Happy Halloween From Ye Puritanic Sands!

Here is one of my early images for Scrooge Studies, showing the gravestone of Ebenezer Scrooge in Stave Four.  It's modeled after the headstone of Captain Joseph Griffith of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, buried in Ancient Cemetery, Y-Port.

And here is a photo of Captain Griffith's headstone itself:

Ancient Cemetery dates to the time of the founding of Yarmouth in 1639.  I don't know how long cultural continuity between Great Britain and the American Colonies survived - undoubtedly some things have survived to the present and other things fell away at different points, accents being the most obvious of things that have diverged.  There is also the very nature of the founding of Plymouth Colony.  I saw a BBC documentary about it where the Puritans were described by historian Pauline Croft as "a very, very small group of very extreme people" (The Mayflower Pilgrims: Behind the Myth, 2016, quote starting at around 00:02:00).  I think that's a fair characterization.

I've come to think of coastal New England after a phrase by Herman Melville's Ishmael: "the Puritanic sands" (Moby-Dick, end of Chapter 6).  There's the oft-remembered bit about Massachusetts Bay Colony outlawing the observance of Christmas.  I sometimes wish that certain Christmas traditions, such as depicted by Seymour in The Book of Christmas, had been more popular on the Western Side of The Pond.

On headstones, there is a survivor into the 1800s: "ye" on tombstones.  Recently I learned about this from Stephen Jarvis, author of Death and Mr Pickwick: The "y" in "ye" is actually a morphing from the old Anglo-Saxon "thorn" character, which was pronounced as "th," not "y" (so "ye" should actually be pronounced "the").  Having studied a bit about the evolution of German, where thorn appears in the First Germanic Sound Shift, I was delighted to see its descendant here in my neighborhood Puritanic cemetery.  

I would also like to take this opportunity to highly recommend Death and Mr Pickwick, in which Stephen has packed an enormous amount of historical information into an insightful, sometimes tragic, frequently comic, and uniquely engaging novel about the origins of The Pickwick Papers.

In the spirit of Halloween - a tradition whose practice seems quintessentially New England despite its probably very pagan (or at least un-Puritanic) origins - here are some photos of other headstones from Ancient Cemetery.  There's some lovely detail on some of them, especially in the borders.  And a comparison of the dates reveals a "fashion" in the half-round areas on the top of the tombstones.  Early tombstones (1600s-early 1700s, as near as I can guess - often they don't have dates) tend to be small, with an abstract design that might be opposed clouds.  In the 1700s, the classic Death's Head, often winged, became widely used.  Around 1800, this in turn became supplanted by a Weeping Willow, an urn, or both, and remained widely used until the mid-1800s. I'm guessing that the stones may have been commissioned en masse and then used as needed, which would explain the "popularity" of particular styles in particular periods.  

There are also some other interesting script details, such as a merging of the "c" and "t" in "Oct." and "October," "lyes" instead of "lies," and elongated "s" characters which look a bit like "f."  Some of these show the elongated next to the regular "s," such as on the headstone of "Mifs DESIRE GRIFFITH" (Captain Griffith's daughter).  This form of a double-s is quite similar to German "ß" as well.  All of these photos are under my copyright.

This grave, of Lucrecia Sturgis, is one of the early headstones.  This shot shows the abstracted opposing-cloud motif:

And this one, of Thomas Baxter, shows an interesting joining of the "T" and "E" in his last name:

Happy Halloween!

Tiny Tim

I've tried to use historical figures as the models for as many characters as I can.  Tiny Tim is a central figure in the story.  Of all the characters, he's the first who really starts to melt Scrooge's icy heart, and he maybe has the strongest impact on Scrooge.

But I had trouble finding a suitable person to portray him.  Fortunately, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, helped me out.  In the Netherlandish Collection there is a delightful painting by Jan de Bray, titled "Portrait of a Boy Holding a Basket of Fruit" (1658).

I wasn't able to learn the identity of the sitter, so I've credited him as "Jan de Bray (The Younger)."  The boy may or may not have been Jan de Bray's son, but painters from that period often used their own family members as models.

Here is my original sketch, which I made at the MFA:

I decided to do the final version in silverpoint.  I'm not presenting that one here (it's in the eBook), but this is a practice version in silverpoint:

Both images in this post are high resolution jpegs to show the detail.

The eBook (Scrooge Studies: An Illustrated Exploration of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol") is available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Scrooge-Studies-Illustrated-Exploration-Christmas-ebook/dp/B07GZ9QJKX/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1539908783&sr=1-2&keywords=scrooge+studies.

A Preparatory Sketch

This is a preparatory sketch for an image from Stave Two of A Christmas Carol.  It shows Belle's husband arriving home with a porter, who is carrying Christmas presents, and the porter being overwhelmed by all the children:

"Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection!"

The final image is a paper cut-out.  What you see above is what I removed, and becomes solid black.  However, I still like this as a drawing, because it reveals some things that the final black-and-white image doesn't.

I took a tracing of it before I cut it out - just in case of mistakes:

The final image is in my eBook (Scrooge Studies: An Illustrated Exploration of Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"), available on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/Scrooge-Studies-Illustrated-Exploration-Christmas-ebook/dp/B07GZ9QJKX/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1538945246&sr=1-1&keywords=Scrooge+Studies.

I Saw (more than) Three Ships

This post is not directly about A Christmas Carol.  But it is about some of my ideas on the art-making process.

While working on a commission two years ago, I looked at Canaletto's Bacino di San Marco, Looking East.  Because it's in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it was convenient for me to go look at it in person.  Here is a photo reproduction, from the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu/art/c/canalett/5/canal512.jpg) (photo reproductions of 2-dimensional public-domain artworks are considered to be in the public domain in the United States, where I currently live and work):

I have a few thoughts on Canaletto, and I'd be interested to get others' feedback (I'm NOT an art historian, so I don't intend to make any definitive claims):

1. I understand that there is some debate about whether or not Canaletto used a camera obscura to make his paintings.  I think that he did use a camera obscura for this painting (and probably others as well).
2. I think he painted most of this painting over the course of a single day.
3. I think Canaletto was left-handed.

The painting is brilliant.  It is incredibly accurate, which suggests a camera obscura.  I understand that there's some question about whether or not the aperture of a camera obscura would allow for accurate focus.  This is a Venetian painting by a Venetian painter.  I think it's likely that the Venetian glass industry would have been capable of producing high-quality optical lenses at that time - if you lived in Europe in the 1700s and you wanted eyeglasses, a telescope, or a nautical spyglass, where would you go to get the highest quality?  Probably Venice, if you could afford to travel.

I understand that Canaletto trained under his father to be a theatrical set painter.  So he would have developed his skills with speed in mind.  Any trick he could come up with to produce a painting faster would have been desirable for him.  Combined with the likely availability of high-quality optical lenses, a camera obscura would be a tremendous, and logical, aid in speeding up his process.  

Notice the change in sunlight on the architecture.  At the left side of the canvas, shadows fall to the right.  The sun is low, behind us and to the left, placing it in the west.  So this part of the canvas was painted in the evening.  But then, look at the right side of the canvas.  The shadows fall to the left, at a steep angle, placing the sun high up and to the right, and so probably painted in late morning.

If the image had taken multiple days to complete, it would have made sense for Canaletto to pick a single position for the sun.  The fact that he didn't (pick a consistent position for the sun) suggests that he wasn't thinking about his light source at all, which in turn suggests that he was working quickly.  You can actually track the movement of the sun by the shift in direction and angle of the shadows across the canvas, from right to left.

With the boats, this is less consistent than in the architecture, but he could have added some of the boats after he painted the architecture.

His treatment of the surface of the water also suggests working quickly.  A photo reproduction doesn't show this as well as looking at the painting in person, but here it is: why would a painter be so exacting and accurate in his depictions of architecture and boats, only to paint the surface of the water with simple little U-curves?  Looking at it at the MFA, one can see this contrast between his attention to detail and then the lack of it.  That contrast in turn is highlighted by comparisons with other nautical works, especially in the MFA's Dutch collections.  Most nautical painters who really know their ships also take great care in their depictions of water, but Canaletto doesn't.  So again, like with the change in the sun's position, this suggests that Canaletto cared about speed as much as (or more than?) anything else.

Finally, as to Canaletto being left-handed: using oil paint, with a slow drying time, he wouldn't want to smudge his work.  The inside of a camera obscura must be dark, except for where the image is projected (obviously).  Based on the change in the sun's position, he had to have painted right-to-left.  If he were right-handed, he would have created a high probability of messing up his own work.  But if he were left-handed,  the risk of smudging would be minimized.

I also think he painted the entire background in the light blue sky color some time beforehand, and started painting in the late morning to avoid the architecture being backlit, but I'm not as confident about that.

Again, I would be interested in the opinions of anyone who is more knowledgable about Canaletto than I am...so please feel free to make a comment.