Léonard Defrance

One of the perks with being rather uneducated about The Arts is that you constantly stumble upon artists you'd never heard of. This happened today, to me. And it was awesome.

Defrance (1735-1805) was a Belgian painter and according to what I could find through an Google image search, he was very fond of painting ordinary people in ordinary and sometimes less than graceful situations. Things that I love!

These paintings seem to be the more known of his work, since I got many versions of them in my search results. The resolution is not always great, but here we go:

Men Fighting. Hermitage Museum

Women fighting.  Hermitage Museum   

Fish market. Some oil painting on demand site. Totally copyrighted.

Interior of a forge. Artnet

Recruting officer in a public house. Artnet

The breakfast. Hermitage Museum

Visiting the printers. Musée de Grenoble




And my absolute favourite...

The rope dancer The Met

Follow the link and zoom in! Look at her little outfit! Who's going to make it? It won't be me, I'm afraid - don't have the legs for it.

Museum goodies

An early holiday gift from three Swedish museums: The Royal Armoury, the castle of Skokloster and the Halwyl museum? Yes, please! Link

These three museums now have an online database with a vast collection of objects from the middle ages and onwards so here is something for all tastes:





The website is in Swedish only for the time being, but to make a simple search for garments, type "kläder" (clothes) in the search field on the front page and you'll get hundreds of results.

Happy browsing!

Hospital fashion!

I was searching the 'net for "kattun", which is the period term for printed cotton fabric (derived, of course, from cotton). Since there - obviously - is a Japanese pop group called KAT-TUN, an image search proved to be quite frustrating. Trust me. But in the end, I found something very interesting.

Belonging to the collections of the Army museum here in Stockholm are 32 shirts labelled "hospital shirts" or "night shirts". They had been stacked away in storage on the island of Gotland until 1919 when they were given to the museum. Information is a bit scarce, but here is what we know (and by "we", I mean Army museum...):

It's the year1808. Sweden is at war with Russia and Denmark/Norway. War means battles and battles means wounded men in need of care and medical equipment. And hospital clothing.

C A Staaff. 1870's illustration

5,000 hospital shirts were required to be made in Stockholm. They were to be made from linen, white with blue stripes...

Images copyright of Armémuseum, Stockholm

Not quite as described?

We don't know why these shirts came to look as they did. 1808 was a year where mostly everything was in hight demand due to the war and bad harvests and the factory obliged to deliver the shirts obviously couldn't get hold of enough of the right fabric, and had to make do with whatever they could find. Which happened to be an assortment of very fashionable cotton prints...

Images copyright of Armémuseum, Stockholm

The museum description says that the shirts seem to have been made in great haste with a very simple construction, like an infant's shirt with no side seams and sleeves attached with a minimum of care.

The prints have been identified as the work of Lamm's kattun factory at Lilla Blecktornet in Stockholm, signed Salomon Aron Moses Lamm (Lamm is by the way one of the oldest Jewish families in Sweden).

Did the factory rob its inventory of every available remnant to be able to secure the order of 5,000 shirts? How many were made in the end? The museum description doesn't tell us anything about the condition of the shirts but from what I can tell, they look well preserved. Perhaps they never got into service at all? One of the many problems with the 1808-09 war was the poor logistics. Supplies often ended up nowhere near the troops that (badly) needed them, so it is possible that these shirts weren't used. Or that some out of the 5,000 shirts were used, but just not these 32.

At any rate, it is a bit amusing to imagine the reactions on these shirts. The field hospital is up and running but badly under-equipped. The starving men are bleeding in their uniforms. It's cold. But lo! Finally some supplies! An eager surgeon opens a much longed for crate. Will it contain food? Medical equipment? At least some bandages? He stares at the contents in disbelief. Printed cotton in all the colours of the rainbow: "What the deuce is this?"

We'll never know for sure. But follow this link and you can admire all the 32 shirts (clicking an item will allow you to click again for a larger image). Some of them have been examined more closely in a 1953 book on Swedish kattuns that I will look up at the library whenever I get the chance.

Lust & Vice - get Lust & Vice tomorrow!

...if you are lucky enough to be in Stockholm by then.

Lust & Last is the Swedish name for the new exhibition at the National Museum in Stockholm. In three rooms, over 200 works show how virtue, sexuality, sin and lust have been depicted by Swedish and international artists from the 16th century to present day (a friend of a friend is represented, which is super fun).

Apparently, one wall in one room is entirely dedicated to women's behinds and, yes! They to have one of those double portraits where one finds you face to face with a lovely nun, while the other... You figure.

Good Nun
(click the image for Bad Nun)

Kneeling nun, verso. Martin van Meytens the younger.
© Erik Cornelius / Nationalmuseum 2007

Link to the English presentation of the exhibition Lust & Vice (note: artistic nekkidness galore - may be NSFW depending).

I haven't been to the National Museum in ages despite many interesting past events there so I really must take this exhibition as an excuse to go as soon as time and leisure permits.

This post could also mark my return as a blogger of sorts. I have not given up on costumes and related goodness, but the whole of Autumn and Winter I just couldn't find anything interesting to tell. That's all. I hope someone still remembers me (I have been reading your blogs and journals, just been on silenced mode while doing so...)

18th century weeks at Skansen - revisited

Another Sunday at Skansen - this time with much cooler weather which made the hours there even more agreeable than last week! I have to repeat - I really could do this thing for my day job!

And would you believe - I brought the camera this time (although I forgot to bring newly purchased spare batteries and had to buy on site for $$$ - GAAH!) and I took many pictures of the interiors of the lovely, lovely Skogaholm manor:

A bedroom with 17th century walls and ceiling

A bed chamber

A blurry picture of the Chinese parlour

And a DARK but cool picture of the same:

The loveliest little parlour, it says: The table is set - do come in!

Another very female bed chamber......from another angle.

The nursery

I think this was supposed to be the master bedroom:

Another parlour/sitting room, where you could spin...

...play a tune......or just warm yourself up a bit!

And to wrap things up, a handful of ego pictures of me, fooling around inside and outside of the manor house:

Nothing new to wear this week either - my current project has been giving me so much pain that I've started to question my ability to sew even a pillow case in the future! I'm NOT giving up just yet, though. Grey hair makes one look distinguished anyway.

Summertime fun: A trip to Gripsholm

Me and my darling spouse made a day-trip to the little town by the Mälaren lake, Mariefred, last Wednesday.

While the town itself is charming, filled with tiny doll-sized houses and situated so beautifully by the lake...
...the Thing To See is the Gripsholm palace.





The palace not only houses the National Portrait Collection which features portraits from the 16th century to our days, but also many examples on architecture and interiors from decades past (and of course all those little quirky things one loves about old castles: small staircases leading to no-one-knows, dusky dungeons and creaking floorboards...)

Photography was not allowed, and I was too chicken to take stealth-shots (without flash, of course) because of the many guards...

That means that the gift shop got me to buy a number of post cards, at least!

Forgive my old, faithful scanner his faults:

Prince Fredrik Adolf, Duke of Ostrogothia, painted by Roslin in 1770

Courtisane, a dog. David Klöcker Ehrenstral's atelier, second half 17th century


Carl Fredrik von Breda, self-portrait


The hen-picture, with queen Lovisa Ulrika's ladies-in-waiting. Mid-18th century, possibly by Johan Pasch (if you really must compare women to poultry, I suppose this is the most stylish way of doing so...)


Princess Sofia Albertina's rooms.


The green salon. See why I wanted to take pictures so badly?!?



Duke Carl's chamber. Mostly original 16th century.


One of the really unique sights: King Gustaf III's theatre. Tiny, but fully working with machinery and all!


This charming fella's name is Adolf Ludvig Stierneld but I knew nothing about him when I bought the card. Now I know that he was the person who started to organize the portrait collection at the palace, which would have suited his history sense well. He collected historical documents and was considered something of an authority and expert in his own time. Today, however, many of his so-called "historical documents" have been exposed as blatant forgeries made by himself, often to make his ancestors look more important.

***

I have visited Gripsholm many times since my childhood but it's like a new experience every time, because you always discover something you didn't see before. There are so many rooms, so unique in their own way, and so many fantastic portraits... And if that's not anough for you, then there's always...

THE LION!

Before we left for Stockholm, we visited the town's small but charming museum which showed the home of a well-to-do family in the late 19th century.

I could take pictures, and we can haz costumes:

...and creepy dolls.

After a cup of coffee and home-baked pastries in the museum's lovely garden, we boarded the 107-year old steamship Mariefred and had a very pleasant journey home!