Tag Archives: maps

May 30, 2013

Joan for the Ages

By daseger

Today marks the day of Joan of Arc’s execution at the hands of the Rouen Inquisition under the thumb of the English occupiers of France in 1431, and consequently her Feast Day, as of 1920. She was accused of a myriad of charges, but ultimately it was her conviction as a relapsed heretic that led to her death by burning at the stake, as well as the desire of the English to demonize such an inspirational figure in the closing stages of the Hundred Years’ War. There are many interesting things about Joan’s life and death, but one of the most compelling aspects of her image is its timelessness, which is discussed at length (and in many manifestations) in two great books: a collection of essays edited by Dominique Goy-Blanquet entitled Joan of Arc, a Saint for All Reasons: Studies in Myth and Politics (2003) and Nora Heimann’s Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700-1855): From Satire to Sanctity (2005).

Jehanne La Pucelle, the “Maid of Orleans” was famous in her own time and immediately after her death. I love the poem by her contemporary Christine de Pisan, directed to the French king but really all about Joan:

And you, the King of France, King Charles,
The seventh of that noble name,
Who fought a mighty war before
Good fortune came at all to you:
Do, now, observe your dignity Exalted by the Maid, who bent
Your enemies beneath your flag
In record time (that’s something new!)

That’s something new! It sounds so modern, but I guess Joan was pretty modern in the fifteenth century, which might account for some of her timelessness thereafter. She resurfaces pretty predictably in times of conflict: the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, World Wars I & II in the twentieth century. All of her cultural depictions could fill a museum, or an encyclopedia, but certainly she is transformed into a nineteenth-century romantic heroine by Friedrich Schiller’s 1801 play, The Maid of Orleans. She was embraced by the Suffrage movements on both side of the Atlantic in the early twentieth century, and she remains a feminist hero(ine) in our own time. Joan’s eternal image can be seen in depictions from a succession of centuries, beginning with the late fifteenth-century manuscript poem Les Vigiles du roi Charles VII by Martial d’Auvergne (Paris, BnF, département des Manuscrits, Français 5054) and proceeding into the last century.

The Maid of Orleans in Les Vigiles du Roi Charles VII, later 15th century, and riding into battle in Les Vies des femmes célèbres by Antoine Du Four, about 1505, Dobrée Museum, Nantes, France.

Joan of Arc in print in the seventeenth century: prints by Leonard Gaultier (1612) and William Marshall (1642), British Museum.

I’m skipping over the eighteenth century, when the imagery associated with Voltaire’s scandalous poem La Pucelle d’Orléans reduces Joan to a sexual object; you would think the Enlightenment would be a great time for the Maid as a victim of the Inquisition, but it isn’t. It’s in the following centuries that she really gains power as both an iconic and historical (with the release of the trial records in the 1840s) figure, tying into the emerging nationalist and feminist movements (sometimes at the same time).

Satirical print of the support for Napoleon among French “Amazonian” women, who rally around a statue of Joan, Jean Baptiste Genty, 1815, British Museum; Edward Penfield cover for Harper’s, April 1895, New York Public Library Digital Gallery; Lillian Lancaster [Tennant] Map of France as Joan of Arc (or vice-versa), 1910, Garwood & Voight; Progam Cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress; Joan of Arc They are Calling You (a “weeping” France) sheet music, 1917, Library of Congress; U.S. war posters from the First and Second World Wars, Library of Congress.

1 Comment | tags: ephemera, Joan of Arc, Manuscripts, maps, print culture, Renaissance | posted in Culture, History

April 17, 2013

Streets of Boston

By daseger

Like everyone else, I was thinking about Boston a lot yesterday and as it was a non-teaching day I was very vulnerable to the drip drip of media “updates” while at home. So I turned off everything and looked through some books about Boston: its history, its architecture, its culture. Much better! Then I began assembling some of my favorite images and impressions of the city, and as that seemed like a somewhat productive enterprise I began to feel even better. So what I have today is a very random sample of my “collection”, including old favorites, new discoveries, and images of past and near-present. Boston is a dynamic city which has experienced a lot of change in the past few decades, but when I look at these images I still see a recognizable city, with the exception of the harbor views–visual reminders that Boston’s first and foremost identity for several centuries was that of a port. Paul Revere would draw on these prints a few decades later for his pre-revolutionary depiction of the occupation of Boston by British ships.

Two James Turner etchings of Boston’s wharves in the mid-eighteenth century from The American Magazine (Boston: Rogers and Fowle, 1743-46) and a hand-colored etching by John Carwitham of “A South East View of the Great Town of Boston in New England in America” (London: c. 1730-60), American Antiquarian Society, Worcester.

A century later, it’s more about the streets of Boston, the emerging “hub of the universe” and “Athens of America”. The mid- to late-nineteenth century were heady days for Boston, which of course had left Salem in the dust. During my hunt yesterday, I was particularly surprised to find that my favorite British pioneering photographer, Francis Frith, had included several images of Boston in his “Universal Series”. Artworks of varying mediums–watercolor, oil, another photograph–to depict other city scenes at around the same time.

Francis Frith photographs of Boston Common and the Massachusetts State House, 1850s, Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Benjamin Champney, Washington Street, Boston, 1850, Princeton University Graphic Arts Department; William Sharp, Railroad Jubilee on Boston Common, 1851, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Tremont Street, 1860, Halliday Historic Photograph Company, New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

And then there are the novel views of the city, created by creative and entrepreneurial publishers, cartographers, and balloonists! The nineteenth century loved the “big picture”.

James Black, “Boston, as the Eagle and Wild Goose See It”, 1860, Metropolitan Museum of Art; a Birds Eye View of Boston Triptych, 1903, ArtHouseGraffiti.

Of the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “Boston painters’, I think Arthur Clifton Goodwin was particularly adept at capturing Boston streetscapes in his impressionistic way. There are lots of Goodwin paintings to choose from (in auction archives and the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which gave him his own posthumous show in the 1970s), but I went with Copley Square (1908). Of course I had to include a painting from his fellow Boston Impressionist, the more well-known Childe Hassam, so I went for Mount Vernon Street (1919) one of the most beautiful, and reproduced, streets of Boston. Jump forward thirty years, and you’re looking at “old” Beacon Hill with the financial district rising above it from across the Charles River in Cambridge in an amazing (oil!) painting by Thomas Adrian Fransioli. I love the “modern” look of this painting, although I believe that Fransioli is referencing the present, the past, and the future. Boston looks like the “shining city on the hill” that it has always been.

Arthur Clifton Goodwin, Copley Square, London , 1908, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Childe Hassam, Mount Vernon Street, Christies; Thomas Adrian Fransioli, Beacon Hill, 1947, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

8 Comments | tags: Art, Boston, Culture, Etsy, maps, Museum of Fine Arts, Photography | posted in Culture, History

March 23, 2013

Matrimonial Maps

By daseger

Consider this post a follow-up to last year’s Maps of the Human Heart, the most popular post of my blog so far, by far. I’m not tooting my own horn, but merely acknowledging how very popular maps are in general, and allegorical maps in particular. The other posts I have written about maps have been popular too, but artistic and metaphorical maps much more so than straightforward representations, historic or otherwise. The best allegorical maps fall in the period from the French Revolution to World War One; I think it’s really interesting that once the world was mapped scientifically there was a desire to distort and play with its representation for a variety of purposes, both political and personal.

Matrimonial maps fall right into this period; they are, for the most part, a nineteenth-century phenomenon. While I was searching through the archives of sold lots at Skinner’s site the other day, looking for recent prices fetched by fancy chairs, I came across a matrimonial map that I had not seen before, and that led to today’s post. This watercolor map was apparently painted in 1824, and its $400-$600 estimate was exceeded by a selling price of over $2000. People like maps.

The recently-sold Skinner 1824 map in its frame and close-up, and a similar hand-drawn Map of Matrimony from a nineteenth-century Canadian autograph book, Hudson’s Bay Company Archives.

United States of Agitation! Kingdom of Suspense! Land of Expectation and the Isles of Envy and Spinsters: the often-dangerous terrain and waters of matrimony. Let’s compare these early nineteenth-century matrimonial maps with those that came before and after. Everyone seems to agree that the first matrimonial map, or at least the first published matrimonial map was “A New Map of the Land of Matrimony”, dated 1772. The image below is from Katherine Harmon’s great book You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (2004), which is a fount of information, imagery and inspiration, but the original map is in the collection of Yale University Library. The matrimonial fan-map was published in London about a decade later: less treacherous waters here, though there is a desert on one border of the “Land of Matrimony”.

Also from Great Britain is the “Island of Matrimony” charted and published by John Thompson around 1810. I’m not really getting all of the (classical) regional references on this particular map, but the various water bodies have pretty straightforward designations: the Lake Content, Disappointment Harbor, Turbulent Ocean in the south, Ocean of Delights in the north. Everything is measured on the scale of “80 love links to the mile”.

A Map of the Island of Matrimony by John Thompson, Edinburgh (?), 1810. Jonathan Potter, Ltd.

Beware of Divorce Island on the undated Matrimonial Map below, which features a “Lake of Contempt” rather then a “Lake of Content”. The routes toward happy and unhappy marriages are indicated on Philadelphia lithographer John Dainty’s novel & interesting game of matrimony, a more original take on cartographical matrimony.

Nineteenth-century Matrimonial Map, National Library of Ireland; The Novel & Interesting Game of Matrimony, lithographed and published by John Dainty of Philadelphia, Library of Congress.

In the later nineteenth century chromolithography is going to make everything more vivid, including matrimonial maps. The “Map of Matrimony” below, published by C.S. Beeching in London about 1870, retains the regions, references and tone of maps from a century earlier: the island of matrimony lies halfway between the Land of Spinsters and the Country of Single Men, surrounded by wavering waters of introduction, admiration, doubt, and felicity.

10 Comments | tags: Antiques and Collectibles, Art, Auctions, maps, Nineteenth Century, printing | posted in Design, History

January 22, 2013

Teaching with Tentacles

By daseger

I’m back at school for the Spring semester with the typical four-course teaching load, including a modern world history course that I have not taught for some time. So it is time to refresh my arsenal of Powerpoint presentations and maps. An interesting map can quickly catch a college student’s attention as easily as it does a blog reader, and after perusing my various digital collections a bit, I realized that I might be able to teach world history almost exclusively through octopus maps! Or at least nineteenth- and twentieth-century history: the creature does not seem to have been used as a metaphorical device before 1870. I searched in vain for a map or caricature depicting Napoleon as an octopus but could not find one, which is incredulous: few rulers deserve an octopus map to represent their regimes more than the little Corsican! There’s nothing too terribly original about this post: octopus maps have captured the attention of several bloggers before me (also see here), but I can’t resist putting my own take out there.

1870 marks a turning point in European and world history with the unification of Germany (as well as Italy): Europe was now “filled out” and further territorial ambitions could only be satisfied by global imperialism and/or war. The maps from this time forward reflect this jingoism and fear, but anthropomorphic satire dulls the edge. One of the first major octopus maps, Fred Rose’s “Serio-Comic War Map For The Year 1877” shows Russia as the octopus-aggressor rather than Germany, even though the Crimean War had revealed the severe weaknesses of the Russian Empire (this is reflected on the map below by wound on one of the octopus’ tentacles–that which is located in the proximity of the Crimea). From the British perspective that this map represents, it’s a bit early to portray Germany as the aggressor, and so Russia becomes either the ferocious bear or the reaching octopus.

F.W. Rose, “A Serio-Comic Map of the Year 1877”, London: G.W. Bacon & Co., British Library; (an earlier Dutch map at the University of Amsterdam upon which this map is based is identical except for the wounded tentacle).

A later Rose map, even more obviously depicting the British perspective, is “John Bull and his Friends” from 1900 in which John Bull (Great Britain) faces a continent full of hostile, disinterested, or preoccupied “friends” and an even more threatening octopus-Russia, reaching out in all directions. On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5), a Japanese take on the Serio-Comic map shifts the focus decidedly eastward and portrays Russia as the “black octopus”. And for a completely contrary view, a Japanese print self-identifies with the octopus after the war commenced with the Battle of Port Arthur.

F.W. Rose, “John Bull and his Friends: a Serio-Comic Map of Europe”, London: G.W. Bacon & Co., 1900; K. Ohara, “A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia”, 1904; “Tako no asirai”, The Japanese Octopus of Port Arthur, 1904, Library of Congress.

In addition to aggression and domination, whether threatened or realized, the octopus is just the perfect symbol, visual metaphor, avatar of imperialism, and the period between 1870 and 1914 was the golden age of the “new” imperialism, in which Europeans divided up the world, eager to get their piece before Britain gobbled it all up. Consequently there are probably more images portraying John Bull as the octopus rather than John Bull confronting the octopus, like this famous American cartoon, which was published in Punch in 1882.

Anonymous American cartoon, “The Devilfish in Egyptian Waters”, 1882: John Bull makes a grab for Egypt, initiating the “Scramble for Africa”.

The octopus was not just used externally to criticize an opposing or competitive nation’s policies but also internally on a partisan basis, particularly in America and Britain. This particular sea creature can symbolize greed just as well as territorial expansion, and this was a gilded age as well as an age of imperialism. Consequently we see octopuses portraying greedy capitalistic monopolists and associated special interests, on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, Puck magazine illustrator Udo Keppler used the octopus to characterize Standard Oil in 1904 and President Wilson’s fight for “business freedom” a decade later, while in Britain its use was more literally land-based: as a Socialist critique of urban “landlordism” around London just prior to World War I, and to depict urban sprawl from a traditional planning perspective.

Udo Keppler octopus illustrations for Puck magazine, 1904 & 1914, Library of Congress; W. B. Northrup’s “Landlordism” postcard and book cover of Clough Williams-Ellis’s England and the Octopus (1928), British Library.

As the octopus was a well-recognized symbol of aggression by the time that World War I broke out, it was only natural that it would appear on several anti-Germany maps. The English and French maps below, from 1915 and 1917 respectively, both single out Prussian aggression, an indication that the militaristic reputation of the new Germany’s northernmost region was still relevant, and the second one (“war is the national industry of Prussia”) is explicitly racist, with its German “hun” looming very large indeed.

The “Prussian Octopus” (1915; University of Toronto) and “La Guerre est l’industrie Nationale de la Prusse” (1917; Library of Congress).

There’s an easy transition to the propaganda maps of World War II,when both sides used octopuses to put forward their points of view. Hitler is obviously an easy octopus, as the title and cover of a prescient book published by a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly in 1938–just before the Germans moved into Czechoslovakia–boldly asserted. Henry C. Wolfe was trying to wake up the west and he used the octopus to do it.

Once the war began, the very clever German propaganda machine issued an anti-British poster from the perspective of France, which they had occupied: Winston Churchill as octopus reaches out toward French colonial possessions in Africa and the Middle East, echoing the imperial competition of the later nineteenth century. The bleeding tentacles–the amputations– indicate that Germany is preventing an English takeover of the French empire, even as it occupies France itself!

“Have Faith”: German anti-British propaganda poster, Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

As you can imagine, when the real war is over and the Cold War commences, the octopus continues to flourish as a symbol of rampant (anti-American) capitalism and rampant (anti-Soviet) communism, as well as rampant consumerism, evangelical Christianity and Islam, and a host of other perceived threats. However, cephapodal cartography is not subtle, and I think it lost much of its resonance in the later twentieth-century world, after the very literal 1950s.

British Economic League anti-Communist pamphlet, Archives of the Trades Union Congress and Warwick University Cold War Archive.

Now octopuses are rather whimsical, rather than threatening. I superimposed one on a cropped frame of a beautiful 1771 map of Salem and its vicinity and found it charming rather than ominous: what would they have been afraid of then? Definitely redcoats and tax collectors. What are we afraid of now?

65 Comments | tags: books, ephemera, maps, Teaching | posted in History, Salem

December 27, 2012

Best Bedside Books 2012

By daseger

Well, it’s the time of year for lists, lots of lists: best and worst, most important, so on and so forth, lists of ten things that characterize the passing year in one way or another. I’ll do my part with a best books list, with a qualification: these are titles that were published in 2012 which I consider to be essential for bedtime reading, or bedtime reference, to be more precise. I do like to read in bed before I sleep, but I drop off quite rapidly, so I need a quick hit of compelling information, and/or some visual stimulation, before I’m gone. I’ve given up fiction altogether for this purpose, and I never read any sort of academic history later at night: my bedside books need to be “dippable”; I will pick up one or the other from the stack–too tall for the bedside table–and dip into it every other night or so, in order to see or learn something before I fall asleep (books that do not perform these services leave the stack rather quickly). Several amazing natural histories were published this year which are perfect for this purpose, so I’ll start with them.

Natural Histories cover

Natural Histories. Extraordinary Selections from the Rare Book Archive of the American Museum of Natural History Library. Edited by Tom Baione. Sterling Signature, 2012.

Nothing fascinates me more than the merger of art and science and this first book illustrates that historical merger in an extraordinary way. It is the ultimate gift and coffee table book, as it comprises a collection of historical sources relating to every branch of natural history from anthropology to zoology, succinct yet substantive contextual essays, and lots of images, as well as frame-ready prints, but it is also incredibly informative and inspirational. Similar in its historical range and the compelling nature of its images is the National Library of Medicine’s Hidden Treasure, and rather more whimsical (yet still empirical) is Caspar Henderson’s The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. A 21st Century Bestiary. These books are just visual feasts, and I also learn something every time I pick them up.

Hidden Treasure

the-book-of-barely-imagined-beings-a-21st-century-bestiary

Hidden Treasure: the National Library of Medicine. Edited by Michael Sappol. Blast Books, 2012; The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson. Granta Books, 2012.

I’ve been interested in folklore for quite some time, and an amazing new edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales was published this year: this bicentennial edition of The Annotated Brothers Grimm was edited and annotated by Maria Tatar, Chair of the Program in Mythology and Culture at Harvard. It really is a definitive edition, and also includes many classic illustrations. There’s nothing better than reading Grimm fairy tales before you fall asleep: food for dreams!

9780393088861_custom-4b83bd148becf10073c6395f14fbda06c18a1daf-s6-c10

The Bicentennial Edition of the Annotated Brothers Grimm. Edited by Maria Tatar. W.W. Norton, 2012.

I always have architecture and design books in my bedside stack, also good for dreaming, and the ones I purchased this year are American Decoration by Thomas Jayne and London Hidden Interiors by Phillip Davies. Their titles are self-explanatory. I love Jayne’s traditional style, and with its 180 properties and 1200 photographs, Hidden Interiors is positively encyclopedic.

Book Jayne

philip-davies-london-hidden-interiors1

American Decoration: A Sense of Place, by Thomas Jayne. Monacelli Press, 2012. London Hidden Interiors, Phillip Davies. An English Heritage Book, Atlantic Publishing, Ltd., 2012.

Both art history and history texts seldom function well as bedside books, as they require a bit more sustained concentration. If they are far removed from my academic interests, sometimes I can make them work out of sheer ignorance/ interest and curiosity (or if they have relatively short chapters!) Right now I have two books in these categories by my bed, both very recently published: Eleanor Jones Harvey’s The Civil War and American Art, which is the companion volume to the exhibition that’s on right now at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and Todd Andrlik’s Reporting the Revolutionary War, which presents a narrative of the American Revolution through contemporary newspaper reports, including several from the Salem Gazette.

CivilWar_500

Reporting

Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Civil War and American Art. Yale University Press, 2012; Todd Andrlik, Reporting the Revolutionary War. Before it was History, it was News. Sourcebooks, 2012.

Salem is a “walkable city”, and I think more places in car-obsessed America should be walkable cities, which is why I purchased urban planner Jeff Speck’s Walkable City. How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time. I’m learning a lot from this book, but I do think it is better read in the daytime rather than just before bed. And last but not least, a perfect bedside book that my brother just gave me for Christmas: Simon Garfield’s Just My Type. A Book about Fonts. This was actually published in 2010, but I also have another Garfield book that was published this year, On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, (Gotham) so together they can fill out my top ten list. Typography and cartography: two very interesting, yet contained topics. Perfect for end-of-day reading.

Walkable City

Just-My-Type

Jeff Speck, Walkable City. How Downtown can Save America, One Step at a Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012; Simon Garfield, Just my Type. A Book about Fonts. Gotham reprint, 2012.

8 Comments | tags: Art, books, Flora and Fauna, folklore, Interior design, maps, Natural History, Smithsonian, Typography, urban planning | posted in Culture, Design, History

March 30, 2012

Urban Landscapes

By daseger

I wish we had city maps like the “bird’s eye” views produced in abundance in the second half of the nineteenth century today, but I suppose Google maps have taken their place. Digital maps are not substitutes for the first generation of these maps, however, which give us a unique perspective on urban landscapes of the era, a block-by-block, house-by-house, humanistic view that not even photography provides. I suppose I like them so much because they remind me of the city maps of the sixteenth century, my period: the civic pride, the belief in progress through construction, the people are so conspicuous in maps of both eras. To illustrate my point, let’s look at two maps, produced centuries apart: a map of the German city of Nuremberg from Georg Braun & Franz Hogenberg’s multi-volume Civitas Orbis Terrarum dated 1575, and a map of Salem that I happen to own, John Bachelder’s southern perspective of the city, published by Endicott & Company of New York City in 1856.

There are several differences in these perspectives (color, water, iconography, dress) but there are also, I think, some striking similarities, the most important of which is the central placement of the citizens of these cities. The message seems to be: the people are the city, not just the magnificent buildings or the busy harbor. Very democratic, in both the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century. Google maps don’t place people front and center; people aren’t even in Google maps.

John Bachelder, a New England native and an artist, lithographer, and photographer as well as a cartographer, published several other views of Salem, as well as many other cities, before he went on to distinguish himself as a “battlefield cartographer” and more: documenting in minute detail some of the major battles of the Civil War, most notably Gettysburg. But I think that his eye for detail is present in is antebellum city maps as well, many of which are at the Library of Congress. Below is his western perspective of Salem, also published by Endicott & Company–a bit further back, more of a traditional panoramic view featuring more landscape than people, yet the people are still present.

As impressive an artist as Bachelder was, my very favorite Salem city map, also from this era, was produced by John William Hill in 1854. Here is a map that defies categorization: it’s part panorama, part rendering. The detail, perhaps a bit idealized, is amazing, especially if you view it with a zoom feature. Yet the people are stick figures; it’s all about buildings and streets.

Map of Salem, Mass., 1854 by John William Hill for Endicott & Co., and the Smith Brothers, New York, 1854

Another artist and lithographer who was producing “low-level” (I’m referring to perspective rather than quality) vista maps of American cities in the middle of the nineteenth century was Edwin Whitefield, who emigrated to America from England in 1838 and almost immediately began to earn his living by making on-the-spot sketches of his new country. Like Bachelder, it was the built landscape that caught his eye rather than the natural one, and no doubt both he and Bachelder knew that city fathers would be far more likely to pay for their work than farmers. Later in his life, Whitefield moved to the Boston area and became a real booster of the New England heritage, publishing several volumes of renderings of first period homes under the title Homes of our Forefathers. Perhaps he wanted to capture them before the urban landscape swallowed them up.

Whitefield’s Views of Salem, Lynn, Beverly and Danvers, Massachusetts, 1850 (New York Public Library Digital Gallery), and two Salem houses in Homes of our Forefathers (1880).

4 Comments | tags: Architecture, maps, print culture | posted in Culture, History

February 14, 2012

Maps of the Human Heart

By daseger

Heart-shaped maps are one thing, but maps of the human heart are quite another, and I’ve got both on this Valentine’s Day. The charting of emotional territory, as opposed to physical space, has resulted in the production of several interesting maps from the seventeenth century to the near-present. Below are the companion Map of the Open Country of a Woman’s Heart and Map of the Fortified Country of a Man’s Heart, ostensibly and anonymously drawn “by a lady” and published by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut in the 1830s. These heart maps, along with lots of other examples of the Kellogg’s impressive lithography, can be viewed at the online gallery of the Connecticut Historical Society and Museum.

I’ve brightened and cropped both maps so that you can better see the different regions that make up these human hearts. It’s very interesting that the woman’s heart is an “open” country while the man’s is a walled fort. Money seems to take up a lot of territory in the man’s heart while outward appearances dominate the woman’s; romance and sentiment take up space but love is referenced only with power, ease, eating, dress and admiration! Matrimony is very clearly outside of the man’s heart (whereas the “citadel of self-love” is inside).

These heart maps seem to be fusing together two cartographical trends from the early modern era: the cordiform map, in which actual places are displayed in a heart-shaped map, and allegorical maps, which use map formats but dispense with the places altogether in order to put forth the message, often in caricature. The most famous world map with a cordiform projection, the Nova, et Universi Orbis Descriptio of Oronce Fine, was published in a succession of early modern atlases after its initial appearance in 1531.

As for the allegorical, two very sentimental maps were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the carte de tendre, a road map to and through the country of “tenderness” first published in Madeleine de Scudery’s novel Clelie in 1654, and the “Empire of Love” map published by German typographer Johann Gottlob Immanuel Breitkopf in 1777.

The Carte de Tendre: beware of the “Lake of Indifference” and “Dangerous Sea”!

The Empire of Love: proceeding from the “land of youth” at the bottom, northward to the “land of lust”, and then easterly to the “land of happy love” (hopefully).

Even after the turn of the twentieth century, emotional maps continued to be published in various formats. I found a Brazilian postcard from 1904 in a collector’s forum along with a locally-made map of “Loveland” in the collection of the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library (part of their ongoing exhibition of “unconventional maps”), and two heart maps that are clearly based on the Kellogg prints which were first published in McCall’s Magazine in 1960 and reprinted in the fascinating book by Katherine Harmon, You are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

A map of “Loveland” by Ernest Dudley Chase dating from 1943; it doesn’t scan very well, but a zoom feature is available at the BPL map site. Lots of very 1940s-ish cartoon characters.

Geographical Guide to a Woman's Heart Emphasizing Points of Interest to the Romantic Traveler: illustration by Jo Lowrey for McCall' s Magazine, 1960

Geographical Guide to a Man's Heart with Obstacles and Entrances: illustration by Jo Lowrey for McCall's Magazine, 1960

Times and sentiments change; I think we’re about due for an updated map of the human heart.

150 Comments | tags: books, ephemera, maps, print culture, Valentine's Day | posted in History

January 10, 2012

The other Ropes House

By daseger

In my last post I showed pictures of the barren and brown (white this morning!) garden of the perfectly-preserved and well-protected Ropes Mansion in downtown Salem, but yesterday also brought sad news of another Ropes Mansion in Salem, presently in imminent danger of demolition. This is the Ropes house in North Salem, which has belonged to another branch of that eminent Salem family (original seventeenth-century land grantees) since its construction in the later nineteenth century.

Here is the house and its outbuildings yesterday afternoon, before the dusting of snow that arrived last night. The cupola-topped carriage house–also threatened–is particularly charming, so I took another photograph from the vantage point of a neighbor’s well-manicured lawn.

As many of the older houses in North Salem (Northfields) once were, the Ropes house is situated on a large lot with mature trees, including the magnificent copper beech you see above. The wrap-around porch on the house evokes the earlier era of the “garden estate”, when prosperous Salem families established “rural” residences (both year-round and seasonal) across the North River from the busy city center. The 1820 map below, drawn by Jonathan Saunders based on late eighteenth-century census materials, illustrates the relationship between North Salem and Salem proper in the nineteenth century–I placed a big star on the present location of the Ropes house.

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

For as long as I’ve lived in Salem, everyone has had their eye on this house, coveting its graceful presence and large lot. It remained in the Ropes family until this past fall, when it suddenly appeared on the market and sold relatively quickly despite the fact that the city of Salem had revoked an occupancy permit a while ago. Now the present owners have put forward plans to demolish the buildings and build three houses on the lot, but perhaps save some of the trees. These plans are now before the Historic Commission, so we’ll see what happens.

21 Comments | tags: Architecture, Flora and Fauna, Historic Preservation, maps | posted in History, Salem

November 25, 2011

Way out West

By daseger

My whole family is out at my brother’s house in Rhinebeck, New York, not very far west at all really, but clearly beyond the known world according to the satirical (but often accurate) Boston-centric map below.

Not sure how to attribute this map; it shows up in several places and I don’t know whose original idea it is: step forward if it’s yours!

I always orient myself to locations through architecture, and I thought I’d showcase some “western” examples of some of my favorite Salem houses. In a post from a couple of weeks ago, the Down East Dilletante reminded me of Santarella, an amazing house deep in the “land of dragons”, and so I thought I would visit it on the way to New York. I have a distant memory of seeing this house long ago but had forgotten how charming it is: the ultra “storybook” house, built in the Berkshire village of Tyringham in the 1920s by British sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson. I wrote about Salem’s storybook house in a post from last winter, and I can see a basic similarity in the structures with their rolling thatch-like roofs, but Santarella clearly lifts the fantasy style to a whole new level. I took these pictures on the cold and wet day before Thanksgiving, but somehow the weather heightens the “gingerbread” quality of what is essentially an elaborate asphalt roof.

Santarella from the front and its rear towers; Salem’s more restrained storybook house.

Even beyond the land of dragons is Rhinebeck, an old Dutch colonial town in the middle of the Hudson River Valley. Rhinebeck is a beautiful little village of streets lined with amazing houses which are always striking to me for their decidedly non-New England details. I’ll show some of my favorites in a later post but for today, just one. My brother and his partner have a full house for the holidays, so my family and I are staying in the village at the Beekman Arms, one of the oldest inns in America. Actually we’re staying down the street a bit at the Delamater Inn houses annex of the Beekman, centered around Andrew Jackson Davis’s 1844 Delamater House, built in the universal (or at least American) Gothic Revival (or Carpenter’s Gothic) style that transcended regional architectural designs.

The main building of the Beekman Arms, Delamater House (1844), and the Brooks House in Salem (1851), based on a design of Andrew Jackson Downing.

4 Comments | tags: Architecture, holidays, maps | posted in Travel

November 22, 2011

Early Takes on the Turkey

By daseger

Before the turkey became the top-heavy symbol of consumption, it was the very image of the New World and America. It comes as no surprise to me that Benjamin Franklin preferred the turkey over the eagle as the symbol and embodiment of the new nation, writing to his daughter in 1784 that “I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.” A true original Native of America, like the pumpkin, the pineapple, and the porcupine, once-exotic entities that became more familiar and “domestic” with the passage of time.

The Turkey is a conspicuous image on this seventeenth-century map of Dutch America by William Blaeu, along with its equally American badgers. Europeans had already come to identify this flamboyant bird with the New World, perhaps because of its earlier inclusion (along with lots of other American animals) in Konrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium (1551-1587).

Turkeys are all over the place in the seventeenth century: in paintings and prints, and even on pottery. One of the most beautiful representations is not European at all, but an Indian painting of the turkey brought to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir’s court menagerie by a European embassy; clearly the turkey had a global reputation by this time.

Ustad Mansur, circa 1612. Victoria and Albert Museum

Here are some more seventeenth-century images of the exotic bird: a drawing by an anonymous Dutch artist from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and two chalk drawings from the British Museum. The “turkey-cock” in the center was drawn by Dutch artist Jan Griffier as a study for a later painting (see below), while the last turkey resided in another royal menagerie: that of King Louis XIV at Versailles.

And here is Griffier’s paining, completed in the first decade of the eighteenth century. The turkey is shown along with other birds that are not native to Britain, where Griffier lived and worked. So it was apparently still a rare and cosmopolitan specimen, and a symbol of wealth and conspicuous consumption.

Jan Griffier, A Turkey and other Fowl in a Park, 1710. Tate Collection.

I don’t usually think of the turkey as “song bird”, but a particularly beautiful illustration of a “crested turkey cock” is included in Eleazer Albin’s three-volume History of English song-birds, and such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and Esteemed for their Singing (1741).

Indeed, by the time we get to Benjamin Franklin’s day, the general depiction of the turkey is one of an elegant and exotic bird, resident in all the best landscape parks. Hardly a modern turkey. I’m beginning to think that the long decline of the Ottoman Empire, accompanied by satirical characterizations of its most central country, led to the deterioration of the bird’s image as well. Caricatures of the bird/country (like those below) begin to be a lot more prevalent than naturalist ones (like those above) after the turn of the nineteenth century.

You get the general idea: poor Turkey/turkey being carved up and threatened by the European powers in British Museum satirical prints from 1802, 1803, and 1828: I could download many more. Franklin’s “courageous” bird is noble no more; maybe this is what happens when you take something out of its native environment!