8. Infrared Reflectography of Edward Hopper’s High Noon: Questions of Authentication

Author(s):  
Ian E. Longo

An unprovenanced oil study, purportedly by the early American realist Edward Hopper (188* -1967), was purchased in 2007 on eBay by a pair of brothers from Ontario. It is a smaller, poorly-executed near-copy of Hopper’s High Noon at the Dayton Art Institute. Given that detailed diary entries by Hopper’s wife, Josephine, note only that four charcoal sketches preceded the final version of High Noon, and fail to mention an oil study, Gail Levin, the author of Hopper’s catalogue raisonné, has conservatively concluded that it can at best be assigned to a dedicated follower. Can Infrared Reflectography of the two paintings shed light on the question of authenticity? Many pigments used by Hopper become transparent in the Near Infrared spectrum, a fact verified by a test-panel. By using a DSLR camera, converted to detect IR, charcoal sketches on the primed canvas of the original were revealed. While IR Reflectography reveals earlier stages in the composition of the authentic High Noon, stages suggested by the charcoal sketches, IR does not provide positive proof for the authenticity of the oil sketch. The issue of authenticity became further complicated when the media, led by the Globe and Mail, took up the case of the owners and overstated the IR results. At present the IR investigation suggests only that the oil study was painted by a follower working from either Josephine’s diary or, more intriguingly, from Hopper’s own sketches, which are held in a private collection.

Author(s):  
Ian Longo

An unprovenanced oil study, purportedly by the early American realist Edward Hopper (188* -1967), was purchased in 2007 on eBay by a pair of brothers from Ontario. It is a smaller, poorly-executed near-copy of Hopper’s High Noon at the Dayton Art Institute. Given that detailed diary entries by Hopper’s wife, Josephine, note only that four charcoal sketches preceded the final version of High Noon, and fail to mention an oil study, Gail Levin, the author of Hopper’s catalogue raisonné, has conservatively concluded that it can at best be assigned to a dedicated follower. Can Infrared Reflectography of the two paintings shed light on the question of authenticity? Many pigments used by Hopper become transparent in the Near Infrared spectrum, a fact verified by a test-panel. By using a DSLR camera, converted to detect IR, charcoal sketches on the primed canvas of the original were revealed. While IR Reflectography reveals earlier stages in the composition of the authentic High Noon, stages suggested by the charcoal sketches, IR does not provide positive proof for the authenticity of the oil sketch. The issue of authenticity became further complicated when the media, led by the Globe and Mail, took up the case of the owners and overstated the IR results. At present the IR investigation suggests only that the oil study was painted by a follower working from either Josephine’s diary or, more intriguingly, from Hopper’s own sketches, which are held in a private collection.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 392-401
Author(s):  
T. R. Birkhead ◽  
G. Axon ◽  
J. R. Middleton

Most of the approximately 75 known eggs of the extinct great auk ( Pinguinus impennis) are in public museums, with a few in private collections. A small number of these eggs has sustained damage, either at the time of collection or subsequently, and two of these eggs are known to have been repaired. The two eggs suffered rather different types of damage and were subsequently restored using different techniques. The first, known as Bourman Labrey's egg, sustained extensive damage sometime prior to the 1840s, when the shell was broken into numerous pieces. This egg was repaired by William Yarrell in the 1840s, and when it was restored again in 2018, it was discovered that Yarrell's restoration had involved the use of an elaborate cardboard armature. This egg is currently in a private collection. The second egg, known as the Scarborough egg, bequeathed to the Scarborough Museum in 1877, was damaged (by unknown causes) and repaired, probably by the then curator at Scarborough, W. J. Clarke, in 1906. This egg was damaged when one or more pieces were broken adjacent to the blowhole at the narrow end (where there was some pre-existing damage). The media reports at the time exaggerated the extent of the damage, suggesting that the egg was broken almost in two. Possible reasons for this exaggeration are discussed. Recent examination using a black light and ultraviolet (UV) revealed that the eggshell had once borne the words, “a Penguin's Egg”, that were subsequently removed by scraping.


2019 ◽  
Vol 625 ◽  
pp. L2 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. M. Kalari ◽  
J. S. Vink ◽  
W. J. de Wit ◽  
N. J. Bastian ◽  
R. A. Méndez

The formation mechanism of the most massive stars in the Universe remains an unsolved problem. Are they able to form in relative isolation in a manner similar to the formation of solar-type stars, or do they necessarily require a clustered environment? In order to shed light on this important question, we study the origin of two very massive stars (VMS): the O2.5If*/WN6 star RFS7 (∼100 M⊙), and the O3.5If* star RFS8 (∼70 M⊙), found within ∼53 and 58 pc, respectively, of the Galactic massive young cluster NGC 3603, using Gaia data. The star RFS7 is found to exhibit motions resembling a runaway star from NGC 3603. This is now the most massive runaway star candidate known in the Milky Way. Although RFS8 also appears to move away from the cluster core, it has proper-motion values that appear inconsistent with being a runaway from NGC 3603 at the 3σ level (but with substantial uncertainties due to distance and age). Furthermore, no evidence for a bow-shock or a cluster was found surrounding RFS8 from available near-infrared photometry. In summary, whilst RFS7 is likely a runaway star from NGC 3603, making it the first VMS runaway in the Milky Way, RFS8 is an extremely young (∼2 Myr) VMS, which might also be a runaway, but this would need to be established from future spectroscopic and astrometric observations, as well as precise distances. If RFS 8 was still not found to meet the criteria for being a runaway from NGC 3603 from such future data, this would have important ramifications for current theories of massive star formation, as well as the way the stellar initial mass function is sampled.


2008 ◽  
Vol 35 (6) ◽  
pp. 1708-1716 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Falcone ◽  
F. Bloisi ◽  
V. Califano ◽  
M. Pagano ◽  
L. Vicari

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Frédéric Dubois

This scholarly essay discusses one particular form of documentary production: interactive documentary. It does so in the larger context of media innovation research. Its main aim is to shed light on how those thinking and creating living documentaries define and frame social impact. The thesis behind this essay is, that contrary to media innovation happening within the paradigm of what scholars and practitioners call the ‘media industries’ - which are largely tributary to capitalist impact criteria, living documentary producers are mainly driven by the potential social impact that their work might have. By presenting and analysing the living documentary Field Trip (2019), a project in which I assumed a combined role of practitioner-researcher, I offer a case study that illustrates and tests my assumptions. I complement my observations within the case study with interviews and other practices. My findings indicate that from a media production perspective, the impact expectations of those making living documentaries can loosely be as associated with a commons-based production paradigm. Yet, producers of these documentaries constantly need to renegotiate and compromise on their social impact expectations because of internal production affordances and the (external) dominance of the ‘media industries’ paradigm.


2020 ◽  
Vol 642 ◽  
pp. A155 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Zhou ◽  
D. Elbaz ◽  
M. Franco ◽  
B. Magnelli ◽  
C. Schreiber ◽  
...  

Thanks to its outstanding angular resolution, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has recently unambiguously identified a population of optically dark galaxies with redshifts greater than z = 3, which play an important role in the cosmic star formation in massive galaxies. In this paper we study the properties of the six optically dark galaxies detected in the 69 arcmin2 GOODS-ALMA 1.1 mm continuum survey. While none of them are listed in the deepest H-band based CANDELS catalog in the GOODS-South field down to H = 28.16 AB, we were able to de-blend two of them from their bright neighbor and measure an H-band flux for them. We present the spectroscopic scan follow-up of five of the six sources with ALMA band 4. All are detected in the 2 mm continuum with signal-to-noise ratios higher than eight. One emission line is detected in AGS4 (νobs = 151.44 GHz with an S/N = 8.58) and AGS17 (νobs = 154.78 GHz with an S/N = 10.23), which we interpret in both cases as being due to the CO(6–5) line at zspecAGS4 = 3.556 and zspecAGS17 = 3.467, respectively. These redshifts match both the probability distribution of the photometric redshifts derived from the UV to near-infrared spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and the far-infrared SEDs for typical dust temperatures of galaxies at these redshifts. We present evidence that nearly 70% (4/6 of galaxies) of the optically dark galaxies belong to the same overdensity of galaxies at z ∼ 3.5. overdensity The most massive one, AGS24 (M⋆ = 1011.32−0.19+0.02 M⊙), is the most massive galaxy without an active galactic nucleus at z > 3 in the GOODS-ALMA field. It falls in the very center of the peak of the galaxy surface density, which suggests that the surrounding overdensity is a proto-cluster in the process of virialization and that AGS24 is the candidate progenitor of the future brightest cluster galaxy.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 34-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aisha K Gill ◽  
Karen Harrison

In May 2012, nine men from the Rochdale area of Manchester were found guilty of sexually exploiting a number of underage girls. Media reporting on the trial focused on the fact that eight of the men were of Pakistani descent, while all the girls were white. Framing similar cases in Preston, Rotherham, Derby, Shropshire, Oxford, Telford and Middlesbrough as ethnically motivated, the media incited moral panic over South Asian grooming gangs preying on white girls. While these cases shed light on the broader problem of sexual exploitation in Britain, they also reveal continuing misconceptions that stereotype South Asian men as ‘natural’ perpetrators of these crimes due to culturally-specific notions of hegemonic masculinity. Examining newspaper coverage from 2012 to 2013, this article discusses the discourse of the British media’s portrayal of South Asian men as perpetrators of sexual violence against white victims, inadvertently construing ‘South Asian men’ as ‘folk devils’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marius Crous ◽  
Alan Murdoch

Hilda’s Diary of a Cape Housekeeper (1902), by Hildagonda Duckitt, is an example of culinary literature and essentially a diary of life in the Cape at the time (one that includes recipes, notes on gardening, etc.). This text is investigated in this article with the aim of examining the responsibilities of women with respect to food, food preparation and the kitchen, the depiction of men with respect to food, its preparation and the eating thereof, and the influence of class and the ethnicity of the author’s intended audience. The article notes how these responsibilities have changed over time, particularly with regard to their content and appearance, as well as discusses the relationship between cookbooks and men. Cookbooks have become a mainstream subject of academic study, of popular culture and the media, not least of all for the insights that they provide about gender (especially in terms of the division of labour), ethnicity and culture, and while they have traditionally been aimed at white women, this is no longer always the case. Such gender issues are the primary focus of this article. The context of the book, namely South Africa under British colonial rule during the late 1800s and early 1900s, is also considered in order to shed light on the questions of ethnicity and culture. Duckitt’s affinity for the British Empire is explored, as well as her views about the indigenous people of South Africa, their roles with respect to food, and their place in the colonial home. Lastly, the article takes stock of Duckitt’s voracious appetite for new knowledge and its production, despite the patriarchy of the time.


2021 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-282
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Nehring ◽  
Myriam Krutzsch ◽  
Ira Rabin

Abstract Near-infrared reflectography and imaging X-ray fluorescence analysis reveal that carbon inks of two different compositions were used in the papyrus manuscript Berlin P 11702. In contrast with the writing ink, one of the carbon drawing inks contained a significant addition of iron. This result emphasizes the need for routine instrumental ink analysis.


Author(s):  
Stephen Siff

This introductory chapter describes the media hype over LSD and related psychedelic drugs: a grand arrival to a 1950s cultural landscape that had been deliberately scrubbed of alluring descriptions of drug use; the the picturesque drug trips related in mainstream magazines and newspapers; sensational television specials and radio discussions; the contradictory reactions in mass media as the drugs accrued both casualties and countercultural cachet; and, finally, the loss of interest in psychedelic drugs by mainstream media outlets at the end of the 1960s. Ultimately, the book's goal is to not build a general theory but to shed light on a particular case through close examination of the media content and circumstances surrounding it.


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