Faces with stories ………..

I am looking at the face of a young woman, and what makes the image very remarkable is that it sat at the bottom of the sea for nearly 160 years amongst the wreckage of S.S. Central America which sank in 1857 off the coast of South Carolina.

But not the Mona Lisa of the Deep, 2023

Now the story of the picture, the ship and the mystery woman are there on the internet, and  as ever I will not presume to lift other people’s research and writing*

Other than to say that the image is an example of a daguerreotype “which was made on a silver-plated copper plate, polished to a mirror finish, then sensitized by exposing the plate to the fumes of iodine or bromine. 

After being exposed to light through a lens, the image was developed by exposing the plate to the fumes of mercury until the direct positive image appeared, then fixed in a bath of sodium thiosulfate or ordinary salt”.**

In all 100 images were recovered but many were too degraded to offer up a face, but there are ten which are very clear.

And of the 10 this one has captured the imagination of many and has gained the name of the “Mona Lisa of the Deep”.  It was found a pile of coal on the sea bed.

Just who she was remains a mystery but my old school friend Richard Woods who sent over the image thinks “there is a possible resemblance to Ellen Lewis Herndon, who was the daughter of the captain of the SS Central America, although the image I have come across was taken at an older age”.

Astarte Syriaca, 1877

Who ever she was there is no escaping the vividness of the image, and that set me thinking of the heaps of photographs and paintings I have come across over the years, and the stories that sit behind the faces staring back at us.

And that in turn prompted me to think about a series of Pre Raphaelite paintings many of which are in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery.

Of these the paintings Astarte Syriaca** and the Bower Meadow are two of my favourites. 

Both were painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and feature Jane Morris.  She was the wife of William Morris, the socialist and leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement.

William Morris remains one of those 19th century figures I am drawn to.  His book News from Nowhere, and his designs have long been part of our house.

But if I am honest I have always also been captivated by images of Jane Morris which might be a bit questionable given that she was born in 1839 and died just 35 years before I was born.

Not that being married stopped her from a romantic entanglement with Rossetti or later with the poet and political activist, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who despite standing as a Tory and then a Liberal Parliamentary candidate was an anti-Imperialist, who campaigned for Irish independence, and challenged the motives of those who supported the Empire. 

Proserpina, 1876

Now I knew nothing of Jane’s romantic attachments when I first came across her in the City Art Gallery.  Nor that she had been born in what used to be called “humble circumstances”  or that her mother was illiterate and according to one source her own education had been limited, which “probably was destined to go into domestic service like her mother…… [but after her engagement to William Morris] …… she was privately educated to become a gentleman's wife. Her keen intelligence allowed her to recreate herself. 

She was a voracious reader who became proficient in French and Italian, and she became an accomplished pianist with a strong background in classical music. Her manners and speech became refined to an extent that contemporaries referred to her as ‘queenly.’ 

Later in life, she had no trouble moving in upper-class circles. She was the model for the heroine of the 1884 novel Miss Brown by Vernon Lee and may also have influenced George Bernard Shaw in creating the character of Eliza Doolittle in his play Pygmalion (1914) and the later film My Fair Lady (1964). She also became a skilled needlewoman, self-taught in ancient embroidery techniques, and later became renowned for her own embroideries.”**** 

The Meadow Bower, 1872

Although there is a suggestion that her work as an embroider with that of her sister never got the full recognition that it deserved when she worked in the firm of which William Morris was a partner.

And that pretty much is that, other than to say this has been one of those twisty turney stories which started off with a ship wreck and a mystery woman in a picture and by degrees led me to William Morris and heap of things about Jane Morris.

All of which confirms that observation that history is messy and can take you off in all sorts of directions, and along the way highlights the poverty and lost chances of so many in 19th century Britain and the lucky chance that allowed one young woman destined for domestic service to warp off in a totally different direction.

I would like to have included that stunning image of the young woman plucked from the sea, but as yet I do not have permission from the company who who hold the rights to the image to publish it.

Hence the substituted image Not the Mona Lisa

It is a shame but falls into that domain of copyright issues of which I am a staunch supporter.

That said there is perhaps a difference between a work produced by an individual and one acquired by a company even if they went to the cost of preserving it.

But if that permission does finally come through there may be a story about its preservation by the Paul Messier Studio.

We shall see.

And in the meantime there are plenty of images of the young woman out there posted by people who have secured permission or just don't care.

Another not the Mona Lisa of the Deep

Location; the 19th century

Pictures; , Astarte Syriaca, 1877, and Meadow Bower, 1872,Dante Gabriel Rossetti Manchester City Art Gallery, and Proserpina, 1876, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Art Gallery 

* Doomed ship of gold’s ghostly picture gallery is plucked from the seabed, Dalya Alberge, The Guardian, February 27th, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/feb/27/doomed-ship-of-golds-ghostly-picture-gallery-is-plucked-from-the-seabed and Mona Lisa of the Deep, Professional Photographers of America, Sunken treasure, Amanda Arnold • November 2022 Issue, https://www.ppa.com/ppmag/articles/mona-lisa-of-the-deep

**Stuart Williams

***Astarte Syriaca, Manchester City Art Galley, https://manchesterartgallery.org/explore/title/?mag-object-163

****Jane Morris, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Morris

Hard Times a painting and a story

This is one of those paintings I come back to time and time again, and each time it prompts me to reflect on how little I know about those men and women who migrated across the country looking for work.  

These four may stand for many.  They have few possessions, only what they carry in the blankets along with his tools.

The journey has been long and you sense that the children and their mother cannot go much further.  But he stands resolute gazing across the fields to where there might be work and shelter.

Hard Times was painted by Hubert von Herkomer in 1885 and hangs in the Manchester City Art Gallery.

It crops up fairly regularly in books and on the covers of novels of 19th century rural life, and has generated its fair share of criticism.

At the time there were those who were repelled by its realism while later others have argued that it over idealises the labourer, seeking to contrast the tired and forlorn figures at his feet with his own steadfast confidence that in the distance there will be work and the promise of better times.

I cannot pretend that I have that depth of knowledge or even that ability to really get under the painting but as that caricature of low brow culture often says, “I know what I likes” and I do like this painting.

For me who has spent some time describing the landscape of rural Chorlton in the 1840s as well as the lives of the people who lived here Hard Times works for me.

I can almost feel the chill in the winter air and hear the sound of the rooks with their piercing and ugly cries breaking the silence of  the empty sky.

At the same time I recognise that landscape.

Look at the OS map for the township in the 1840s and there in the fields behind the hedgerows are the same ponds and water courses as well as the twisting lanes which seem to follow no logical route other than they were determined by ancient field boundaries and natural obstacles.

Just how many such wandering families passed through Chorlton is unrecorded but enough of our farmers had shippons where their labourers were accommodated above the cattle.

And there were plenty of people living in Chorlton during the middle years of the century to suggest that our population was no stay at home bunch who never went more than the next village.

Now Hard Times was painted in 1885 just one year before Thomas Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge with that memorable opening sentence,

“One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one third of its span a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon- Priors, in Upper Wessex on foot.”

And it may be that there is more than a hint that here we are dealing with people who while they are on the margins of poverty experiencing hard times, do have a dignity and determination about them.  A little over forty years earlier many would have been self educated, and pursued a variety of interests from literature to the natural sciences.

Men like the shoe maker Richard Buxton and his fellow botanists who were hand loom weavers who in their spare time roamed the countryside around Manchester recording the plant life and discussing their finds in working class societies.

While here in the township there were those of energy and determination who worked hard, left the fields to play in our brass band, raised money for church and lay buildings and participated in the local democracy of the community.

Now I do have a romantic side, but history has taught me that you cannot draw too cosy a picture of rural life in the 19th century.

Work was long and often interspersed with periods of unemployment, living conditions could be basic and pretty uncomfortable and the ever present threat of ill health, lack of work or just bad luck could pitch almost every labouring family into poverty and destitution with a spell in the workhouse.

Which brings me back to the painting.  Now true it depicts a real moment of hard times but it suggests that there is a dignity and nobility in these unknown people on the tramp and that will do for me.

Oh and I have learnt that Hubert von Herkomer, who was born in 1849 and died in 1914, was not only a painter but also a pioneering film director and composer.

Picture; Hard Times, by Hubert von Herkomer, 1885 Manchester City Art Gallery, taken from Wikipedia common and in the public domain because the copyright has expired.