fall of the Vienna Secession, weathered the outrage surrounding his erotically-charged work, and could now take his place at the pinnacle of Art Nouveau.

Death and Life still resonates deeply with audiences. I would know—shortly before Christmas, I posted a Note featuring the painting on Substack, and it received thousands of interactions. Many of my newer readers discovered my newsletter thanks to Klimt’s painting.

But that version of Death and Life, which hangs in the Leopold Museum in Vienna, is not what viewers would have seen at the 1911 exhibition.

This painting exists now only as a faint memory, buried beneath layers of paint. It is thanks to a 1913 color reproduction in the magazine Kunst für Alle (“Art for All”) that we even know what the original looked like.

The first version of Death and Life emerged at the tail end of Klimt’s “Golden Period,” named for his use of gold leaf in some of his most famous works, including The Kiss (1907-1908), Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), and Judith I (1901). Klimt’s father was a Bohemian gold engraver, and Klimt would have followed in his father’s footsteps were it not for his obvious talent as a draftsman—a skill that would motivate his decision to enroll in the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) at fourteen. His use of gold leaf in his paintings was not only an homage to the early training he received from his father, but a nod to Byzantine and medieval artistic traditions.

Klimt’s portrayal of Death in the first version of Death and Life embodies this style; Death is a somber figure, head bowed, surrounded by a golden halo. Delicate gold flakes warm the background of the image, though already, Klimt was using far less gold when compared to many earlier works. On the right, a cascade of dreaming figures at various stages of life remain blissfully unaware of Death’s presence.

Despite the overwhelming acclaim Klimt received for this work, the artist was navigating a difficult period in his life. He was still reeling from the rupture of the Union of Austrian Artists, the group he had co-founded in 1897 as a radical stance against the stuffy, conservative Association of Austrian Artists.

Similar to the plight of the Impressionists in 1874, young Austrian artists found that the Association possessed little patience for Art Nouveau, and breaking through as up-and-coming talent was an uphill battle. But by 1905, the Union of Austrian Artists, otherwise known as the Vienna Secession, was falling apart. Divisions surfaced between those who felt that they should focus on painting, and those (like Klimt) who insisted on the equal elevation of decorative arts. That year, Klimt, along with graphic artist Koloman Moser and architects Josef Hoffman and Otto Wagner, left the Union.

Meanwhile, Klimt’s melancholy and existential dread mirrored the aura of impending doom pervasive in Vienna. With the imminent outbreak of the First World War, the fissures within the Austro-Hungarian Empire were growing beyond repair. A city once captivated by modernity, the mysteries of psychoanalysis, and expanding democratic sentiment would now have to see how well they could dance as the floor moved beneath their feet.

In 1914, the empire went to war, and the limp carcass of the Old World was smothered by mustard gas and strangled to death. As the foundations of the country he had once known crumbled around him, Klimt’s style evolved. Leading up to the war, Klimt began moving away from gold leaf, instead embracing elements of French Post-Impressionism and Fauvism, synthesized with his distinctly Viennese explorations of the human psyche. He started painting more landscapes, making ample use of his summer escapes to Attersee.

Then, in 1915, his mother died.

Klimt was extremely close to his mother, Anna. He lived with her until her death; it was a relationship he always treasured, particularly in light of the early deaths of his father and his brother, Ernst.

After Anna’s death, Klimt revisited Death and Life. Some of the changes he made were in keeping with the stylistic evolution we’ve explored: he painted over the gold and removed Death’s halo. Life grew in size and importance to the composition. More humans were added to a tapestry of riotous color. With a billowing, ovoid shape, Life became a fragile ecosystem rippling across the canvas.

All of the humans are asleep, each locked within their own subconscious—except for one. Only the woman on the left sees Death with wide eyes.

Though still covered in crosses, Death is no longer the somber saint, the simple eventuality of the original painting. Death stares back at the woman. (Curiously? Menacingly?) He wields not a scythe nor a sword, but a club.

Countless scholars have highlighted this reference to the Danse Macabre, a motif common in medieval art in which Death leads away princes as well as paupers. It was both a political message and a spiritual reminder that death comes for us all.

But what strikes me about Death and Life is the artist’s choice to depict Death holding a club, rather than the traditional scythe. It’s an instrument so primitive and barbaric in a painting that is otherwise modern in its style and psychoanalytical themes. Death’s wielded club seems to remind the viewer not just of the inevitability of dying, but of the underlying savageness from which modernity cannot escape. It’s a message that rings true especially today—the times change, the technology advances, and the world’s overwhelming brutality remains.

Klimt didn’t live to see the end of World War I. He died of pneumonia caused by the Spanish flu, a brutal pandemic that swept through Europe towards the end of the war and eventually killed about 50 million people worldwide. His own dance with death arrived on February 6th: exactly three years after his beloved mother, down to the final day.

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Mystery of Edinburgh’s Fairy Coffins

In the summer of 1836, a group of Scottish boys were hunting for rabbits on Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano that overlooks Edinburgh, when they encountered something they couldn’t explain: seventeen tiny coffins hidden in a small cave. Ever since, the coffins have mystified historians and the public.

Were these “fairy coffins” used in an obscure, magical ritual? Were they intended as mimicked burials for sailors lost at sea? Or, could they be related to something far more sinister?

Quite a few of you are new here, so for those who are unfamiliar, Fireside Fables is my new-ish show on YouTube all about folklore and weird history. If you enjoy learning about ghost stories, witches, historical mysteries, and eccentric characters throughout time, then Fireside is for you. I’d love for you to join me!

As some of you might have noticed, I took a longer-than-expected break from Substack over the past month. I’ve been in the weeds establishing my new channel on YouTube, formulating and dreaming all that Fireside Fables can be.

During that time away, I was able to gain some perspective on how to give this website a refresh. The original name for Crossroads was The Crossroads Gazette, and while I’ve always loved that title, I’ve come to realize that “Gazette” doesn’t properly fit the function of this newsletter. Ultimately, Crossroads is my space to share my essays and keep readers apprised of any news related to my projects.

Henceforth, the new title will be Crossroads by Nicole Miras, and the new link is crossroads.nicolemiras.com, which is connected to my website. Shortly after sending this off, I’ll be changing the Substack email address.

As always, thank you for reading and supporting Crossroads! Looking forward to sharing more soon.

Cheers,

Nicole Miras

This is the fifth and final essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

As the First World War embroiled France, Georges Clemenceau made a trip to Normandy to visit his artist-friend at Giverny. The former prime minister (who would be elected to lead France once again in 1917) was concerned about Claude Monet, and he felt he had just the project to revive the painter’s spirits.

The rest of Europe was engulfed in disaster and death; the modern world had come marching into view with the sound of machine guns and the suffocation of mustard gas. The Belle Époque, the world of Impressionism, had disappeared. At Giverny, Monet was dealing with his own tragedies—his wife Alice had died in 1911, and his eldest son Jean had died in 1914. Already prone to depressive episodes, Monet sunk into a deep, impenetrable melancholy.

You may recall that several years before, Clemenceau endeavored to buy Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series for the country. Clemenceau was determined to secure some of his friend’s works for the French people, especially now that so many of the Impressionists’ artworks resided in the United States. (To which Paul Durand-Ruel would likely say, the French should have bought the art when they had the chance! It was Durand-Ruel’s idea to bring the art to the States in 1886 after poor reception in France, and this decision cemented the success of Impressionism on the global stage.)

At Giverny, Clemenceau proposed the idea of a Water Lilies series painted for the French nation. The government could even help Monet secure supplies to build a separate, larger studio on the grounds of Giverny for the project. At 24 by 12 meters (about 79 by 39 feet), the studio could only be constructed during the war thanks to Clemenceau’s connections.1

Monet painted over 250 works in his Water Lilies series, but these giant canvases required a special viewing experience. The artist conceptualized what we today might call an “infinity room,” such as those created by the contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama. Monet wanted viewers to feel as if they were inside his pond, viewing the lily pads up close. He therefore agreed to Clemenceau’s proposal, but on the condition that a special pavilion be created for the canvases’ display.

Initially, they chose a location on the grounds of the Hôtel Biron, where there already existed a museum dedicated to Rodin. The French government rejected the proposal, feeling that a pavilion constructed for Monet was too great an honor.2 (Even at this stage of his career, Monet could still experience rejection!)

But Monet was in his seventies, and he had learned a thing or two in his time. He threatened to pull the project, and sure enough, buyers from the United States and Japan flocked to Giverny with the goal of securing the paintings for their nations’ museums. Clemenceau counter-offered with the Musée de l’Orangerie, where the wall-to-wall canvases could be installed in two oval-shaped rooms. Monet finally agreed, and to this day, thousands of visitors every year get to see Monet’s Water Lilies as he intended them to be displayed.

When I was twenty, I became one of those visitors. Standing in the Orangerie, I indeed felt submerged in Monet’s watery world. What struck me about the vast canvases was the sight of Monet’s garden reflected on the pond. Compared to his earliest Water Lilies, these later works completed in the last decade of the artist’s life were landscapes mirrored in water, with visions of the bank’s willows and reeds shimmering amidst the lily pads.

Last week, I mentioned that Monet’s brushstrokes grew more fluid in his final years, and his compositions became further immersed in the world of the pond. Monet’s declining eyesight forced him to adapt his technique; many photos of him during his later years show the artist wearing a big straw hat, which he needed to keep the sun from his eyes.

He underwent two operations to treat his cataracts. This restored his eyesight, though perhaps impacted the way he viewed color. His later works incorporate more dramatic shades, especially reds, browns, and deeper greens. Nonetheless, there’s a potent energy to these paintings that exemplify the artist’s uncompromising work ethic. He painted relentlessly until his death in 1926—he was just shy of eighty-seven years old.

The hundreds of artworks he left behind aren’t even his complete collection. Monet saw that after Édouard Manet’s death, the artist’s sketches and unfinished paintings were quickly snapped up by buyers and institutions. Monet was keen to preserve a fastidious legacy, and he burned the canvases with which he was unsatisfied.

Claude Monet was the last of the original Impressionists to pass away. At Monet’s funeral, Clemenceau ripped off the black cloth that had been draped over his friend’s coffin. “No black for Monet!” he declared, replacing it with a floral fabric.3 The garden followed Monet into the afterlife.

Some artists don’t live long enough to see their ideas become mainstream. Monet lived so long that he witnessed both the rise of Impressionism and the blossoming of its offshoots. He told Gustave Geffroy:

Techniques vary, art stays the same: it is a transposition of nature at once forceful and sensitive. But the new movements, in their full tide of reaction against what they call “the inconsistency of the impressionist image,” deny all this in order to construct their doctrines and preach the solidity of unified volumes.4

Perhaps Monet felt some angst about the younger generation’s abandonment of Impressionist principles. But the Post-Impressionists, the Cubists, the Surrealists, and all the others owe much to the movement that Monet and his friends pioneered. After all, they took on the artistic establishment, thereby opening the door for the innovative styles that would follow.

And, as is the nature of trend cycles, artists of future generations would once again find inspiration in Monet’s work. The Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, were particularly intrigued by Monet’s use of color in his Water Lilies series, and they adapted his ideas for the Post-War era.

Monet is an example to all artists (and here, I’m including those from all areas, including literature, film, etc.) because he not only persevered in the face of adversity, but he dared to push his vision to the furthest possible extent. His use of the series allowed him to fully articulate the aesthetics of Impressionism across a range of subjects.

Too many today find these “pretty paintings” frivolous, but amidst the chaos and conflict of our world, the ability to recognize and elevate the beauty of nature is worth celebrating. Of all people, Monet understood that beauty—in the earliest embers of sunrise, in a mist-laden afternoon, in the pastel fantasia of dusk.

Recently on Fireside Fables - When Christmas Was For Ghosts: A Very Victorian Christmas

In Victorian England, Christmas Eve was a night for ghosts — a time when families gathered around the fire to share stories of the strange, the supernatural, and the unexplained. Why did this tradition die off, when so many other Victorian holiday customs endured?

Pour yourself a cup of tea (or maybe eggnog?) and join me for a very Victorian Christmas on Fireside Fables!

This is the fourth essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

Claude Monet moved to the house in Giverny in 1883.

The people of Giverny, a small village in Normandy, were no doubt scandalized by the artist’s living arrangements. His wife Camille had passed away in 1879, and his mistress Alice Hoschedé now resided with Monet and all of their children from their separate marriages. To make matters worse, Alice’s husband, the former department store magnate Ernest Hoschedé, was still alive. (For some years, the Monets and the Hoschedés all lived together after Ernest went bankrupt in 1877. In a rather peculiar arrangement, Alice nursed Camille before she died at the age of thirty-two.)

Monet chose the property in Giverny as a place in which the families could settle after years of instability. He would be a renter in the beginning; it wouldn’t be until after the success of his Haystacks and Poplars series that he could purchase and expand the property. Nevertheless, the home quickly became a refuge, and Monet would live there until his death in 1926.

The day after Monet, Alice, and their children moved from Poissy to Giverny, they received terrible news from Paris: Édouard Manet was dead. Monet rushed to the city for the funeral, in which he served as a pallbearer alongside Antonin Proust, Émile Zola, and other prominent Parisians. Among those who attended were Monet’s fellow Impressionists, including Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, and Paul Cézanne. Manet’s death marked the beginning of the end for the group’s cohesion, even though Manet never really considered himself to be an Impressionist. Some of the artists moved further from Paris—Monet, of course, had found Giverny, Alfred Sisley moved to Saint-Mammès, Pissarro to Eragny, and Cézanne increasingly remained in the South of France. The painters and their network of friends tried to meet once per month for dinner in Paris, but these get-togethers grew increasingly sporadic.1

When he wasn’t traveling, Monet devoted himself to his garden. The artist was fastidious in its execution, and the result was (dare I say?) as brilliant a work of art as any of his paintings. He carefully arranged each planting scheme, laying out borders to maximize the visual effect of the blooms’ myriad hues. As his fortunes improved, he was able to purchase plants from faraway lands, such as tuberoses from Mexico or bamboo from China. The art critic Arsène Alexandre wrote of the impact of visiting Monet and his garden:

Wherever one turns, at one’s feet or head or at chest height there are pools, chains of flowers, blossoming hedges at once wild and cultivated, changing with the seasons, ever becoming new.2

The property grew with Monet’s success. In 1892, Monet married Alice (following the death of Ernest), and they were able to buy not just the original property but the adjacent field. Monet decided to convert the field into a water garden, including his famous water-lily pond. In 1895, he installed an arched wooden bridge inspired by those found in Edo-era Japanese prints.3 (Readers might remember from my Impressionism series that the artists took great interest in ukiyo-e, as Japanese artists incorporated vibrant pigments into their works.)

Thus, Monet would embark on his most extensive series, complete with over 250 oil paintings.

Monet spent the last thirty years of his life documenting his water-lily pond. Unlike his Rouen Cathedral or Houses of Parliament series, which were painted in a span of several years each, we have three decades of Giverny paintings to enjoy. Therefore, one can clearly see the evolution of his style throughout this series, especially as his eyesight began to decline.

His early Water Lilies were closely-framed images of the flowers at different times of day. At this point in his career, he would paint much of each work en plein air but finish the piece in his studio, and he would continue to work this way for the remainder of his life. These early paintings reveal little of their surroundings, something that would change as the series evolved. Color and light are the focus of these Water Lilies—a pure, distilled impression.

At the turn of the century, Monet began painting larger scenes surrounding the water lilies, showing the viewer the pond’s environment. These works included the Japanese bridge hovering over the pond, with willows and irises and reeds reflecting off of its water. When we close our eyes and imagine the garden at Giverny, this is the vision that comes to mind. Like his Haystacks, Monet painted this scene in different seasons, sometimes in fiery amber and crimson, sometimes in the green of early summer.

However, all of these early paintings are more distinctly figurative. While none of Monet’s paintings really qualify as abstract (since all were images of places and people he had observed in the real world), we will see in next week’s essay why his later Water Lilies would inspire the Abstract Expressionists of the mid-20th century.

Yet in all of his Water Lilies, Monet’s brilliant use of color stands out. By now, the artist was an expert in rendering subtle differences in shade and hue, what Christoph Heinrich calls a “mosaic of light.”4 The artist achieved this by starting with extremely thin layers of paint and building from there, such that the deepest layers gleamed through those on top. This technique allowed Monet to mimic both the depth and transparency of water, giving his canvases a life-like glow. Over time, the shorter brushstrokes in his earlier Water Lilies would give way to greater fluidity.

In the final installment of this series, we will turn to those later works, including the vast canvases displayed in the Musée de l’Orangerie, which was once part of the Louvre. What we’ll discover is the work of a painter who, for all his trials and tribulations, refused to become complacent even after achieving his dreams.

This is the third essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

In 1834, a fire burned most of the United Kingdom’s Houses of Parliament to the ground. Westminster Hall, built in 1097, was salvageable—a miracle, thanks to the efforts of brave firefighters and a change in the winds.

Once the ashes settled, it grew obvious that rebuilding would be a tremendous undertaking. A committee in each House decided to host a contest, in which architects could submit plans for a revamped Palace of Westminster. At the time, the Classical style was the norm for British state buildings. But Charles Barry had a bold idea: he submitted a design in the Gothic Revival style. After all, England wasn’t unified until the late 900s; the Gothic seemed a more fitting choice for Parliament’s new home. Barry won the contest, and he soon recruited Augustus Pugin, an architect who believed that the Gothic was the only truly acceptable style for a Christian nation.1

The entire project wouldn’t be finished until 1870, by which time Barry and Pugin had both passed away. While the Palace of Westminster clearly paid homage to Britain’s medieval past, its construction included modern developments. Its central tower was designed as a ventilating chimney, making it one of the world’s earliest artificial ventilation systems, and its clock tower (famously known as Big Ben) was the most accurate clock of its kind when it was completed in 1859.2

Claude Monet first arrived in London in 1870, just in time to see Barry and Pugin’s final masterpiece. It was four years before the First Impressionist Exhibition would shock Paris, though gallery shows were likely the furthest thing from Monet’s mind. He and his first wife Camille were among the many refugees of the Franco-Prussian War who had temporarily relocated to Britain.

The Monet family lived at 11 Arundel Street before moving to Kensington. Monet often ventured to the nearby River Thames, and he grew captivated by scenes of daily life along its banks. During these early years, Monet greatly struggled to sell his work. But as fate would have it, the Barbizon landscape painter Charles-François Daubigny was also waiting out the war in London, and he had been successful in selling his own paintings of the Thames. He told Monet, “I know what you need. I’m going to get you a dealer.”3

The following day, Daubigny introduced Monet to Paul Durand-Ruel.

Over thirty years later, Monet was now a famous artist, and Durand-Ruel was the mastermind who had ushered the Impressionists onto the global stage. Eager to discover new subjects, Monet began to travel abroad around the turn of the century. His trips to London and Venice gave him ample material, and both allowed him to explore his love of painting bodies of water. Additionally, his house at Giverny was growing crowded with in-laws and grandchildren. At the start of the new century, he took the opportunity to return to London, this time painting from the balcony of his room at the Savoy Hotel, or from a window at St. Thomas’s Hospital.4

Like his Rouen Cathedral series, Monet’s Houses of Parliament paintings lent a fairytale aura to a great, Gothic structure. It’s clear how much his style had evolved when comparing these works to those created during the Franco-Prussian War. Unlike the Rouen paintings, his Houses of Parliament went beyond the architecture to convey the haziness of London’s fog, such that one can’t tell where the water ends and the sky begins.

To effectively showcase various light conditions, Monet worked on multiple canvases at once, stopping and moving onto the next when the light changed. He explained this process to Durand-Ruel in a letter from March 23rd, 1903:

I cannot let you have a single London picture, since it is essential that I have them all before me, and, to be honest, not one of them is finished. I am working on them all together.5

In 1908, Monet and his second wife, Alice Hoschedé, were invited by John Singer Sargent to join him for two weeks at the Palazzo Barbaro, situated along the Grand Canal in Venice. After a few days of sightseeing, Monet grew so consumed with a series of the Grand Canal that Alice was concerned. She wrote to her daughter Germaine on December 3rd, “It is high time he relaxed. He is working very hard, especially for a man his age.”6 (Monet was now sixty-eight years old.)

But Monet had no such plans. As with the Houses of Parliament, he painted the Grand Canal at all hours, only stopping his work after sunset. However, his process had changed since his early years. Monet still began his works en plein air, but especially when traveling, he stopped and finished them in his studio at Giverny. The fantastical quality of these paintings could apply not just to their pastel colors but to the question of the scenes’ “truthfulness.” (Was the water in the canal really such a sparkling blue in the dead of winter?) In that sense, we are missing the “instantaneity” of his Haystacks, though in exchange, we receive greater insight into the artist’s subjective experience. These works are a marriage between the initial light and weather conditions of each piece’s early stages and Monet’s memories from his travels as he finished them at Giverny.

So far, we’ve covered several of the artist’s most important series and followed him across Europe. But there is a subject that occupied so many of his works that I can’t possibly fit them into a single essay.

As Monet painted his Haystacks and Poplars, as he traveled throughout France and beyond, there was one series to which he continuously returned, resulting in roughly 250 paintings. For the last two essays of this series, we will visit Claude Monet in his garden at Giverny, and of course, his water-lily pond.

Speaking of medieval inspiration…

Recently on Fireside Fables: Why We Don’t Build Castles Anymore

This week on Fireside Fables, we discussed the rise and fall of the castle, its fairytale resonance, and why the Victorians led a brief comeback of this iconic style of architecture.

This is the second essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

In 1895, a young Wassily Kandinsky was perusing an exhibit in Moscow when he came across a painting of haystacks. It was a strange artwork. The artist used feathery brushstrokes that gave what would otherwise be mundane stacks of grain a hazy character, as if the painter had glanced quickly in their direction while the sun was shining in his eyes.

Kandinsky was blown away. “Previously, I knew only realistic art,” he later reflected:

Suddenly, for the first time, I saw a “picture.” That it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I could not recognize it. This lack of recognition was distressing to me. I also felt that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly. I had a muffled sense that the object was lacking in this picture, and was overcome with astonishment and perplexity… But what was absolutely clear to me was the unsuspected power, previously hidden from me, of the palette, which surpassed all my dreams. Painting took on a fabulous strength and splendor.1

Kandinsky would go on to become a major pioneer of abstract art in the twentieth century, but at the time, he was just one of many admirers of Monet’s later works. As we discussed in last week’s essay, the Haystacks series helped to make Claude Monet a global star, yet these works were also sincere explorations by an artist who wished to push Impressionism to new heights.

Most of Monet’s art is set outdoors; this is true even of his early works, before he became a leader of the Impressionist style. His next major series would focus on a new subject: closely “cropped” images (to use today’s photographic language) of an architectural masterpiece, in which the building’s structure is examined outside of the context of its setting.

Rouen Cathedral sits in the center of Rouen, a city in Normandy that grew prosperous in the late Middle Ages. The towering spires of its Gothic cathedral are a testament to that wealth. Monet painted the cathedral’s exterior thirty times between 1892 and 1894. Beginning in February of 1892, the artist was able to gain a unique vantage point by renting a room directly across from the cathedral’s West façade; about two years into the project, Monet was forced to rent a different room, and the angle that he painted inevitably changed.2

As with his Haystacks and Poplars, the project of showcasing a subject in different seasons and light conditions continued. But the intricacies of Gothic architecture created new challenges (and possibilities).

One might think that Gothic architecture and Impressionism would make for an unlikely pair. Impressionism was all about looking forward, capturing modern life, and finding new techniques that painters could use to express themselves. However, these styles are united in an important area: both sought to capture and play with light.

Gothic architecture emerged in the mid-1100s, when church leaders decided they needed better methods to bring light into their buildings. The Romanesque churches of the 10th through 12th centuries adapted—and in some ways, improved upon—Roman building techniques to create arches and vaults. However, Romanesque architecture used less ornamentation than its Roman and Byzantine counterparts. In the words of 20th-century architect Harry Seidler, Romanesque buildings “[extended] the structural daring, with minimal visual elaboration.”3

Crucially, Romanesque churches had much smaller windows, and one of the earliest Gothic structures aimed to tackle this problem. The east end of the Abbey of St. Denis, north of Paris, was commissioned in the mid-12th century with explicit instructions to create a light-filled interior. Abbot Suger got exactly what he wanted: “The heart of the sanctuary glows in splendor… and the magnificent work shines, inundated with a new light.”4

This architectural transformation was possible thanks to the strategic use of flying buttresses and arches, which kept these massive buildings from collapsing even though their walls were overwhelmingly made of glass. Like an Impressionist canvas, stained glass windows painted the interior of Gothic churches in a kaleidoscope of color.

Painting Rouen Cathedral was something of a homecoming for Claude Monet. Monet grew up in Normandy, specifically in the port city of Le Havre: the subject of his 1872 painting Impression, Sunrise from which the Impressionist movement got its name. The Seine, another frequent subject in his art, connects Rouen and Le Havre with Paris. As Napoleon III would often muse, “Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris are a single city, in which the Seine is a winding road.”5

The Rouen series was an all-consuming endeavor. On March 30th, 1893, Monet wrote to the art dealer, Paul Durand-Ruel, “I am working as hard as I possibly can, and do not dream of doing anything except the cathedral. It is an immense task.”6 Each painting reveals the cathedral’s ornate carvings, columns, and spires in different lighting, and by removing Rouen from its setting and focusing on just its architectural details, Monet lends the cathedral a dream-like quality. Today, one can almost imagine it as the setting of a fantasy novel, a castle somewhere in the clouds. This is especially true of the cathedral’s façade in early morning, in which the pastel pinks and blues of sunrise offer the structure a fairytale glow.

For a 19th-century audience, this fantastical element likely would not have gone unnoticed. One of the architectural styles sweeping through Western Europe was the Gothic Revival, in which writers, artists, and architects found inspiration in the medieval world. This revival embraced a romanticized view of the period—a time of knights and dragons and chivalric romance—especially in the United Kingdom. In fact, Monet’s next major series would celebrate a masterpiece of the Gothic Revival in the UK: the Palace of Westminster.

In May of 1895, Durand-Ruel held an exhibition of twenty of the thirty Rouen paintings. It was an enormous success, and the pieces sold in quick succession. Monet’s friend, the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau, wanted the French government to buy the series so that the artworks would stay together. Monet declined.7 He was, after all, a child of Napoleon III’s France; in his lifetime, he had seen the country transform from the Second Empire to the Third Republic, with the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune appearing along the way. He possessed an instinctual distrust of government, and so the purchase never panned out.

Nevertheless, Monet had achieved his wildest dreams. After decades of striving, he was now an internationally-known artist. The mistake many artists of all stripes make is becoming complacent after finally seeing monetary success. Those who read my Impressionism series won’t be surprised to learn that he did not fall into that trap. Now was the time to seek new subjects and new locations. He traveled to Norway to visit his stepson, and he participated in motoring tours in Spain and Italy.

At the turn of the century, Monet stumbled upon another subject worthy of expanding into a series: views of the River Thames, and in particular, the Palace of Westminster. Next week, we will travel with Monet to Edwardian London and discover how the artist reckoned with light enveloped in fog.

Speaking of fairytales…

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Fairy Flag of Dunvegan

Last week’s episode of Fireside Fables explored the legend of the Fairy Flag of Dunvegan, a silk flag of mythical origins that hangs in Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye.

This is the first essay in Claude Monet: The Art of the Series.

Claude Monet was just shy of fifty when he turned to the subject of haystacks.

Initially, it seemed a surprising choice for a man who, after thirty years of determination, had finally reached the brink of success. In 1886, longtime supporter and art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel had set sail for New York with numerous Impressionist canvases in tow—a decision that jump-started the movement’s international popularity. The following year, Monet, along with Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and countless others, participated in the Exposition Internationale at Georges Petit’s gallery in Paris. The Parisian bourgeoisie who once found the Impressionists shocking and horrid were changing their tune, and the artists now experienced greater ease in selling their work.1

Given this momentum, why would Monet turn to a subject that some of his contemporaries would criticize as unimaginative? Why was he so captivated by stacks of grain?

Monet’s eternal passion for the countryside motivated his decision to move with his family to Giverny in April 1883, just before the death of his ailing friend, Édouard Manet. While many of the original Impressionists were experimenting with different styles (such as Paul Cézanne’s later works, which would personify Post-Impressionism), Monet doubled down on his exploration of light and his efforts to capture fleeting visual impressions. While his earlier works sought to convey a more neutral record of what he saw, the artist was now introducing greater subjectivity in rendering his experience onto the canvas. As he explained, “For me, the subject is of secondary importance: I want to convey what is alive between me and the subject.”2

Beginning in the year 1888 but proceeding in earnest in 1890, Monet created his Haystacks series. This was not his first time using a series as a tool to exhibit seasonal shifts; earlier examples include Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) and The Pyramides at Port-Coton (1886). But Haystacks marks a transition into Monet’s mature style, one that endeavored to attain instantaneity. If light conditions changed, he would promptly stop and resume when similar conditions reappeared, “so as to get a true impression of a certain aspect of nature and not a composite picture.”3

This wasn’t without difficulty. Often, Monet was at the mercy of the weather, which only made his early struggles with rheumatism worse. He vented his frustration, in a characteristically expressive manner, when corresponding with his close friend Gustave Geffroy. On July 21st, 1890, Monet wrote:

I am very depressed and deeply disgusted with painting. It is really a continual torture. Don’t expect to see anything new; the little I was able to do is destroyed, scraped, or torn apart. You can’t imagine the dreadful weather we have had without interruption for two months. It’s enough to drive one raving mad, when one tries to capture the weather, the atmosphere, the surroundings.4

Throughout the seasons of 1890 and 1891, Monet painted stacks of grain in snow and sunshine, in early morning and afternoon. Using what otherwise may be considered simplistic subject matter, he is able to reveal subtle shifts in light and atmosphere. This is why museums that are lucky enough to have more than one piece from this series always display them together—the effect of seeing the stacks in a row allows the viewer to better appreciate the variation between each painting.

Monet pushed onward, as he always did. Within his garden at Giverny, he found an exciting source of inspiration among its bountiful blooms. (We will explore his Water Lilies in a future entry.) In 1891, he began working on another countryside series featuring the poplar trees that grew along the banks of the Epte. Poplar trees are deciduous trees that grow quickly and come in several varieties. Like his Haystacks, Monet’s Poplars series demonstrates the diversity of light and color in the French countryside as the land moves through different months.

If Monet had previously been on the edge of stardom, the Haystacks and Poplars launched him into the stratosphere. Within a few days of showcasing his Haystacks, all of them sold for prices ranging from 3,000 to 4,000 francs. (3,000 francs in 1890 comes out to roughly €20,000 to €25,000 today.) The advance from Durand-Ruel on his Poplars series would allow Monet to buy his property in Giverny, which he had previously been renting. Despite his success, Monet received criticism from some contemporaries, who felt that he was bowing to popular demand. Edgar Degas had once sniped, “[Monet’s art] was that of a skillful but not profound decorator.”5 To several critics, Monet’s Haystacks proved that Degas was right.

I have to disagree with Degas and the others on both points. First, it is clear from Monet’s letters during this period that these series were sincere artistic explorations, over which he agonized to such a degree that he destroyed numerous paintings. Monet was possibly his own most ferocious critic.

Second, I would argue that in his Haystacks and the series that would follow, Monet actually achieved the apotheosis of Impressionism as an aesthetic ideal. Despite his distaste toward philosophizing (oh, how artists hate to be categorized!), Monet accomplished the ultimate stylistic statement that the Impressionists carved out during their first exhibition in 1874. Here, we have an actual impression, or what he called “instantaneity,” which illustrates an observer’s subjective experience in nature. Unsurprisingly, Monet’s most recognizable works come from this later period, with his most famous being his Water Lilies.

Over the coming weeks, we will learn about some of the subjects that fascinated Monet, from the Gothic glory of Rouen Cathedral to the Houses of Parliament. Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872) gave the Impressionist movement its name, and it seems fitting now to visit with the artist in the places he adored.

Related essays from The Crossroads Gazette:

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armée d’Orient, invaded Egypt. At the time, Egypt was ruled by the Mamluks and nominally controlled by the Ottoman Empire, but these groups were not Napoleon’s chief rivals. The goal was to undercut British trade routes to the nation’s colonial holdings in India; doing so would give France an enormous territorial advantage.

The Egyptian campaign ultimately failed, but it resulted in a major discovery—one that would transform the field of Egyptology and launch a public mania for all-things-Egyptian.

Several miles from the port city of Rosetta (modern-day Rashid) lies Fort Julien, constructed around 1470 during the rule of the Mamluk Sultan Qaitbay. Then-General Napoleon placed Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard in charge of rebuilding the fortress; it was during the demolition of a wall that Bouchard spotted what would become known as the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a stele, or an upright stone slab, featuring an inscription of a royal decree issued on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 196 BC. Part of the decree is missing, as only a fragment of the original stele remains; its message was written by a council of priests in celebration of Ptolemy’s coronation. What made an otherwise typical royal decree so significant—and why the British were eager to wrestle it from French hands, which they did upon signing the Treaty of Alexandria in 1801—was that the decree was inscribed in three different languages. On top was hieroglyphic script, followed by Demotic script and Ancient Greek. For the first time, modern scholars would be able to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs.

This seminal discovery was ground zero for Egyptomania: a century of fascination and obsession with Ancient Egypt in Britain, France, and the United States.

Soon, British and French scholars, adventurers, and bureaucrats were scouring Egypt for antiquities, which were either purchased or looted and brought back to Europe. It was a manic free-for-all, motivated both by nonfiction accounts of Egypt by Egyptologists and travel writers, as well as mass market fiction that played on the ancient civilization’s mystical aura. This enthusiasm bled into the Egyptian Revival in architecture and decorative arts, in which the artistic styles of Ancient Egypt served as a source of inspiration for everything from public buildings and fountains to furniture, jewelry, picture frames, boxes, candelabras, and more.

Fueling this popular image of Egyptian culture was Spiritualism, an occult movement of psychics, mediums, and believers that swept across both sides of the pond. As the public’s interest in Spiritualism grew, so did its appetite for anything adjacent to the occult. Ancient Egypt, with its mummies, Book of the Dead, and intricate mythology, was the perfect canvas on which contemporary Brits and Americans could project their own fantasies.

Enter mummy-unwrapping: if you couldn’t travel to Egypt, attending the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy was the next best thing. As with a variety of artworks and artifacts, mummies were also brought to European museums and universities for public unveiling. These events ranged from sincere scientific exploration to entertainment and spectacle, and they drew enormous crowds. In some cases, mummy unwrappings were held in private homes, in which a very wealthy individual would purchase a mummy and host an unwrapping party.

It’s possible that the first mummy unwrapping was hosted in 1821 by Giovanni Belzoni, an Italian adventurer, engineer, and amateur Egyptologist. On behalf of Henry Salt, the British Consul General to Egypt, Belzoni undertook the removal of the Younger Memnon (the giant bust of Ramesses II in the British Museum) from Egypt and shipped it to London. But the most prolific host of mummy unwrappings was Thomas Pettigrew, an English surgeon who led so many public unwrappings for various scientific and archaeological societies that he became known as Mummy Pettigrew.

When Howard Carter, Lord Carnarvon, and their crew excavated the tomb of Tutankhamun during the winter of 1922-1923, the public was already primed to view Egypt as magical and thrilling. After several people connected to the excavation began dying of strange illnesses or accidents, it didn’t take long for members of the public to believe they had awakened an ancient curse…

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Curse of King Tutankhamun

Last week’s episode of Fireside Fables explored the “cursed” excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter in a dig funded by George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon. (If you’re a fan of Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle is the ancestral seat of the Earls of Carnarvon.)

King Tutankhamun’s tomb is in danger of collapsing.

The Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was laid to rest in 1323 BC. He slumbered undisturbed for thousands of years—miraculously, his tomb was never found by thieves, who had been picking through the Valley of the Kings since ancient times. This all changed in 1922, when an excavation team led by Howard Carter and funded by George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, opened the tomb for the first time in centuries.

A recent study by Sayed Hemeda, head of the Architectural Conservation Department at Cairo University in Giza, indicates that the tomb’s ceiling is at risk of collapsing:

Flash flooding with heavy rain caused by climate change significantly contributes to the activation of movements along the faults within the Valley of the Kings, particularly the prominent fault that runs through Tutankhamen’s tomb and is easily visible in the antechamber and burial chamber’s ceilings.

The landscape of the Valley of the Kings is mainly comprised of Esna shale and porous limestone. As Hemeda noted in his report, moisture causes the shale to swell and fracture. Coupled with the weight of the mountain on top of the tomb, this instability allows cracks to form, which in turn causes more moisture to seep in.

Fungal outbreaks on the interior murals have been a consistent issue as a result. To make matters worse, “The presence of brittle rocks under significant stress could result in rock bursting (a sudden release of built-up stress energy), which can appear as sudden explosions.”

The hope is that with this report, Egyptian authorities will step in to ensure that the tomb is effectively preserved and damage from flash-flooding can be effectively mitigated.

The Louvre jewelry heist: two suspects admit partial involvement.

As of my writing this, French authorities have caught two suspects in the infamous Louvre heist. The suspects admitted to “partial involvement,” but investigators believe there are at least two other co-conspirators at large. Paris Prosecutor Laure Beccuau criticized this public disclosure, which she fears will hinder the investigation. The jewels have not yet been found.

In case you somehow missed it, the brazen daytime robbery occurred on October 19th at around 9:30 AM. The thieves, disguised as construction workers, used a freight lift parked on the side of the Louvre to enter through a window, smash several cases containing French crown jewels, and escape the same way they entered. The startling simplicity of the theft has provoked questions and criticism regarding the Louvre’s security.

What makes this an especially painful loss for France is that most of the country’s crown jewels were auctioned off by the Third Republic in 1887 to pay off the national debt. These auctions were also symbolic in nature—a shedding of the vestiges of monarchy.

The eight pieces still missing have been collectively valued at over $100 million, though some would argue that their historical significance makes them priceless. Among the stolen pieces were an emerald and diamond set given by Napoleon Bonaparte to his second wife, Empress Marie Louise. Also stolen was a sapphire set owned first by Hortense de Beauharnais, Queen of Holland, and later by Maria Amalia of Naples and Sicily, wife of Louis Philippe I; the set included a tiara, earrings, and a necklace.

Several pieces owned by Empress Eugénie (wife of Napoleon III) were also stolen. Fortunately, the thieves dropped Eugénie’s gold crown, made for the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, as they escaped the scene via motorcycles. Unlike paintings, which are easily identifiable and therefore difficult to sell on the black market, jewelry pieces can be broken down into individual stones, slightly reshaped, and then resold. If the jewels are not found soon, it will be an uphill battle to recover them.

To learn more about the women who wore these jewels, and how the pieces made their way to the Louvre, I would recommend reading Devorah Lauter’s informative essay on the subject.

The Winchester Mystery House is an icon of Victorian architecture. But is it haunted?

The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California is one of America’s most famous haunted houses. Over 24,000 square feet in size, its labyrinthine layout and architectural oddities have captivated visitors for over a century. But behind the mansion’s bizarre design lies the tragic and mysterious story of its owner, Sarah Winchester: the heiress said to have been haunted by the ghosts of those killed by her family’s rifles. Was she building a refuge from restless spirits, or forestalling a horrible curse?

This week’s episode of Fireside Fables tackled the legend of Sarah Winchester and her home. The truth, as you probably guessed, goes far beyond a simple ghost story. Rather, it is a tale of Gilded Age industrialists, westward expansion, and one woman’s vision for an architectural masterpiece.

A few other stories that caught my eye:

This won’t be surprising to those who read last month’s Roundup, but a number of prominent galleries are backing out of this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach. As the art market falls into a period of contraction, gallerists will have to be more strategic about where to show.

In archaeology news, researchers have discovered a 3,500-year-old Egyptian military fortress in the Sinai Desert, as well as a 2,400-year-old Iron Age settlement in the Czech Republic.

Overshadowed by the dramatic Louvre heist was this story about an international ring of art forgers, whom German authorities caught this past month. Among the works they attempted to sell are forgeries of Rembrandt, Pablo Picasso, and Frida Kahlo.

Finally (and completely unrelated to the subject of this newsletter, but in my opinion, hugely important for you to know), otters have once again been hitching rides with surfers in Santa Cruz, California.

A circle of witches gather with the Devil beneath a waxing moon.

Upon first glance, Francisco Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath (1798) may not appear too different from depictions of witches during the height of the trials. The women in this coven are elderly and haggard in appearance. One is holding a skeletal, malnourished child as an offering to the horned devil, and hanging from a spear are what appear to be spit-roasted infants. Gathered in one painting are a number of “witchy” stereotypes that convey suspicion and bigotry toward post-menopausal women: symbols of infertility, quite literally eating babies.

But the date of this painting should be your first clue that not all is what it seems.

Goya painted his Witches’ Sabbath at the very end of the 18th century. By now, witch trials in Europe were largely a thing of the past, and Goya wanted to keep it that way. This painting, as well as his later Sabbath painting, The Great He-Goat (1820-1823), are often interpreted by art historians as a liberal protest against encroaching royalists and clergy, who would succeed in taking back control of Spain after the Peninsular War. Goya’s exaggerated portrayal of witches, in this light, can be evaluated as a critique of superstition in favor of Enlightenment ideals.

As we explored in last month’s essay on Albrecht Dürer’s witch engravings, the European witch trials were mainly concentrated between 1550 and 1650. Dürer’s engravings (which predate that period) pull from classical imagery. However, once the trials escalated in earnest, the visual motifs of witchcraft adopted by witch hunters often fell in line with these earlier artworks.

After the Enlightenment, witch trials were regarded not as divine justice but uncivilized superstition. This shift in public attitudes gave artists a new opportunity: the witch could be painted as a symbol of protest, Gothic imagination, or feminine power.

Take The Three Witches from Macbeth, painted by Daniel Gardner in 1775. Shakespeare’s witches are described in the play Macbeth as elderly, androgynous, and frightening oracles of doom. Gardner’s witches are beautiful women in fashionable attire. The ladies featured in this painting, from left to right, are Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess Melbourne; Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire; and the sculptor and author Anne Seymour Damer.

All of these women were powerful and notorious in their own right—political operatives who used their influence in society to campaign for the Whig Party. Damer was a successful artist in a male-dominated field, and the subject of much gossip due to her relationship with the actress Elizabeth Farren. In this commissioned painting, the three friends acknowledge their mystique with a sly wink: as witches, the women are literally stirring the pot.

However, it is in the art of the Pre-Raphaelites that witches became true icons of glamour. As a refresher from my past series on Pre-Raphaelite art:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was itself a short-lived association, lasting from 1848 to 1853. The Brotherhood was founded by seven British artists and writers (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner) who joined together in rebellion against the Royal Academy of Arts. They resented the Royal Academy’s commitment to the techniques of Renaissance master Raphael and the Mannerists who came after him. The Pre-Raphaelites wished to return to the styles that preceded Raphael (hence, Pre-Raphaelite), and found inspiration in medieval and early Renaissance artists.

Then, there is the broader Pre-Raphaelite movement, one that endured long after the original Brotherhood disbanded and some of its members, including Millais, began moving in different directions. The style they pioneered would influence artists for decades to come—among them are Edward Robert Hughes, Evelyn De Morgan, and John William Waterhouse. One can also find echoes of the Pre-Raphaelites in other movements, including the Glasgow Style and Art Nouveau.

Within the broader movement, which maintained a presence in British art through the end of the 19th century, witches were a subject of consistent inspiration. John William Waterhouse painted Medea and Circe, Frederick Sandys pulled from Arthurian legends for his Morgan le Fay, and Edward Burne-Jones painted another Arthurian witch in his The Beguiling of Merlin. In the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, witches were the femme-fatales of the mystical past, a rebuttal of the Victorian “angel of the house.”

But in the works of Evelyn De Morgan, a female Pre-Raphaelite painter, witches took on a more complex nature. De Morgan used mythological symbols and allegories to convey her Spiritualist, pacifist, and feminist beliefs through her work; her female figures are usually painted in the midst of action. This is certainly true for her witches—whether casting a spell or stirring a potion, the witches in her oeuvre are the movers-and-shakers of their narratives.

What stands out to me about her witches is their psychological depth. They are more than the villainous “hags” of the witch trial era, and more than the sexy temptresses featured in other Pre-Raphaelite paintings. For example, in The Love Potion (1903), the witch is brewing an elixir to steal another woman’s man: we can see the couple embracing each other outside the window. The witch is in the wrong, but rather than portraying her as the typical evil enchantress, De Morgan brings out the emotional exhaustion in the witch’s face, the sadness in her eyes. It’s as if the woman knows she is making a mistake, but she’s proceeding nonetheless.

By the 20th century, mythological scenes largely took a back seat in fine art, but witches and occult symbolism did find a home in Surrealist works. In particular, female artists Leonora Carrington, Kati Horna, and Remedios Varo were dubbed the “Three Witches of Surrealism” for their frequent use of occult imagery. Varo’s Witch going to the Sabbath (1957) is a hybrid entity: part woman, part bird. The tail feathers of the witch’s familiar turn into a winding road that disappears inside her torso, suggesting the infinite possibilities of the inner world.

Upon first glance, Varo’s figure may not look as traditionally “witchy” as the other paintings we’ve examined. But wrapped in a feathered cloak, stepping out with her crystal and pointed boots, this witch is the one most poised to take flight.

Recently on Fireside Fables: The Girls Who Talked to Ghosts

In 1848, the sisters Maggie and Kate Fox stunned their small community in Upstate New York with their ability to communicate with ghosts. The Fox Sisters were “ground zero” for Spiritualism: a 19th-century movement that captivated millions of Americans and Brits with the promise of speaking to the dead. This is a story of Victorian psychics and mediums, rapacious fraudsters, and the people who longed to believe.

In 1862, a jewelry engraver in Boston took a photograph of a ghost.

Like many Americans, William Mumler had developed an interest in photography, and improvements in cameras had made this technology accessible to a larger portion of the public. Mumler decided to take a self-portrait. All proceeded smoothly, until he developed the photo. To his shock, the pale image of his long-deceased cousin hovered beside him.

At least, that’s how Mumler recounted the story to the media. The truth involves some creativity, technological sleight of hand, and a public hungry for spectral visions of dead relatives.

Patrons of the Gazette may remember an essay in the archive about the Cottingley fairies, in which two English girls stunned the world with photos of flower fairies taken at the bottom of their garden. The photos, snapped in 1920, were proven to be a hoax. From the mid-19th century until the 1920s, magical photos that claimed to prove the existence of ghosts (or fairies) captured the imagination of the public.

Mumler was the first person to commercialize the practice of spirit photography. He came to this realization by chance: while taking a self-portrait alone in his studio, he accidentally used a plate that had already been exposed, which resulted in the pale, superimposed image of a young woman in the background of the developed photo. He spun the story into a narrative about a deceased cousin and found himself at the center of a media storm.

However, Mumler was not the first to experiment with spirit photography. In 1856, the scientist Sir David Brewster realized that the long exposure times required of the era’s daguerreotypes meant that if someone briefly entered and exited the frame, they would appear translucent in the photo. The London Stereoscopic Company then adapted this technique to create their photographic series, “The Ghost in the Stereoscope.”

But this early proof that technology, not spirits, had created the illusion did not stop Mumler’s success. He began charging people $10 (or about $320 today) to be “photographed” with their deceased; with incredible enthusiasm from customers, he was soon able to quit his job as a jewelry engraver. His wife joined in, and she became a psychic medium.

What catapulted Mumler’s career internationally was the photograph he took of Mary Todd Lincoln, in which the faint image of Abraham Lincoln is visible in the background. Mrs. Lincoln was a devout Spiritualist, part of a growing movement of believers in the United States and Britain. Spiritualists believed in psychic abilities and mediumship as tools to communicate with the dead. Like spirit photography, their occult beliefs were paired with the new language of scientific experimentation and technology, as Spiritualists argued that they could prove the validity of mediumship as one would prove a scientific theory.

Mumler’s career met a stumbling block in 1869, when P. T. Barnum of all people grew hell-bent on exposing Mumler as a fraud. Phineas Taylor Barnum, best known for co-founding the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, was himself known for promoting hoaxes like the Fiji mermaid. But after some photography practice of his own, Barnum discovered the double-exposure technique that allowed Mumler to create fake photos of ghosts. Mumler was brought to trial in 1869 after some of his photos included “ghosts” who were very much still alive. Barnum testified against him, and to prove the simplicity of this scam, he created his own photos of himself with Abraham Lincoln.

Hilariously, Mumler was acquitted on the grounds that the jury couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had faked the photos. He spent his final years largely in the realm of the living, and he succeeded in developing photo-electrotype plates that could be easily produced and printed.

Despite Mumler’s fall, other spirit photographers followed his example across the pond. In Britain, Frederick Hudson and William Hope dazzled believers with their images of ghosts. Édouard Isidore Buguet, a prominent French spirit photographer working in London, was arrested in 1875 and confessed to fraud. Hudson and Hope used similar deceitful methods through pre-exposed plates, creating the illusion of spirits floating around their main subjects.

One famous spirit photograph happened by accident: an image of a ghost sitting in the library of Combermere Abbey, photographed by Sybell Corbet in 1891. The late Lord Combermere was being buried while his sister-in-law Sybell took the photo, leading some to believe that it was indeed the ghost of the deceased viscount. After all, the ghost was seated in what had been his favorite chair. Because the exposure time would have taken over an hour, critics pointed out that someone in the household (perhaps a servant?) could have entered that room at any point and left. But the servants at Combermere Abbey insisted that they had all gone to the funeral, which was several miles away. Why Sybell Corbet decided to take that photo during her brother-in-law’s funeral is unclear.

Spirit photography found both powerful critics, like Harry Houdini, and powerful supporters—among them, the ardent Spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote in support of spirit photography as well as the Cottingley fairies.

Why were Victorians and Edwardians so eager to believe? As we’ve explored in past essays on the Spiritualist Movement, rapid technological development often inspires spiritual backlash, as we grow wary of becoming disconnected from faith and nature. The height of Spiritualism as a movement was also bookended by two major wars: the American Civil War and World War I. With thousands of grieving family members seeking answers, spirit photographers found a steady stream of clients. Mary Todd Lincoln had lost a son and a husband during the Civil War. Arthur Conan Doyle lost a son and a brother during WWI.

Interest in spirit photography declined after the 1920s, thanks to the efforts of debunkers like Houdini, who loathed to see vulnerable people tricked by swindlers. In an age when artificial intelligence can now be used to manipulate images, I find it fascinating to pull back the veil on another era when unfamiliar technology was employed to play similar tricks.

It’s all ludicrous, because no respectable ghost would be caught dead in a machine. They’d be the odd shadow in the graveyard, the chill on a windswept moor, the creak of a stair in an ancient house—just behind your shoulder, in the corner of your eye.

Recently on Fireside Fables: Folklore from the Salem Witch Trials!

Last week’s episode of Fireside Fables covered the legacy of folklore that emerged from Colonial America’s infamous witch trials. If you’re a patron of the Gazette, you also have access to a full series on the history of the trials in the archive.

Philippe Clicquot had weathered many storms in his life. He had built a successful career as a textile merchant, navigating industrialization, the French Revolution, and securing his family’s future by arranging the marriage of his only son to the daughter of his greatest competitor. Together, the Clicquot and Ponsardin families dominated the textile industry in and around Reims, France.

But nothing could have prepared him for the death of his son François at the age of thirty.

In the autumn of 1805, François caught some terrible illness (possibly typhoid?) and after twelve days of relentless fever, he died. He left behind his 27-year-old wife, Barbe-Nicole, and his six-year-old daughter, Clémentine.

The family was devastated by the loss. Though their marriage was arranged, François and Barbe-Nicole grew to love each other, and they shared a mutual passion: champagne.

Textiles were the family’s main enterprise, though they did own a few vineyards. In 1772, Philippe had established a modest champagne business. François saw greater potential in the industry; he poured his heart into expanding the family business in the final years of his life. Sadly, his efforts garnered little success. First the French Revolution and now Napoleon’s campaigns certainly didn’t help. The champagne business was struggling, and vicious rumors began to spread around Reims that François hadn’t died by fever, but by suicide.

To hell with champagne. Philippe’s son was dead. He wanted nothing more than to sell the vineyards and put the business behind him.

Then, his daughter-in-law came to him with a proposal.

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin was an intelligent young woman, and she was determined to see her and her husband’s goals for the champagne business brought to fruition. She was also in an advantageous position to take control of the reins, because Madame Cliquot was a veuve—a widow.

Women under the Napoleonic Code were second-class citizens with little more rights than children. They were the property of their fathers, and then their husbands. Only upon widowhood could a woman retain control of her late husband’s property and businesses. So long as she never re-married, Madame Clicquot could take ownership of the champagne business and ensure that the passion she shared with François did not fall into the hands of another man. Furthermore, she was willing to invest her own inheritance to make it happen.

As Philippe was part-owner, she would need his approval to put her plan in motion. He agreed to let her take over, on the condition that his daughter-in-law have a male business parter with experience in the wine industry. Selected for the job was a man named Alexandre Fourneaux.

The partnership with Forneaux didn’t last long. With the Napoleonic Wars casting their deadly shadow over Europe, and the British blockade thwarting French exports, the business suffered. By 1812, their champagne sales fell to just 10,000 bottles that year. At that point, Forneaux had already jumped ship.

Philippe asked Barbe-Nicole if she would consider selling now, after years of turbulence. But Madame Clicquot refused to be defeated. She had a greater vision not just for her business, but for the champagne industry as a whole. The Widow Clicquot could not stop Napoleon from waging war, but she didn’t need to lose time, either. Rather than wallowing over factors beyond her control, she began experimenting.

How did Clicquot eventually turn the business around? The harvests of the early 1800s were poor, but opportunity struck in 1810. That year brought mild weather and bountiful yields. Traditionally, champagne was produced by blending wine from different years to achieve a consistent product. But Clicquot had an idea: after such a miraculous harvest, she would instead produce a line of champagne using wine from only that year. In doing so, she created the first known champagne vintage. She renamed the company “Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin” so that anyone who drank her champagne would know that a woman was at the helm.

The following year, another miracle played across the heavens: the Great Comet of 1811, visible to the naked eye around the world for about 260 days. Though harvests were mixed that year across the European continent, it was a very good year for wine-producing regions. Clicquot decided to create another vintage for 1811, and she stamped the corks with the image of the comet.

By 1814, Madame Clicquot had a brilliant product and savvy marketing. In March, Napoleon abdicated, and she took a leap: she hired a Dutch ship and sent 10,000 bottles of champagne (along with her salesman, Louis Bohne) across the Baltic.

Having been cut off from French products for years, the Prussian and Russian nobility quickly bought up Madame Clicquot’s vintages. She sent another shipment of 12,500 bottles. That, too, sold out. By the fall, she had sold another 70,000. Buoyed by these positive results, Madame Clicquot kept innovating.

There was the question of the champagne’s clarity. Champagne is produced in two stages: the grapes undergo a first round of fermentation to create wine, and then, a mixture of yeast and sugar is added to each bottle for a second fermentation. This produces carbon dioxide—champagne’s distinctive bubbles. However, the second fermentation also gave the champagne a murky, unappealing color.

With trial and error, Madame Clicquot discovered that if bottles were stored neck-down and gently rotated, it would be easier to remove the sediment, thereby preserving the wine’s clarity. The storage rack she invented in 1816 is called a riddling table, the precursor to the riddling racks used today.

Clicquot was also passionate about devising a new method of making rosé. Before her experiments, rosé was made by coloring white wine with berries or through red wine maceration. She wanted to develop a champagne that not only had a pink color, but a unique flavor that she could market to customers. In 1818, she found that mixing white wine with a bit of red wine indeed resulted in a new flavor profile, making her the inventor of the first blended rosé.

By 1821, annual sales reached over 280,000 bottles, with sales continuing to climb throughout the 19th century. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin became famous throughout Europe and North America, and the Widow Cliquot was so synonymous with the brand’s prestige that the company kept the name after her death in 1866 at the age of 88. Today, Veuve Clicquot produces approximately 20 million bottles per year.

Dear reader, I have a confession to make: I am not fond of alcohol, so I don’t drink. But when I learned Barbe-Nicole Clicquot’s story, I was so inspired by her perseverance, her business acumen, and most of all, her love of craft. In remaining steadfast to her vision, she transformed a major sector of France’s economy for generations to come.

An experienced hunter, Roe initially assumed that the large creature ahead on the trail was a grizzly bear. Then, it stood. At six feet tall, the strange, humanoid figure was covered in brown and silver fur, and upon closer inspection, Roe discerned that it was female. In his words:

Its arms were much thicker than a man’s arms, and longer, reaching almost to its knees. Its feet were broader proportionately than a man’s, about five inches wide at the front and tapering to much thinner heels. When it walked it placed the heel of its foot down first, and I could see the grey-brown skin or hide on the soles of its feet. The head was higher at the back than at the front. The nose was broad and flat. The lips and chin protruded farther than its nose. But the hair that covered it, leaving bare only the parts of its face around the mouth, nose and ears, made it resemble an animal as much as a human.

By this description, someone today would easily recognize this as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Roe’s account is just one of many alleged sightings of the mysterious Bigfoot—a folkloric character as iconic to British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest as the Yeti is to the Himalayas, or the Loch Ness Monster is to the Scottish Highlands.

But Bigfoot is also the perfect case study to examine how folklore develops in communities, and how this process of storytelling and myth-making involves both published media and word-of-mouth. The origins of this legend are more complex than you might assume.

Bigfoot is the subject of Episode 1 of my new show, Fireside Fables. I’m thrilled to be launching this series on YouTube, in which we will explore folklore, fairytales, and things that go bump in the night. This show is co-produced with Brennan White, better known as house and techno producer Astara and fellow enthusiast of all-things-folklore.

If you too are fascinated by ghost stories, fairies, witches, cryptids, haunted places, and spooky tales, then I’d encourage you to watch the first episode below. It would mean the world to me if you subscribed.

And don’t worry, you will still find me here on Substack. Thank you for your ongoing support!

Dr. Kathleen Martinez’s ongoing hunt for Cleopatra’s tomb has resulted in a major discovery…

If you’ve been reading the Roundups for a while, you may remember the story of Kathleen Martinez, a Dominican archaeologist who is on a mission to find Cleopatra’s final resting place. Her theory was that Cleopatra was buried not in a tomb, but in a temple. In 2022, her excavations at Taposiris Magna resulted in an extraordinary discovery: a massive tunnel beneath the temple stretching over 4,300 feet (roughly 1,310 meters). Sitting 43 feet (13 meters) underground with a height of over six feet (1.8 meters), the tunnel was called a “geometric miracle” by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Part of the tunnel is now submerged in the Mediterranean, due to medieval earthquakes that caused portions of the coastal area to collapse. Martinez believes that Cleopatra’s burial place could therefore be underwater.

She has since teamed up with Bob Ballard, the American oceanographer famed for his discovery of hydrothermal vents and finding the RMS Titanic. (Quite the dream team!) This month, they announced that their underwater excavations have unveiled a vast, submerged Egyptian port, which is connected to Taposiris Magna by the tunnel that Martinez discovered in 2022.

The researchers found columns and polished stone floors, as well as amphora and anchors that date to the reign of Cleopatra. Martinez believes that Cleopatra was carried through the tunnel, which leads out to the port, and buried in a location onsite. “I’m not going to stop,” she says. “For me, it’s a matter of time.”

“The Storm Hits the Art Market.”

On September 7th, Artnet published an engrossing article by Katya Kazakina that quickly made the rounds online. (Those of you active on Substack may have come across it there, too.) The subject was the turmoil that has characterized the art market over the past several years, in which inflated prices have scared off even the wealthiest of buyers, leading to a period of contraction. Doubled with sky-high real estate costs, many galleries are at risk of closure. Some, including the Clearing gallery, are gone for good:

[Clearing’s] Babin is far from the only dealer on the way out. The art world is in a precarious state as it heads into the second half of 2025. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties. Smaller galleries are exiting and downsizing discreetly. Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.

We’ve discussed this issue here in Crossroads. The major shift of the late-20th and early-21st centuries was that art went from being an heirloom (to be treasured and passed down in families) to a mere investment (which encourages speculation and leads to the crazy prices that are now turning buyers away).

Some of this speculation allowed for the creation of plainly ridiculous sectors of the industry. Remember the NFT craze? This month, Christie’s quietly shut down its digital art department.

Kazakina’s entire piece is worth reading, as she breaks down different methods by which researchers can track what is otherwise a notoriously opaque industry. She also explores how younger gallerists are finding ways to limit their overhead, including orchestrating pop-up shows, keeping their staff small, and maintaining smaller gallery spaces in otherwise expensive cities.

One of those younger dealers, Sebastian Gladstone (36), told Kazakina, “More than anything, you are seeing a massive shift in the players. It’s really easy to be at a beach house in Malibu and not be in touch with what’s happening.” In his view, the new generation of dealers are “able to respond to the world in a way the older guard isn’t able to.”

A few more stories…

This month, several major collections hit the news. John Pritzker announced that he would be donating 188 Dada and Surrealist works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s will be auctioning a $400 million collection from the late Leonard Lauder of Estée Lauder, who during his life donated over a billion dollars worth of art to the Met. The collection includes works by Gustav Klimt, Henri Matisse, and Edvard Munch.

A Banksy mural of a judge attacking a protester with a gavel was found on the Queen’s Building in the Royal Courts of Justice complex in London. The mural has since been scrubbed, though the ghostly outlines of the figures remain—itself a poignant commentary on freedom of speech and assembly.

And severe droughts in Iraq have had one unexpected consequence: the unearthing of dozens of ancient tombs along the Mosul Dam reservoir. You can read more here.

Finally, 80 museum exhibitions to check out this fall:

ARTnews has compiled a fantastic list of shows from all over the world to check out this autumn. Highlights include a major exhibition on Renaissance master Fra Angelico at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, the Divine Egypt show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many Surrealist showcases, including the Whitney’s survey of 1960s Surrealism, the Tate’s Lee Miller retrospective, and the Palazzo Reale’s Leonora Carrington retrospective. And of course, fans of Impressionism will enjoy the Manet & Morisot exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

The list also includes many exciting contemporary shows—I’d encourage you to peruse them here to find events in your area.

Subscribe now

1. John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott - 1888

Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott features the protagonist of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem of the same name, published first in 1832 and revised in 1842. Set in an Arthurian England, the Lady of Shalott is trapped in a tower, with her only view of the outside world a reflected window in her mirror. If she dares turn towards the real window, she is cursed to die.

So much of the story is left unexplained. Who cursed her and why? When the curse is enacted and the mirror breaks, why must she die? Why does she first board the boat and float down to Camelot? The reader never receives clear answers. It’s exactly the kind of tragic damsel and dreamy, romanticized Middle Ages that the Pre-Raphaelites loved to paint.

John William Waterhouse was not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Here is a refresher from an essay I wrote back in April:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was itself a short-lived association, lasting from 1848 to 1853. The Brotherhood was founded by seven British artists and writers (William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner) who joined together in rebellion against the Royal Academy of Arts. They resented the Royal Academy’s commitment to the techniques of Renaissance master Raphael and the Mannerists who came after him. The Pre-Raphaelites wished to return to the styles that preceded Raphael (hence, Pre-Raphaelite), and found inspiration in medieval and early Renaissance artists.

However, Waterhouse was one of many artists who took inspiration from the Brotherhood to create the broader Pre-Raphaelite movement. Others include the wonderful Evelyn De Morgan, as well as Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Robert Hughes.

What I love about Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott is that it’s an ode to the moodiness of autumn: the darkening clouds, the dying reeds, the Lady’s fiery red hair. As the natural world nears its slumber, so too does the Lady of Shalott approach her final, tragic rest.

2. Claude Monet’s Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn) - 1890-91

Long-time readers know that I take great inspiration in Claude Monet’s tenacity; he spent about thirty years fighting for success not only for himself but for his fellow Impressionists. The First Impressionist Exhibition was held in 1874 in Paris, and it wouldn’t be until 1886 that the movement found international recognition thanks to the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel’s shrewd strategy of showcasing Impressionist art in New York, where audiences were more open-minded.

Monet’s own fate transformed when he produced his Haystacks series, painted in the Giverny countryside; most works in this series were created in 1890 and 1891. Finally, he was experiencing real financial success, and he was able to purchase his home in Giverny, which he had previously been renting.

While some of his former colleagues were now experimenting with Post-Impressionist styles, Monet instead doubled down on Impressionism in his later years. His various series (including his haystacks, water lilies, poplars, and more) aimed to capture changes in light and atmosphere throughout the year and at different times of day. It is for this reason that these works are so evocative when displayed together.

Stacks of Wheat (End of Day, Autumn) transports the viewer to a fall sunset in the country. We can see the grass is starting to die and the trees in the background are turning orange, though their leaves are muted in the low light. You can practically smell the drying hay. I’ve argued before that through the Haystacks series,

…Monet actually achieved the apotheosis of Impressionism as an aesthetic ideal. Despite his distaste toward philosophizing (oh, how artists hate to be categorized!), Monet accomplished the ultimate stylistic statement that the Impressionists carved out during their first exhibition in 1874. Here, we have an actual impression, or what he called “instantaneity,” which illustrates an observer’s subjective experience in nature.

3. Egon Schiele’s Four Trees - 1917

Egon Schiele was one of the leading artists of the Vienna Secession, a movement launched in 1897 in rebellion against the conservative Association of Austrian Artists. The Secession was a multi-media affair, with painters, architects, graphic designers, and sculptors all joining together to promote their take on Art Nouveau. (Think Gustav Klimt, Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffman, etc.)

Schiele was an Expressionist whose work often featured erotic, sometimes grotesque portraits of contorted figures. Schiele’s work reflected a Viennese culture fascinated by psychoanalysis, and he found inspiration in visiting psychiatric hospitals, which lent a tortured, morbid quality to some of his paintings.

Four Trees, however, is a landscape painted during World War I. Due to his weak heart, Schiele was lucky enough to avoid combat, instead serving as a prison guard, clerk, and other administrative roles. Whether or not this piece was ever intended to reflect the turmoil of the time, I still find Four Trees to be incredibly poignant within that context—three of the trees are clinging to their leaves, but one has nearly faded.

4. Yokoyama Taikan’s Autumn Leaves - 1931

Yokoyama Taikan was a Modern artist and a major pioneer of Nihonga, a Japanese painting technique that used mineral and organic pigments on paper or silk, typically produced between the Meiji Restoration and the end of World War II. Nihonga was intended to stand apart from Western art by using traditional Japanese materials, while still embracing modern styles.

At the turn of the century, Taikan’s Modernist work was initially rejected in his home country for being too untraditional, as he avoided the line drawing techniques expected from previous generations of Japanese artists. Undeterred, he began exhibiting in countries throughout Asia and Europe, eventually building a name for himself internationally.

Even for a Modernist, Taikan was wildly ahead of his time. What I love about Autumn Leaves is how contemporary the piece feels—I could easily believe that it was painted within the last decade. Additionally, one can’t ignore the vibrancy of the colors, something for which Japanese artists have been revered for centuries, from Hiroshige to Murakami.

5. Alma Thomas’s Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze - 1973

And finally, Alma Thomas’s Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze. While Abstract Expressionism found a foothold in the New York School, another abstract movement flourished further south in Washington, D.C. The Washington Color School, as the name suggests, embraced color field painting as a new mode of expression; Thomas was part of the “second generation” of artists who carried the movement into the late sixties and seventies. In a time period when Black artists faced major barriers to having their works exhibited, Thomas defied the odds and built a successful career after she had already completed her first: teaching art to middle school students for thirty-five years.

Thomas’s art is often described as “joyful” and “exuberant”—her many years of working with children and nurturing their creativity no doubt informed her perspective. Unlike many other color field artists of the era, Thomas forewent the use of masking tape and drew her patterns, lending her later paintings a pointillist quality reminiscent of Georges Seurat. Her work was at the cutting-edge of midcentury art in its exploration of color theory, yet to me, Autumn Leaves Fluttering in the Breeze still captures the bliss one feels as a small child, racing to tumble into a pile of leaves.

A sublime take on a bright, autumn day. In her words, “The use of color in my paintings is of paramount importance to me. Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness in my painting rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”

A naked woman, broom in hand, rides backwards on a goat. Her hair flows in the opposite direction of the creature’s fur, suggesting something deeply unnatural. Magic is afoot.

She is surrounded by putti: one carries an alchemist’s pot, one holds a highly-poisonous thornapple plant, and one appears to be passing gas as another tries to grab the magic wand from his hand. It is an image wild and wicked, clearly meant to illustrate the popular perception of witches at the height of the European witch trials… right?

Except this engraving was created in the year 1500 by Albrecht Dürer, and the witch craze wouldn’t begin in earnest until the mid-sixteenth century. Witch trials did exist, but they were scattered events compared to the widespread panic that would engulf the public decades later. When evaluating Dürer’s witch engravings, we have to ask: from whom did he derive his inspiration?

Many readers will be familiar with Albrecht Dürer as an icon of the Northern Renaissance and German humanism. Though the Renaissance arrived later to Northern Europe, its adherents were no less enthusiastic in their passion for rediscovered Classical texts, which they integrated with their Christian worldview. Rooted in a philosophy that championed the individual, humanists emphasized the importance of a broad, humanities-based education and an understanding of ancient philosophy and literature. In the North, humanists sought to make primary and secondary education available to a wider share of the public. Johannes Gutenberg’s movable-type printing press facilitated this spread of knowledge.

Dürer was deeply ensconced within the humanist community in Nuremberg. As historian Margaret A. Sullivan notes in her research on Dürer’s witches:

Inspired in large part by Conrad Celtis, with the “the Poet’s School” in Nuremberg one indication of its importance, poetry was a compelling interest for the German humanists in the years around 1500, and this enthusiasm coincides with Dürer’s introduction of the witch as a subject in his art. Dürer’s participation in this humanist culture—including his friendship with Celtis and Willibald Pirckheimer—the vivid descriptions of magic and witchcraft available in the poetry of the ancient world, and the scarcity of actual witch-hunting activity in these years, make the assumption that the Malleus maleficarum lies behind Dürer’s witches highly problematic.1

The Malleus Maleficarum is a treatise on witchcraft and demonology written by the German priest Heinrich Kramer in 1486. Notably, it asserted that women are more susceptible to demonic influence than men. Though the text would eventually become one of the most famous works on witchcraft, it didn’t possess the same influence when it was published. The Protestant Reformation and subsequent religious conflicts were still decades away. The Catholic Church roundly condemned Kramer’s text for its advocacy of unethical tactics to coerce confessions from victims. Kramer’s tirade was born of his own failed attempts to prosecute “witches” in Tyrol; he was actually kicked out of Innsbruck and dismissed as a madman.

In Dürer’s day, most people believed in magic, but their views were more nuanced than one might expect. Coming out of the medieval period, there remained a belief that some magic was “good” (such as folk charms intended for healing or protection), and some was “bad” (such as necromancy or summoning demons).

As Sullivan suggests, Dürer’s inspiration was therefore not likely based on the Malleus Maleficarum, but on his knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry, throughout which magical women feature prominently. German humanists were extremely interested in the works of Roman poets like Horace and Lucan, both of whom wrote satirical works involving witches. In particular, Horace’s evocative descriptions of Canidia, Sagana, Circe, Madea, and more would shape the perception of witchcraft in the Western canon.

Sadly, some readers in the Early Modern period missed Horace’s sense of humor. The witchy-imagery of his poetry and that of his peers “are a staple in the literature on witchcraft published in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries”:

…repeated in great detail by writers no matter what their views on the witchcraft issue and often treated as more fact than fiction, a testament to the hold the ancients had on their imagination and the strength with which the humanists believed that “philosophy”—that is, serious matter—was hidden in the ancient poets.2

For Dürer’s purposes, I should note that not only did he create his witch engravings prior to the escalation of the witch trials, but he produced these works for an educated, humanist audience. Therefore, when we examine The Witch (1500), we can see his work in a new light: the prominent putti are a clear Classical reference as mischievous representations of Cupid, and the humor of their vulgarity makes sense given their satirical context. Few images of witches can be found in medieval art, and the ones that do exist depict them clothed. The hag’s nudity in The Witch gestures to her roots in the Classical tradition, as in other mythological artworks produced during the Renaissance. Even Dürer asserts his own sense of humor by writing the letter “D” backwards in his signature—a play on the “unnaturalness” of the scene.

With this in mind, Dürer’s earlier (and only other) witch drawing can be evaluated from a Classical lens. The women in Four Witches (1497) are also nude, conducting a ritual in a circle that evokes dancing muses or goddesses. The ornament above them resembles a pomegranate, a symbol of fertility in the ancient world. Meanwhile, a demon peeks around the corner with its mouth gaping open. This naughty, voyeuristic scene speaks more to the fantasies of Dürer’s educated, male audience than it does to the horrors of the witch trials.

Dürer’s engravings are therefore emblematic of an elite stratum of society fascinated by Classical literature and mythology. However, we know where this story is heading: within a few decades of Dürer’s death, witch trials would sweep across Europe, claiming tens of thousands of victims.

As we sink deeper into autumn, we’ll revisit the topic of witches in art—but next time, our vantage point will be on the other side of the trials.

“There’s a moment when a young girl turns into a woman. It doesn’t last long, and I’d like it caught on canvas.”

These are the words that Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) shares with John Singer Sargent (Bobby Steggert) on HBO’s The Gilded Age, a show that explores the lives of wealthy New Yorkers and their servants during the late 1800s. Russell is married to the self-made railroad tycoon George Russell, whose character was inspired by the infamous robber barons of the period. Among the upper-crust, the Gilded Age was an era of tension between Old Money (those whose ancestors arrived during the colonial era, either of English or Dutch origins) and New Money like Bertha Russell, who is implied to be of Irish descent.

Nevertheless, the United States was barely 100 years old. Even those of Mayflower stock couldn’t claim the lineage of Europe’s aristocracy—despite, in many cases, having more money. Wealthy Americans still took their cues from overseas. As one character on the show quips, the “old people” wanted to be English and the “new people” wanted to be French. Bertha will do anything to secure her family’s place in high society; among her many strategic decisions is having her daughter Gladys (Taissa Farmiga) painted by Sargent.

Gladys’s portrait is revealed at a party moments before her parents make an important announcement regarding her future. Admittedly, the painting on screen doesn’t resemble a work by Sargent; one can forgive the show for failing to recreate his distinctive style. While the portrait’s theatrical unveiling before an audience is more drama than real life, it is true that having a portrait painted by Sargent would have been a major status symbol.

The real Sargent was a reserved man, known for being shy even amongst his friends. It is his talent for capturing Belle Époque beauties that made him famous first in France, and eventually, around the world.

John Singer Sargent was born in 1856 in Tuscany to American parents. They were a family of upper-middle-class expatriates who never truly settled in one country, but traveled throughout Europe and lived off a modest inheritance. Sargent’s education was therefore unconventional, though by his teenage years, his burgeoning talent for painting motivated his parents to move to Paris so that he could receive formal training.

Though he didn’t visit the United States until his young adulthood, Sargent always considered himself to be an American. At this point in history, the center of the art world was Paris, with London in second place. American cities were far further down the list, as the US was only just establishing the arts institutions that it enjoys today. In fact, it was the industrialists of the Gilded Age (like George and Bertha Russell) who would fund the creation of new museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Isabella Stewart Gardner was one of many wealthy women to commission a portrait by Sargent.

Sargent dazzled viewers at the Paris Salon, where he made his debut in 1877. His portraits were just past the edge of traditional, adopting daring techniques such as unconventional poses and compositions, or looser brushstrokes that hinted at Impressionism without going all the way. (He was friends with Claude Monet and fellow American Mary Cassatt.) The women he painted were not passive sitters; portraits like that of Gardner or Lady Agnew (above) capture the psychological complexity of their subjects; Lady Agnew’s knowing gaze compels one to wonder what secrets she might tell.

Sometimes, this daring went too far. I’ve written before about the enormous scandal of Madame X, a portrait of Virginie Gautreau that shocked the Salon for its off-the-shoulder strap and bold display of makeup. Sargent faced such uproar that he left France for England, where he found a new pool of clientele. There, he cemented his status as the most beloved portrait artist of the late Victorian period.

For much of the 20th century, as art moved towards abstraction and radical experimentation, Sargent’s portraits were seen as stuffy emblems of a straight-laced era. That is, until historians found his sketches.

The “stacks of sketches of nude people” were seen in 1890 by Sargent’s friend, the American artist Edwin Austin Abbey. The vast majority of the drawings were of men, and though drawing nudes was a standard form of artistic training, Abbey observed that Sargent’s were “a bit earthy.”1 These drawings—beautiful drawings of the male body, if a little “earthy”—were discovered by art historians in the 1980s, forcing them to reconsider the perception of Sargent as a hyper-traditional society artist. Many scholars now believe that Sargent was gay, with his close companion Count Albert Gustavus de Belleroche a likely lover.

Regardless, these sketches reveal a depth of passion and sensuality which simmers beneath his more “acceptable” portraits of ladies. They also demonstrate the divide between Sargent’s public persona and private life. In the context of history paintings, male artists could display nudes of men in the Salon. Sargent chose not to.

However, the image that has always haunted me is his 1919 painting Gassed, which hangs in London’s Imperial War Museum. On the surface, it may seem so unlike the rest of Sargent’s work. Here was a painter of attractive women, far from the luxurious salons and drawing rooms where he made his fortune.

But in the emotional intensity of this painting, I see a through-line to Lady Agnew’s perceptive stare, to Virginie Gautreau’s defiant stance. Sargent was a keen observer of his times, both the gentle and the horrifying. Though the glittering world of his youth was blown apart by war, he painted the soldiers as he painted his ladies: with respect and dignity.

This essay is part of the series The Year Without a Summer.

Throughout this series, we’ve traveled the world and witnessed tragedies, discoveries, and inventions left in the wake of the largest recorded volcanic eruption. We’ve examined how a natural disaster could be a catalyst for events that would shape human history, such as the establishment of the Golden Triangle (still today a major center of the narcotics trade), or the creation of a novel that launched the science fiction genre. Tambora forced scientists to reevaluate how climate was studied, and compelled millions to adopt more effective methods of food preservation.

What about the regions that didn’t face extreme weather? As I noted earlier in this series, different areas of the world experienced varying levels of impact after Tambora’s eruption. Russia managed to escape the worst of it, and Russian grains played a key role in preventing population collapse in Europe.

Across the Atlantic, the United States’ East Coast was bludgeoned by unforgiving freezes. Instead of “the Year Without a Summer,” the notorious year of 1816 lived on in New England folk memory as “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death.”

But beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the frontier largely avoided Tambora’s wrath—with profound consequences for the westward expansion of the United States.

Weather was a deeply personal matter to the fledgling nation. Not only were most Americans farmers, but the emerging patriotic vision of the country was that of an agrarian republic of Edenic abundance. Since the nation’s founding, weather had generally improved, leading to an attitude of “climate boosterism” among its people. After traveling throughout the US in the early 1800s, geographer Constantin-François Volney reported:

I have collected similar testimonies in the whole course of my journies [sic] … On the Ohio, at Gallipolis, Washington (Kentucky), Frankfort, Lexington, Cincinnati, Louisville, Niagara, Albany, everywhere the same changes have been mentioned and insisted on. Longer summers, later autumns, shorter winters, lighter and less lasting snows, and colds less violent were talked of by everybody: these changes have always been described, in the newly settled districts not as gradual and slow, but as quick and sudden, in proportion to the extent of cultivation.1

However, the year 1809 launched a period of cooler temperatures, with the eruption of Tambora causing two especially brutal years in 1816 and 1817. In New England, a shocking snowstorm in June of 1816 destroyed farmers’ crops. Hopes of a calmer summer were soon dashed as frosts persisted into September. Many farming families had no choice but to make the treacherous journey across the Appalachian Mountains to what are now the Midwestern states. There, they discovered that the volcanic weather that had overtaken New England never made it past the mountains.

The flat Midwestern prairies proved ideal for farming. In 1817, the volume of grains sold down the Mississippi quadrupled as the suffering New England states were eager to buy flour, and trade with starving European nations boomed. It was also a period during which thousands of European refugees migrated to the United States, so much so that the British Parliament attempted to limit the number of emigrants leaving their ports.

For context, immigration from Europe never surpassed 10,000 per year in the 1790s. In 1817, that number grew to over 22,000, with an additional 10,000 in 1817 and 14,500 in 1818 coming from British Canada. Politicians from frontier states and territories were eager to advertise to these immigrants in the hopes of boosting economic activity. As one Missouri representative put it, “There neither is, nor, in the nature of things can there every be, anything like poverty there. All is ease, tranquility, and comfort.”2

Of course, this flurry of expansion came to the detriment of indigenous tribes, who were pushed further west either by force, by treaties that favored white settlers, or by the spread of diseases.

For the new settlers, the gravy train would soon come to an end. By 1818, climate patterns were returning to normal in areas that had been hit by Tambora’s volcanic weather. As farmers on the East Coast and across Europe recovered, demand for Midwestern grains plummeted.

The problem was that at this early stage in American history, many of the land deals on the frontier were brokered with a handshake and backed by letters of endorsements from friends and family rather than cold, hard cash. The country’s national bank was especially irresponsible, issuing $22 million in notes to finance the land boom even though it only had $2 million in reserves. Speculation on the frontier, coupled with the drop in demand in grain, resulted in the Panic of 1819—the United States’ first economic depression.

The consequences were long-lasting. Readers from the US will remember Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton’s dueling visions for the nation from history class: Jefferson’s agrarian republic versus Hamilton’s economic centralization. While Jefferson’s plantation Monticello floundered during the Year Without a Summer, Hamilton’s ghost was resurrected. Long since dead (he passed in 1804), Hamilton’s ideas promoting a powerful national bank and industrial development proved victorious. Credit was depersonalized, and the government began investing in better infrastructure to transport agricultural goods into urban communities.

Tambora’s 1815 eruption provides us with a unique opportunity to investigate how one event can cause a domino effect that would change the course of history. What if the US never faced any impacts from Tambora? Would the nation be slower to industrialize, and if so, how would that transform its future? The possibilities of alternate realities seem endless.

Despite the fact that it would be another hundred and fifty years before the connection to Tambora was discovered, “Eighteen-Hundred-and-Froze-to-Death” endured in the minds of Americans. In 1924, meteorological historian Willis Milham said of the year 1816, “If all the statements in climatologies, in books on the weather, in biographies, in histories, and in the periodical literature were collected, they would form a sizable volume.”3

Indeed, Mary Shelley’s “wet, ungenial summer” would leave a tangled web of events whose threads stretched long into the future, and whose trials would survive in the folk memory of people around the globe.