The Pictorial Arts: Alive and Well

Monday, March 11, 2013

Alive and Well

From an old old textbook, when they knew how to keep a school boy's interest in history alive and well.

Bathsheba — circa 1900

4 comments:

eViL pOp TaRt said...: Excellent composition.; March 12, 2013 at 3:23 AM
M. D. Jackson said...: Wow! That kind of book would have been confiscated when I went to school (and likely passed around the teacher's staff room). Today I assume the kid in possession of such a dangerous object would be suspended, sent for counseling and the book would be locked away in a vault somewhere.

And they call it progress. Go figure.; March 12, 2013 at 6:21 AM
Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...: Certainly, images such as this excited me in a way that had some sort of nascent sexuality to it, but the primary appeal to me was of the image as such.

I wasn't the sort of school boy who would have fantasized about going to a place such as that shown — I would have recognized it as an imagining of a would long gone and not to return. I wouldn't have had an idea of what could be done with women of the sort shown, let alone opinions about what ought to be done.

But I would have recognized that an artist had found a way to produce such an image, and I would have wanted to have been able to make such images myself. I would have longed for that even in cases where I would presume that the requisite skill would forever be out of reach.

I wasn't much paying attention to the teachers. If I could, I would have spent all of my time with the pictures.; March 12, 2013 at 6:28 AM
Thomas Haller Buchanan said...: And that, Daniel, is ,of course, exactly what I meant. Thank you!; March 12, 2013 at 7:17 AM

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