Author: Kristine Hughes

A Look at The Look of Love

 A guest blog by Jo Manning

Jo Manning (with Lily)

The LOOK OF LOVE exhibit has opened in Birmingham, Alabama, at the Birmingham Museum of Art.  I was fortunate enough to be there for the opening and the first couple of days of the show, which runs until the end of June.  For museum information, click here.

Dr David  and Nan Skier
Before discussing this spectacular exhibit – the first of its kind in the world – and one that, with its accompanying catalog, sets the standard for research on this unique portrait miniature-cum-jewelry that has been, up until now, so little known in either the art or jewelry worlds, some backstory…
I often tell people that one never knows, after one’s book is published and sent out into the marketplace, who will see it, who will be affected by it, and what repercussions it will generate.  My biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a notorious courtesan of the late 18th-early 19th centuries, was sold in bookstores and museum gift shops. 

At one of the latter, the Bass Museum of Art’s gift shop in Miami Beach, Florida, it was seen by Dr David Skier, an eye surgeon from Birmingham, who thought his wife would enjoy it. One of the things he noticed in the book was a sidebar on Lover’s Eyes — eye miniatures – with a photo of a ring in the “collection of the author”.

This was of great interest to Dr Skier because he and his wife Nan had quietly been collecting these beautiful objects for many years and had accumulated some 70+ of them. (They now own 100+ of these miniatures.)  Assuming that I had a collection of these objects, they wrote to my publisher Simon & Schuster, asking for my contact information.  The publisher referred them to my agent, Jenny Bent of the Bent Agency, and she contacted me.  I responded promptly with the news that, no, I owned just the one ring, and that I’d become interested in them after seeing the eye miniatures in the collection of my writing colleague Candice Hern, who owned several lovely brooches.  I was also entranced by the story of how they came about and their subsequent history.
 
The Skiers became friends, and when I was asked to contribute to the catalog for an exhibition of their collection called The Look of Love, I said I would be happy to do so, but that I did not in any way consider myself an expert on the subject.  No, they said, we’d like you to write some stories, vignettes, inspired by the eyes in their collection.  I thought this was a brilliant idea, frankly, because each of the eyes had a story – an unknown story for the most part, to be sure, as sitters and artists were mostly unidentified – and the eyes do speak to the viewer.  I gave my imagination full rein and wrote five stories for their consideration.  To my knowledge, this is another first; I know of no fiction in the catalogs of art shows. Essays on the art and history, yes, those are standard, but bits of fiction…nope!
 I have to confess that the stories came very easily, which does not always happen to a writer.  But the eyes drew me in, and I chose the most eloquent, in my opinion, and wrote away.  My goal was to illuminate how these objects of love and affection came about, what they meant in a society with mores quite unlike our own, who the artists might be and why they painted them, what the symbolism involved meant to people in that era, and, yes, the aura they held of clandestine love tokens was very appealing to me, as a writer of historical romance.
The stories are:  “Pippa and William”; “Ursula Engleheart Prepares Tea For Her Artist Husband George…”; “I Mourn Your Loss, My Beloved…”; “My Mother, Mariah Norcross”; and “The Grey Eye in Great-Aunt Lavinia’s Jewelry Box”.
 Pippa and William are star-crossed lovers (not to be confused with Pippa Middleton and Prince William J) who meet as children, fall in love, but cannot marry because of dynastic “rules” governing marriage; Ursula Engleheart is the story of a prolific painter of miniatures (an estimated 5,000 of them in his lifetime) who paints eyes for clandestine lovers but doesn’t sign them to avoid trouble with his patrons, their parents; I Mourn Your Loss tells a sad tale of two of the many young men who perished in the Napoleonic Wars and how all that remains of one of them is the lover’s eye he gave to his fiancée; My Mother, Mariah Norcross is another bereavement story that also illustrates the perils of epidemics in that Georgian era and its horrific costs to families; and, finally, the last story, of what was found in Great-Aunt Lavinia’s Jewelry Box by careless heirs, speculates on the possible unfortunate fate of many an eye miniature.
The exhibition, and the beautifully illustrated 208 page catalog – a proper coffee-table book! – have each garnered wonderful publicity.  The catalog will probably become a collector’s item as well as an important research source on the subject of eye miniatures; the essays by Dr. Graham Boettcher, the curator, and Elle Shushan, a dealer in portrait miniatures, are outstanding, detailed, and most readable.
Graham Boettcher
Elle Shushan
The exhibit is exquisite, mounted with extreme delicacy and care by the professionals at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the oohs and ahhs of those visiting the jewel of a room in which it is housed brings joy to everyone who’s been involved in its creation and implementation, but most of all to Nan and Dr David Skier, who collected these gorgeous pieces that combine art/history/and jewelry in such a unique manner. Plans are underway to bring the exhibit to other cities; the catalog can be ordered through Amazon, where it has been Number One in its category – Art  and Antiques – for weeks. It can also be ordered from the English publisher
D Giles Ltd here.
Nan Skier talks about the collection here. Scroll down half a page for the presentation.

There are special events surrounding the Look of Love which can be found on the museum’s web site  here.

The coverage has been overwhelming: Take a look at the Vanity Fair web article, for example, here.
A beautiful article appears in Antiques & Fine Arts which requires an online FREE registration.  Here is the online site:  http://www.antiquesandfineart.com/
Many other articles area available on the internet and through the museum’s website.
A postscript:  One of the several delightful people I met – including dealers/art consultants/appraisers Reagan Upshaw, Michael Quick, and Sonja Weber (the book is dedicated to her late husband Barry Weber, who often appeared on Antiques Roadshow) — was Thomas Sully, a painter and direct descendant of the English-born American painter of the same name.

Tom Sully self-portrait miniature

Tom Sully paints portrait miniatures, amongst other painting genres and has lately begun to do eye miniatures. I asked him, “How do you do this? Isn’t elephant ivory  [which was used for most Georgian eye miniatures] endangered?”  He replied that the Russians are selling woolly mammoth – yes! woolly mammoth! – ivory and that is what he is using. Not endangered. Extinct. But not endangered.&
nbsp; I saw some samples of his work and it is very fine, indeed.  Check him out   here.

 





And do consider commissioning a lover’s eye – or two – for yourself.

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the movie, opens in the UK and Ireland 24 February. Those in the States will have to wait until summer to see the film, although the novel will be available in stores in March.

The movie, directed by John Madden, sees a group of retirement age Brits move to India to see out their elderly years in colorful Jaipur and take up residence in what they believe is a newly restored hotel. Less luxurious than its advertisements, the Marigold Hotel nevertheless slowly begins to charm in unexpected ways. Dev Patel, of “Slumdog Millionaire” fame, plays the guy who entices them to take the adventure and the film also features Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith, Penelope Wilton and Bill Nighy.

Deborah Moggach is the author of sixteen successful novels, including the bestselling Tulip Fever, and two collections of stories. The book on which this film is based was originally titled These Foolish Things. Her screenplays include Pride and Prejudice, which was nominated for a BAFTA. She lives in North London.

You can watch the movie trailer here.

And Now for Something Completely Different…

Victoria here, with a completely off-topic post. It’s completely shameless self promotion as a matter of fact.

My first novel, originally published in 1983, is now available as an e-book on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords. BirthRights: A Dangerous Brew is a family saga about three generations of  Milwaukee, Wisconsin, brewers – of beer, not baseball players. Starting in 1870, the novel concludes in 1920 as prohibition and the Volstead Act take over the nation, ending the era of the great breweries until 1933.

Pabst Brewing Company
Milwaukee was first settled by New Yorkers and New Englanders, known as Yankees.  They followed the explorers like Father Marquette and the French fur-traders like one of the city’s founders, Solomon Juneau.  By the 1840’s, however, the city attracted thousands of German emigrants and took on a distinctly German flavor for decades.  Many breweries filled the thirst of the new residents, with more coming on every ship that landed at the Lake Michigan waterfront.
The authors in the Pabst Brewhouse, 1983
In the early 1980’s, my co-author, Reva Shovers, and I were inspired to write a book when we when couldn’t find much that interested us on bookstore shelves.  That first attempt will never see the light of day, but we sort of taught ourselves what to do, with the help of our agent and many others. Although he probably despaired of our eventual success, Al Zuckerman suggested we write a story about the great brewing fortunes in Milwaukee. 
Along with dozens of small breweries —  and today many boutique breweries and brew-pubs — four of the largest breweries in the U.S. called Milwaukee home:  Pabst, Miller, Schlitz, and Blatz.  Though all these beers are still on the market, only one of the great old breweries still operates on a large scale in Milwaukee – and it is a very large scale indeed.  The Miller-Coors  brewery annually turns out ten million barrels of beer at its great complex on State Street in the Miller Valley where more than 700 employees work.  Miller is a popular tourism site. Their website is here.
Writing BirthRights: A Dangerous Brew was truly a labor of love. Lots of research and lots of fun.  Eventually, the book was sold to Pocket Books and came out as BirthRights in 1983.  We had a ball promoting it.  And we started working on a sequel. Wouldn’t you know that we got caught in the revolving door of changing editors – and our option book fell through the cracks. We picked up the pieces and went on to other things.  Reva is truly a contemporary art maven, serving the Milwaukee Art Museum  in multiple capacities.  Victoria turned her efforts toward regency romance and published 8 novels and 3 novellas for Kensington Zebra.
1983 Pocket Books Edition
Now we have re-issued BirthRights (with a subtitle attached – A Dangerous Brew) as an e-book.
Back when it was first written, of course, it was pre-computers and done on a typewriter.  We had to have the book scanned and we had to re-edit it to find all the glitches in the type – then we had James Bolen, techno-expert extraordinaire, prepare it and upload it to Smashwords, Kindle and Nook.  Many thanks to Bo and his colleagues at http://ebookeditorpro.com/. Bo also created the wonderful new cover, at the top of this post.  We recommend them enthusiastically.
 
Back in ’83, we did our promotion work by snail-mailed press releases and included a  black and white glossy photo (as above).  We offered ourselves as speakers and went to a number of groups to talk about the book. And we cooked a dinner with every course made with beer. It was featured on the front page of the Home section of the Milwaukee Journal with color pictures and our recipes.  Sometime I will put those recipes on the Summit Wahl blog. We did many signings in  bookstores.
How times have changed!!!  Now we are tweeting and doing Facebook and blogging — amazing!!  Here is the blog: http://summitwahl.blogspot.com where there  is an excerpt of the novel.
And you can look for us on Facebook as Summit Wahl and twitter @summitwahl 
And now we return you to our regularly scheduled program of British-oriented material!! As we say in Milwaukee, Prosit!

Naturalist's Diary for March

From the Times Telescope, an annual almanac, here is the entry for March, 1826, with a few quite optimistic pictures:

March, though the hours of promise with bright ray

May gild thy noons, yet, on wild pinion borne,
Loud winds more often rudely wake thy morn,
And harshly hymn they early-closing day.

            The cutting blasts of March, so trying to the invalid, are equally injurious to the progress of vegetation; and the ‘sweet flowers’ are compelled to await the smiles and tears of gentle April to encourage their growth, and to bring them to perfection. Some more bold than the rest, who dare to brave the warrior front of Boreas, often perish in his chilly embrace. The winds of March, however, are highly beneficial to drying up the superabundant moisture of the earth; and although they may retard the delights and beauties of Spring, these are rendered more valuable to us, because they are less fugacious.

            The russet-brown dress of the hedges is now spotted with green, preparatory to their assuming the complete vesture of Spring.—The leaves of the lilac begin to peep from beneath their winter clothing, and gooseberry and currant trees display their verdant foliage and pretty green blossoms. The yew-tree, ‘faithful in death,’ as it protects our tombs from the gaze of every passing stranger, when our more gaudy floral acquaintances have deserted us, opens its blossoms about the beginning of this month.

            The melody of birds now gradually swells upon the ear. The throstle, second only to the nightingale in song, charms us with the sweetness, and variety of its lays. The linnet and goldfinch join the general concert in this month, and the golden-crowned wren begins its song. The lark also, must not be forgotten.—While the birds delight us with their song, the bees read us a lesson of industry, for they are to be seen collecting materials for their elegant condiment of honey on every fine day throughout the year.
Goldfinch

            Each succeeding week pours forth fresh beauties from the lap of Flora, and furnishes the botanist with new sources of delight. Golden tufts of crocuses, expending their corollas to receive the genial warmth of the sun, interspersed with pink and blue hepaticas, and the garden daisy, with its little tufts of crimson velvet, united with the blossoms of last month, greatly ornament our flower borders. The alpine wall-cress is still in bloom; the mezereon puts forth its leaves; and the primrose peeps from the retreating snows of winter: it forms a happy shade of distinction between the delicate snowdrop and the flaming crocus.

            Daffodils, yellow auriculas, coltsfoot, with its brilliant golden and sometimes pink or silvery stars, and hounds-tongue, are in blossom about the middle of the month. The American cowslip, with its beautiful rose-coloured blossoms, growing in thick branches in the form of a cone, flowers in March. The charming violet, whose attractions have been the theme of many a poetic effusion, makes her appearance this month, but not in full perfection, for the chill winds of March are not very congenial to the expansion of so delicate a blossom.

            If the weather be mild, the rich hyacinth, the noble descendant of the modest harebell—the sweet narcissus, delicately pale, and some of the early tulips, are now in bloom. The peach and the nectarine begin to show their elegant blossoms.

            Protected from inclemency of the weather by our green-houses, roses, hyacinths, heliotropes, and geraniums, are now in full blossom, regaling the senses with their varied hues and rich perfumes.

            In this month, black ants are observed; the black-bird and the turkey law; the house pigeons sit. The greenfinch sings; the bat is seen flitting about; and the viper uncoils itself from its winter sleep. The wheatear, or English ortolan (Sylvia oenanthe) again pays its annual visit, leaving England in September. Those birds which have passed the winter in England now take their departure for more northerly regions; as the fieldfare, the red-wing, and the wood-cock.

            On the 20th, the vernal equinox takes place, and all nature feels her renovating sway, and seems to rejoice at the retreat of winter.

            The general or great flow of sap in most trees takes place in this month; this is preparatory to the expanding of the leaves and ceases when they are out. The ash now puts forth its grey buds; and the hazel and willow exhibit some signs of returning life in their silky, enfolding catkins. The leaves of the thornless rose and of the hawthorn are gradually becoming determinate. The field daisy is now seen scattered over dry pastures. This pretty flower, the poet’s darling, from Chaucer to Wordsworth and Montgomery, has claimed for itself many an elegant tribute.

            The planting and sowing of Forest Trees is generally concluded in this month. The mixing of fir-trees with oaks (except in very sheltered situations) is now frequently adopted by the planter.

            In March, trouts begin to rise, and blood worms appear in the water. The clay hair worms is found at the bottom of the drains and ditches, and the water-flea may be seen gliding about upon the surface of sheltered pools. Bats now issue from their places of concealment. Peas appear above ground; the sea-kale (Crambe maritima) begins to sprout. The male blossoms of the yew-tree expand and discharge their farina. Sparrows are busily employed in forming their nests. Young otters are produced, and young lambs are yeaned this month.

            The equinoctial gales are usually most felt, both by sea and land, about this time.

            The brimstone-coloured butterfly (Gonepteryx rhamni) which lives throughout the winter, is usually seen in March. It is found in the neighbourhood woods, on fine and warm days, enjoying the beams of the noonday sun. Some of our most beautiful butterflies, belonging to the genus Vanessa, as V. atalanta, Io, Polylcholoros, and Urticae, are seen in this month; and the Antiopa, or Camberwell beauty, has once been captured at this season.