Stave Three: The Spanish Onion-Friars

"There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe."

The imagery of the sentence is too humorously irreverent for me not to have made a drawing of it.  

Jan Steen - "Twelfth-Night Feast"

This drawing does NOT appear in "Scrooge Studies." But it did influence my eBook.

It is my pencil study of a self-portrait by Jan Steen, which he included smack in the middle of his 1662 painting "Twelfth-Night Feast." I started making small drawings from this painting some months ago at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Do look it up on the MFA's website. The details of hands, poses, and facial expressions in the painting are really well done, and a lot of fun to boot; this and other Dutch paintings helped me hone my illustrations for "A Christmas Carol."

The painting is intricate, skilled, but down-to-earth. Obviously a high-end work of art, it's nevertheless decidedly full of low-brow elements, from the egg shells casually tossed on the floor, to the jester in all his crassness, to the undoubtedly drunk carolers at the door in the background. Gotta love it.

My eBook is Published; Three Institutions; and two Thank-Yous

At long last, I've completed sixty illustrations for A Christmas Carol, and I've published them as an eBook.  Scrooge Studies: An Illustrated Exploration of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" is now available on Amazon.

I apologize that Scrooge Studies is not available in a print edition.  Also, due to this being an image-intensive eBook, it is not readable on some devices.

I would like to mention three institutions, with my thanks for their important work in preserving and presenting so many historical, technological, and cultural treasures: 

• The Henry Ford, Dearborn, Michigan, which houses the restored Fairbottom Bobs mine pump; 
• Old Sturbridge Village, Sturbridge, Massachusetts, which displays numerous examples of early nineteenth-century material culture and technology; 
• and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, whose extensive collections provided me with valuable material to sketch and study, to better refine my drawings.

I would like to thank the collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo, who recently made a truly massive donation of Netherlandish art to the MFA.  Being able to make studies from some of these masterpieces really helped me enhance my drawings in a significant way.  Obviously I do not know the Otterloos personally, but they have my appreciation anyway.

I would also like to thank Stephen Jarvis, author of Death and Mr Pickwick, for the insights into Dickens and Robert Seymour that he presented in his book.  It is both an entertaining and informative novel, and any fan of Dickens should read it.  I had come across Seymour early on while working on Scrooge Studies, but Mr. Jarvis's novel really gave a very in-depth and personal view of Seymour that I wouldn't have been able to access otherwise.  

I won't be posting all sixty of the finished images on this blog.  But over the next few months, leading up to the Christmas Season, I will be posting many of my working drawings - the studies from which I built the final images in the book.  And of course I'll have to continue on to other projects, but from time to time I'll probably make additional new drawings for "A Christmas Carol."  Thank you for your interest, and stay tuned...