if we opened me up, we'd find beaches

lydia, 20 | art. film. poetry.

[updownfragile]

Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1961)

[oldfilmsflicker]

Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, 2017 (dir. Griffin Dunne)

[nesepalamudu]

Alain Delon and Romy Schneider*

[laadystoneheart]

Pride and Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright

[magictransistor]

Hans Sebald Beham (c.1500-1550)

[thisblueboy]

Pelagio Palagi (1775-1860), Seated Male Nude, ca.1810-20, Pen with brow and black ink

[modelsof-color]

Ugbad Abdi by Bibi Borthwick for Vogue US Magazine - November 2019.

[uwmspeccoll]

Flora and Sylva

Today we present illustrations from Volume One of the revised edition of Paxton’s Flower Garden by John Lindley and Sir Joseph Paxton, revised by Thomas Baines and published by Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co. in London in 1882. The color illustrations we are featuring today are by Walter Hood Fitch, a prolific botanical illustrator who also produced chromolithographs for Curtis’s Botanical Magazine.

Paxton’s Flower Garden was issued in monthly parts from 1882-1884, which became three volumes. It was written by two eminent British botanists. John Lindley (1799-1865) is considered by many as the “father of orchidology.” In his early years he served as an assistant to Sir Joseph Banks in his library and herbarium, and later was appointed assistant secretary to the Royal Horticultural Society. He was also elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London and in 1829 he was appointed professor of botany in the newly founded University of London. Sir Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) was a British gardener, designer, writer, Member of Parliament, and creator of one of most famous buildings of Victoria’s reign, The Crystal Palace, a cast-iron and glass structure originally built in Hyde Park, London, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The preface states the original purpose of Paxton’s Flower Garden was “To supply, in monthly parts, as full an account of all the new and remarkable plants introduced into cultivation as is necessary to the horticulturist; the history of such plants being sought in botanical works published on the continent; to which English cultivators have little access, as well as in those of our own country, and in the gardens or herbaria from which they are derived.” 

View more posts from Paxton’s Flower Garden.

View more posts from our Flora and Sylva series.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern 

[artist-lautrec]

Portrait of a Child, 1882, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Medium: oil,panel

[artist-modigliani]

Nude, 1917, Amedeo Modigliani

Medium: oil,canvas

[artist-mondrian]

Windmill in the Gein, 1907, Piet Mondrian

Medium: oil,canvas

[books-n-quotes]

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.

Anna Akhmatova, You Will Heart Thunder (via books-n-quotes)

[bienenkiste]

Photographed by Romain Duquesne for Glossier

[womansart]

In 1998 Portuguese born artist Paula Rego created a series of work entitled Untitled.The Abortion Pastels.  Rego created her work in response to a referendum to legalise abortion in Portugal, which was very narrowly defeated. Each canvas depicted the image of a woman undergoing an unsafe abortion.

Rego was born in Portugal in 1935, into what she describes as a repressive, middle-class Portuguese life in which women were highly encouraged to do nothing, while working-class women were forced to do everything. The painter recalls girlhood as a time of learning obedience to men, in addition to secretive and confused messages about puberty, sexual abstention and female propriety.  Then fascist Portugal was described by her father as a ‘killer society for women’.

After leaving her homeland in the late 1950’s to attend London’s Slade School of Fine Art, Rego recollected an era including coerced sexual encounters leading to secretive and often tortuous back street abortions. In turn, her Abortion series would be both inspired by her own experiences and that of her fellow female students, utilising what she had witnessed growing up around the small Portuguese villages of her formative years.

[didoofcarthage]

Dejanira (Autumn) by Gustave Moreau 

c. 1872-1873

oil on panel

Getty Museum 

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