Archive · Art · People
Oscar Nemon at Work on His Sculpted Portraits of Sigmund Freud. In 1920, when Nemon was a very young sculptor and an entranced admirer of the celebrated psychologist's work, he approached Freud through one of his pupils with a request to be allowed to model him, but Freud
NB! · Art · Monarchies · Humour
Take a porcelain cup, fit it with a silver stem, and you have a goblet. So thought some craftsman of the Elizabethan age. Four hundred and some years on, this hybrid goblet of the Ming Dynasty and Elizabeth I has fetched a tidy sum
NB! · Archive · Art · Observations · Mores
Looking through sketches of French Art Nouveau interiors, I came upon some curious curtains that might easily have belonged to an old Soviet interior. At any rate, I keep at home valances and throws from the early twentieth century with almost exactly the same pattern
Art · Monarchies · Museums · People
Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, hunting with hounds. Louis-Auguste Brun, 1783. The painting is on display on the ground floor of Versailles. It is currently being shown at the exhibition of the Rothschild collection; last year it featured in the exhibition The King's Animals.
NB! · Art · Paris · Pop Culture
NB! · Art · Nature
Still life with cherries and strawberries. And also with bread, wines and olives. Of living nature, the picture admits a dragonfly and a butterfly. By the Southern Netherlandish Baroque painter Osias Beert
Faith · Art
Saint Zosimas of Palestine Gives Saint Mary of Egypt Communion of the Holy Mysteries. An icon by the Cretan painter Emmanuel Lambardos, 1603.
NB! · Art
The Kiss. Christopher Bisschop (1828-1904)
Art · Monarchies · Museums · Rome
The Prada Foundation in Milan has put on show a re-created copy of the 13-metre marble statue of the Emperor Constantine, dating from the 4th century, of which 20 fragments survive to this day, kept in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The head, right arm, right knee, right
Archive · Art · Books
In 1874 Julia Margaret Cameron, one of the most celebrated women photographers and portraitists of the nineteenth century, created a series of allegorical portraits of the heroes of the Arthurian legends to illustrate "Idylls of the King", a collection of poems on the legends of King Arthur by
Art · Books · Museums · Ethnography
"Ruslan and Lyudmila", Pushkin. This is what one of the oldest surviving knotted carpets in the world looks like: a Norwegian tapestry of the 12th century from Baldishol, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
Architecture · Art · Observations
Inside a cello. Charles Brooks. Hands up, all those who would like a house that looks like this on the inside. Perfection, if you ask me.