Visions of Japan 1992

This boxed collection of Japanese graphic ephemera served as a visual accompaniment to the V&A exhibition of the same name as part of a Festival of Japan in 1992. It was encased in a card sleeve along with a hard-backed volume of observations on life in Japan and a series of extended photo essays on aspects of modern and traditional Japan, bound and stitched in a traditional Japanese style. The ephemera box was presented as a scrapbook and contained 28 A4 printed sheets featuring a wide range of visual culture from consumer products to transport, cultural events to etiquette, packaging to logistics, medicines to comic books, selected to illustrate the Japanese twin poles of contemplative elegance and impulsive exuberance. A special touch is the inclusion of tipped-in items of genuine ephemera, some wrapped in plastic envelopes, others pasted in. It’s a lavish treatment with no expense spared.  The last image reproduces the list of captions that explains the content of each of the 28 loose leaf pages. One detail not on the list is that  Raymond Loewy designed the peace symbol featured on the Peace cigarette pack (item 21).

 

Dulwich Picture Gallery

About a month ago we visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the Anna Ancher exhibition (fascinating, if a little uneven) and had a wander through the permanent collection housed in the main gallery distinctively designed by Sir John Soane. Soane’s great innovation, the indirect lighting supplied by overhead lantern glazing became the model for a generation or more of subsequent museum designers. It was England’s first public art gallery when it opened in 1817. 

The painting collection had its origins in a project led by a London art dealer and philanthropist, Sir Francis Bourgeois, (whose name lives on in the form of the famous YouTube trainspotter) to assemble a group of Old Masters as the basis of a National Gallery for Poland on behalf of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (PLC). By 1795 the PLC had ceased to exist and on his death in 1811 Bourgeois bequeathed funding for Sir John Soane to design a new museum to display the collection. In his design Soane included a Mausoleum to house the remains of Bourgeois and his business partner, Desenfans (and the latter’s wife) that occupies the heart of the building. For those who notice it, it is a slightly unsettling presence but at the same time it’s a grand gesture on the part of Soane to honour an unfulfilled ambition of Bourgeois to create a mausoleum for himself and Desenfans in the grounds of the latter’s home.

These are some notes on the examples that caught my attention.  At the top of the post is a wonderful small portrait by Rubens as a family man. Sensitive and tender, from c. 1612, a painting of his 12 year old daughter, Clara Serena. A sense of immediacy underlines her fragility and, sadly, she only lived a few more years. A stark reminder of how often infant mortality haunted family lives. Next is a small scale version of an old favourite subject due to its potential for eroticism and gruesome violence, in which the Jewish heroine Judith brandishes the severed head of the inebriated Assyrian commander, Holofernes. Based on a much larger original work by Cristofani Aliori, more dramatic conceptions of this story feature the moment of decapitation, most memorably that by Artemisia Gentileschi.  Below is an enigmatic composition of female heads orientated in opposition. It turns out to be a surviving fragment of a Poussin painting from c. 1529, rescued from the remains of an Adoration of the Golden Calf, otherwise war damaged beyond repair. Then we have a close-up on the hands of a Locksmith, extracted from a portrait by an unidentified Neapolitan artist, the full painting can be seen here. Following this is another intimation of mortality - a deathbed portrait of “Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby”, painted by Anthony van Dyck. The story goes that she suddenly died in her sleep at the age of 32 whereupon her husband summoned Van Dyck to record her likeness within two days of her demise. Sidestepping any mawkish sentiment, the artist shows her asleep in peace while also conveying, via the cloudy turbulence of her nightdress that her sleep has no end to it. Finally we have an entire wall of Gainsborough portraits except for a single Hogarth (lower left). The centrepiece is a double portrait (c. 1772) of Elizabeth and Mary Linley, accomplished singers and performers from a well-connected Bath family, their willowy forms surrounded by wispy foliage. About 12 years later in 1785, Gainsborough was employed to update their apparel to reflect changing fashions, by which time their musical careers were over, thanks to their marital status. 

 

Kino International Berlin

Opened in what was then East Berlin in1963 and part of the final phase of the westward extension of Karl-Marx-Allee concluding at Alexanderplatz, in which the Soviet wedding cake style was supplanted by something more contemporary. The cinema is a concrete framed construction designed by Josef Kaiser with a first floor box that projects forward to give the appearance of floating. The mostly glazed façade is only broken by a full height poster for the current film which by tradition is always hand-painted. On the other three sides of the box are stylised relief carvings moulded in concrete and designed to celebrate world peace and healthy outdoor pursuits. When complete, the capacity was an audience of 600. Eight rows of seats with the best sightlines and extra legroom were reserved for the use of weary party apparatchiks who could relax and stretch out their legs after a hard day’s labour ordering arrests and enforcing party discipline. It was a prestige project for the DDR and has remained in business since reunification. A two year closure for refurbishment began in May 2024 and reopening could be as early as the end of this month if all goes to plan.

 

Fire over America

It’s a dangerous occupation so firefighters are heroes everywhere (other than those who start their own fires) and nowhere more so than in the US.  Serving as the guardians of their community and emblems of selfless devotion to duty, they pose on these postcards inside their vehicles or standing to attention outside their fire stations. The men of the Salvage Corps in Newark exhibit an air of grim resolve as they prepare for their next assignment.  Edward Croker was appointed Chief Fire Officer for the city of New York in 1899 at the age of only 35. He led by example and attended every major fire in the city, often first on the scene thanks to his automobile outrunning the teams of horses that carried his comrades. After leaving the Fire Department he became an advocate and promoter of fire prevention.

Equipped with water pumps and access beneath the hull to an unlimited water supply, construction of special purpose Fire Boats began in the early 1900s. Equally effective at extinguishing waterfront fires as those onboard ship. In Seattle the Duwamish went into service in 1909 - after retirement in 1985 the vessel was preserved as a National Monument. Opportunistic postcard businesses appear to have used the same images, with extensive but clumsy retouching on the pairs of cards from New York. Postcards of burning buildings in San Francisco and Chicago (where extreme cold is freezing the water jets on contact) follow. The final item is a memorial in Hoboken where the local community honours the fire crew who perished in the line of duty.

Bridge Postcards of 2025

A selection of vintage postcard views of bridges acquired in 2025, beginning in Dresden with a record low water level on the River Elbe. A crowd of locals enjoy the novelty of exploring the river bed on foot. In August 2025 all river transport was suspended when the Elbe fell to its lowest level ever recorded. Next is from Ironbridge in Shropshire where the pioneering cast iron bridge manufactured by Abraham Darby has crossed the River Severn since 1779. Equally famous is the ancient Roman aqueduct built in the first century near Nîmes that follows. The River Trent at Gunthorpe, Nottinghamshire was first crossed by this cast iron toll bridge in 1875 - it was replaced in 1927 by a three arch concrete structure.  Constantine is Algeria’s third city, built on a high plateau above the River Rhumel and is known as the City of Bridges. The El-Kantara stone bridge of 1863 is one of the oldest to span the spectacular gorge and the colonial French influence is very apparent in this unusual elevated view. When completed in 1889 the Sukkur railway bridge over the River Indus was the longest cantilever bridge in the world. Later renamed the Lansdowne Bridge (in honour of the Viceroy), it’s still in use as a rail link between the city of Lahore and the port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea. 

Next is a single track railroad bridge in the Pacific Northwest of the US, completed in 1912 and still crossed today by freight trains - in 1957 a vertical-lift section was added. Another railway subject follows - this card shows what was in 1905 a common method of testing the loading capacity of new bridges by running multiple locomotives over the top and monitoring the impact. In Melbourne the River Yarra is spanned by the Queen’s Bridge, completed in 1889 and protected by listing on the Victoria Heritage Register. Hydraulically powered lifting bridges are very much an American thing - two more examples here from Portland, Oregon and Chicago. The final card is an elevated view of the second Tay Bridge opened in 1887 to replace the one that collapsed in a storm in December 1879 - everyone on board the train crossing the bridge at the time lost their lives. There’s something peculiarly Victorian about the action of the North British Railway in recovering the submerged locomotive and returning it to service.