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).