The Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Virginia was built in 1858 next to the train tracks. Though a small town, Brandy Station saw a lot of activity during the Civil War because of its location at the junction of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad — the sole rail line linking Confederate capital Richmond with Union capital Washington, D.C. — and of the roads leading to two major fords of the Rappahannock River. The house is thought to have been used as a hospital by both Confederate and Union troops, many of whom left their autographs and sketches of girls, horses, birds, soldiers and more on the second floor walls to mark their stay.
It’s their graffiti that has given the house its moniker, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, the homeowners weren’t keen to preserve the doodles soldiers had scribbled all over the walls using charcoal from the fireplaces and the occasional pencil. The owners whitewashed all that tasty social history. Thankfully, a thin layer of dirt and soot had accumulated over the graffiti, keeping the whitewash from destroying the charcoal markings.
Over the years, the house passed through many hands, some of which made some unfortunately damaging repairs. The graffiti were forgotten until a 1993 renovation stripped off some wallpaper and old paint to reveal the treasures beneath. Despite the rediscovery of this important history, by 2002 the house was derelict. People took chunks of plaster off the wall just to ensure that some part of the graffiti would be preserved when the house was, as seemed inevitable, demolished. This dire fate was avoided thanks to the Brandy Station Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the natural and historical patrimony of the town, which purchased the house in August 2002.
They restored the house and hired conservator Chris Mills of Christopher Mills Conservation Services out of New York City to work on the graffiti walls starting last year. He has had to stabilize the walls because the 1858 plaster is coming off the wooden lathing, and while he’s at it, he is painstakingly removing the whitewash using q-tips and razor blades, revealing new graffiti and reviving faded ones.
In some cases, previous owners have used strips of porous tape, covered with some type of spackling, to keep the cracks from widening. Removing these foreign substances makes Mills’ job even tougher and results in some minor but unavoidable damage to the graffiti underneath.
Once the tape is removed, Mills pins the cracked plaster to the laths with nail-like plastic fasteners. When the pins are removed, the holes they made are used to inject an alcohol solution into the plaster.
“Then I inject a synthetic resin that adheres the wood lath to the plaster,” Mills says, adding that he makes the substance himself. As it dries, the alcohol solution helps pull the heavier synthetic resin into the hole, says Mills.
The Brandy Station Foundation has researched all the identifiable signatures. Cavalry units dominate, which dovetails neatly with the history of the town because the Battle of Brandy Station (June 9, 1863) was the largest cavalry battle of the war, in fact the largest cavalry battle in United States history.
General J.E.B. Stuart, Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia Cavalry, led the Confederate cavalry in the Battle of Brandy Station. Many of the signatures are from members of Stuart’s cavalry, and one very large prominent signature is J.E.B. Stuart’s own. We don’t know for sure that he wrote it, but the Brandy Station Foundation has some copies of his confirmed signature hanging on the wall next to the graffito and they sure do look a lot alike.
The Foundation was also able to match a signature to a face. Here’s Private Michael Bowman of the 7th Virginia Cavalry, his signature and a period picture of him in uniform:
In May of 2007, Odyssey Marine Exploration, a privately owned marine treasure-hunting company, discovered a Spanish shipwreck somewhere on the Atlantic seabed. Odyssey refused to divulge the exact location or the name of the ship. They ultimately recovered 17 tons of silver coins, plus almost 100,000 gold coins and a number of other artifacts from the wreck, which they code-named “Black Swan.” The site must have been near Spain because Odyssey secretly landed the $500 million treasure on Gibraltar, chartered a flight and flew the loot back to its headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
Spain was displeased, to put it mildly. Odyssey claimed the find was made in international waters in full compliance with the United Nations’ Law of the Seas, but since they refused to reveal the wreck site and pleaded ignorance about the name of the ship, Spanish authorities got suspicious. They filed suit against Odyssey Marine in a federal courthouse in Tampa, demanding that the company reveal everything it knows about the wreck so Spain could claim ownership, and they got a Spanish court order to seize Odyssey ships around Gibraltar and search them for historical artifacts.
The case has been winding its way through the legal system ever since then. In 2009, a Florida judge declared that the “Black Swan” was the Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, a Spanish frigate sunk by the British off the coast of Cape St. Mary, Portugal in 1804, that Odyssey had specifically set out to find the Mercedes and had succeeded, and that Spain was the rightful owner of the recovered treasure. Odyssey’s claims of ignorance did not impress.
The judge argued that the coins, all dated prior to 1804, matched the Mercedes’ haul of mainly silver coins minted in Lima – part of a haul being brought back to finance Spain’s European wars. He also said cannon found there matched those on board the Mercedes.
“The debris field’s location, coins, cannons, and artefacts persuasively match the Mercedes’s historical record,” the judge said.
“That Odyssey, which set out to discover the Mercedes, found this mix strewn about in an area a few football fields square where the vessel met its explosive ending makes the conclusion even more compelling.”
Judge Pizzo also ruled that Peru, which had filed a suit of its own in 2008 claiming the treasure because the coins were made from Peruvian gold and silver, did not have a valid claim because there was no nation of Peru in 1804.
Odyssey appealed the ruling. Now a federal circuit court judge has upheld Judge Pizzo’s decision, giving Odyssey Marine 10 days to return the loot to Spain. Odyssey will doubtless appeal to a higher court next, so this story isn’t over yet, but they’ll run out of courts soon enough.
Don’t worry about Odyssey, though. They just made a sweet deal with the British government and the Maritime Heritage Foundation to recover the wreck of the HMS Victory which an Odyssey team discovered in 2008. This is the predecessor of Admiral Nelson’s famed vessel; it went down in a storm in 1744 carrying four tons of gold.
The terms of the agreement ensure that all of Odyssey’s costs will be reimbursed and they will in addition receive a percentage of the market value of any recovered artifacts. If the Maritime Heritage Foundation chooses, they will get paid in artifacts rather than cash, but Odyssey prefers cash.
Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 80% of the fair value of artifacts which were primarily used in trade or commerce or were private property and bear no direct connection to the construction, navigation, defense or crew of the ship, such as coins or other cargo.
Odyssey will receive the equivalent of 50% of the fair value of all other objects typically associated with the construction, crewing and sailing of ships including, but not limited to, the ship’s hull, fittings, fasteners, construction elements, clothing, organic remains, foodstuffs, cooking utensils, pottery, weapons, ammunition, ground tackle and navigational equipment.
For any private property including coins or other cargo administered through the Receiver of Wreck, the Foundation has agreed that Odyssey shall receive 80% of the value.
Two masked men broke into the Siskiyou County Courthouse in Yreka, California and stole the largest nuggets from a display case replete with gold nuggets, leaf, and dust from the area’s rich mining history. They got in through an unlocked window in the back of the courthouse, then broke a hand-sized hole through the thick bulletproof glass covering the display and helped themselves to the choicest pieces they could reach. Court employees discovered the theft when they arrived in the morning.
Surveillance footage timestamps the theft at 1:00 AM on Wednesday. For reasons still unclear, a silent alarm connected to the display never sounded. Authorities are investigating whether the alarm was intentionally disabled in some way or whether it simply malfunctioned. An attempted theft in 1979 was deterred by the silent alarm; the thief stole hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of nugget, but was caught by police just a few blocks away. After that theft, the glass was replaced with even thicker glass and a new alarm installed.
The County Treasurer/Tax Collector Wayne Hammar is the official in charge of the gold. He and his team will inventory the remaining gold to sort out exactly what is left. According to the Sheriff’s office, an estimated third to a half of the gold was stolen, including a famously huge nugget known as the “slipper” or “shoe” because of its shoe-like shape.
The Siskiyou County Courthouse gold was donated to the county over the years since 1851 by miners who lived and worked there. It is (was?) the largest gold display in the continental United States and was exhibited at the 1939 World’s Fair in San Francisco’s Treasure Island. The locals, many of whom have been involved in the mining industry for generations, are deeply connected to these artifacts so dazzlingly symbolic of their history.
That connection is so profound that when faced with a dismal economy the county refused to cash in on their gigantic hoard. They had 20% unemployment in 2010; the county budget was getting slashed left and right. Still, even under that kind of pressure they refused to sell their gold display, worth almost $1,300,000 in gold weight alone and estimated to be worth $3,000,000 because of its historical significance and because the gold is in its natural form rather than melted down into generic ingots.
There’s a very-sad-in-hindsight video of the gold display at the courthouse from 2007 when the Huell Howser PBS show “California’s Gold” filmed a segment there:
Here’s the surveillance video from Wednesday night:
If you have any information about the theft, please contact the Sheriff’s office at 530-841-2900.
During a routine valuation in Dorset, a Duke’s Auctioneers specialist found a rare working model of a guillotine made out of animal bone scraps. According to family lore, the model has been in the family since the 19th century, but they had no idea what it was until Duke’s expert Amy Brenan (who also generously provided the sweet high resolution pictures herein) identified it.
The guillotine was crafted by a prisoner of war, probably French, who was held in Britain between 1805 and 1815 during the Napoleonic wars. He collected sheep bones from the trash, carved them and put them together with impeccable attention to detail to make the 20-inch high model of an execution. An elaborate superstructure crowns the decapitation machine which rests on a platform with a victim lying horizontally waiting for the blade to fall. The victim is surrounded by armed guards on the platform, and the base of the structure is also manned by armed guards and cannons. Each figure has a hand-painted face, the blade of the guillotine drops and the soldiers holding weapons have moveable arms.
Amy Brenan describes its rarity:
“Napoleonic prisoner of war models made from bone and ivory are hard to come by. Many designs such as the model battle ships, spinning jennies and guillotines are so intricate that they disintegrate overtime and this makes any surviving examples extremely rare.
The sheer skill in creating a working model of the guillotine coupled with its social significance at the time, has made the guillotine models particularly desirable.”
Britain held approximately 100,000 prisoners of war over the course of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The Revolutionary government decreed in 1793-4 that prisoners would no longer be ransomed, or even taken, and Napoleon would later also eschew traditional prisoner exchanges. Since Britain was at war with France for pretty much the whole time from 1793 until 1815, they soon had more prisoners than they could stuff into their prison hulks. Enemy officers were allowed parole and housed in various towns across England, but most of the prisoners enjoyed no such privileges.
The first permanent camp built intentionally to house prisoners of war was built in Norman Cross, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, in 1797. From 1797 to 1816, about 10,000 prisoners were held at the Norman Cross POW camp.
Conditions were miserable — prisoners were crammed into barracks on rows of hammocks, disease was rampant, England was cold and wet — albeit comparatively humane. (French soldiers were known to voluntarily surrender to the British because they treated their prisoners better than anyone else.) Typhus cut a swath through the population in 1800 and 1801 killing 1021 prisoners. At least another 770 more died during the camp’s 17 years of existence.
Many of these soldiers and sailors had been conscripted into the Napoleonic military machine. They had crafting skills from their civilian lives, and desperate to make a little money to pad their meager subsistence, they made models of bone, ivory, wood scraps, even straw which they used to create marquetry baskets. Many of them are signed with the artists/prisoners’ names. The prisoners would then be allowed to sell their crafts to the local inhabitants. (They also fabricated counterfeit banknotes and porn, but the authorities weren’t so supportive of those creative endeavors.)
“….to Norman Cross for the purpose of guarding some thousands of unhappy Frenchmen, cooped up in that place and clothed in yellow (the prison dress), to expiate their revolutionary sins by many years captivity and exile in loathsome prison, cut off from family and friends.
Their necessities forced them to exert their ingenuity in making various curious toys which the disposed of at a very low rate to enable them to procure a few comforts to alleviate their extreme wretchedness…..for want of clothes many of them suffered every privation rather than be clad in a conspicuous and humiliating colour.”
The Peterborough Museum has a large collection of these models from the Norman Cross prisoners, and many of them are in deteriorating condition due to their inherent fragility. A working Napoleonic prisoner guillotine with all the parts moving and all the paint still attached, therefore, is a museum-quality find.
The guillotine will be sold at Duke’s on February 9 with an estimated price tag of £4000 – £8000 (about $6300 – $12,600).
Two [of the wax cylinders] preserve the voice of Helmuth von Moltke, a venerable German military strategist, reciting lines from Shakespeare and from Goethe’s “Faust” into a phonograph horn. (Moltke was 89 when he made the recordings — the only ones known to survive from someone born as early as 1800.) Other records found in the collection hold musical treasures — lieder and rhapsodies performed by German and Hungarian singers and pianists at the apex of the Romantic era, including what is thought to be the first recording of a work by Chopin.
Since they weren’t labeled or cataloged, nobody had any idea what was on them until last year when Edison laboratory curator Jerry Fabris used an Archeophone device to trace the grooves on 12 of the cylinders and convert them to audible wav files. The recordings were very faint, too faint for Fabris to identify, so he enlisted the aid of sound historians Patrick Feaster of Indiana University and Stephan Puille of the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin to try to determine who and what were on the cylinders.
They had a starting point: the words “Wangemann. Edison” carved into the lid of the wooden container in which the cylinders had been found. Adelbert Theodor Edward Wangemann had been hired by Edison in 1888 to market his newly invented wax cylinder phonograph. Wangemann quickly became adept at recording with the phonograph and was sent to Europe in June of 1889 to supervise the operation of the Edison phonographs on exhibit at the Paris World’s Fair.
The assignment was only supposed to last two weeks, but after the World’s Fair was over Edison expanded his brief and allowed him to travel Europe collecting quality recordings to use for exhibitions. After Paris he went to his native country of Germany where he set up displays of the technology for scientists and luminaries. In Berlin, Wangemann set up his equipment in a room loaned to him by the Siemens Corporation. He carried the cylinders and accessories to the exhibition room in a lockable wooden box. It’s that box that was discovered back at Edison’s New Jersey lab in 1957.
Edison joined Wangemann in Germany to make a splash during the phonograph exhibits to scientists. While he was there, Edison asked to meet the three most important people in Germany, Bismarck, von Moltke and Kaiser Wilhelm II, but none of them were available. They all replied that they wanted to see the phonograph, though, so Edison sent Wangemann to show them the new toy and get their voices recorded for posterity. He did meet with them all, but although Wilhelm II greatly enjoyed Wangemann’s musical recordings, he never did get his own voice carved in wax. Three of his sons, the eldest just seven years old, did get recorded.
In Friedrichsruh on Oct. 7, 1889, Wangemann recorded Chancellor Otto von Bismarck reciting verses from several ditties in four languages. The first is “In Good Old Colony Times,” a British folk song that was altered after the American Revolution to give it an anti-monarchist spin. The second is “Als Kaiser Rotbart lobesam” (When good Emperor Redbeard), an 1814 German heroic ballad by Ludwig Uhland about Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa going on the Third Crusade. The third is the Latin song “Gaudeamus igitur,” a popular graduation song in Europe at the time with your classic “carpe diem” message. The fourth is the first verse of “La Marseillaise,” which is something of an enormous iceburn on the French given their ignominious defeat by Bismarck’s Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71.
The last lines Bismarck speaks are a direct appeal to his son Herbert who would listen to it on a phonograph in Budapest a few weeks later and recognize his father’s voice. “Do everything in moderation and morality, namely work, but then also eating, and apart from that especially drinking. Advice of a father to his son.” Solid Junker advice, that.
Read about all of the newly converted Edison/Wangemann wax cylinders, listen to the recordings and read the original text and transcripts of the spoken parts on the National Park Service website.
The Island of Montecristo, most famous for its role as the treasure island in Alexandre Dumas’ novel of betrayal and revenge (the best adventure story ever written, in my humble opinion), is a protected nature reserve in Arcipelago Toscano National Park, a chain of islands between the coast of Tuscany and the Island of Corsica. Giglio, the site of the ongoing Costa Concordia grounding disaster, is another island in the archipelago just east of Montecristo.
The islet is the tiny, rugged tip of an underwater volcano, and the only humans living there are one official caretaker and his family. Sights include an 18th century villa and the ruins of a 7th century A.D. monastery dedicated to Saint Mamilian of Palermo, a 5th century bishop who slew a dragon on the island and changed its name from Montegiove (“Jupiter’s Mountain”) to Montecristo (“Christ’s Mountain”). Very few tourists get to see them, however, since the island can only be reached by private yacht and only 1000 travel permits a year are issued.
Those few boats — and perhaps many others before them over the centuries — have carried an even more pernicious kind of tourist: the black rat. As they so often do, the rats have made a cozy home for themselves on Montecristo, breeding lustfully and invading every niche of the delicate islet ecosystem. There’s an estimated one rat per square meter.
Italian and European government agencies are planning to solve this problem by nuking it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. Okay, not exactly, but the scheme is almost as cockamamie as that. The National Park, the region of Tuscany, the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and the European Union announced that starting at the end of January, they will fly airplanes over Montecristo and drop 26 tons of pesticide pellets to kill all the black rats. They plan to use brodifacoum, an anti-coagulant poison often used as a rodenticide which is classified as “extremely toxic” for its devastating effect on mammals, birds and fish.
How do they plan to ensure none of the pellets miss the tiny tip of the volcano in the middle of an island chain national park, and having ensured this, how did they plan to ensure that only the invasive rats eat them instead of the native fauna? They have top men working on it right now. Top. Men.
Director [of the national park authority] Franca Zanichelli defends the project. “Nobody wants to poison the island,” she explains. “The project, prepared by experts, involves the use of 26 tons of food pellets, similar to that used to contain the rats everywhere, consisting of edible cereal feed which inside holds a fraction of a percent of the active poison. The baits, which can not be placed off the ground to the inaccessibility of the rugged interior, will be distributed by air with a special funnel provided by another protected area in Sardinia that has already performed a similar operation. Rat exterminations were performed with similar success in smaller Giannutri [, the southernmost islet in the Tuscan Archipelago].
Ecological groups, anti-vivisection organizations and former world champion dive fisher Carlo Gasparri (a native of Elba, home of Napoleon’s first exile and the largest island in the archipelago) vocally oppose the plan and have requested a halt to the project pending an official government investigation. Gasparri believes rats should be eradicated using a less toxic product that doesn’t persist in the environment for years, accumulating in animal tissues, tainting the food chain for God knows how long.
Fiorella Ceccacci Rubino, a representative from the ruling center-right People of Freedom party, has introduced a parliamentary inquiry on the merits of the plan, submitting that a less environmentally damaging method should be used.
P.S. – The top picture is from the phenomenal anime science fiction version of Dumas’ immortal novel, Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo. Although there are of course a number of major departures from the original, this is the only filmed version of the book I’ve ever seen that does the novel justice. If you love the book, like me, and if like me you’ve seen every live action movie version only to be disappointed, even renting the late 1990s French mini-series hoping that at least Dumas’ countrymen would respect the genius of his plot, pacing, and characterization only to stare in undisguised horror at Gerard Depardieu playing the starved and driven-to-madness Edmond Dantès in the Chateau d’If pretty much like he played Obelix, then Gankutsuou can make you whole again.
That exhibition was a blockbuster success, but other works like View of Delft were considered the stars of the show. This time, she gets top billing above the likes of Rembrandt, probably because her popularity has skyrocketed since Tracy Chevalier’s eponymous novel was published in 2000 and the movie starring Scarlett Johansson as the model and Colin Firth as Vermeer hit theaters in 2003.
The new exhibition, “Girl with a Pearl Earring: Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis,” features 35 important paintings by Dutch Golden Age masters including Vermeer, Rembrandt, Fans Hals and Jan Steen. The Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis in The Hague is housed in a 17th century palace which will be undergoing a major two-year renovation and expansion. It will close on April 1st and move its entire permanent collection to the Gemeentemuseum, also in The Hague.
The Mauritshuis collection will be on display there in its entirety from April 28, 2012 to May 28, 2012, and then the Girl with a Pearl Earring and her 34 escorts will begin touring the world. First they’ll go to Japan, from July until mid-September at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, then on to Kobe’s City Art Museum until January 2013.
Their first stop in the United States will be the de Young Museum of San Francisco where they’ll be on display from January 26, 2013 to June 2, 2013. Next up will be the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, which will host the exhibition between June 22, 2013 and September 29, 2013. This will be the first time Girl with a Pearl Earring has ever been seen in the southeast United States, so it will give a great many people a unique opportunity to see her in person.
The last stop on the US itinerary is the The Frick Collection in New York City from October 22, 2013 to January 12, 2014. After that the works head home to the Netherlands. They will be back on display at the newly expanded and renovated Mauritshuis by mid-year.
Through landscapes and portraits, the exhibition will explore the idea that Dutch artists more readily embraced genre paintings of secular subjects than their southern European contemporaries and focused on capturing commonplace scenes of daily life. Dutch artists not only recorded representations of the domestic interior, still lifes and revelrous crowds, but often imbued these scenes with moral undertones and humorous, sarcastic wit.
Some time ago, I was wandering around the Internet nerding out over old things as is my wont when I came across the YouTube channel of a genius. Before my astounded eyes, professional hairstylist Janet Stephens recreated the hugely intricate hairstyle of Empress Julia Domna (170–217 A.D.), wife of Emperor Septimius Severus, using only period-appropriate tools and a sculpted bust of the empress as an example. No pins. No perms. No hairspray. Behold Janet’s amazing skills in action:
Naturally I watched the rest of her videos in quick succession. Then I secured a copy of “Ancient Roman Hairdressing: On (hair) pins and needles,” a paper she wrote that was published in the 2008 edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology (JRA). The depth of her knowledge blew me away. She is fully conversant in the archaeology (including unpublished artifacts), ancient literary sources and published scholarship of Roman hairstyling, and not just Roman but Etruscan and Greek as well.
Her work in this field is unique because her experience as a stylist gives her particular insight into how hair works and what can be accomplished with what tools. She upends a number of assumptions — that Roman women must have used wigs to achieve their more elaborate hairstyles, that they used hairpins — and injects a whole new simplicity and accuracy to the very vocabulary of ancient hairdressing.
Virtually all commentators demonstrate modern technological biases that lead to anachronistic speculation: in both looking at images and interpreting literary passages, they assume that the Romans used the same hairdressing technologies as do moderns. In addition, not being hairdressers, they fail to understand the technical possibilities of the tools that the Romans did have at their disposal. I will analyze the physical capabilities of the single prong hair-pin in order to show the impossibility of its application in many contexts. As an alternative I will propose sewing needles, arguing that, as Roman women of the 1st c. A.D. abandoned vitta-based [(vittae were linen or woollen ribbons used to tie the hair together when arranging it)] coiffures in favor of more elaborate fashions, they used needles (artifacts well attested in antiquity) invisibly to stitch together the style’s various components.
And that’s just the second paragraph. The rest of the paper lives up to its promise and then some.
Correction: I initially wrote she had done the recreations live, but that was my misunderstanding. In fact, Janet’s Julia Domna videos were running on a computer while four pre-styled mannikin heads, one at each stage of Julia’s hair loss as portrayed on coins, provided real-hair examples for the people attending to examine. A 4×8 foot graphic illustrated the probable progression of hair loss from one stage to another.
Shocked and awed by her combination of scholarly research and styling craftsmanship, and cat-killingly curious about how all the elements came together, I asked Janet Stephens if she would submit to an interview and she has most graciously done so.
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Q: How did you first begin to research ancient hairdressing?
A: My research began with a visit to the Walters Art Museum in 2001. They had just finished renovating the Greek/Roman collections and displayed a number of portrait busts at eye level, out in the center of the room, like a cocktail party. I had never seen the back of a roman portrait before—they are usually placed high on shelves/pedestal with the backs tight up against a wall. As I circled the portraits I saw the logic of the hairstyles and determined to try some at home. It was electrifying, can’t thank the Walters enough.
Q: When was the first time you tried to recreate a look and how successful was that initial foray?
A: I think it was my first day off after that visit! I pulled out a long haired mannikin to try out Julia Domna, type 2. I made it as far as the serpentine bun and hit a wall. Bobby pins and hair pins just wouldn’t do the job. It was all library leg work and practical experimentation after that.
Q: Which came first: your love of history or your love of hair?
A: My love of hair definitely came first (as a child I had the best coiffed dolls in the neighborhood), and my love of hair kindled my love of fashion and social history.
Q: Your article in the JRA demonstrates an astonishingly thorough command of the archaeological record, and of primary and secondary sources relating to Roman hairstyling (and not just Roman, but also Etruscan and Greek). How did you master such a density of material?
A: Lots and lots of reading, poring over exhibition catalogs, back searching the footnotes to the reading and reading some more! It helped that I am fluent in Italian and, in 2006, I took a German for reading class. Working in my spare time, the research took 6 years.
Q: Did you do all this research on your own or through a school or other institution or …?
A: I am an independent researcher, but my husband is a professor of Italian at the Johns Hopkins University, so I have library privileges there. We are friendly with colleagues in the Classics/Archaeology department and at the Walters Art Museum. They were kind enough to send me articles and clippings, read drafts and help with some picky Latin, though I try not to impose.
Q: You say in the JRA article that sculptures tell you where to part the hair, what direction to twist it in, even whether the curl is natural or artificial. I’m particularly curious about the latter. How you can identify the source of the curl?
A: It helps to have a lot of hairdressing experience! This is a complex topic with room for much ambiguity. Identifying artificial curl on a statue requires a visual literacy similar to that necessary to distinguish a particular painter’s work by his brush strokes. It can be difficult to identify artificial curl today because of the vast array of hair care technologies available.
The Romans did not have the range of technologies that we do (electric dryers, plastics, cheap metal clips, air conditioning, hair spray), so changing the shape of hair was both risky (irons heated over fire) or time consuming (air drying wet hair so it takes on an unnatural shape can take many hours). How long these artificial curls might endure depended on climate and weather. I believe most Roman women made do with their natural curl patterns and avoided artificial curling.
But on Roman portraits, curls that are too neat, ribbon-like, evenly sized and orderly may be suspected as artificial. I always examine the entire hairstyle, looking for signs of wave or straightness. I look for signs in hairstyle components where curl would be irrelevant or counterproductive to the finished style, and I pay special attention to mismatches between one zone of the head and another. Artificial curls are arranged in strict rows or stacks, with a logic and consistency to their rotational direction, say clockwise on one side of the head and counterclockwise on the other. Natural curl tends to be chaotic and “frizzy”, there is usually a mix of different diameters of curl and they don’t always rotate in the same directions.
Q: Were you already an accomplished stylist by then?
A: Yes. I now have over 20 years professional hairdressing experience. I have also taught in an accredited beauty school and as a color educator for a major haircare company.
Q: Did you have to do a lot of trial and error to figure out how certain hairstyles were achieved?
A: Not really, once I realized they could be sewn together, the styles came together fairly quickly. Using high quality portrait examples is a must, though.
Q: Which ones were the most challenging and why?
A: The ones I do on mannikins are the hardest, because I have only my two hands to work with. A live model can follow directions or help out by holding on to a piece of equipment or hair. But in terms of sheer manual dexterity, the “beehive” (ca. 117 A.D.) is the toughest so far.
Q: I was surprised by how much hard science — like the isometric tension keeping bodkins in place and the anatomical requirements of hair length for any given style — was in your JRA paper. Are these factors you can calculate by observation or did you have to learn them by experimenting?
A: Hairdressers learn a lot of biology and anatomy during cosmetology training and we apply it every day in the salon. We all learn that certain hair lengths work better for certain styles. I prefer using vertebrae to measure hair length because it is precise but not dogmatic. I have used bodkins to dress my own hair and I use them to manage the long hair of clients. You become familiar with how they work and it just becomes a matter of finding ways to describe them.
Q: How did you find those unpublished needles in the Johns Hopkins collection?
A: The Johns Hopkins University has a very good archaeological collection and museum. Their gracious former curator, Eunice Maguire, helped me with the needles. There is a lot of unpublished material out there.
Q: How was your “Julia Domna: Forensic Hairdressing” presentation received at the Archaeological Institute of America Conference this year?
A: It seemed to create a a lot of buzz and people said they enjoyed it. It’s not every conference where you go to the poster session and see “heads on pikestaffs”!
Q: Is there anyone else doing anything like what you do?
A: Dr. Elizabeth Bartman (president of the AIA) and Prof. Katherine Schwab of Fairfield University have each employed hairdressers to recreate the hairstyle of Faustina the Elder and the ancient Greek Erechtheion caryatid hairstyles, respectively. But, so far as I know, I am the only professional hairdresser working as a scholar in her own right on the topic of ancient hairstyle recreation.
Q: Do you have any specific goals, attitudes you’d like to change or new approaches you’d like to establish in the archaeological community?
A: I would love it if all archaeological museums would display their sculptures out in the middle of the room instead of in niches and against walls! And I wish there were mirrors behind every small sculpture displayed in a case.
Q: For instance, creating consistent terminology (i.e., bodkins and needles instead of curlers/hairpins/bobby pins) standards in the scholarly literature?
A: That’s a great idea…and I would extend the concept to include technologically neutral descriptions of hair itself.
Q: If you could choose one ancient hairstyle or technique to bring back into fashion today, which one would it be and why?
A: Selfishly, I would love to see more women of every age wearing their hair as long as they can: that way I could find hair models more easily!
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Inspiring, isn’t she? Not only is Janet Stephens an expert in her profession, but in just six years she taught herself to be an expert in the academic field of ancient hairdressing, maybe even the primary expert. Now run, don’t walk, to watch all of her videos and clamor for more.
A silk on linen needlework sampler stitched by 12-year-old Mary Antrim in 1807 sold at Sotheby’s Important Americana sale in New York on Sunday for $1,070,500 (including buyer’s premium). That’s ten times more than its pre-sale estimate of $80,000-$120,000.
Girls at that time (and from the 17th century through to the 20th) were taught needlework from a very young age, both in school and at home. They proved their skill, virtue and industry by creating samplers. Early samplers had a utilitarian aspect, teaching girls schoolwork as they stitched things like letters of the alphabet, maps and mathematical tables, but by the 18th century the focus had shifted to a more pictorial approach. Mary’s elaborate design of farm life, featuring symmetrical vignettes of trees, animals, houses, fruit bowls and an elegant lady riding side-saddle is an exquisite example of pictorial needlework. She was the daughter of weaver John Antrim, so she came by her extraordinary skills honestly.
The piece was one of 198 lots from the collection of needlework historian Betty Ring who wrote the definite reference books on the subject and pretty much single-handedly elevated the entire field of folk art needlework with her scholarship and her collecting. Sotheby’s has put her seminal books on the subject, Girlhood Embroidery Volume I, Volume II and American Needlework Treasures online. They are so rich with illustrations even just paging through them is a beautiful voyage of exploration.
The sale of the Ring collection totaled $4,389,503, over a million dollars above the total estimates, which is particularly remarkable considering that a quarter of the lots didn’t sell at all. Most of the unsold pieces were memorial samplers, depicting veiled mourners, weeping willows and gravestones stitched in memory of a deceased loved one. Interestingly, when Girlhood Embroidery was first published in 1993, it was positively reviewed by The Wall Street Journal (to this day it’s the only book about American decorative arts ever reviewed by the WSJ) and that reviewer was creeped out by mourning pieces. His description of them as “eerily premonitory of Edward Gorey” is supposed to be negative, I suppose, but I think it’s a ringing endorsement. The one pictured on the right, embroidered and painted on silk by Betsey Clarke, at Miss Patten’s School, Hartford, CT, ca. 1809, is one of the ones that didn’t sell. I find it gloriously Gorey-esque.
Sotheby’s press release declares the Mary Antrim sale established a new record sale price for a needlework sampler at auction. It’s not the greatest sale price ever garnered by a young woman’s embroidery, though, so either they made a mistake or they’re defining needlework sampler in a way I don’t understand. The most expensive sampler ever sold is View of Boston Common by Hannah Otis (1732-1801), stitched around 1750. It’s a huge piece, meant for display over a chimney mantelpiece, embroidered in wool and silk on linen canvas. It was purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Sotheby’s in 1996 for a record $1,157,500.
Its historical subject matter drove the price. It captures the Boston Common during the colonial era, complete with British flag flying over the Block House (destroyed in 1761) on the left, the actual beacon on Beacon Hill, and in the middle the Thomas Hancock house with a wealthy young man on his horse accompanied by a black groom in front of it. Thomas Hancock was the father of John Hancock, he of massive signature fame. The young man on the horse could well be John Hancock himself, and the couple on the left his mother and father.
Hannah Otis is closely linked to the American Revolution and American history in general. She was born in 1732, the daughter of Colonel James Otis and Mary Allyne Otis. Her mother was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Edward Doty. Her father was a judge and representative to the Massachusetts legislature. He was a fervent anti-royalist as was his son, James Otis, Jr., who introduced the phrase “Taxation without representation is tyranny” during the Stamp Act debates. Hannah’s older sister Mercy Otis Warren was a poet, playwright and historian who published numerous pro-Revolution writings and corresponded with the luminaries of the American Revolution like John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Adams.
The sampler remained in the Otis family until the 1996 sale. It had been on loan at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for over 40 years when the family decided reluctantly that they had to sell it.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was determined to buy the needlework, which was consigned to Sotheby’s by Martha Gray Otis (b. 1943) and her brother, Samuel Allyne Otis (b. 1940), who felt they could not afford to give it to the museum. “We are happy to have the museum have it; we hated to take it away from them,” said Martha Otis after the sale. “My greatest joy, besides being out of debt, is that the Boston museum has it.”
It was estate planning that drove the Otises to sell the needlework. “We are not wealthy enough to own it and pay inheritance taxes, and now by the time we pay the capital gains tax, we are not talking about a fortune divided between the eight of us,” Martha Otis continued. “I think Hannah Otis, who struggled to support herself, taking in borders and running a shop, would be pleased to know that the monies from the sale of her needlework will give my children and my brother Sam’s children a boost when they need it.”
Oxford University professor and Voltaire scholar Nicholas Cronk has uncovered 14 previously unknown letters by Voltaire written during his almost-three-year exile in England. Professor Cronk, director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation, found the letters while doing archival research in US libraries. Paul LeClerc, former president of the New York Public Library and a Voltaire scholar in his own right, asked Cronk to examine 11 letters by the French Enlightenment satirist they had recently purchased. Cronk found an additional two in the Morgan Library and Museum and one in the Columbia University library.
These letters shed new light on Voltaire’s time in England, confirming that he did indeed receive an impressive £200 pension from Robert Walpole’s government, a fact long debated by scholars, and underscoring Voltaire’s remarkable success at climbing the British social and literary ladder in a short period of time. He had arrived in England in 1726 a penniless poet and playwright with a knack for irritating the monarchy and aristocracy of France with his biting satire. He didn’t speak a word of English, and all he had to smooth his way was a letter of recommendation from the British ambassador to Paris. He learned fluent English in six months and was corresponding with royalty before a year had passed.
Professor Cronk said: “Voltaire spent two important but relatively undocumented years in England in his early thirties at a time when he was best known as a poet – he arrived with only a recommendation from the British Ambassador to Paris. While here, he was exposed to ideas of English writers and later took empiricism back to the Continent where it became the basis for the Enlightenment. These newly-discovered letters are therefore very interesting because they show how Voltaire’s close interaction with the English aristocracy exposed him to Enlightenment ideas and help us to piece together the nature of those interactions.”
One letter is from Voltaire to Lord Bathurst, a patron of the arts who often hosted great English thinkers at his manor, Richings, including Alexander Pope who wrote much of his translation of Homer there. In this letter Voltaire thanks Bathurst for “the freedom of your house and the many liberties I enjoyed in that fine library.” “This shows us one way in which Voltaire would have been exposed to so much of Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Swift, Pope and others – both by reading their books in the library at Richings and perhaps even by meeting contemporary English thinkers,” Professor Cronk explained.
Shortly after his arrival, in June of 1727, King George I died and his son assumed the throne as King George II. This was a fortunate changing of the guard for Voltaire, because the new king’s wife Queen Caroline was a strong supporter of the arts with a particular love of poetry. Grabbing the social climbing bull by the horns, Voltaire published an English translation of La Henriade, his 1723 epic poem about French King Henri IV, dedicating it to Queen Caroline. The poem sold well and solidified his patronage at the highest levels of British society.
Queen Caroline was a political ally of Sir Robert Walpole and may have played a part in securing Voltaire that £200 grant. One of the most notable of the newly discovered letters was written by Voltaire to the Treasury confirming receipt of the money. He signs it “Francis Voltaire,” a unique autograph that combines an anglicized version of his first name François with his famous pseudonym.
His time in England introduced him to ideas that he would advocate for the rest of his life, including freedom of speech, religious tolerance and constitutional monarchy. After his return to France in 1729, he would praise those ideals in his Letters Concerning the English Nation, a collection of essays published first in English in 1733 and then in French a year later. The French publication caused a scandal, getting the publisher sent to the Bastille and forcing Voltaire to flee yet again.
The 14 letters have been scanned, digitized and uploaded to Oxford’s Bodleian Library’s Electronic Enlightenment website, a treasure trove of correspondence from over 6,000 writers, philosophers, and political leaders from the 17th and 18th centuries. In collaboration with Oxford’s Voltaire Foundation, Electronic Enlightenment is working on digitizing the definitive complete collection of Voltaire’s writings.
It’s subscription only, I’m sad to say, but if you have access to an institutional login, you can view the Voltaire letters here.
The Graffiti House in Brandy Station, Virginia was built in 1858 next to the train tracks. Though a small town, Brandy Station saw a lot of activity during the Civil War because of its location at the junction of the Orange and Alexandria Railroad — the sole rail line linking Confederate capital Richmond with Union capital Washington, D.C. — and of the roads leading to two major fords of the Rappahannock River. The house is thought to have been used as a hospital by both Confederate and Union troops, many of whom left their autographs and sketches of girls, horses, birds, soldiers and more on the second floor walls to mark their stay.
It’s their graffiti that has given the house its moniker, but in the immediate aftermath of the war, the homeowners weren’t keen to preserve the doodles soldiers had scribbled all over the walls using charcoal from the fireplaces and the occasional pencil. The owners whitewashed all that tasty social history. Thankfully, a thin layer of dirt and soot had accumulated over the graffiti, keeping the whitewash from destroying the charcoal markings.
Over the years, the house passed through many hands, some of which made some unfortunately damaging repairs. The graffiti were forgotten until a 1993 renovation stripped off some wallpaper and old paint to reveal the treasures beneath. Despite the rediscovery of this important history, by 2002 the house was derelict. People took chunks of plaster off the wall just to ensure that some part of the graffiti would be preserved when the house was, as seemed inevitable, demolished. This dire fate was avoided thanks to the Brandy Station Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving the natural and historical patrimony of the town, which purchased the house in August 2002.
They restored the house and hired conservator Chris Mills of Christopher Mills Conservation Services out of New York City to work on the graffiti walls starting last year. He has had to stabilize the walls because the 1858 plaster is coming off the wooden lathing, and while he’s at it, he is painstakingly removing the whitewash using q-tips and razor blades, revealing new graffiti and reviving faded ones.
Q: How did you first begin to research ancient hairdressing?
