Tag Archives: Easter

Back Bay Easter

We were a small party for Easter this year so we went to the St. Botolph Club in Boston for a buffet of oysters, salmon, eggs benedict, coq au vin, and lamb (no ham). This is the artsy old Boston club, and I always enjoy going there because the walls are lined with the work of its members past and present. In the crimson library, there is a portrait of an artist who I became acquainted with through his connections to several Salem artists at the end of the nineteenth century: John Leslie Breck. I’ve come to admire his work over the past few years, and I always “check in” with him whenever I go to St. Botolph’s. Though known as one of the young artists who brought Impressionism to the United States (in successive exhibitions at St. Botolph’s), Breck’s portrait is one of earnest realism: he looks handsome and troubled, or maybe I am just imposing that state on him as I know he ended his own life at the age of 39 in 1899.

Back Bay Easter

Back Bay Easter Dining Room

Back Bay Easter Library

Back Bay Easter Breck

PaintingsbyJohnLeslieBrock1890_0000

I don’t mean to be so maudlin, but that portrait always makes an impression on me. But it was a lovely Easter afternoon with great food and company and a walk down Commonwealth Avenue searching for signs of spring. We found some, mostly man- made, but there were a few flowering buds—we are on the brink! Walking back to the car from the Public Garden, I looked for my favorite version of the three Lutheran solas: I was just lecturing on them in my Reformation class last week, and I took a photograph for some extra validation for/from my students.

Back Bay Easter Box

Back Bay Easter last

Back Bay Easter 4

Back Bay collage

Back Bay Easter 3

Back Bay Gloves

Back Bay Bushes

Back Bay Easter Flowers

Back Bay Solas


To Lop or Not

Happy Easter weekend to everyone, and Patriots’ Day to those of us in Massachusetts: I’m traveling next week, so will leave you with some rabbits, for Easter and just because. Not the common variety, mind you, but the “fancy”, lop-eared kind. These charming illustrations are from William Clark’s The Boy’s Own Book: A Complete Encyclopedia of all the Diversions, Athletic, Scientific, and Recreative, of Boyhood and Youth, first published in 1828 in London and then updated every couple of years through the end of the century. Rabbit-keeping was perceived as a beneficial “diversion” for boys, and detailed instructions for hutch construction are included in every edition I looked at, but the attitude towards which rabbits to keep evolves: the first editions emphasize the floppy lop-eared rabbits, a novelty of selective breeding, but later in the century these bunnies are viewed with more disdain: according to the fanciers, when one ear grows up straight and the the lops over the shoulder, it is a great thing, and when the two ears grow over the nose, so that the poor creature cannot see (as in the horn-lop, or when both ears stick out of each side horizontally (as in the oar-lop), or when the hollows of the ears are turned out so completely that the covered part appears in front (as in the perfect-lop), these peculiarities are considered as marks of varied degrees of perfection, but to unsophisticated minds they present nothing but monstrosities; we can see no beauty in such enormities, and shall no further describe or allude to them. 

Lop

Lop perfect

Lop 2

Lop 3 up eared rabbit A variety of lop-eared rabbits, and one preferable “up-eared” rabbit, from The Boy’s Own Book (1843-62).

So lop-eared rabbits are for the fanciers, but not for boys. The standard-bearers of the rabbit industry in America don’t have much to say about lops either, sparing only a page or so for fancy English lops in their manuals, as opposed to pages and pages on the Flemish Giant and Belgian Hare. The most Victorian of rabbits was not for everyone.

lop collage

Lop 5

Herring I, John Frederick, 1795-1865; A Happy Family American standards for English lops in the Standard of perfection for rabbits, cavies, mice, rats & skunksNational Pet Stock Association, 1915; John Frederick Herring, A Happy Family, ©Leeds Museums and Galleries.

 


Hatching Hostilities

Well this is not really a post that speaks to the spirit of Easter, but it does involve eggs…..I think I’ve written about all of the usual Easter topics over the years, including rabbits, the White House Easter Egg Roll, and Swedish Easter witches, but never war, until today. The minute I saw some egg-themed postcards from the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), I knew I had to write about them, and this seems like an (oddly) appropriate time. Even though it was a relatively short war, this cross-cultural conflict was nevertheless a major turning-point in Russian history, Japanese history, and world history, and it anticipated the truly global nature and coverage that would characterize World War I in the next decade. A good part of this coverage was pictorial: photographs, editorial images, and postcards–the latter was new media at the turn of the last century, and producers and artists in the west and the east embraced them as a multi-national form of war reportage. Cards produced for domestic audiences tend to be more propagandistic and jingoistic, obviously (you can see a sampling at MIT’s “Asia Rising” online exhibit), but those oriented towards an international market tend to be more symbolic, allegorical, and (above-all) humorous. Because of the universal symbolism of the egg and its all-too-apparent nature, these egg-themed cards, all from the vast Leonard A. Lauder Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, are not too difficult to understand: an “Easter Egg of the War” is about to hatch hostilities in Manchuria, a Russian soldier cracks opens a “boiled egg” filled with his enemy, and the theater of war is played out in two postcards from the “Easter Eggs of the Mikado” series.

Japan Easter Egg of the War

Boiled Egg

Japan PC 1 MFA

Japanese PC 2 MFA

A.F. Delamarre, “The Easter Egg of War”, 1904-1905; Fernet, “Boiled Egg”, 1904-1905; and unidentified artist, “The Easter Eggs of the Mikado” series, 1904-1905, all from the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The meaning behind these next four postcards is even easier to grasp: an egg fight, in which eggs are broken, and scrambled (leaving behind a big mess!):

Egg Battle 1 Fact to Face

Egg Battle 2 Start the Fire

Egg Battle 3 Fire at Will

Egg Battle 4 Body to body

Egg Battle 5 After

Unidentified (Japanese?) artist, The Egg Battle series: face to face, start the fire, fire at will, body to body, after the battle, 1904-1905, Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Japanese Postcards, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.


Easter Ambiance

I was writing a post about the computation of the date for Easter in the medieval period and after when it became clear that my technical text was taking the joy out of one of our most joyous holidays. Math:  what was I thinking? So I deleted all that dry stuff, and assembled some of my favorite Easter images, which hopefully are easy on both the eyes and the brain. This is a very random assortment: artistic and historical images, Easter advertising, items and scenes that caught my eye. To me, they just conjure up an Easter ambiance, with a bit of religiosity, a bit of whimsy, and a bit of spring.

Easter Nerius MS early 14th Met

Easter Decoration Krebs Lithograph Co 1883

Easter Sunday in Harlem Cartier-Bresson

The Letter A with images of Easter, northern Italian MS. by Nerius, early 14th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; “Easter Decorations” by the Krebs Lithography Co., 1883, Library of Congress; “Easter Sunday in Harlem”, 1950s, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Easter Hot Cross Buns Walter Crane 1890s

Eastertide Dora Batty

Easter 1936 ad Smithsonian

Delivering Hot Cross Buns on Easter Day, Walter Crane illustration, 1890s, New York Public Library Digital Gallery; Dora Batty advertisement for the London underground, 1934, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Western Union advertisement, 1936, Smithsonian Institution.

Easter Ensemble Eggs

Easter Crosses At West End

Easter-esque accessories from At West End.

Easter 001

Easter 007

Easter 005

Easter Bunny at Hawthorne Hotel

Easter 015

Easter in Salem: Bunnies (and heads) in the PEM gift shop and the window of Beautiful Things on Essex Street; the Easter Bunny at the podium at the Hawthorne Hotel a couple of years ago (I loved this picture when I saw it in Northshore Magazine and found it online; could not find a photographer credit, sorry); first flowering, finally!


%d bloggers like this: