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Pieter Brueghel's village lawyer, 1615.
I love 17th and C18th art that made commentary on social issues in the communities where the artists lived. William Hogarth (1697-1764), for example, documented the seamy side of life in England,...
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London's East End - my grandmother's life
My paternal grandmother’s descriptions of living in the East End of London were fascinating, but I never knew how accurate her memories were. And there was no way I was going to discover details about...
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stunning Belle Epoque architecture in Nice - lost and "recovered"
The city of Nice in southern France has long attracted holiday makers from the north. The construction of the Promenade des Anglais in 1820 suggests that the town council was actively targeting British...
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the birth of democracy in Australia - Eureka Stockade 1854
The Eureka Stockade Rebellion (Dec 1854) was fought between rough and rugged gold miners, on one hand, and the British Colonial forces in Australia, on the other. There is not a primary school student...
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Kandinsky and Schoenberg - what a disaster !
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was born in Vienna. I don’t suppose his Jewish parents were very pleased when their son converted to Lutheranism as an adolescent in 1898, but perhaps he felt his career...
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Rasputin: a short life and an ugly one
Grigory Rasputin (1869–1916) was an illiterate Siberian peasant who had a religious vision in the early 1890s and from then on, led the life of a mystic and sage. Frances Welch tells a great story in...
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Paul Klee at the Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Berlin
Born in Switzerland, Paul Klee (1879-1940) started out as a musician like his parents but soon chose to study painting in Munich during the years 1898-1901. After finishing at the Academy, he visited...
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Coleridge's small cottage, great poems, sad marriage and opium
I saw the two comedians, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, in their 2010 film, The Trip. The road trip to Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Lake District was to review restaurants for a major British daily. But...
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The Monuments Men were more Frick-based than Hollywood-based.
After Henry Frick's death in 1919, his daughter Helen channeled her energy into turning the Frick Library into a premier centre for scholarly research. Frick’s private collection was one of the most...
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The sometimes-great Australian film industry
With film technology emerging in France in the late 1800s, Australia excitedly jumped onto the new medium, and saw a period of rapid development in the industry. Inauguration of the Commonwealth...
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collecting British and French culture in the USA - Huntington Library
In 1870 railway magnate Collis Huntington (1821-1900) met Arabella Yarrington, 30 years his junior; in 1884 they married when he was 63 and he adopted her son Archer. Soon the couple built their...
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Spies, Writers and Artists in Hampstead
I have just read the fascinating book The Lawn Road Flats by historian David Burke (Boydell, 2014). The firm Isokon (Isometric Unit Construction Control Co) was established to make modern flats,...
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Ongoing story of the Alfred Dreyfus Affair: 1894-2014
I have written and lectured many times about the Dreyfus Affair that hit France from 1894 to 1906. But it has largely been from the perspective of the artists, writers and cultural salons, or the...
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an Australian socialist utopia in Paraguay - 1893-1900
I have noted before that the concept of ideal communities, be they religious, socialist, feminist, temperance, environmental or even industrial, is very appealing. The Fruitlands project, for example,...
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J.M.Barrie's house-museum in Scotland
James Barrie (1860–1937) was the child of a Calvinist family of weavers from Kirriemuir in Angus, close to the Scottish city of Dundee. There were 10 children born to David Barrie and his wife...
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"a conspiracy of Christian goodness" in WW2 France
France had a mixed history when it came to its own Jewish community. Consider the splitting of France into the anti-Semitic German-occupied north and the anti-Semitic Vichy government in the unoccupied...
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images of Scottish-Australian history
What has Scotland got to do with the development of Australia? Quite a lot, according to the Art Gallery of Ballarat which has mounted a special exhibition to the relationship between Australia and...
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How a British prince became a German duke.. and fought against Britain!
I believed it was impossible to learn accurate history from a tv programme. Wrong!!! The Channel 4 documentary “Hitler's Favourite Royal” traced the tragic tale of how a member of the British Royal...
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Toscanini and the Lusitania - there but for the grace of God go I
Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) was born in Parma where he studied the cello and later was selected to play in the orchestra of an Italian opera company. In 1886, the teenager conducted his first opera,...
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Marriage a la 1970
Inspired by the blog Melbourne - Our Home on the Bay, I decided to have another look at the clothes we wore at a friend's wedding in 1970 and then at our own wedding a few months later. But I need a...
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