From Nineveh to New York: The Strange Story of the Assyrian Reliefs in the Metropolitan Museum and the Hidden Masterpiece at Canford School, and: A.W. Franks: Nineteenth-Century Collecting and the British Museum (review)

2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 298-301
Author(s):  
Frederick Nathaniel Bohrer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Metropolitan Museum ◽  
Strange Story

V. The Talbot Casket and Related Late Medieval Leather Caskets

Archaeologia ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 131-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Cherry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Northern France ◽  
Sphere Of Influence

Late medieval wooden caskets decorated with leather have attracted much greater attention in Germany and Belgium than in England. The Spitzer collection is one of the first that included examples of them, and the first major survey that mentioned them was that of Dr. H. Kohlhausen in 1926. His discussion of Minnekästchen, the romantic name given in the nineteenth century to caskets with secular subjects, included both caskets of wood alone and wood covered with leather. He discussed leather caskets now in the Deutsches Ledermuseum at Offenbach and in the Cluny Museum, Paris but, since he was solely concerned with secular iconography, he did not discuss other leather caskets whose style and technique indicated that they had a related origin. The whole group of leather caskets, including the two already mentioned and also caskets at Lucca and in the collection of Mr. Robert Martin on loan to the Cloisters, New York, was first discussed as a whole by Dr. G. Gall in his magisterial survey of European leatherwork. He assigned the Offenbach and Cloisters caskets to northern France or Flanders in the second half of the fourteenth century and the Lucca casket to Northern France or Flanders around 1400. Earlier in 1952 Mme A. M. Marien Dugardin reviewed the evidence for a number of leather caskets mainly in Belgium museums but including the example in the Cluny Museum and concluded from their use of Flemish for the inscriptions around their lids that they were Flemish in origin. In 1975 Mr. H. Bober discussed the Martin casket on loan to the Cloisters and concluded that it was of Flemish origin and dated to about 1400 or slightly earlier. In contradiction to the previously expressed views R. Didier in 1978, in the catalogue of the exhibition Die Parler und der Schöne Stil, discussing the lid of a casket preserved at Nivelles rejected a Flemish origin for the group and suggested that the caskets found an origin in the French sphere of influence, probably in Paris. This article will see how far the casket recently acquired by the British Museum (pis. xxviii-xxxin a) relates to these caskets and will review the evidence for its place of production.

John Gillies, M.D., traveller and botanist, 1792-1834

1951 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-136 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Natural History ◽  
South America ◽  
Sick Leave ◽  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Early Death ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Joseph Hooker

During the first half of the nineteenth century progress in botany lay very largely in the hands of the systematists, many of whom were received into the Fellowship of the Royal Society. Among them are to be found such widely celebrated names as Sir Joseph Banks, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Sir William and Sir Joseph Hooker, John Lindley, A. B. Lambert and Alexander Macleay. To all of these John Gillies and his work were well known. Gillies also numbered among his friends and acquaintance such distinguished travellers as John Miers and Captain Basil Hall, the naturalist Robert Jameson and the physicist Sir David Brewster, all of whom became Fellows. To-day, while their memory lives on, Gillies himself is all but forgotten. 1 W. J. Hooker, Professor of Botany in Glasgow, who early befriended him, wrote that ‘ Dr. Gillies carried with him a degree of scientific knowledge and a philosophical spirit of inquiry, such as have fallen to the lot of few travellers ’. 2 Gillies was a young naval surgeon who went to South America at the age of twenty-eight on sick leave, in the hope of avoiding an early death from consumption ; he stayed there for eight years trying to undertake scientific inquiries despite wars, civil disturbances and ill-health. The six years of life remaining to him after his return to the British Isles were spent in ordering his extensive botanical collections and in distributing them among his friends who published accounts of them on his behalf. In this way his collections became scattered but the greater proportion of them are still to be seen in the herbaria of the British Museum (Natural History), Kew, Oxford, Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Brno, Florence and New York. 3 For these reasons an account of his life and work needs no apology.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

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