Attracting enormous crowds, by the late 1800s, the Longchamp Racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris had become one of the most fashionable public venues in France.
Spectating at the races was an immensely popular and socially prestigious pastime.
A place to see and be seen, Longchamp was like a giant stage to vaunt one’s social position.
Attended by Emperor Napoleon III and his wife Eugénie, who sailed down the Seine River on their private yacht to catch the third race, Longchamp Racecourse opened to the public on Sunday, April 27, 1857.
And it wouldn’t only be French Royalty who loved Longchamps—King Edward VII of Great Britain attended too.
Enclosures were reserved for aristocrats and the well-connected and ladies were required to be escorted by a gentleman in order to enter.
But grabbing the spotlight was a new class of celebrity: the demimonde.
Supported by wealthy lovers, these were women on the fringes of respectable society.
Arriving alone, demimondaine were forbidden access to the enclosures but were as much of a spectacle as the races themselves.
Mixing with society women, they often shared the same couturier but appeared a little more chic.
Attending the Longchamp races as the mistress of wealthy textile heir Étienne Balsan was a young Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel.
Although she didn’t quite fit the mold of a typical demimondaine, Gabrielle appeared in the loose, simple dress that would later influence an entire generation of “flappers” during the Roaring Twenties.
Paris had become the fashion capital of the world and it wasn’t long before designers realized that Longchamp was a goldmine.
Fashion houses outfitted models with their finest clothes, sending them to the races to show off the latest styles.
Join us as we travel back in time to the Longchamp Races from 1907 to 1935—a time of elegance and flamboyance that may never be repeated.
Kensington and Chelsea Libraries in London, England, uncovered a series of images suggesting that the Edwardians might have been the world’s first photobloggers.
Amateur photographer Edward Linley Sambourne (1844 – 1910) was the chief cartoonist for the British satirical magazine “Punch” which was first published in 1841.
He captured a slice of Edwardian life in these amazing candid photographs.
Read more …
Young women walking to work in London; ladies and families strolling the boulevards of Paris; couples crossing the English Channel on steamships; friends enjoying the beaches of Kent and Ostende; and housemaids hard at work cleaning the steps to plush city townhomes.
Continuing the long, elegant lines of the late Victorian period, the Edwardian era was a time of transition in women’s fashion.
It would be the last time women would wear corsets in everyday life.
And as these images show, women were enjoying a new level of freedom from the rigid conventions of heavy ankle-length Victorian gowns and bustles.
Embracing leisure sports, the upper-classes drove rapid developments in more mobile, flexible clothing styles made of lightweight fabrics for more active lifestyles.
Women’s fashion would never look back.
As Oxford University historian Arthur Marwick (1936 – 2006) noted, “for, however far politicians were to put the clocks back in other steeples in the years after the war, no one ever put the lost inches back on the hems of women’s skirts.”
Sambourne’s hobby gave us glimpses into a past that looks oddly familiar.
It was 1905.
What is this woman thinking as she walks to work?
She had similar worries to most of us today—a to-do list as long as your arm, what to make for dinner, helping her little sister with her homework, whether to accept the advances of a work colleague who seemed like a true gentleman …
Apart from her hat, the practicality and style of her clothing wouldn’t change much for decades to come.
Think the Internet generation was the first to truly embrace mobile multi-tasking? Glued to a book on the walk to work in London, this woman reminds us of how much we rely on mobile devices today.
No need to look where we’re going—other people will simply adapt and move around us. As long as we don’t walk into a lamppost, we’re good to go.
Big hats with giant bows and cycling may not go together well today, but Edwardians made it work. Cycling was in vogue as the way to get around, but to be without one’s hat was sacrilegious.
Sambourne used a concealed camera to capture candid moments. But it looks like this woman has an inkling that something is going on.
Few things in the Edwardian era were worse than being out-hatted. One had to keep a close eye on the competition.
Edwardians too had to suffer the inescapable feeling of incredulity at the various scandals of politicians and celebrities.
Imagine this woman is checking her iPhone. The little dog doesn’t seem too impressed.
More freedom of movement in Edwardian clothing allowed these women to put their best foot forward.
Be careful! Having a good sense of balance was important for wearing an Edwardian hat.
Whistle while you walk to school with Mother. A charming picture of a happy moment in time, captured forever.
Confidence. Perhaps for the first time in history, Edwardian women were free to project confidence and begin determining their own future.
We move to Paris, France. Higher hemlines were a feature of Edwardian skirts that afforded women greater freedom of movement, but at least one of these ladies prefers to lift her skirt to clear the puddles just in case.
Arm-in-arm. What could be more perfect than an afternoon stroll around the Tuileries Garden in Paris?
Black mourning dress worn for months or years was a convention carried over from the Victorian era and still widely practiced.
Notice the wheels on the horse-drawn cab. Inspired by the wheels of bicycles? These were interesting times—a transition from horses to automobiles was underway.
Time to see and be seen at the Place du Louvres.
A brisk breeze, sea air, and steam power.
This lady is aboard a steamer—a ship propelled by steam—crossing the English Channel to visit Ostende in Belgium.
Invented by Victorians, the steamship enabled the upper classes to see the world and as prices fell, the middle class were able to enjoy the occasional weekend getaway.
Looks like this woman found a nice spot on the ship that was sheltered from the wind.
Hitting the beach in Edwardian times was a very formal affair.
Getting a tan was still many decades away from becoming a fashionable or even desirous thing.
Hidden from gazing eyes, this woman enters a Victorian bathing machine to change out of her modesty.
Hats and coats against the wind.
No weather could prevent one wearing one’s hat.
Hold onto your hats, ladies!
How do we get rid of that pesky photographer, Mr Sambourne?
How about we ask him to fetch a bucket of water and a brush and help us clean the steps!
And he’s off …
Thought that would do the trick.
Bye bye Mr Sambourne, and thank you for this incredible journey into the Edwardian era.
The year was 1847 and Queen Victoria was pregnant with her 6th child, Princess Louise.
Hearing about a new type of baby carriage with three wheels which was pushed from behind, she couldn’t wait to see one.
“Albert!” she hollered, “come along, we’re off to the city to buy a pram”. “A pram?” inquired Albert. “Yes, yes, it’s a new type of carriage for our babies—you’ll love it!” “Love it? repeated Albert. “Yes, of course!” exclaimed the queen. “You know how you love inventions—well, this is one where the babies sit and you push”. “I see”, said Albert, realizing what was coming …
Prams or perambulators date back to around 1733 when the Duke of Devonshire asked English architect and furniture designer William Kent to make a carriage for his children to keep them amused while they played in the grounds of Chatsworth House.
Equipped with a harness for a goat or small pony, Kent’s shell-shaped basket-on-wheels even had springs so that children could ride in comfort.
Riding in goat-powered carts wasn’t new—children had been enjoying that since the early 17th century.
And it was still fashionable by 1890, as the grandchildren of the 23rd President of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, would attest.
But what Kent’s design did was to inspire an entire industry of baby carriage manufacture during the Victorian era.
Starting out as three-wheeled versions that were typically pulled along by a Nanny, a later innovation allowed prams to be pushed, making it easier to keep an eye on the baby’s welfare.
Arriving from France, the wickerwork “Bassinet” style of pram allowed the infant to lie flat within a basket on a wheeled frame.
Royal patronage helped launch a fashionable craze among the well-heeled all over Europe and the United States.
So popular were prams in London by 1855 that the Rev. Benjamin Armstrong from rural Norfolk noted in his diary:
The streets are full of perambulators, a baby carriage quite new to me, whereby children are propelled by the nurse pushing instead of pulling the carriage.
Built of wood or wicker and held together with expensive brass joints, baby carriages were sometimes heavily ornamented works of art.
Patents for new innovations were registered on both sides of the Atlantic.
In 1899, African American William H. Richardson patented a design for a reversible baby carriage, allowing the baby to face either forward or toward the person pushing the carriage.
By the late Victorian era, many more people could afford a baby carriage and new coach-built luxury models came onto the market named after royalty—Princess and Duchess being popular names, as well as Balmoral and Windsor.
The Edwardians made perambulator design a fine art with elaborate decoration, improved maneuverability, rubber tyres, and protection from the elements.
And of course, babies were the big beneficiaries of all this innovation. Peekaboo!
It was definitely a baby’s world—even royal babies loved their pram rides to the park.
With a commanding position to see all the sites and a comfortable ride with someone else doing all the work, what’s not to love?
Waiting on them hand and foot, some siblings would go to great lengths to ensure the baby was as comfortable as possible.
For the wealthier families, it was the Nanny’s responsibility to look after the children while the parents attended the many parties and functions on their busy social calendars.
Mothers who couldn’t afford or didn’t want a nanny could spend some quality time with their baby dressing them for an enjoyable pram outing.
Admiring glances and polite conversation from passers-by would be all part of the fun of owning a perambulator.
Top down, wind in the hair. Nothing quite like it.
Even fathers started to take an interest, but generally only those working in zoos.
With the arrival of the 1920s, new technology provided a way of helping to keep babies quiet—namely Radio.
And for the first time, babies in prams became movie stars.
Along came the 1930s and prams took on some design cues from automobiles, with shiny fenders, sports wheels, and even windows.
We’re only human and so you never know when we’ll be at war again. Best to be prepared with a gas-proof pram.
Fasten your seatbelts for the 1950s!
New lightweight convertible sports and luxury models entered the market.
“Mom, I think we left them for dust.”
Companies like A & F Saward and Silver Cross started building custom-made prams in the 1950s that were—and still are—the choice of British royalty.
At the end of World War I, the world desperately needed a scapegoat to help come to terms with four long years of human carnage.
And the widely disliked Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, was the man in the firing line.
As the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria, Wilhelm was a first cousin of the British Empire’s King George V, who called him “the greatest criminal in history”.
British Prime Minister David Lloyd George proposed that the Kaiser be hanged.
After all, he had been responsible for the invasion of neutral Belgium and was instrumental in starting a war that killed tens of millions.
But since 1916—halfway through the war—Germany had become a military dictatorship under the control of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his deputy General Erich Ludendorff.
Look at those faces. You didn’t want to mess with these guys.
Wilhelm’s role had been effectively relegated to awards ceremonies and honorific duties for the last two years of the war.
Deserted by his own military High Command, Wilhelm abdicated in 1918 and fled to the Netherlands, ending 400 years of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
Thanking the Dutch government for granting him asylum in the Netherlands, Wilhelm sent this telegram to Queen Wilhemina of the Netherlands on November 11, 1918:
The events have forced me to enter your country as a private person and put myself under the protection of your government. The hope, that you would take my difficult situation into account, has not disappointed me, and I offer to you and your Government my sincere thanks for so kindly offering me hospitality. Best regards to you and yours.Wilhelm
Although article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles called for the prosecution of Wilhelm “for a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties”, the Dutch government refused to extradite him, despite appeals from the Allies.
Settling initially in the 17th-century Amerongen Castle in the little village of Amerongen in the central Netherlands, Wilhelm called this home for two years before moving to nearby Doorn village.
And there it was. One day in 1920, while Wilhelm was househunting in Doorn, he spied the place he would call home for the rest of his life.
Owned by Dutch aristocrat Ella van Heemstra—mother of actress Audrey Hepburn—Wilhelm paid 1.35 million guilders for Doorn House.
Originally a moated 14th-century castle, Doorn House had been converted into an elegant country house in the 1790s.
The rear side view shows how deceptively large Doorn House actually is.
Covering 35 hectares with English-style landscaped gardens, the house was filled with antique furniture, paintings, silver, and porcelain from Wilhelm’s palaces in Berlin and Potsdam—30,000 pieces in all, requiring 59 train wagons to transport to Doorn.
Modest by what Wilhelm had become accustomed to, Doorn House was, nevertheless, deceptively large—this imposing building was just the entrance gatehouse that Wilhelm added to the property.
Once through the gatehouse, visitors would pass through more gates to cross a little bridge across a real moat.
The grounds even had an Orangerie used to protect tropical plants during the cold winter months.
The tasteful dining room once hosted an uneasy dinner with the powerful Nazi Party figure, Hermann Göring.
Now a museum, the rooms have been left unchanged since the time the Kaiser lived here.
Doorn House is frozen in time.
Wilhelm even had the saddle that he sat on while working in Berlin shipped to Doorn.
The Doorn House collection includes snuffboxes and watches that belonged to Frederick the Great.
Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands bought this lamp as a gift for the exiled Kaiser and his wife.
A real water closet—a flush toilet inside of an armoire.
Wilhelm liked to surround himself with reminders of Prussia’s military hegemony.
From bombastic Emperor to elderly statesman in exile.
Aging mellows most of us, but was this the case with Wilhelm?
Shortly after moving into Dorn House, Wilhelm learned that his youngest son, Prince Joachim of Prussia, had committed suicide by gunshot.
Believed to be directly related to Wilhelm’s abdication, 29-year-old Joachim could not accept his new status as a commoner and fell into a deep depression.
Affectionately known as “Dona”, Wilhelm’s first wife, who had been his companion for 40 years, died in the spring the following year.
When Wilhelm received a birthday greeting in January of 1922 from the son of a recently widowed German Princess, he invited the boy and his mother to Doorn House.
Finding much in common with Princess Hermine, and both being recently widowed, Wilhelm proposed and the two were married in November, 1922.
Hermine remained a constant companion to the aging emperor until his death in 1941
It would appear that Wilhelm mellowed in later years and settled for a simple life.
He spent much of his time walking the grounds, chopping wood, and feeding the ducks.
There were some great things he had done for Germany.
He promoted art, science, public education, and social welfare.
He sponsored scientific research, helped modernize secondary education, and tried to position Germany at the forefront of modern medical practices.
But historians believe he lacked the personal qualities of a good leader at such a critical juncture in history.
Bluster, rhetoric, and martial swagger cloaked a profound emptiness, for ignorance and self-indulgence were his primary characteristics.Lamar Cecil.
superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and successThomas Nipperdey.
Deeply antisemitic and paranoid about a British-led conspiracy to destroy Germany, he did, however, recognize the evils of Nazism:
Of Germany, which was a nation of poets and musicians, of artists and soldiers, Hitler has made a nation of hysterics and hermits, engulfed in a mob and led by a thousand liars or fanatics.Wilhelm on Hitler, December 1938.
Declining an offer of asylum from Winston Churchill when Hitler invaded the Netherlands in May of 1940, Wilhelm must have known the winter of his life was drawing to a close.
He died of pulmonary embolus on 4th June 1941, aged 82, just weeks before the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union.
What a time he had lived through.
A time when Emperors toyed with millions of lives like they were little more than model soldiers in a game of war.
Wilhelm’s dream of returning to Germany as monarch died with him in Doorn, where he is buried in a mausoleum in the gardens.
A man so various that he seemed to be,
Not one, but all of mankind’s epitome
Fixed in opinion, ever in the wrong
Was all by fits and starts, and nothing long. English poet Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744)
Skagen is a village in the northernmost part of Denmark.
From the late 1870s until the turn of the century, a group of Scandinavian artists descended on Skagen every summer.
It was the light that drew them.
A translucent light that merged the sea and the sky—especially during the evening “blue hour”.
Influenced by the “en plein air” techniques of French Impressionist painters like Claude Monet, they broke away from traditions taught at the academies and developed their own unique styles.
The long beaches stretched for miles and miles …
Listen to Claude Debussy’s haunting Clair de Lune as we travel back in time to late 19th-century Skagen through the eyes of the Skagen Painters.
Nor moon nor stars were out.
They did not dare to tread so soon about,
Though trembling, in the footsteps of the sun.
The light was neither night’s nor day’s, but one
Which, life-like, had a beauty in its doubt;
And Silence’s impassioned breathings round
Seemed wandering into sound. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Sea-Side Walk
I have loved hours at sea, gray cities,
The fragile secret of a flower,
Music, the making of a poem
That gave me heaven for an hour Sara Teasdale, I Have Loved Hours At Sea
Rendering light with paint in such a way that it makes you feel you are there and you need to squint at the sun’s reflections on the water.
One of the shared interests of the Skagen painters was to paint scenes of their own social gatherings—eating together, celebrating, or playing cards.
As if you could reach out and touch them, Krøyer’s characters are full of movement, full of life.
The group gathered together regularly at the Brøndums Inn in Skagen, which still operates as a hotel today.
Filled with the paintings the artists donated to cover the cost of board and lodging, the Brøndums’ dining-room became the center of their social life.
Can you feel the excitement in the air and hear the clinking of glasses?
Deep in concentration, an after-dinner game of cards continues into the small hours.
Many of the Skagen painters are depicted here enjoying Midsummer Eve celebrations on Skagen beach around a bonfire, traditionally lit to ward off evil spirits believed to roam freely when the sun turned southward again.
The painting includes Peder Severin Krøyer’s daughter Vibeke, mayor Otto Schwartz and his wife Alba Schwartz, Michael Ancher, Degn Brøndum, Anna Ancher, Holger Drachmann and his 3rd wife Soffi, the Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén and Marie Krøyer.
Anna Ancher was the only one of the Skagen Painters to be born and grow up in Skagen.
Her father owned the Brøndums Hotel where the artists stayed during the summer months and she married Michael Ancher, one of the first members of the Skagen colony of artists.
Expressing a more truthful depiction of reality and everyday life, she was a pioneer in observing the interplay of color and natural light.
They love the sea,
Men who ride on it
And know they will die
Under the salt of it Carl Sandburg, Young Sea
Combining realism and classical composition, Michael Ancher painted heroic fishermen and their experiences at sea.
Becoming known as monumental figurative art, his strict training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts was tempered by his wife Anna’s more naturalistic approach.
Painted in 1885, Michael Ancher’s ‘Will He Round the Point?” (below) earned him and the Skagen colony particular attention since it was sold to King Christian IX of Denmark.
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Life was hard.
A fisherman’s life was not an easy one.
Better to die surrounded by people who would give their life for you.
That’s what close-knit communities were made of.
Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with that there is Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
The Skagen artists also painted each other and their children going about everyday aspects of life—collecting flowers, walking the dog, reading in the shade of the garden or inside the house, meal times with the children, and saying prayers before bed.
This is the tragic story of how 146 immigrant workers—mostly young women—lost their lives in one of the worst industrial disasters in US history.
Popular in the Edwardian Era—the period of Downton Abbey and Titanic—the shirtwaist was a woman’s tailored garment with design details copied from men’s shirts.
Constructed of shirting fabric, sometimes with turnover collar and cuffs and a buttoned front, shirtwaists could be highly ornamented with embroidery and lace.
One of the best-known factories making shirtwaists was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City.
Housed in the beautiful neo-Renaissance 10-story Asch Building, the iron-and-steel structure was said to be “fireproof” and attracted many other garment makers.
Russian immigrants Max Blanck and Isaac Harris set up shop on the top three floors of the Asch Building and hired 500 workers—mostly female Jewish and Italian immigrants, about half of whom were not yet twenty years old.
Working 52-hour weeks, workers earned between $7 and $12 per week, the rough equivalent of between $170 and $300 a week today.
But they were docked pay both for errors and the needles and thread they consumed, which was sometimes more than they were paid.
Overcrowded, with few working bathrooms and no ventilation, conditions ranged from sweltering in summer to freezing in winter.
Packed with inflammable objects, including clothing hanging from lines above workers heads and cuttings littering the floors, unsurprisingly, the Asch Building did not comply with several safety regulations.
With an improperly installed water hose, no sprinklers, a fire escape unable to withstand the weight of many people and dangerously dark stairwells, the Asch Building was a disaster waiting to happen.
In June of 1909, a fire prevention specialist sent a letter to the owners to discuss ways to improve safety in the factory.
It was ignored.
In addition, there was no limit set for how many workers could occupy each floor, leading to very cramped conditions.
Only one bathroom break was allowed in a 14 hour day, forcing many to find ways to relieve themselves on the factory floor, only exacerbating the already unsanitary conditions.
It seemed that nobody noticed and nobody cared about their plight.
Strike!
So the brave young ladies went on strike. They rose up to fight for change.
Supported by the National Women’s Trade Union League of America (NWTUL), the strike began in November 1909.
I have listened to all the speakers, and I have no further patience for talk. I am a working girl, one of those striking against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers who talk in generalities. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I make a motion that we go out in a general strike.Clara Limlich
20,000 workers walked off the job in an industry-wide strike that was the largest single work stoppage in the US up to that time.
Money talks, as they say …
Ann Morgan, daughter of the wealthy financier JP Morgan (who would later bail out the banks in the Wall St Crash of 1929), took up the cause of the garment workers.
Joined by Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, the multi-millionaire American socialite and a major figure in the women’s suffrage movement, most small factory owners gave in to worker demands fairly quickly.
But not Blanck and Harris of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory.
They hunkered down to play hardball.
Hiring prostitutes and ex-prizefighters to pick fights with the picketers, the police were bribed to arrest any who fought back and dragged them off to court bruised and bloodied.
Even judges were bribed to find picketers guilty.
But the women stood defiant.
By February of 1910, the union settled with the factory owners, gaining improved wages, working conditions, and hours.
The workers at Triangle failed to win union representation, making it very difficult to organize future protests.
Fire!
It was near the end of the working day on Saturday, March 25, 1911.
In a scrap waste bin under one of the cutter’s tables on the 8th floor, smoke started to rise, which quickly flared into a fire at about 4:40 pm.
Five minutes later, a passerby saw smoke coming from the 8th-floor windows and raised the alarm.
Meanwhile, a bookkeeper on the 8th floor telephoned upstairs to the 10th floor to warn employees, but there was no audible alarm bell and no way to contact workers on the 9th floor.
Several exits, two freight elevators, a fire escape, and a stairway down to street level were all blocked by flames.
Another stairway down to Washington Place was the trapped workers’ only chance, but it was locked.
Managers made a habit of locking doors so they could check the women’s purses before they left each night.
It also made it easier for the foreman to control the workers’ break times. But where was the foreman? He had the key—and with it, their escape to safety.
He’d long since escaped by another route to his own safety.
Dozens took a stairway to the roof, but within minutes it collapsed under the heat and overload. Twenty people spiraled 100 ft to their deaths on the concrete sidewalk beneath.
I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalkWilliam Gunn Shepard, reporter
Operators of the elevator, Joseph Zito and Gaspar Mortillalo were the only heroes to be found and they made three return journeys up to the 9th floor risking their own lives to save others.
They had to be quick since the elevator rails started to buckle under the heat.
Some women desperately pried open the elevator doors and jumped into the shaft trying to slide down the cables. But their bodies fell, lifeless, onto the elevator car and made it impossible to make another return trip.
Suddenly, the reassuring sound of the firefighters rang out in the smokey air.
But their ladders were only long enough to reach the seventh floor and the workers were trapped on the ninth.
Workers had no choice but to jump or burn to death.
Many jumped.
Crowds gathered, watching in horror as bodies came hurtling down to certain death.
Louis Waldman, a New York Socialite was sitting reading in the nearby Astor library,
I was deeply engrossed in my book when I became aware of fire engines racing past the building. I ran out to see what was happening … When we arrived at the scene, the police had thrown up a cordon around the area. Horrified and helpless, the crowds — I among them — looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below, to land as mangled, bloody pulp. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street.
146 souls died that day as a result of the fire. 123 women and 23 men. Burns, asphyxiation, blunt impact injuries, or all three.
Justice
Did 146 people needlessly die in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire?
Some say it was a discarded cigarette butt that started the fire. Others that it was the engines running the sewing machines.
Owners Blanck and Harris had fled to the roof for safety when the fire began. They were initially charged with first- and second-degree manslaughter. But a good defense lawyer can find holes in any case.
Max Steuer cemented his career reputation by successfully defending Blanck and Harris. He argued that witnesses were told what to say and that the owners didn’t know the exit doors were locked.
Commuted to wrongful death, plaintiffs were awarded $75 per victim in a civil suit. That was the going rate for the life of an immigrant factory worker in 1911.
Tragedy bleeds some and benefits others. The insurance company paid Blanck and Harris about $60,000 more than the reported losses, or about $400 per casualty.
Two years later, Blanck was arrested for locking the exit doors. He was fined $20.
Wealthy noble suitors professed their love, proposed, and showered you with the finest gifts.
These were halcyon days enjoyed by the few. The best of times.
The Worst of Times
Being poor in 19th-century Europe was not something to be recommended.
To be a peasant in Russia was about as harsh as it could get.
But life was a game of chance and if you were that unfortunate, you were not alone.
Ninety-Five percent of Russians were poor peasants who owned no land.
They paid high rents to landlords who just happened to be members of the ruling aristocracy.
Living in little more than mud huts in villages cut off from the world, the illiterate peasants worked the land to scrape a living to survive and pay their rent.
When the Industrial Revolution came to Russia, poverty followed the people from the countryside to the cities.
Factories were dark, dirty, and dangerous.
Low wages and long hours kept the former peasants in their place and they were drawn to speeches by men with ideas on changing the world and the promise of a better life.
Against this backdrop were born two sisters—Princess Elisabeth, born 1864, and Princess Alix, born 1872.
They were part of a large noble German family of seven children.
But there was something connecting Elisabeth and Alix in particular.
It was as though they were marked by the hand of fate.
Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhine
Known as “Ella” within her family, Princess Elisabeth was named after St Elizabeth of Hungary, a princess herself and greatly venerated Catholic saint and patroness of the Third Order of St. Francis.
St Elizabeth, who was married at 14 and widowed at 20, built a hospital to serve the sick and became a symbol of Christian charity after her death just 4 years later.
The story of St Elizabeth would strangely touch the life of Princess Ella.
Growing up, she lived a modest life by royal standards, even though her father was from one of the oldest and noblest houses in Germany and her mother was Queen Victoria’s daughter.
She swept floors, cleaned her own room, and even accompanied her mother to care for soldiers at a nearby hospital when war broke out between Austria and Prussia.
Ella was charming and kind and considered to be one of the most beautiful of all the princesses in Europe.
Frequently visiting his Hessian relatives and not failing to notice Ella’s beauty was her elder cousin, the young man who would later become the German Kaiser Willhelm II.
Writing and sending her numerous love poems, he fell in love with her and proposed in 1878.
One cannot help wondering how her life would have been different had she accepted.
Ella’s heart was eventually won by Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia—a choice her grandmother Queen Victoria did not approve of.
We must always listen to our grandmothers because they know things that we do not.
But such is young love.
Everyone fell in love with her from the moment she came to Russia from her beloved Darmstadtone of Sergei's cousins.
They were married in June 1884 and at the wedding, fate also struck her little sister when she met 16-year-old Nicholas, the future Tsar Nicholas II.
Residing in one of the Kremlin palaces and a summer home outside of Moscow, they lived happily, hosting frequent parties.
Ella encouraged the young Nicholas to pursue her sister Alix, again much to the dismay of Queen Victoria, who somehow had a sixth sense for what was coming.
Grandmothers know.
Then on a cold February morning of 1905, Ella’s husband Sergei was assassinated inside the Kremlin by a Socialist-Revolutionary.
Sergei had previously rounded up 20,000 Jews and evicted them from their homes for no reason and without warning.
Devoutly religious, Ella herself prophesized that “God will punish us severely”.
It was just the beginning.
Consumed with sadness and guilt, Elisabeth became a devout nun.
Selling her possessions in 1909, she worked tirelessly for several years, helping the poor and sick in Moscow, often in the worst slums.
In 1916, Ella saw her sister for the last time.
The Murder of Elisabeth
It was July, 1918 when Lenin ordered the arrest of Elisabeth.
She spent a few days with other prisoners from Russian noble families before they were all carted to a small village with an abandoned mineshaft 66 ft deep.
Elisabeth was first.
She was beaten and hurled down the shaft.
Then the others followed and a hand grenade was thrown down to kill them, but only one man died.
According to one of the murderers, Elisabeth and the others survived the fall and after the grenade was tossed down, he heard Elisabeth and others singing a hymn.
Down went a second grenade and finally, brushwood shoved into the entrance and set alight.
After the revolution, her convent erected a statue of Elisabeth in the garden. It read simply:
To the Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna: With Repentance.
Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine
Sixth child among seven and the fourth daughter, Alix was nicknamed “Sunny” by her mother and “Alicky” by her British relatives so as to distinguish her from her aunt, Princess Alexandra of Denmark who would become Queen of England as the wife of Edward VII.
Blossoming into a beautiful young woman with sparkling blue eyes and red gold hair, she was Queen Victoria’s favorite granddaughter.
The Queen had her in mind to marry Edward Prince of Wales’s eldest son, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, thus securing her a future position as Queen of England.
What is it about grandmothers just knowing what is best for us?
A very different course of events awaited Alix as she was destined to marry Nicholas, the last Tsar of Russia.
Alix fell in love with Nicholas in 1889 and Nicholas wrote in his diary:
It is my dream to one day marry Alix H. I have loved her for a long time, but more deeply and strongly since 1889 when she spent six weeks in Petersburg. For a long time, I have resisted my feeling that my dearest dream will come true.
Nicholas had to propose twice because at first Alix did not want to convert to Russian Orthodoxy but was assured by her sister Elisabeth that it was very similar to her German Lutheranism.
After their engagement, Alix returned to England and was joined by Nicholas where they became godparents of the boy who would become the first British monarch to voluntarily abdicate the throne—King Edward VIII.
When Tsar Alexander III died in 1894, he left Nicholas as the new Emperor of Russia.
It was a whirlwind for Alix—she became Empress on her wedding day.
Shy and nervous, she was disliked from the beginning by the Russian people who saw her as cold and curt.
It set in motion a serious of events that would profoundly change the course of history.
Despite producing five beautiful daughters, the Russian people frowned upon her distaste for Russian culture and her inability to produce a male heir to the throne until Alexei, her little ‘sunbeam” arrived in 1904.
By this time, she had isolated herself from the Russian court, doting on her son and becoming a recluse.
She believed in the divine right of kings that it was not necessary to seek the approval of the people.
In a letter to her grandmother, Queen Victoria, her aunt wrote of her:
Alix is very Imperious and will always insist on having her own way; she will never yield one iota of power she will imagine she wields…Alix's aunt, German Empress Frederick
It was this thinking and her unwillingness to embrace her people that sealed her fate and that of her entire family.
The Murder of Alix
Dangerously weakened by World War I, Imperial Russia’s government could not bear the financial burden.
Mass hunger became the norm for millions of Russians who refused to accept it any longer and turned on their monarchy.
The entire family became prisoners in their own palace.
The provisional government hoped their foreign relatives might take them in.
Nicholas’s first cousin, George V of Great Britain, refused to offer the family asylum because the public sentiment was turning against royalty.
France was reluctant to accept them because the war with Germany was still raging and Alix was seen as a German sympathizer.
Hope abandoned the Romanovs.
The Bolsheviks seized power and moved the family to a more remote location.
It was Tuesday, 16 July 1918, a date that passed by peacefully without incident.
Nicholas walked with his daughters at 4 o’clock in the small garden.
Alix and Nicholas played cards until 10:30 and then retired to bed.
In the morning, everything changed.
Nicholas was shot in the chest several times and a bullet entered the left side of Alix’s skull just above her ear, exiting from the right side.
Their children were executed in a similar manner.
And that was the end of that.
Elisabeth and Alix were no more.
Two sisters caught up in the winds of change.
Two beautiful princesses whose lives were cut short because ideas changed.
And so it goes.
Why?
It is the oldest question known to mankind.
The mysteries of this world are often unfathomable.
But one thing is for certain.
The same question will continue to be asked until we find ways to live together in peace.
Rising majestically above the trees, deep in the center of the Netherlands, the towers of Castle de Haar glisten in the morning sunlight.
This is no ordinary castle.
It is the largest in the Netherlands, and one of the most luxurious in Europe.
From Humble Beginnings
To go from this, in 1892 …
… to this, in 1912 …
… requiredbig money. Rothschild money.
In 1391, the family De Haar was granted rights to the original castle and surrounding lands that existed on the same site as the current castle.
Changing hands to the Van Zuylen family in 1440, then burned down and rebuilt in the early 1500s, the castle had fallen into ruins by the late 17th century.
Eventually, De Haar was inherited by Etienne Gustave Frédéric Baron van Zuylen van Nyevelt van de Haar.
Try saying that with a mouthful of Edam.
Etienne married Baroness Hélène de Rothschild in 1887—and the money connection was forged.
Restoration on a Grand Scale
20-years of restoration has created one of the world’s most beautiful and romantic castles.
Fully financed by Hélène’s family, the Rothschilds, the famous Dutch architect Pierre Cuypers set about building 200 rooms and 30 bathrooms.
Well, you never know when you’ve got to go, do you?
Installing all the mod-cons of the late Victorian and Edwardian Eras, the castle had electrical lighting running off its own generator and steam-based central heating.
A large collection of copper pots and pans adorns the kitchen that was very modern for its day, having a 20 ft-long furnace heated with either coal or peat.
Decorated with fine detail throughout, the kitchen tiles have the coat of arms of both the De Haar and Van Zuylen families.
Richly ornamented woodcarving reminiscent of a Roman Catholic church adorns the interior along with old Flemish tapestries and paintings.
Formal Gardens
Reminiscent of the French gardens of Versailles, the surrounding park contains many waterworks and 7000 trees.
Elf Fantasy Fair
Attracting some 22,500 visitors every year, the Elf Fantasy Fair held in April at Castle de Haar is the largest fantasy event in Europe.
Next to fantasy, there are also themes from science fiction, gothic, manga, cosplay and historical reenactment genres.
Click to show Google Street View of Castle de Haar
Flanked and backed by majestic fir trees, Peleș Castle, sits atop a rise in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains near Sinaia, Romania.
Never intended as a fortress, it is a lavishly furnished and decorated 170-room palace, with 30 bathrooms covering 34,000 sq ft.
Inspired by Schloss Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, Peleş Castle is a romantic blend of Neo-Renaissance and Gothic Revival styles.
Constructed between 1873 and 1883 at a cost of 16 million gold Romanian coins (~$120 million today), major improvements continued until 1914.
Housing one of the finest collections of art in Eastern and Central Europe, consisting of statues, paintings, furniture, arms and armor, gold, silver, stained glass, ivory, fine china, tapestries, and rugs, it spans over four centuries of history.
The collection of arms and armor has over 4,000 pieces, divided between Eastern and Western war pieces and ceremonial or hunting pieces.
Peleş Castle interior. Credit Diana Popescu
Commissioned by King Carol I of Romania, his towering statue by Raffaello Romanelli overlooks the main entrance of Peleş Castle.
When King Carol I was walking in the Carpathian Mountains of Sinaia in 1866, he came across the site of the future castle and fell in love with the scenery.
He commissioned a royal summer retreat and hunting preserve together with several other buildings and a power plant.
Peleș was the world’s first castle fully powered by locally produced electricity.
Peleș Castle was a truly European collaboration.
While Europe’s leaders eyed each other with suspicion and readied for war, ordinary workers from diversely different backgrounds worked together to build their palaces.
Elisabeth of Wied, the Queen of Romania, noted in her diary:
Statues by the Italian sculptor Romanelli, mostly of Carrara marble, adorn the seven Italian neo-Renaissance terrace gardens.
Guarding lions, fountains, urns, stairways, marble paths, and other decorative pieces grace the gardens.
Visiting in 1896, Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria-Hungary wrote:
Accomplished as a writer under the nom de plume Carmen Sylva, Queen Elisabeth of Romania wrote poems, plays, novels, and short stories in German, Romanian, French and English.
Considered a dreamer and eccentric, she was once a favorite of Queen Victoria as a prospective bride for her son, the future Edward VII.
Said to be unmoved by her pictures, Edward chose Alexandra of Denmark instead.
Prince Carol of Romania first noticed Elisabeth in Berlin in 1861 and the two were married 8 years later in her hometown of Neuwied, in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
They had one daughter who tragically died at age three. Elisabeth never got over it.
Failing to produce a male heir, the couple became estranged and King Carol adopted his nephew, and successor, Ferdinand.
Queen Elisabeth encouraged a love affair between Ferdinand and one of her ladies in waiting, Elena Văcărescu.
Doomed from the start, a marriage between Ferdinand and Elena would have been forbidden by the Romanian constitution.
Elisabeth and Elena were exiled while Ferdinand was introduced to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, his distant cousin Princess Marie of Edinburgh.
Married in January 1893, and with the birth of their son at Peleş Castle in October of that same year, Ferdinand and Marie would give meaning to the phrase “cradle of the dynasty, cradle of the nation” that the king had bestowed upon the castle.
The infant Carol would later become King Carol II of Romania and grow up under the thumb of his domineering great-uncle King Carol I.
In the early 20th century, Romania had a famously relaxed “Latin” sexual morality and Princess Marie pursued a series of love affairs.
Shy and weak, Ferdinand was easily overshadowed by the charismatic Marie, but fiercely resented being cuckolded.
Feeling that Marie was unqualified to raise the young Prince Carol, the stern King took him under his wing and thoroughly spoiled him.
Regarding the king as a cold, overbearing tyrant, Marie worried that he would crush her son’s spirit.
But life wasn’t so bad for Ferdinand and Marie.
Commissioned by the King and built within the same complex as Peleş Castle, the Art Nouveau style Pelișor Castle became their new home.
An accomplished artist herself, Marie made many interior design decisions for Pelișor and considered Art Nouveau an antidote to sterile historicism.
Creating her own personal style, she combined Art Nouveau with elements from Byzantine and Celtic art.
As if foretelling the future, Queen Elisabeth held the private opinion that a Republican form of government was preferable to monarchy, writing in her journal:
But for these “little people”, Romania’s transition away from monarchy was neither rational nor romantic.
With the monarchy abolished in 1947, Romania fell under the iron grip of Communism and the castle complex became first a place of recreation for Romanian dignitaries, then a museum, and finally closed for most of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime.
It wasn’t until 2006 that the legal ownership of the palace complex, including Pelișor, was returned to the heirs of the Romanian royal family.
At 95, King Michael I of Romania, the last surviving head of state from World War II, wishes Pelișor castle remain a home for his heirs.
William Merritt Chase was an American painter who thrived during America’s Gilded Age.
He is best known for his portraits and landscapes in the impressionist “en plein air” (painted outdoors) style.
He captured the domestic comforts of his own family and the blissful lifestyle of some of the wealthy.
While working in the family business, Chase showed an early talent for art, studying under local, self-taught artists in Indianapolis, who urged him to further his studies at the National Academy in New York.
Declining family fortunes cut short his training and he left New York to join his family in St Louis—working to help support them, but continuing his art.
Catching the eye of wealthy St Louis art collectors, Chase was sent on an expense-paid trip to Europe in exchange for some of his paintings and help in procuring others for their collections.
As one of the finest centers for art training in Europe, Chase joined the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where his figurative and impressionist loose brushwork began to shine.
Further travels in Italy rounded out his skills and he returned to the United States as one of a new wave of highly accomplished European-trained artists.
American statesman Samuel Greene Wheeler Benjamin once said of Chase’s style,
A noble sense of color is perceptible in all his works, whether in the subtle elusive tints of flesh, or in the powerful rendering of a mass of color. In the painting of a portrait he endeavors, sometimes very successfully, to seize character
Whether relaxing in the country, strolling in the park, playing with children at the beach, boating on a summer afternoon or simply contemplating life, his paintings show us a slice of American life at a beautiful time. A time tinted with gold. A Gilded Age.
Something wonderful happened to the world of fashion during the second half of the 19th century.
Beautiful gowns were no longer the exclusive privilege of the aristocracy …
… but were available to anyone with the wherewithal to display their finery on the boulevards, in the opera houses, and in café society.
It was a time to “see and be seen”.
And who was responsible for this change?
None other than the English entrepreneur Charles Frederick Worth, “the father of Haute Couture”.
Born in Lincolnshire, England, Charles Frederick Worth spent his early career working for department stores and textile merchants in London.
Besides learning all there was to know about fabrics and the dressmaking business, he would spend hours in the National Gallery studying historical portraits.
It was this time in London that would inspire his later works.
As the center of world fashion, Paris beckoned, and Worth found employment with the prominent textile firm Maison Gagelin, soon becoming a leading salesman, then dressmaker.
Establishing a reputation for himself and winning commendations at the expositions in Paris and London, news of Worth’s skills caught the attention of the Empress Eugénie, wife of Emperor Napoleon III of France.
Appointed court designer, Charles Frederick Worth’s success was all but guaranteed.
Soon after, he opened his own design house in Paris at 7 Rue de la Paix—first in partnership with Otto Bobergh and later as sole proprietor.
The House of Worth and Haute Couture were born.
Haute Couture is the fusion of fashion and costume.
It is wearable art.
And wealthy women of the 19th century would pay handsomely for it.
With seemingly endless social engagements, clients changed dress up to four times a day, some purchasing their entire wardrobes from Worth.
The House of Worth was known for showing several designs for each season on live models.
Clients would select their favorites and Worth would tailor-make gowns with elegant fabrics, detailed trimmings, and superb fit.
By the 1870s, Worth’s name frequently appeared in ordinary fashion magazines, spreading his fame to women well beyond courtly circles.
I told you it was a dress from Worth’s. I know the look.
Combining colors and textures using meticulously chosen textiles and trims, House of Worth produced works of art.
That so many examples have survived in such good condition is testament not only to the popularity of Worth among wealthy patrons but also the quality of textiles insisted upon by Charles Frederick Worth.
What better way to celebrate the extraordinary House of Worth than the dulcet tones of Claude Debussy.
This is one of Worth’s earlier designs when he was still in partnership with Otto Bobergh under the name Worth and Bobergh.
Skirts of the 1860s were wide, full, and bell-shaped, supported initially by multiple layers of petticoats and later by crinolines made from graduated hoops of cane or steel.
As the 1870s got underway, the shape of skirts changed, with flatter front and sides and the fullness pulled back and supported behind by a “bustle”.
As the 1880s came to a close, the lines of skirts transitioned away from the bustle to form a clearer shape, but the sleeves swelled to enormous proportions, earning them the nickname “elephant sleeves”.
House of Worth gowns were worn by the very wealthiest of clients. The dinner dress (below left) was worn by the wife of the great American banker J.P. Morgan, Jr.
At night, the stars in the evening dress (below right) would twinkle as the wearer moved and the light caught the different textures.
Charles Frederick Worth passed away in 1895 and The House of Worth remained in operation under his descendents but faced increasing competition from the 1920s onwards, eventually closing in 1956.
The House of Worth brand was revived in 1999 but failed to compete successfully in Haute Couture.
When a young painting conservator from New York University happened upon some Louis Vuitton trunks in a 15th-century Florentine villa, she could not believe what was inside.
Undisturbed for almost 90 years were the most beautiful dresses she had ever seen, each with the label “Callot Soeurs”.
This was no ordinary find. Not many Callot Soeurs dresses have survived in such pristine condition.
They belonged to Hortense Mitchell Acton, an heiress from Chicago, married to Arthur Acton, a successful Anglo-Italian art collector and dealer.
Mrs Acton had been a valued client of Callot Soeurs from the moment they opened their couture house in 1895.
The Callot sisters—Marie Gerber, Marthe Bertrand, Régine Tennyson-Chantrelle, and Joséphine Crimont—rose to become the premier dressmaking house of the Belle Époque.
After losing Joséphine to suicide in 1897, Marie, Marthe and Régine continued to run the business.
Vogue magazine called them the Three Fates, and declared they were “foremost among the powers that rule the destinies of a woman’s life and increase the income of France.”
Among the first of the design houses to reject the corset, Callot Soeurs knew what women wanted—more freedom of movement, fluid lines, and exquisite detail.
In a male dominated business, the sisters stood out by including the word “Soeurs” (French for sisters) in their label.
For Hortense Acton, Callot Soeurs’ gowns were perfect for throwing parties at La Pietra—the Acton’s Florentine villa. She entertained everyone from Gertrude Stein to Winston Churchill.
Just how the dresses survived is somewhat of a miracle.
When the Fascists took over Italy, most of Mrs. Acton’s expatriate friends upped and left.
But not her husband. He was determined to stay, ride out the storm and look after the house and art collection.
Poor Hortense Acton stayed with him, only to be arrested and imprisoned. The villa and art collection were confiscated.
As if from a scene out of the Sound of Music, both Actons eventually managed to escape through Switzerland.
Today, they form part of a collection at La Pietra which was bequeathed to New York University in 1994.
Several other Museums house a collection of Callot Soeurs gowns, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Museum of Decorative Arts, Paris.
In each case, the collections show the signature elements of the house of Callot Soeurs: antique lace trimming, Orientalist textiles, lavish embroidery, and bead- or ribbonwork.
Exemplifying the fashion aesthetic of the time, this 1914 gown uses multiple layers and textures to give the appearance of an unstructured and spontaneous design.
One of Callot Soeurs’s greatest supporters was American socialite Rita de Acosta Lydig, regarded as “the most picturesque woman in America.”
Ordering dozens of dresses at a time, she would design them herself and have them handmade by Callot Soeurs.
So exacting were her tastes that when she discovered her husband was having an affair with a poorly dressed woman, she sent the mistress to Callot Soeurs for new clothing.
She wore a silver Callot Soeurs dress for this 1911 Giovanni Boldini portrait.
In Marcel Proust’s second volume of “Remembrance of Things Past”, he asks his girlfriend, “Is there a vast difference between a Callot dress and one from any other shop?” To which she replied, “Why, an enormous difference. Only, alas! What you get for 300 francs in an ordinary shop will cost you two thousand there. But there can be no comparison; they look the same only to people who know nothing about it.”
Callot Soeurs often used delicate materials in their very feminine creations.
Renowned for their exquisite lacework, such as this black, imbricated leaf pattern overlaid on pale taffeta. Finely embellished with black and silver sequins and rhinestones, this dress was exemplary of fashions in La Belle Époque.
By the Roaring Twenties, Callot Soeurs had branches in Nice, Biarritz, Buenos Aires, and London.
Ladies’ Home Journal of 1922 wrote,
Callot probably has more rich clients than any other establishment in the world. They come from South America, from South Africa, and as far east as Japan.
One of the twentieth century’s greatest designers—Madeleine Vionnet—was Callot’s head of the workroom, or première, before venturing out on her own.
She considered her time at Callot invaluable later in her career.
Without the example of the Callot Soeurs, I would have continued to make Fords. It is because of them that I have been able to make Rolls RoycesMadeleine Vionnet
And she expressed great respect for the house’s head designer, Madame Gerber.
A true dressmaker and a great lady totally occupied with a profession that consists of adorning women . . . not constructing a costume.Madeleine Vionnet
Frances “Fannie” Benjamin Johnston, a pioneering female photographer from Grafton, West Virginia, was given her first camera by George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak Company.
After a period of training with Thomas Smillie, director of photography at the Smithsonian, she toured Europe, learning from other prominent photographers to further her craft.
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In 1894, she opened her own studio in Washington D.C. and was commissioned by magazines to take celebrity portraits, including Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington and even Alice Roosevelt’s wedding.
Well connected among the elites of society, from the late 1800s through 1935, she photographed the gardens of the rich and famous.
To the wealthy and class-conscious, gardens signified status and refinement in an ever growing industrialized America.
Deemed “the finest existing on the subject”, many of her meticulously composed images were hand tinted and were meant to educate the masses on how to beautify their yards.
What must be the sensations of a visiting Martian, when after thrilling to the matchless beauty of the New York skyline… the squalor and sordidness of many of our city districts…? (1922).Francis Benjamin Johnston
Francis Benjamin Johnston played a significant role in defining American landscape design.
Here are 40 glorious gardens from the Gilded Age.
Continue with more beautiful images of Gardens of the Gilded Age
At the age of eight, Cléo de Mérode (1875 – 1966) was already showing the talent that would make her a world renowned dancer of the Belle Époque.
Born in Paris to a Viennese baroness, she entered the Paris Opera ballet school at seven and made her professional debut at age eleven.
But it would be her beauty that stirred the public’s imagination, for Cléo de Mérode was, perhaps, the first real celebrity icon.
Before long, her dancing skills took second stage to her glamour, as postcards and playing cards around the world started featuring her image.
She was the talk of the town. Her new hairstyle was eagerly awaited and quickly imitated. Famous artists of the Belle Époque, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Giovanni Boldini, and Félix Nadar queued to sculpt, paint, and photograph her.
Even royalty courted her. In 1896, King Léopold II, having watched her dance at the ballet, became infatuated with her, and rumor soon spread that she was his mistress. The king had fathered two children with a prostitute and her reputation suffered as a consequence.
But this was the Belle Époque, a time of unprecedented colonial expansion, the very dawn of modern celebrity culture. Such indiscretions were soon forgotten and Cléo de Mérode became an international star, giving performances across Europe and the United States.
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Her decision to dance at the risqué Folies Bergère cabaret only served to heighten her following. And when she met artist Gustav Klimt, whose specialty was female sexuality, a romance blossomed that inspired the 2006 movie Klimt.
Continuing to dance into her early fifties, Mérode eventually retired to the seaside resort of Biarritz in the French Pyrénées. In 1955, she published her autobiography, Le Ballet de ma vie (The Dance of My Life).
At the ripe old age of 91, the greatest celebrity of the Belle Époque was no more. Cléo de Mérode was interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Her spirit still watches over her mother, interred in the same tomb.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, child labor reached a peak in the United States.
American children worked in large numbers in mines, glass factories, textiles, agriculture, canneries, home industries, and as newsboys, messengers, bootblacks, and peddlers.
Social activism and political reform were sweeping across the country, and many states enacted laws to improve the conditions under which people lived and worked.
At the urging of prominent social critics, child labor laws were strengthened, age limits raised, and the work-week shortened—restricting night work and requiring school attendance.
When asked how old, she hesitated, then said “I don’t remember.” Then confidentially, “I’m not old enough to work, but I do just the same.”
The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) was formed in 1904 to promote “the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working.”
But children were being exploited for cheap labor in secret, hidden from public view. So in 1908, the NCLC hired Lewis Hine as an “investigative photographer” to document working and living conditions of children across the United States.
Hine would gain access to factories under assumed identities—one day a bible salesman, another day a fire inspector, a postcard vendor, or even an industrial photographer saying he was making a record of machinery.
Undeterred by threats of violence and even death by factory police and foremen, if he couldn’t get inside a building, he would wait outside and photograph the children in groups as they entered or left.
His photographs were instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the US.
We can all relate to the plight of this little girl who stares longingly out of the window of a cotton mill, watching the childhood she should’ve had slip away.
Reminiscent of a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, the little girl below probably thinks she’s done something wrong and can’t understand why Lewis Hine is asking her to stand still while pointing the camera at her.
… after I took the photo, the overseer came up and said in an apologetic tone that was pathetic, “She just happened in.” Then a moment later he repeated the information. The mills appear to be full of youngsters that “just happened in,” or ” are helping sister.”
We can probably all remember our grandparents saying “kids today don’t know they’re born”—we’ll probably say the same thing because each generation thinks they had it tougher than the current one.
But the young lads below really did have it tough. They worked the night shift from 5 pm to 3 am along with thousands of other children in the dangerous glass making industry.
Exposed to the intense heat (3133 °F) needed to melt glass, the boys could suffer eye trouble, lung ailments, heat exhaustion, not to mention constant cuts and burns.
Paid by the piece, they had to work as fast as they could for hours without a break. Many factory owners preferred boys under 16 years of age.
Eight-year-old Leo worked in a cotton mill and picked up bobbins for 15c a day. Already feeling the responsibility of contributing like the grown-ups, he said he didn’t do it just to help his sister or mother, but for himself.
Breaker boys worked in the coal mining industry. Their job was to separate impurities from coal by hand. It was midday when this photo was taken, and already the lads are covered from head to toe in coal dust.
A couple of the lads below muster a smile, while others are probably just relieved to get a few minutes respite.
Three-quarters of all child laborers worked in agriculture. Many of them were children of sharecroppers or seasonal workers who didn’t own their own land.
Paid by how much they picked, the only way for families to survive was for everyone in the family to join in with the work.
Waking when it was still dark, families would pile into trucks headed for the fields where they would work until the sun went down, often without a break.
Fighting to stay awake, come rain or shine, the children would pick cotton until their hands bled.
Frequently, the children lost weeks of schooling before the picking season ended and it was too late for them to catch up.
Like agricultural work, cannery jobs were seasonal. Whole families would move on site for the season, living in squalid temporary quarters provided by the employers.
The day began at 3 am, with six- and seven-year-olds working alongside their parents. Payment was piecework and speed was everything.
Daisy helps at the capping machine, but is not able to “keep up.” She places caps on the cans at the rate of about 40 per minute working full time.
Shucking oysters at a seafood cannery, children might manage two four-pound pots per day while their parents filled eight or nine.
Piled up on the ground, the shells made it exhausting to keep a footing and their jagged edges cut into fingers.
The baby will shuck as soon as she can handle the knife.
Eighteen-hour working days were not uncommon and children using sharp knives were especially likely to hurt themselves toward the end of the day, when they were exhausted.
The salt gits in the cuts an’ they ache.
In vegetable and fruit canneries, produce had to be canned quickly before it wilted. Children would haul boxes to the weighing stations—some weighing between 30 and 60 pounds.
In comparison, selling newspapers was relatively easy work and a good education in the ways of business.
Children would buy as many newspapers as they thought they could sell. Their own salesmanship came into play, but so did the drama of the headlines and how kind the weather was.
Most “newsies” attended school all day and had decent homes to go to at night. They were the lucky ones.
The National Child Labor Committee’s work to end child labor was combined with efforts to provide free, compulsory education for all children, and culminated in the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which set federal standards for child labor.
References Library of Congress Smithsonian Institution Wikipedia
The year was 1871. Wealthy financier and Member of Parliament Mitchell Henry (1826 – 1910) was standing with his wife on the shores of a lake in County Galway, Ireland, admiring their new fairytale castle.
It had taken one hundred men four years to complete. But gazing across the lake at the castle’s reflection in the still waters, the couple knew it was worth the wait.
The fairytale dream
Their dream had been forged 16 years earlier when they honeymooned at this exact spot. Renting Kylemore Lodge, the Henrys had fallen in love with the bewitching beauty of the landscape.
Inheriting a sizeable fortune from his father, a wealthy cotton merchant from Manchester, England, no expense had been spared. Covering 40,000 square feet, with seventy rooms and made from granite shipped in by sea from Dalkey and limestone from Ballinasloe, it had cost £18,000 to build (about $3 million today).
But Mitchell Henry’s dream was bigger than Kylemore Castle. He gave up his career as a medical doctor to take over the family business and entered politics as Member of Parliament for Galway County.
With much of Ireland still recovering from the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52, Henry wanted to help the local community by providing work, shelter and a school. He drained thousands of acres of waste marshland, turning it into the productive Kylemore Estate and providing material and social benefits to the entire region.
Victorian Walled Gardens
Included as part of the Kylemore Estate were large, walled Victorian Gardens, with 21 heated glass houses and a 60-foot banana house, growing exotic fruit and vegetables of all kinds.
Tragedy strikes
Just four short years later, Henry’s wife Margaret suddenly died from a fever contracted in Egypt.
Overwhelmed by grief, he built a beautiful memorial church on the shore of the lake about a mile from the castle, where Margaret was laid to rest and where he would eventually join her.
Built from Caen sandstone with internal columns of green Connemara marble, the church is a scaled-down replica of the neo-Gothic Bristol Cathedral.
The Duke and Duchess of Manchester
What does an English Duke do when he finally runs out of money and cannot repay his gambling debts? Why, he elopes with an American heiress and escapes to a castle on a lake in Ireland.
Such was the next chapter in the story of Kylemore.
In 1903, Mitchell Henry sold Kylemore to William Angus Drogo Montague, 9th Duke of Manchester. A notorious spendthrift, Manchester succeeded his father in the Dukedom at the age of fifteen.
His excessive spending and gambling drained the family fortune, but as luck would have it, he met Helena Zimmerman, daughter of Eugene Zimmerman, a railroad magnate and major stockholder in Standard Oil.
Much to the chagrin of the locals, the Duke and Duchess were far more concerned with lavishly entertaining guests than they were in managing the estate.
While the Duke was away in Europe and America, often as a paid guest of wealthy Americans like media mogul Randolph Hearst, the Duchess was seen speeding along country lanes in her Daimler motor car—quite the site in 1900s Connemara!
Some say the Duke lost Kylemore in a late night of gambling at the castle, but one thing for certain is that after Eugene Zimmerman died, the money to fund a life of partying dried up, and the Duke and Duchess were forced to sell.
A sanctuary from war-torn Europe
Kylemore Castle’s next owners were a group of Benedictine nuns from Belgium who had fled the horrors of World War One.
Before the war, the nun’s home town of Ypres, with its 20,000 inhabitants, engaged in nothing more than the peaceful pursuit of making Valenciennes lace.
Then the war arrived on their doorstep.
The ravages of the First World War turned one of Belgium’s most beautiful and historic cities into nothing more than a ghostly shell of its former glory.
Escaping the devastation of their beloved Ypres—their home base for three hundred and forty years—the nuns settled into Kylemore Castle in 1920 and converted it into the working Kylemore Abbey.
Restoring the Kylemore Abbey’s Victorian gardens and neo-gothic church have been major projects aided by donations and the work of local artisans.
Kylemore Abbey continues to be a self-sustaining working monastery and the Victorian gardens are open to the public.
Mitchell and Margaret Henry can rest at peace knowing their dream castle is in safe hands.
Charles Courtney Curran was an American artist best known for paintings of Victorian and Edwardian women in graceful flowing dresses set against expansive romantic landscapes.
Many American artists spent time in Paris in the 19th century, and Curran was no exception. Paris was the center of the art world. To experience Paris was considered essential to American artists with a dream—a dream to excel at what they loved to do.
His paintings are compared with fellow American Impressionists who also spent time in Paris—Mary Cassatt, Edmund Charles Tarbell, and Frank Weston Benson. And it’s not difficult to see the influence of French Impressionists like Monet—especially works like The Promenade, Woman with a Parasol (1875).
Key Facts about Charles Courtney Curran
1500 works in his career, mostly oil paintings, some watercolors and illustrations for magazines.
Born in Hartford, Kentucky in 1861 but grew up on the shores of Lake Erie, Ohio.
Trained at the Fine Arts Academy of Cincinnati, the National Academy in New York City, and Académie Julian in Paris.
Traveled extensively—living in Paris, frequently visiting Europe and even China.
Imagine you are there gazing at the magnificent views from the heights of the Shawangunk Mountains in New York state.
The Edwardian era was the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes extended to 1919.
Edward loved to travel, setting a style influenced by the art and fashions of Continental Europe.
Reminiscing in the 1920s, after the horrors of world war one, the Edwardian era was remembered with nostalgia.
A bygone time of long summer afternoons and garden parties, basking in a sun that never set on the British Empire.
Time for some Edwardian fashion fun.
Two French evening dresses from the Edwardian era (1901 – 1919) battle for your vote. Which one will win? Cast your vote to find out.
Dress A
c1905 Gala Dress. Silk tulle, machine woven silk in plain weave and satin. Silk ribbons, metal hooks. French, now owned by National Museum Norway.
Dress B
1909 evening gown with empire waist, short sleeves and fishtail hem; skirt is square sequins on net over satin fitted to fishtail. Callot Soeurs.
The Edwardian era marked a prominent turn in the direction of fashion for women.
Couturiers of Paris introduced a new columnar silhouette, with a distinctive “S” shaped curve.
It signaled the demise of the corset, which had been an indispensable garment of fashionable Victorian women.
The Edwardian era saw the full flowering of Parisian haute couture as the arbiter of styles and silhouettes for women of all classes.
A series of Edwardian fashion plates give us a good idea of the couturier designs that formed the basis for what women would wear.
Featuring Spring season designs from 1901 to 1906, these New York fashion plates also have notes from the designer.
The first plate features a rose red dress with a high collar and long sleeves. The dress has two decorative bands, one with horizontal stripes of deep pink and black, and the other with pink floral brocade. The collar and bodice have a “v” design, and the sleeves include puffed sections of rose. The skirt is gathered to the waist, flaring out with a slight train at the back. Decorative bands create a petal effect above the hem.
The second plate features the dark, up-swept “Gibson Girl” hairstyle and long red dress with a black trellis-like diamond pattern on the bodice and skirt. The outfit starts with a high-necked, long-sleeved floral blouse in white, red, and black. The blouse extends beneath a full bodice, cinched at the waist with several black bands. The dress flows to the ground with a double layer of red ruffles and a train of tightly-gathered folds at the back, ending in ruffles. The rear view of the dress is shown in black and white.
The third plate features a yellow gown with leaf or abstract flower pattern, deep V-neck over a pink under-layer, and high lace collar. The collar has three or four picot-edged ruffles with narrow black bands and a rosette of eight loops of narrow black ribbon at the V-neck. Bodice features three vertical bands of black lace on each side of the center front. Elbow-length sleeves mirror the collar with ruffles and a black rosette. The waist has three horizontal rows of black with bows at the back, and two long streamers over the gored skirt, flaring into a trumpet hem with a slight train. Vertical lines of black lace surround the skirt at knee length, and five bands of ruffles with picot-edged black ribbon adorn the hem. Complete with elbow-length mitts and a black-banded, yellow flat-brimmed straw hat with white ostrich plumes.
The fourth plate features a home outfit with an elaborate up-swept hairstyle, rose-colored gown with floral-patterned sleeves, lower bodice, and skirt insets. Square neckline with pleats for fullness, floral lower bodice with rose cap sleeves, and bands of trim. Lower floral sleeves are full to the elbow, gathered snug from elbow to wrist. Softly gathered skirt flares into a trumpet hemline, flat at the front with three bands of decorative stitching on the hips. Ornate floral bands decorate the skirt below the knee on each side.
Of course, it just wouldn’t be the Edwardian era without hats, would it? Nine photographs of women numbered 1 through 9 show a variety of hats for Spring 1902.
In the upper left, number 1 wears a dark dress with a white jabot and a hat adorned with overlapping rows of leaves.
Below her, number 2 dons a high-necked white lace dress with a dark straw flat-brimmed hat featuring white on the crown and roses under the left side.
Number 3 sports a dark jacket over a white lace high-necked blouse. Her hat is woven straw with wide strands and several large feathers on the crown.
In the center column at the top, number 4 wears a white lace dress similar to number 2, with a hat covered in white lace, bows, and roses.
Number 5 wears a white lace gown with a jabot, and her hat has an upstanding brim adorned with rows of small beads and feathers fastened by a round jeweled brooch.
Number 6 is in a black outfit trimmed with white-edged ribbons, checks, and lace. Her dark hat has a high brim trimmed with white lace and adorned with many white plumes.
At the top of the right-hand column, number 7 wears a dark patterned high-necked blouse with a deep white collar featuring a scalloped hem and inset diamond patterns.
Number 8 wears the same dress as number 6. Her small-brimmed white hat is adorned with white flowers, bows, and black-dotted veiling.
Number 9, with her back turned, wears a light jacket with a fluffy white jabot. Her white hat has a banded brim turned up, trimmed with ruched dark velvet ribbon around the crown, and a jaunty feather at the side.
Edwardians showcased their latest fashions at horse races, as seen in the next plate featuring three women in conversation amidst an attentive crowd.
On the left, a woman wears a mulberry embroidered French voile gown with a high lace collar, softly gathered sleeves, and a flared skirt. Her high-crowned straw hat is adorned with purple flowers and a large black feather plume.
In the center, a woman dons a black chiffon satin taffeta gown with a high white lace collar extending to the waist. Top-stitched pleats at the shoulders create bust fullness, and the skirt features inverted box pleats. Her black velvet hat has a turned-up brim and is decorated with a large white ostrich plume.
On the right, a woman wears a pale yellow tussar gown with Irish lace, featuring a v-neck collar, released pleats, and elbow-length sleeves with lace cuffs. A soft bow tie and a fabric belt with a large buckle accentuate the waist. Her wide-brimmed straw hat, adorned with a black band and a large yellow rose, complements the ensemble.
References: Wikipedia, Clairemont College, National Museum of Norway, Gregg Museum of Art & Design.
The “Ship of dreams”, Titanic was the pride of Liverpool’s White Star Line.
Billed unsinkable, she would send 1500 souls to a watery grave on her maiden voyage.
There’s something for everyone in our latest post—the glamour, the fashion, the technology, and the tragedy.
Here are 10 fascinating facts about RMS Titanic.
1. Titanic was the largest moving object ever built
When she entered service in 1912, Titanic was the largest ship afloat. At 882 ft 9 in (269.1 m) long and 141 ft (53.3 m) high (waterline to top of funnels), she must have seemed like a floating city.
The New York Tribune ran a headline on Sunday, November 27, 1910 asking the question:
It showed an illustration of Titanic with the famous Halve Maen “Half Moon”—the Dutch ship that sailed into New York Harbor in 1609—wholly contained within Titanic’s hull.
Could people in the Edwardian era imagine that even Titanic would be dwarfed by passenger cruise ships of the future.
Today’s largest cruise ships—the Royal Caribbean’s Oasis of the Seas and sister ship Allure of the Seas are both 1187 ft (362 m) in length and reach 213 ft (65 m) above the waterline.
2. One of Titanic’s funnels was fake
Only three of Titanic’s four funnels were functional—the fourth was a dummy installed because it made the ship look more beautiful and was made into a ventilation shaft for the kitchen.
Imagine you are the Titanic’s designer. Which looks better—3 or 4 funnels?
3. Puttin’ on the Ritz
The interior of Titanic was modeled after the Ritz Hotel, with first-class cabins finished in the Empire style.
Aiming to convey the aura of a floating hotel, it was intended for passengers to forget they were on board ship, and feel as though they were in a hall of a great house on shore.
Take a “fly through” tour of Titanic’s opulent First Class smoking room.
4. Titanic’s hull was made from 2000 steel plates
Riveting stuff, right? Well actually, weak rivets are probably the main reason Titanic sank.
To appreciate just how impressive it is to fasten 2000 steel plates together at a time before sophisticated welding, we first need to know what 2000 steel plates looks like.
Besides making your eyes go funny, imagine each of those tiny gray rectangles is 30 feet long (9.1 m), 6 feet wide (1.8 m), and weighs 3 tons.
Each plate was between 1 inch (2.5 cm) and 1.5 inches (3.8 cm) thick and needed fastening together with steel rivets—three million of them. It’s the same principle used on your jeans.
Rivets are incredibly strong and hold together structures like the Eiffel Tower and Brooklyn Bridge.
Heated, then driven through holes by hydraulic machines, they held together Titanic’s plates with a watertight seal.
But here’s the thing—there wasn’t enough room to use the hydraulic machines on the bow (the forward part of Titanic’s hull). So men had to hammer them through by hand.
To make that job easier, the rivets for the bow of Titanic (and the stern) were made of softer wrought iron—the quality of which was questionable.
Imagine the rivets are like a zipper. If enough force is applied, once the first rivet breaks, the others follow. And so it was when Titanic’s hull collided with the massive iceberg—the plates ripped apart.
Sometimes the smallest things matter the most.
5. Titanic set a new standard for third-class accommodations
Titanic was one of the first ships to offer improved steerage (third class) accommodation.
While most ships only offered open dormitories with inadequate food or toilet facilities, Titanic offered private, comfortable cabins for two, four, six, eight and 10 passengers.
Third-class passengers also had their own dining rooms with pine paneling and sturdy teak furniture.
Substantial open deck space was also made available, as was a smoking room for men and reading room for women—both far exceeding the average for the time.
6. Titanic was an ideal venue for debutantes
For ambitious mothers looking to marry off their daughters to eligible bachelors, Titanic was a venue par excellence.
A passenger list was published before sailing—a veritable “who’s who”—to make everyone aware of which society elites would be gracing the ship with their presence.
Ladies, what would you choose to wear from this sample of Edwardian haute couture?
7. The Grand Staircase descended through seven decks
The Grand Staircase descended through seven decks of the ship, capped with a dome of wrought iron and glass to admit natural light.
Each landing off the staircase gave access to ornate entrance halls lit by gold-plated light fixtures.
It is thought that the inrush of water in the final moments pushed the entire Grand Staircase upwards through the dome.
8. “We are safer here than in that little boat”
John Jacob Astor IV, who went down with Titanic on that fateful night of April 15, 1912, was one of the richest men in the world.
As people jostled for space aboard lifeboats, Mr Astor initially dismissed the idea of leaving the ship’s safety, saying to his pregnant wife:
Astor had built the Astoria Hotel “the world’s most luxurious” in 1897, which later merged with the Waldorf to become the Waldorf-Astoria complex.
His net worth was said to have been in the billions. But here’s the problem with calculating someone’s net worth in 1912: there were no income taxes—not until the following year.
Nevertheless, shortly after the disaster, the New York Times ran a detailed study of the real-estate holdings that Astor’s son, Vincent, would inherit. Factoring additional bequests to his wife and daughter, they arrived at $150,000,000—valued at around $3.75 billion today.
9. And the band played on
If there is any consolation for the eight musicians who perished aboard Titanic, it is that they indulged their passion for music until the very end.
These heroes decided to start playing to help calm the passengers as the crew helped women and children board the lifeboats. One survivor said,
10. When time ran out …
This watch tells the story of when time ran out for over 1500 people.
From a Titanic exhibition at Southampton, a retrieved fob watch from an unknown passenger stopped at the approximate time the ship went down on that fateful night on April 15 1912 at 02:20.
Immersed into lethally cold water with a temperature of 28 °F (−2 °C), almost all died within 15–30 minutes.
Only 13 were helped into lifeboats, even though there was room for another 500.
References
wikipedia.org CNBC—How Much Was Titanic Victim John Astor Worth? The Telegraph
Between 1885 and 1917, Peter Carl Fabergé created a limited number of exclusive jeweled eggs for the Russian Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II as gifts for their wives and mothers.
In the Christian faith, eggs symbolize the empty tomb and resurrection of Jesus—celebrating new life and new beginnings.
It was a different story for the Russian monarchy. The winds of change had swept over Imperial Russia. It was the beginning of the end.
But the exquisite bejeweled Fabergé Eggs live on as constant reminders of a bygone time.
1. The Belle Époque was an era of peace and plenty between wars
The French expression Belle Époque was used in retrospect after the horrors of World War One—a term of nostalgia for a simpler time of peace, prosperity, and progress.
At the beginning of the Belle Époque, France was recovering from defeat in the Franco-Prussian War—a defeat of staggering proportions. In just 9 months, France suffered 138,871 dead, 143,000 wounded, and 474,414 captured—a total that was more than six times that of the Prussian opposition.
In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, Paris would suffer again through the Commune—a short-lived internal conflict between radical revolutionaries and the French Government. More tragedy and more loss, with estimates ranging from 7,000-20,000 revolutionary “Communards” killed.
Between the Paris Commune and the German heavy artillery bombing, Paris was a mess by the time a ceasefire was signed.
At the end of the Belle Époque, the winds of war were once again in the air. This time, it would be a thousand times worse.
One look at the devastation—hell on earth—and it’s easy to imagine every French soldier huddled, shivering in the filth of trench warfare, trying desperately to cling to the distant memory of a beautiful time—the Belle Époque.
2. It was a global phenomenon
Similar periods of economic growth were experienced in Britain during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, in Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I and II during the German Reich, in Russia under Alexander III and Nicholas II, in the United States in a period called the Gilded Age, and in Mexico during the Porfiriato.
Austrian-turned British, and Jewish banker, Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s weekend retreat of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire—built between 1874 and 1889—epitomizes the excesses of the era’s aristocracy in Britain.
Russian aristocrats enjoyed waltzing the night away at lavish balls in St Petersburg.
The Porfiriato was an era when Porfirio Díaz was president of Mexico from 1876-1911. He promoted order and progress that modernized the economy and encouraged foreign investment. The Porfiriato ended in 1910 with the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution.
The Gilded Age was a period of rapid economic growth in the United States—an era when anyone was a potential Andrew Carnegie, and Americans who achieved wealth celebrated it as never before.
3. It was an era of huge urban population growth
In the 39 years preceding 1911, the population of Paris grew by 64%. By the end of the Belle Époque, the population of Paris was higher than it is today.
New York’s population increased by 2 1/2 times from 1870 to 1900.
Chicago experienced even greater growth, with a staggering ten-fold increase in population between 1870 and 1900.
4. The Belle Époque was an era of progress and prosperity
With the humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian war a distant memory, the Paris Expositions of 1878, 1889 and 1900 celebrated France’s recovery.
At the Exposition of 1878, the gardens of the Trocadéro displayed the full-size head of the Statue of Liberty, before the statue was completed and shipped to New York.
Gustave Eiffel’s thousand-foot tower was symbolic of just how far France had come. It was the tallest manmade structure in the world and stood at the entrance to a showcase of French ingenuity and engineering mastery.
An equally significant building was the Machinery Hall. At 111 meters (364 ft), it spanned the longest interior space in the world at the time.
5. It was an era of cultural exuberance
Marked by the red windmill on its roof, the Moulin Rouge is considered the spiritual birthplace of the modern version of the can-can dance.
Befitting the decadence of the times, the dance was considered scandalous and there were even attempts to repress it. Women wore pantalettes, which could be unintentionally revealing.
The club’s decor still holds the romance of fin de siècle (end of the century) France.
6. It was an era of rich and poor
Paris was both the richest and poorest city in France. An 1882 study of Parisians concluded that 27% of Parisians were upper- or middle-class while 73% were poor.
During America’s Gilded Age, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth, while the top 10% owned roughly three quarters.
In New York, the opera, the theatre, and lavish parties consumed the ruling class. Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish once threw a dinner party to honor her dog who arrived sporting a $15,000 diamond collar.
In 1890, 11 million of the nation’s 12 million families earned less than $1200 per year; of this group, the average annual income was $380—well below the poverty line.
7. It was an era of scientific and technological advancement
The second wave of the industrial revolution seized the world.
Along came cameras, electric lights, the telephone, the gramophone, the automobile, and the dawn of air travel.
When Queen Victoria invited herself to Rothschild’s Waddeston Manor, it is said she was so impressed with the electric lighting that she spent 10 minutes switching an electric chandelier on and off.
8. An era of art and architecture
Although the architecture of the Belle Époque combined elements from several styles, the predominant architectural style was Art Nouveau.
A reaction to the academic influence of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau (“new art”) was inspired by the natural forms and structures of flowers, plants, and curved lines. Architects tried to harmonize with the natural environment.
The Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900 was an Art Nouveau extravaganza.
9. The Belle Époque was an era of fashion
Jeanne Paquin was one of several fashion designers of the Belle Époque. She became known for her publicity stunts including sending her models to the races and the opera to get her designs noticed.
10. It was an era of Imperialism
The “Scramble for Africa” was a race by European powers to colonize as much of Africa as possible in the latter part of the 19th century.
African land under European control went from 10% in 1870 to 90% in 1914.
By the end of the 19th century, Africa was one of the last regions of the world unaffected by Imperialism. That was about to change.
France and Britain in particular carved out huge swathes of land, with France concentrating on Northwest Africa and Britain wanting the eastern ports as stopovers for it’s Indian and Asian trade routes.
Cecil Rhodes was the man behind Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the world-famous de Beers diamond company. His British South Africa Company acquired the land during the Belle Époque.
The Belle Époque was a beautiful era, but as Mark Twain described the Gilded Age, it was a thin veneer hiding systemic problems—discontent among the working classes, political tensions between nation states, militarism, imperialism, and to top it all, an unyielding arms race that by 1914 was a bubble about to burst. All that was needed was a trigger event.
History is literally dying all around us. Decay is nature’s process of creative destruction—destroying the old to make way for the new.
Andre Govia is on a mission. He is one of an intrepid group of urban explorers who photograph abandoned buildings. He captures moments that would otherwise slip into the mists of time, unnoticed, forgotten.
The people may have gone, but for now, the buildings live on to tell their stories.
Nature never sleeps. Soon enough, the buildings too will be gone. All that will remain are memories and Andre Govia’s photographs.
Listen to the haunting Rachmaninoff 2nd concerto as we explore these abandoned beauties.
What is the story of this room? The piano and the music stand tell of a love affair with music. Once the room was filled with the sounds of music and laughter. Family and friends gathered round the piano to sing together. The lady of the house loved to paint and her little girl loved to play with her pushchair. There was joy, creativity, and shared happiness.
And what about this elegant room? How many guests were entertained here? How many times did the fireplace burn brightly on cold winter evenings? Did couples stand by the french windows at parties, sipping cocktails and gazing at the moonlit gardens? The floor is bare, the paint peeled, but signs of its former glory remain.
Ah what joy this room must have brought to the former family. Reading bedtime stories and watching patiently as their little one slipped into sleep.
Persistent exposure to water causes plaster to gradually decay and soften until physical failure occurs. Leaks, damp, overgrown flora, and frost all provide ways for moisture to permeate buildings.
A major component in most historic buildings, timber is prone to attack from fungi and insects. Once rot sets in, repair costs often mean it’s cheaper to abandon the buildings altogether.
Sadly, for every historic building that is restored, there must be hundreds that are left to wither and die.
Once upon a time, this abandoned cottage was a cozy family home.
Intimate details of its former life are apparent in the assortment of bottles on the dressing table, the photograph still hanging on the wall, the paraffin lamp, and bellows to help get a good fire going.
It was 12:25—as indicated by the clock on the mantlepiece—when time ran out in this room from the past.
It’s not just old homes and mansions that are abandoned. This church has fallen into disrepair, making a very dangerous place to be.
Although Andre Govia and friends have years of experience in urban exploration, they have fallen through floors and broken limbs. They keep the locations secret to discourage unskilled adventure seekers.
Dinner is served. This abandoned manor house even has place settings for dinner service as if expecting guests to arrive at any moment.
You can almost hear the chatter as guests finish their cocktails and are shown to their seats by the Lady of the house.
A soft, filtered light enters through net curtains in this abandoned bedroom.
As if from a movie set, the vintage wheelchair, four-poster bed, and solid wood armoire add drama to this eerie scene.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. —George Santayana.
Why does it matter what happened long ago?
History connects us with people and events through time. The lessons to be learned from studying those connections are profound.
The complex cultures, traditions, and religions of the world were created over millennia. Understanding the linkages between past and present is to understand what it means to be human.
We are living history. We are all rooted in time.
Preserving our past provides a secure foundation for our future.
Sources Wikipedia.org, buildingconservation.com, history.ac.uk Images reproduced with kind permission of Andre Govia. Music: Rachmaninoff Concerto #2, 2nd Movement. (Contains Amazon affiliate link)
Before it became popular to lift heavy objects for an hour or run down the street for fun (known to Victorians as “work”), people of leisure got into shape using a single piece of wearable equipment that didn’t weigh much at all — the corset.
This fantastic invention is possibly the fastest way to get into shape known to mankind—and it’s stood the test of time for several centuries.
Slip one of these on and we look absolutely fabulous!
Being an innovative lot, the Victorians over-engineered the corset to reduce waist size down to an incredibly small 16″ (40cm). (The smallest waist in recorded history was that of Ethel Granger at 13″ (33cm) ).
I’ll just slip into something less comfortable.
And the Victorian Secret applied equally to men.
Jolly fine rugby match yesterday, wasn’t it old chap?
Yes, spiffing!
Wall paintings and statues from Minoan Crete (3rd millennium BCE) depict women wearing tight bodices that are thought to be the oldest known examples of corsets.
But our story begins with a powerful Italian lady by the name of Catherine de’ Medici.
When Catherine became Queen of France in 1547, as the wife of Henry II of France, she required everyone attending court to sport a slim waistline.
Biographer Mark Strage called her the most powerful woman in sixteenth-century Europe.
So feared was Catherine that rumours circulated about her eating little children.
With Catherine’s influence behind it, the corset’s future looked rosy.
Initially a simple bodice stiffened with whalebone or reed, the early corsets were worn only by the aristocracy.
They were often called “a pair of bodies” because they were made in two pieces that fastened together, most often with lacing.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, “stays” became fashionable.
They provided support, held the shoulders back, and gave a conical shape to the upper body.
With or without shoulder straps, the most basic were made of leather and simply wrapped around the torso, then tightened with lacing at the back.
The upper classes could afford custom-made stays, but in both cases, just how tight one should lace them became a matter of controversy and satire during the late 1700s and early 1800s.
This is where the term “strait-laced” comes from—strait (with no “gh”) meaning tight, as in rigid in manners of conduct.
The French Revolution threatened to wipe the corset from the annals of history when the “Empire Silhouette” came into fashion.
Thanks to Napoleon’s first Empress, Joséphine de Beauharnais, the high-waisted appearance with long, flowing skirt became popular across Europe.
But this style didn’t last long. As full skirts and small waists began to dominate the fashion scene, the body-shaping qualities of the corset once again won people over.
Men continued to wear corsets, but claimed it was for medicinal purposes—the old “back pain”.
Once the Victorians had figured out how to mass-produce corsets, there was no turning back.
By 1850, steel was used for boning and eyelets, allowing corsets to be laced very tightly indeed.
In fashionable London, tight lacing was a serious affair—even for one’s teenaged daughters.
An article in the New York Times read:
…tight lacing is fashionable again. One of the most exclusive corsetieres in Oxford Street, who is the authority for the statement, said today: We are on the verge of another tiny-waist craze. The demand for the smaller sizes in corsets has doubled in the last six months. Eighteens are now in common demand and orders for seventeen-inch and sixteen-inch corsets have greatly increased in the last few weeks. Not a few of my clients are systematically training for the fashionable measurements. When the eventual size is decided upon, three pairs of corsets are made, one for ordinary wear, one for special occasions, and another for night wear. To take a typical case, a young lady was brought to me by her mother at the beginning of the year. The girl, who was 16 years old, was tall and already possessed of a well-developed figure. She had a waist that measured twenty inches. Her mother was desirous that it be reduced to sixteen inches. I provided three pairs of corsets of graduated sizes, and the young miss wore sixteen-inch corsets, laced close the week before last at the Buckingham Palace garden party. She and her mother were so delighted with the effect that the girl came to me a day or two later to be measured for a pair of fifteens for dress occasions.
In Europe, the tight-laced corset won royal patronage courtesy of Empress Elisabeth of Austria “Sissi”, who used tight-lacing to reduce her waist to the coveted 16″ (40cm).
She became obsessed with her trademark “wasp waist”, and her lacing procedure sometimes took an hour.
Sissi’s youngest daughter adopted her mother’s fixation with extreme slenderness and is said to have been terrified when, as a young girl, she met Queen Victoria for the first time.
In the Edwardian era, corsets became longer and straight at the front, with a pronounced curve at the back.
This pushed the upper body forward and the posterior out, creating a profile known as the “S-Curve” or “S-Bend.
With the post-Edwardian period came the last stand of the corset before it was to fall out of fashion in favor of the girdle in the 1920s.
The corset was dead. Long live the corset.
Today, the corset lives on in the fashion world thanks largely to the goth and steampunk subgenres, but thanks to new latex rubber materials, also as an inexpensive body shaper.
The Bygone Corseted Era
Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life—Oscar Wilde.
Undoubtedly, taken to an extreme, the whims of fashion can be deleterious to health. But the age of corsets personifies the human fascination with the art aesthetic.
Look at those eyes. Even at seven years old, Princess Wilhelmina of the Netherlands seemed to know she was destined for greatness.
And she wasn’t wrong—just three years later she became Queen of the Netherlands. Her mother, Emma, was named regent, but by all accounts, Wilhelmina was a wise head on young shoulders.
Our accompanying music is by Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock.
In 1895, when she was 15, she visited Queen Victoria in England, who wrote in her diary:
The young Queen … still has her hair hanging loose. She is slender and graceful, and makes an impression as a very intelligent and very cute girl. She speaks good English and knows how to behave with charming manners.
Enthroned in 1898 at 18 years old and married at 20, life moved fast for the young Queen Wilhelmina.
There was considerable pressure on Wilhelmina to produce an heir. Many people believed her heir presumptive—a German Prince with close associations with the Imperial family—would fold the Netherlands into the German Empire if he ever came to power.
After 8 years, two miscarriages and a stillborn son, the whole country was overjoyed when Princess Juliana was born in 1909. Although Wilhelmina suffered two further miscarriages, the birth of Juliana had assured the royal family of Orange-Nassau would continue.
Wilhelmina’s father, King William III, was 63 when she was born. He would only live another 10 years, but these were said to be the best years of his reign. Wilhelmina’s mother, Queen Emma, had a calming effect on her father’s impulsiveness. The marriage was a very happy one.
This stable environment must have given Wilhelmina a good start in life. She was strong willed and knew exactly what she wanted. With a keen business mind, her investment acumen made her the world’s richest woman, and the first female billionaire.
Such confidence showed itself early in her reign. At age 20, she ordered a Dutch warship to evacuate Paul Kruger from South Africa’s embattled Transvaal—an independent country until defeated in 1902 by the British in the Second Boer War, when it became a colony under British rule.
The Transvaal region of South Africa was inhabited by Boers—descendants of Dutch-speaking settlers. Many people of the Netherlands, including Wilhelmina, felt close ties with the Boers. For this reason, she disliked the United Kingdom intensely.
Her feelings towards Britain changed by the start of World War II when King George VI sent a British warship, this time to evacuate her and her family, along with her Government, to the safety of British shores.
The BBC provided its facilities so that Wilhelmina could broadcast to her people in the German-occupied Netherlands. Seen as a symbol of resistance, she called Hitler “the arch-enemy of mankind”. At great risk, many Dutch people tuned in to listen to her late-night broadcasts. Churchill described her as the only real man among the governments-in-exile in London.
On 4 September 1948, after a reign of 57 years and 286 days, Wilhelmina stepped down, handing the crown to her daughter Juliana. The influence of the Dutch monarchy had begun to decline, but the country still loved its royal family. Wilhelmina retreated to Het Loo Palace, making few public appearances until the devastating North Sea flood of 1953. Once again she rallied the Dutch people.
At the time of her death a New York Times obituary sums up what the Dutch people thought of their Queen Wilhelmina during World War II:
Although celebration of the Queen’s birthday was forbidden by the Germans, it was commemorated nevertheless. When churchgoers in the small fishing town of Huizen rose and sang one verse of the Dutch national anthem, Wilhelmus van Nassauwe, on the Queen’s birthday, the town paid a fine of 60,000 guilders (over half a million US dollars today).
Imagine you’ve been invited to dinner at Downton Abbey.
It’s the first season covering the period around 1912-1914.
The decade leading up to our dinner at Downton saw the rise of Haute Couture; French for “high fashion” with its exclusive tailored clothing.
Paris was the fashion capital of the world and designers outfitted models with their finest clothes, sending them to Longchamp Races to show off the latest styles.
A new female silhouette had emerged from design houses Callot Soeurs and Paul Poiret. The new form-fitting gowns featured narrow skirts and raised waistlines and required a “straight line” corset, also known as the S-bend or health corset. It had a very rigid, straight busk, forcing the torso forward.
During Season One of Downton Abbey, a narrow-hipped and narrow skirted silhouette was all the rage.
Listed below are actual evening dresses from the period, donated by various wealthy families to the collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
An Edwardian lady in full dress was a wonder to behold, and her preparations for viewing were awesome.William Manchester.
What will you wear for dinner at Downton? Vote for your favorites.
Recommended reading & viewing:
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Alexander Palace was the favorite residence of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas Alexandrovich Romanov—Tsar Nicholas II.
Nicholas was born there on 18 May 1868. His father, then Tsarevich Alexander, recorded the event in his diary,
God sent us a son whom we named Nicholas. What a joy it was! It is impossible to imagine. I sprang to embrace my darling wife, and she instantly became cheerful and was terribly happy. I had been weeping like a child but suddenly my heart became light and cheerful.
But after the Russian Revolution of 1917, it would become a prison for Nicholas and his family.
When Nicholas II inherited the Russian throne from his father, who died at just 49, he was not ready for the huge responsibility. He told a close friend,
I am not prepared to be a tsar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling.
He quickly married Princess Alexandra Feodorovna and the couple had their first child, Olga, in 1895.
The following year, at his formal coronation, thousands of people were trampled to death as the crowd of 100,000 rushed to get a share of free food and beer.
Nicholas was advised to attend a gala with the French ambassador that same evening—a bad omen as the city mourned its dead and saw him as uncaring.
By 1901, Alexandra had given him another three daughters—Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. Then in 1904, she gave birth to their only son Alexei. That same year, Japan attacked Russia.
Nicholas’s mismanagement resulted in multiple defeats and the loss of the Russian fleet. In 1905, a large but peaceful demonstration ascended on St Petersburg to appeal to Nicholas for improved working conditions.
Troops fired on the crowds and over 1000 were killed. It would be called “Bloody Sunday”.
The family moved from the official residence of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg to the safer confines of Alexander Palace. They remodeled much of he interior and added modern conveniences like telephones, an elevator, and a screening booth for watching movies.
Over the course of WWI, Russia endured major losses on the war front and suffered abject poverty and high inflation at home. The Russian public laid the blame squarely on the monarchy.
On 15 March 1917, Nicholas II abdicated the throne and was placed under house arrest, initially at Alexander Palace.
What did those last months feel like for the Romanovs? Did Nicholas even believe they were in danger? Alexei’s tutor, Pierre Gillard wrote,
In their spare time, free from studies, the Empress and her daughters were engaged in sewing something, embroidering or weaving, but they were never idle…They cleaned paths in the park from snow, chopped ice for the cellar, cut dry branches or old trees, storing firewood for the future winter. With the arrival of the warmer weather, the entire family worked on an extensive kitchen-garden.
In August 1917 they were transferred out of their beloved palace. Less than a year later, the entire family would be brutally executed. If their ghosts could choose, they would have returned home to the beautiful Alexander Palace.
Interested in learning more?
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The First World War caused suffering on a scale that had not been seen before.
Advancements in technological and industrial sophistication wreaked unexpected devastation on armies using outmoded tactics from an earlier time.
“In Flanders Fields” is a war poem written by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae that immortalized the poppy as a symbol of Remembrance.
Click here to read the entire poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
The story goes that McCrae was unhappy with the poem and threw it away, but it was saved by fellow soldiers and published in London’s Punch magazine.
McCrae fought at Ypres and had to bury a close friend in the fields of Flanders, Belgium.
He noticed how quickly poppies grew around the graves.
The poem’s reference to red poppies helped make the poppy internationally recognized as a symbol of Remembrance Day.
The First World War was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history.
The Allies lost around 6 million military personnel and the Central Powers lost around 4 million.
It was called “the war to end war”.
Samuel Barber’s haunting Adagio for Strings brings home the immense sadness of a world at war.
In this landmark, Pulitzer Prize–winning account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates the first month of World War I: thirty days in the summer of 1914 that determined the course of the conflict, the century, and ultimately our present world.
“A fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature.”—The New York Times.
“ has a vitality that transcends its narrative virtues, which are considerable, and its feel for characterizations, which is excellent.”—The Wall Street Journal.
“More dramatic than fiction . . . a magnificent narrative—beautifully organized, elegantly phrased, skillfully paced and sustained.”—Chicago Tribune.
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke was a Danish author best known for her memoir Out of Africa, written under the pen name Isak Dinesen and adapted into the Academy Award-winning motion picture Out of Africa, directed by Sydney Pollack.
Karen Blixen lived a tumultuous life: her father hanged himself when she was 10; she contracted syphilis from her philandering husband, leaving her unable to have children; she lost the love of her life—Denys Finch Hatton—in a plane crash when he was just 44; her African farm—a coffee plantation—failed, forcing her to return home to Denmark bankrupt.
If life’s lessons are borne of experience, then Karen Blixen earned her doctorate living in Africa. Her memoirs of the seventeen years in British East Africa (now Kenya) became a best-selling book and multi-award-winning film.
I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the north, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up; near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.
It was memories of her experiences that mattered to Karen Blixen—moments that “fixed ” themselves in her mind.
Still, we often talked on the farm of the Safaris that we had been on. Camping places fix themselves in your mind as if you had spent long periods of your life in them. You will remember a curve of your wagon track in the grass of the plain, like the features of a friend.
Of her deep love for Denys Finch Hatton—the aristocratic big game hunter (played by Robert Redford in the movie) and major character in her memoir, she wrote,
I am for all time and eternity bound to Denys, to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves.
Baroness Blixen learned that enormous obstacles can be overcome one step at a time.
When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.
And how challenges help us appreciate life and put things into perspective.
Difficult times have helped me to understand better than before how infinitely rich and beautiful life is in every way, and that so many things that one goes worrying about are of no importance whatsoever.
On seeing what lies ahead in the future, she wrote,
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
As a landowner, Karen Blixen wielded great power over her tenants, but she respected and admired native Africans.
It is more than their land that you take away from the people whose native land you take. It is their past as well, their roots and their identity. If you take away the things that they have been used to see, and will be expecting to see, you may, in a way, as well take out their eyes.
Karen felt that dreams set you free.
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom.
In the 1920’s, many European settlers from the aristocratic elite saw British East Africa (Kenya) as a timeless paradise.
The views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.
When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same in all her music.
To a large part, life has its own plan for us. Karen Blixen found truth in the proverb “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”, yet she experienced life to the full and found success in adversity.
Some say Karen Blixen died from the effects of syphilis, others that it was anorexia nervosa that killed her. During the 1950’s, her health declined and she had a third of her stomach removed due to an ulcer. She passed away in 1962 at the age of 77.
The suburb in Kenya where once she had a coffee plantation is named after her—simply, “Karen”.
When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
Listen to John Barry’s beautiful score as you scroll through images of Kenya … and maybe you will fall in love with Africa.
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Robert Redford and Meryl Streep in one of the screen’s great epic romances. Directed by Oscar winner Sydney Pollack, Out of Africa is the fascinating true story of Karen Blixen, a strong-willed woman who, with her philandering husband (Klaus Maria Brandauer), runs a coffee plantation in Kenya, circa 1914. To her astonishment, she soon discovers herself falling in love with the land, its people and a mysterious white hunter (Redford).
With the soundtrack to Out of Africa, composer John Barry really “delivered on his intent: a lush, romantic masterpiece for the ages.”—John McCulley.
In a dusty old Parisian apartment in 2010, a startling discovery was made.
No one had set foot on the premises for 70 years.
Hidden, as if in a time capsule, was a portrait by the Italian artist Giovanni Boldini.
It was of Marthe de Florian, a French actress and demimondaine during the Belle Époque. She was known for having famous lovers including a string of French premiers—Georges Clemenceau, Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, Paul Deschanel, and Gaston Doumergue.
The apartment belonged to de Florian’s granddaughter, who left Paris to live in the South of France at the outbreak of World War 2, and never returned.
Evidence of the painting’s authenticity lay in a love-letter and a biographical reference dating it to 1888, when the actress was 24.
Boldini is best known for his dazzling, elegant depictions of fashionable high society women.
A 1933 Time magazine article called Boldini the “Master of Swish”—one look at his striking, fluid brushstrokes explains why.
He was preeminently the artist of the Edwardian era, of the pompadour, the champagne supper and the ribbon-trimmed chemiseTime Magazine.
Born in Ferrara in 1842, the son of a painter of religious subjects, he moved to Florence to study painting when he was 20 and met the “Macchiaioli”—Italian precursors to Impressionism. It was their influence that set him on a course initially as a landscape artist, then as a portraitist.
On moving to London, he found fame painting society members including the Duchess of Westminster and Lady Holland.
From 1872, he lived in Paris, where he befriended Edgar Degas and became the most fashionable portraitist in Paris.
He lived to be 88, having married only two years earlier. At his wedding breakfast, he made a little speech:
It is not my fault if I am so old, it’s something which has happened to me all at once.
Vote for your favorites from the “master of swish” as you listen to The Swan by Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns.
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Today, the term “lady” is often used as a civil term of respect for a woman, as is “gentleman” for a man.
But there was a time when its purpose was to address women of high social class or status.
During the Middle Ages, princesses or daughters of the blood royal were usually known by their first names with “The Lady” prefixed, e.g. The Lady Elizabeth.
The Renaissance lady is described by Italian courtier, author, and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione (1478 – 1529) in his handbook for the nobility, The Book of the Courtier, (Amazon affiliate link) in which he writes that she was the equivalent of the courtier, with the same virtues of mind and equivalent education.
Castiglione writes that although culture was an accomplishment for the noblewoman and man alike—used to charm others as much as to develop the self—for the lady, charm had become the primary occupation and aim.
knowledge of letters, of music, of painting, and . . . how to dance and how to be festive.
Whereas the courtier’s chief task is defined as the profession of arms, a Lady’s pleasing affability is becoming above all else, whereby she will be able to entertain graciously every kind of man.
By Victorian times, ladies etiquette had become a fine art. Several handbooks provided advice on the complexities and nuances, none other than Florence Hartley’s The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness (Amazon affiliate link) advises that a lady should have knowledge of the forms and customs of society and how to show the gentle courtesies of life.
Emphasizing just how important dress was to the Victorian lady, is this Florence Hartley quote:
‘A lady is never so well dressed as when you cannot remember what she wears.’ No truer remark than the above was ever made. Such an effect can only be produced where every part of the dress harmonizes entirely with the other parts, where each color or shade suits the wearer’s style completely, and where there is perfect neatness in each detail. One glaring color, or conspicuous article, would entirely mar the beauty of such a dress.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary describes the formal use of “lady” as a title of nobility:
any of various titled women in Great Britain —used as the customary title of (1) a marchioness, countess, viscountess, or baroness or (2) the wife of a knight, baronet, member of the peerage, or one having the courtesy title of lord and used as a courtesy title for the daughter of a duke, marquess, or earl.
Here are twelve portraits of titled ladies from the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian eras.
In 1839, a blue diamond weighing over forty-five carats appeared in the collection catalogue of London banker and diamond collector, Henry Phillip Hope.
It would become known as the Hope Diamond, and is famously alleged to have been surrounded by bad luck.
Many owners of the cursed gem met with a grisly death, family tragedy, or a hapless fate.
King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who owned the diamond were beheaded.
Other owners and their families experienced suicides, marriage break-ups, bankruptcy, deaths in car crashes, falls off cliffs, mental breakdowns, and deaths through drug overdoses.
Most grisly of all was perhaps the death of the man who discovered—or some say, stole—the diamond in 1642.
Today, spectators gaze in awe at the Hope Diamond through a thick glass in its case at the National Gem Collection of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D. C.
Here are 10 amazing facts about the “the most famous diamond in the world”.
1
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier acquired the precursor to the Hope Diamond
A French merchant-traveler named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier obtained the stone in 1642 in India, either by purchase, or, as some think more likely, through deception and murder.
Tavernier returned to Paris with a large uncut diamond that became known as the Tavernier Blue diamond and sold it to King Louis XIV.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous dubious reports claimed that the Tavernier Blue was pilfered from the eye of a sculpture of the Hindu goddess Sita.
There is a myth that Tavernier was later torn apart by wild dogs because of the diamond’s curse.
2
The Tavernier Blue was the Precursor to the Hope Diamond
The Tavernier Blue was a crudely cut triangular shaped stone of an estimated 115 carats (23.0 g).
Tavernier’s book, the Six Voyages, contains sketches of several large diamonds that he sold to Louis XIV c.1668.
One of the historical fabrications regarding this gem suggests that it is as large as a man’s fist. However, the reality is that it measures slightly over an inch in both length and width, and is half an inch deep (32.89 x 27.65 x 12.92 mm).
In 2005, 3D imaging technology was used to confirm beyond doubt that the Tavernier Blue was the precursor to the French Blue—and subsequently the Hope Diamond.
3
King Louis XV’s Order of the Golden Fleece
In 1678, Louis XIV had his court jeweler, Jean Pitau, recut the Tavernier Blue into a 67.125 carat diamond, which became known as the French Blue.
Louis’ descendant, King Louis XV, had the French Blue set into a more elaborate jewelled pendant for the Order of the Golden Fleece by court jeweler André Jacquemin.
The assembled piece included a red spinel of 107 carats shaped as a dragon breathing “covetous flames”, as well as 83 red-painted diamonds and 112 yellow-painted diamonds to suggest a fleece shape.
King Louis XV died of smallpox at the Palace of Versailles.
The diamond became the property of his grandson, the ill-fated Louis XVI.
Image credit: Francoisfarges.
4
A cursed King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
During the reign of her husband, Marie Antoinette wore many of the French Crown Jewels for personal use and had the gems placed in new settings and combinations.
In January 1793, King Louis XVI was guillotined, followed by Marie in October. Some said their beheadings were a direct result of the diamond’s “curse”.
During the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, most of the Crown jewels were stolen. The French Blue mysteriously vanished.
5
Is Queen Maria Luisa of Spain Wearing the Diamond?
No one knows for sure, but the French blue is thought to have made its way to Spain.
This famous portrait of Queen Maria Luisa of Spain by Francisco Goya (1746–1828) shows her wearing what was believed to be the stolen French Blue.
Soon after goya painted this portrait, Maria Luisa was forced to abdicate and flee the country.
Was this the curse of the French Blue?
6
Caroline Of Brunswick Became a Smuggler of Hope
On September 11, 1792, during the early stages of the French Revolution, Louis XVI and his family were held captive in the Palais des Tuileries near the Place de la Concorde.
Thieves broke into the Royal Storehouse and over five days of looting most of the Crown Jewels were stolen.
The French Blue was cut into the Hope Diamond in an attempt to prevent its proper identification.
Caroline Of Brunswick—the wife of King George IV of the United Kingdom—is rumored to have played a part in smuggling the Hope Diamond into England.
7
The Hope Diamond was Sold to Pay George IV’s Debts
In 1812, a deep blue diamond described by John Francillion as weighing 177 grains (4 grains = 1 carat) was documented as being in the possession of London diamond merchant, Daniel Eliason.
Strong evidence indicates that the stone was the recut French Blue—the same stone known today as the Hope Diamond.
Several references suggest that it was acquired by King George IV of the United Kingdom.
At his death, in 1830, the king’s debts were so great that the blue diamond was privately sold to pay them.
8
Actress May Yohe Died Penniless. The Diamond’s curse?
In 1894, American musical theatre actress May Yohé married Lord Francis Hope—heir to the Hope fortune—and possessed the Hope Diamond.
She divorced Lord Hope eight years later, followed by a string of failed marriages with handsome adventurers.
May Yohé performed in London’s West End and music hall and vauderville on the US West Coast, but suffered frequent financial woes and died penniless.
9
Pierre Cartier’s Famous Sales Pitch
Pierre Cartier, the Parisian jeweler, is widely credited with publicizing the stories of a curse on the diamond in hopes of increasing its saleability.
When publishing magnate Edward Beale McLean and his socialite wife Evalyn Walsh visited Paris in 1910, Pierre wasted no time in arranging to meet the wealthy couple at their hotel.
As the McLeans sipped their breakfast tea, Cartier, a mischievous glint in his eye, spun tales of the diamond’s past—from gilded Versailles to a Sultan’s opulent harem. The whispers of a curse swirled about, but Evalyn, ever the iconoclast, scoffed. “Bad luck objects for me are lucky,” she declared, a challenge sparking in her eyes. Pierre, with a flourish, unveiled the sparkling mystery, its brilliance cutting through the Parisian morning. Would fortune favor the fearless McLeans?
Cartier made sure to add a clause to the sale agreement, stating: “Should any fatality occur to the family of Edward B. McLean within six months, the said Hope diamond is agreed to be exchanged for jewelry of equal value”.
10
Evalyn Walsh and the Hope’s Curse
Seven years after purchasing the Hope Diamond, The McLean’s first-born son, nine-year-old Vinson Walsh McLean, was killed by a car outside their house.
In 1932, she was conned out of $100,000 (about $2 million today) by a grifter connected with the Lindbergh kidnapping. Some accounts say she even pawned the Hope Diamond, albeit for a short time until the con-artist was apprehended.
By 1933, the McLeans had divorced and Edward B. McLean was declared legally insane. He died of a heart attack in 1941 at the age of 51.
Evalyn died of pneumonia at age 60 and bequeathed the diamond to her grandchildren.
However, the designated trustees obtained permission to sell the Hope Diamond to help pay Evalyn’s debts.
Harry Winston, the jeweler who bought the Hope Diamond from the Walsh estate, donated it to the Smithsonian.
Had the curse ended at long last?
As a Smithsonian curator aptly declared, the Hope Diamond has brought “nothing but good luck” to the non-profit museum.” Its arrival helped build a “world-class gem collection” and attendance has soared.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919), or “TR” as he’s affectionately called, was the 26th President of the United States and a leading force of the Progressive Era. He was also an author, explorer, soldier, naturalist, and reformer.
Although sickly as a child, suffering debilitating asthma, he regained health through a strenuous lifestyle. His high-spirited personality, broad range of interests, and “cowboy” persona made him world-famous.
Ranked by scholars as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents, his face adorns Mount Rushmore alongside Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
Here are six of TR’s best-known quotes that helped make him an icon.
1. Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground
Dream big, but keep it grounded in reality. Roosevelt was a Republican Progressive with high ideals. Biographer H. W. Brands notes, “Even his friends occasionally wondered whether there wasn’t any custom or practice too minor for him to try to regulate, update or otherwise improve.”
But Roosevelt kept his feet firmly planted on the ground by making conservation a top priority. He established national parks, forests, and monuments in order to preserve the nation’s natural wonders.
He reached for the stars but never got too big for his boots.
2. Believe you can and you’re halfway there
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According to the Mayo Clinic, low self-esteem can be harmful to virtually all areas of our lives, including relationships, career, and health.
Teddy Roosevelt overcame severe asthma as a sickly child to become the very model of masculine health. His secret? Self-belief.
No matter how disadvantaged we may think we are, positive self-belief can transform our lives.
One look at the conviction in TRs eyes gives me goosebumps—that’s the look of self-belief.
3. Do what you can, with what you have, where you are
At the outbreak of war with Spain in 1898, the US Army was much smaller than it had been during the Civil War. President McKinley called upon volunteers to form a regiment initially called “Wood’s Weary Walkers” after commander Colonel Leonard Wood. Although they were supposed to be cavalry, they had to make do with fighting on foot.
Second in command was Theodore Roosevelt who later took charge and renamed his volunteers the “Rough Riders”.
In the Battle of San Juan of the Spanish–American War, the Rough Riders gained notoriety for doing what they could, with what they had, where they were.
On the day of the big fight I had to ask my men to do a deed that European military writers consider utterly impossible of performance, that is, to attack over open ground an unshaken infantry armed with the best modern repeating rifles behind a formidable system of entrenchments. The only way to get them to do it in the way it had to be done was to lead them myself.
4. Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care
This is quite possibly the most powerful of TRs quotes because of the breadth and depth of its implications.
Whether you’re leading a team or organization, a road-warrior salesperson, a customer service agent, a medical practitioner, a marketing executive … whatever you do in life, the same wisdom applies—nobody really cares what you say until they believe how much you care.
5. Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far
The exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis.
That’s how Roosevelt described his brand of foreign policy that became known as “Big Stick ideology”.
He used military muscle several times throughout his two terms with a more subtle touch to complement his diplomatic policies. But he also used Big Stick ideology in other contexts, with an emphasis on diplomacy.
In 1902, 140,000 miners went on strike, wanting higher pay, shorter work hours, and better housing.
The prospect of a coal shortage posed a serious threat to the fragile economy of the time. But instead of sending in the military as was the norm before Roosevelt, he hosted a meeting in the White House involving mining union representatives and mining company leaders.
When the miners voted to continue with the strike, Roosevelt used the military, not for force, but to run the mines in the “public interest”.
The mining companies realized they were losing profits, and so gave in to the miners’ demands.
Roosevelt could wield just as much power with a pen as he could with a sword.
The pen is mightier than the swordEdward Bulwer-Lytton
6. Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing
We spend most of our waking hours at work and our jobs can influence our lives beyond the workplace. The type of work we do is part of our identity and can reflect what’s important to us.
Research by Brent D. Rosso, PhD, showed that when people find meaning in their work, it increases motivation, engagement, empowerment, career development, job satisfaction, individual performance and personal fulfillment—and also decreases absenteeism and stress (Research in Organizational Behavior, 2010).
Suggestions for Further Reading
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In 1911, Robert Falcon Scott” Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868 – 1912) led a team of five heroes into the freezing wastelands of Antarctica …
The main objective of this expedition is to reach the South Pole, and to secure for The British Empire the honour of this achievement.
The “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” was a period when the Antarctic continent became the focus of an international effort for scientific and geographical exploration.
Ten countries launched 17 major Antarctic expeditions at a time when success hinged on feats of personal courage that tested human endurance to the very limit.
Heroes were born, some of whom did not survive the experience.
This is the story of the South Pole march of the British Terra Nova Expedition team—the last leg of a journey to the end of the world, and one that would bring bitter disappointment and heartbreaking tragedy.
The team were in high spirits on board the Steam Yacht Terra Nova and disembarked with enthusiasm for the voyage of a lifetime.
On 17 January 1912, Scott arrived at the South Pole only to find Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition had already set up camp.
In his journal, he wrote,
Great God! This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.
Scott had been beaten, and now faced an 800-mile trek back to base camp. With 150 miles to go, Scott and his companions were caught in a blizzard and perished.
He kept a journal with a moving account of their tragic demise as they slowly froze to death.
The whole team knew what they were up against, as Scott had described a storm the year earlier:
We have had the worst gale I have ever known … The wind started at about mid-day on Friday … exceeding 70 m.p.h. I was struck with the impossibility of enduring such conditions for any length of time. One seemed to be robbed of breath; the fine snow beat in behind the wind guard, and ten paces against the wind were sufficient to reduce one’s face to the verge of frostbite.
Their struggle back to base camp showed the bravery, courage, and honor of these five men.
Knowing his severe frostbite was slowing the team’s progress, Lawrence Oates sacrificed his own life to improve the chance of survival for his companions.
On the morning of March 16, Oates walked out of their tent into the blizzard and certain death in the -40°F temperatures.
According to Scott’s diary, these were Oates’ last words before he left the tent:
I am just going outside and may be some time.
Meet some of the other heroes on Scott’s team.
Although Amundsen’s Norwegian team used dogs exclusively, Scott’s team relied on ponies to do much of the hauling, which were ill-suited to work on snow and ice without snow-shoes.
A team of 11 dogs would sometimes pull a load of 1,000 lbs a distance of 15 miles in four hours.
On Thursday, March 29th, Scott made the final entry in his Journal:
Since the 21st, we have had a continuous gale from W.S.W. and S.W. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. SCOTT. For God’s sake look after our people.
Following the news of his death, Scott became an iconic British hero, a status reflected by the many permanent memorials erected across the nation. Scholars have debated Scott’s legend, and although some questions were raised about his character and errors by his team, they concluded that the ill-fated outcome of the expedition was largely due to misfortune.
Scott’s mission was not in vain. His team made groundbreaking scientific discoveries. Of the 2,000 specimens of animals collected, including 400 new discoveries, the most important was a trio of Emperor penguin eggs—seen as long-awaited proof of Darwin’s theory of evolution.