Peking Opera Figures, 19th C

Peking Opera Figures

"Album of 100 Portraits of Personages from Chinese Opera"

Period: Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
Date: late 19th–early 20th century
Culture: China
Medium: Album of fifty leaves; ink, color, and gold on silk
Artist: Unidentified

"In the opera boom of the late nineteenth century, albums were turned to a new purpose: documenting the variety and vibrancy of stage culture in all its multicolored splendor. This album records in detail the makeup and costume of one hundred characters drawn from nine plays. Each character is identified with an accompanying inscription, and the plays are named at the top right of nine of the leaves in slightly larger script."

• 'One Hundred Portraits of Peking Opera Characters' is available online via the Metropolitan Museum website (click on 'Additional Images' below [L] of the picture on that page. The down arrow - bottom [R] - of each image allows for downloading)
• This opera figure series is one of the items on view at *The Art of the Chinese Album* exhibition, running at the museum between September 2014 and March 2015.

Appletons’ cyclopaedia of applied mechanic

Davis & Furber wool-carding machine.
From Appletons’ cyclopaedia of applied mechanic vol. 2, edited by Park Benjamin, New York, 1880.
(Source: archive.org)

Park Benjamin (1849–1922) was an American patent lawyer, physician, and writer. He was born in New York City, graduated at the United States Naval Academy in 1867, resigned from the Navy in 1869, and graduated at the Albany Law School in the following year. He was associate editor of The Scientific American from 1872 to 1878 and subsequently edited Appleton's Cyclopedia of Applied Mechanics and Cyclopædia of Modern Mechanism.

Besides numerous magazine articles dealing for the most part with scientific subjects, he published also:

    Shakings or Etchings from the United States Naval Academy (1867)

    Wrinkles and Recipes (1875)

    The End of New York (1881)

    The Age of Electricity (1886)

    The Voltaic Cell (1892)

    The History of Electricity (1895)

    History of the United States Naval Academy (1900)

    Modern Mechanism (1905)

Squier’s Cuba sugar-mill.

The Lane and Bodley saw-mill.

The Leavitt pumping engine.

The Schneider eighty-ton steam-hammer.

Steam compression of cotton: the Champion compress.

The Sellers planing-machine

Metal-turning lathe.

 

More info available on each machine/Illustration (click on each photo caption).

The song of Hiawatha, 19th C

Oh my little friend, the squirrel.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", “The Song of Hiawatha”, and “Evangeline”. He was also the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's “The Divine Comedy”.

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts. He studied at Bowdoin College. After spending time in Europe he became a professor at Bowdoin and, later, at Harvard College. His first major poetry collections were “Voices ofthe Night” (1839) and “Ballads and Other Poems” (1841). Longfellow retired from teaching in 1854, to focus on his writing, living the remainder of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a former headquarters of George Washington. 

His first wife Mary Potter died in 1835, after a miscarriage. His second wife Frances Appleton died in 1861, after sustaining burns when her dress caught fire. After her death, Longfellow had difficulty writing poetry for a time and focused on his translation. He died in 1882.

Longfellow wrote many lyric poems known for their musicality and often presenting stories of mythology and legend. He became the most popular American poet of his day and also had success overseas. He has been criticized, however, for imitating European styles and writing specifically for the masses.

Above&Below illustrations drawn by Harrison Fisher, from The song of Hiawatha, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Indianapolis, 1906. Found the book in a reasonable quality scan at -as usual this year 2015- archive.org (link provided here). :: Really hard to make a selection of only 4 and finally I selected colour examples but B&W drawings are simply amazing, pure motion catched...

And he loved the lonely maiden

With both hands his face he covered

Painted many shapes and figures