#bowes museum

[vintage-treasures]

The Muse Calliope. Oil on Canvas (ca. 1640–1650) Attributed to Italian Baroque painter Cesare Dandini (1596–1657), this painting shows Calliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry. In mythology, she is one of the nine muses, daughters of Jupiter and Mnemosyne.

Dandini based her look directly on the instructions found in Cesare Ripa's famous 1603 book, Iconologia. The artwork features Calliope looking right at us with a dramatic hand gesture, while holding the great ancient epic poems, ODISSEA ILIADE ENEIDE (Odyssey, Iliad, and Aeneid).

This elegant, half-length style was highly popular with Dandini's wealthy court patrons in Florence.

Loc. Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle. Dim. 78.5 × 58.5 cm (30.9 × 23.0 in.)

[empirearchives]

German caricature of Josephine as a “nocturnal apparition” waking up Napoleon from his sleep

Nächtliche Geister-Erscheinung, anonymous, early 19th century

[yourdailyjormy]

Spent a bunch of time at the Bowes Museum today, sketching both in my own sketchpad and on the easels they obligingly have around the painting galleries.

don't have an artist or name for this bust. call him moustache man.

Portrait of a Young Girl, 1806, Louise Marie-Jeanne Hersent-Mauduit

Harry George Vane, 4th Duke of Cleveland, George Watts (1817-1904 - no date given for the painting itself)

The Tears of Saint Peter, 1580-1589, El Greco

(I always forget just how exaggerated and stylised El Greco's paintings are - they look fairly realistic at first glance and then the closer you look the more cartoonish they are. I love them. truly one of my favourite artists of all time actually.)

and I knocked this one out in 10 minutes because it was coming up to closing time, so I didn't get any details or photos of the original marble.

[fashionsfromhistory]

Day & Evening Bodices owned by Empress Eugenie of France

1850s-1870s

The Bowes Museum via Facebook

[digitalfriend08]

XXX

By Andrew Curtis, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14215737

[graaaaceeliz]

Signed copy of Dracula, at Bowes Museum, Durham.

Display card reads:

Signed copy of Dracula, first edition

Bram Stoker, 1897

Published by London Archibald Constable and Company

"Do you not think there are some things you cannot understand and yet which are, that some people see things that others do not?" - Chapter 14

In 1897, 3000 copies of Stoker's horrifying story 'Dracula' were sent to book stores across the United Kingdom. Stoker's mother wrote to him, "No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."

Kindly loaned by a private lender.

[solnunquamoccidit]

La Virgen de Montserrat con un monje

by Juan Andrés Ricci de Guevara (Castilian, 1600 - 1681) oil on canvas (167,5 x 264), 1645

Bowes Museum

[lionofchaeronea]

The Emperor Augustus Rebuking Cornelius Cinna for His Treachery, Étienne-Jean Delécluze, 1814