The Hidden Baroness

She/Her. Call me Baroness.

[thehiddenbaroness]

Welcome! I’m glad you’re here! <3

Here you'll find: fine art and antiquities, history of all kinds, flora and shiny rocks, fashion and lingerie, writer stuff, ephemera, Asian culture, recipes, architecture. Pretty things plus important things, peppered with sporadic in-jokes and shameless self-promotion. 

As for me, I’m a writer by dreaming, training, and devotion – and soon, vocation. Should go without saying, but any original content I put up is mine. Don’t use it without my permission. Graduated with First Class Honors in a BA Creative Writing; US-born, UK-raised; currently an embarrassed inhabitant of the Southern US aka the 10th Circle of Hell. My Book! :

+ The Fruit of War, Book 1: Stone and Flesh is a dark, epic fantasy for adult readers who like their fantasy intelligent, immersive, and simmering with ghosts of the past -- both figurative and literal. + Available now in eBook and paperback, either directly from me or at an ever-growing retailer list! + My author website is here -- I'd love it if you signed up for my mailing list. You'll get a free prequel novella in exchange, and automatically be the first to hear any news! + You can also follow @tamarasharker here on Tumblr, and my other authorly socials can be found at my LinkTree. + Spread the word! I track the tags #fruit of war saga, #fow stone and flesh, #tamara s harker, #fow saga, #fow saf, #stone and flesh

Tumblr:

+ My Self-Publishing Masterpost -- learn from my mistakes as I document my haphazard journey into self-publishing my novel. + #original poetry + #scrapsofbiography, #my face, #fav – more about me, if you really must know. + Mercedes Carello – my anime/animation-devoted sideblog.

Elsewhere:

+ @ohtobealady and I are revitalizing our historical fiction epistolary project, Any Port in a Storm, so stay tuned for that as well! + Are you a writer of any kind? I have a writer's Discord server -- resources and feedback exchange forums, and just places to chat -- that's open to new members! Reply to this post if interested.

=============================== TERFs and other bigots are exceedingly unwelcome here, as is anyone who generally thrives on belittling or outright persecuting others. I do not knowingly share content made or perpetuated by such people -- if you spot something that got past me, let me know so I can remove it. Similarly, if you see me unknowingly posting AI imagery, tell me. I'm in my 30s, and while I try to avoid explicit material, this blog is guaranteed to contain some content that's unsuitable for minors.

[thecollectibles]

I’m listening by Yun Huai Huang

[chantssecrets]

John Singer Sargent - Study for Judgment, c. 1903

[positivelyqueer]

”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

[jaseroque]

Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.

[jaseroque]

I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.

All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.

[elodieunderglass]

and thank you so much for doing all that!

[random-brushstrokes]

William Verplanck Birney - The Ghost Story (ca. 1897-1899)

[dailyclassicart]

Charles Marie Bouton - "Gothic Chapel"

[historicalbookimages]

🪲 The natural history of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands: London: Printed for B. White, 1771. Original source Image description: Illustration showing a small brown sparrow perched upside down on a twisting vine with green arrow-shaped leaves and pink trumpet-shaped flowers. Below the flowers hangs a large black and white spotted moth with bright red and blue markings on its body. The detailed natural history style depicts the interaction of bird, insect, and plant species native to Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands. The sparrow is labeled “Passerculus The little Sparrow” and the plant “Convolvulus Carolinensis &c.” The image highlights the insect (moth) in contrast to the bird and flora.

[tomoleary]

“Our Other Faces” A group of pen drawings by Norman Lindsay (1936)

“The Sphinx's Whisper,” “The Procession,” “An Interesting Tale,” “Gossipers.”

“Norman did a series of pen and ink drawings which were exhibited at the Argus Bookshop in Chicago, USA in 1936.”

[wanderthewood]

by JunSus

[pmamtraveller]

Amor and Psyche by Adolfo de Carolis

[wildbeautifuldamned]

Tile England Art Nouveau Furniture Majolica Antique Vintage Rare 6x6 inch ebay shopthrus

[leavingeden]

Alicia Burke by JD Barnes for L'Officiel India, April 2021

[pmamtraveller]

A Comforting Gaze (1910) by Frank Craig

[nobrashfestivity]

Unknown, Persian bowls, 10th-13th century

[pmamtraveller]

"Danse macabre" (2023), acrylic painting created by the Iranian artist Bahman Pezeshkzad.

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[laerugo]

#tapping the reblog button with utmost care because i’m handling a historical artifact (via @malarkiness)

[mortimermcmirestinks]

holy shit OP is not only still active but is still making absolutely banger posts in this exact style 11 years later

[rue-nightly]

A 2025 update

[coolthingoftheday]

Mexican artist Gabriel Dawe creates a rainbow sculpture woven from over sixty miles of colored thread.

(Artist)