Oxford: city of aquatint

I have recently been reading Evelyn Waugh's book 'Brideshead Revisted' following seeing again the 1981 TV series. In the opening chapters, Oxford is referred to by the narrator Charles Ryder (who is an artist) as still being a 'city of aquatint'. I realised I had no idea what an aquatint is: in fact it is a particular kind of print, produced by a process I have not fully understood. But I see more clearly now why the book makes this reference. Below are two aquatints of Oxford, both admittedly of a time rather earlier than the 1920s when the book is set:


In both of these but particularly the second, we see Oxford as it were through a damp gauze, softening the image and making it more redolent of a time before Oxford became mostly a park-and-ride place still crammed with traffic.

Pictures of an earlier time

These images are paintings by the artist Margaret Dovaston. Ignored by the art establishment, they have graced countless waiting rooms and living rooms, although their popularity is now quite diminished. I once bought a print of the second picture at a car boot sale but I somehow lost it at work. They are redolent of an earlier age; most take place in a country inn, or some in a squire's house. The sort of scenes which they show would have been familiar to that famous diarist Parson Woodforde; scenes of a natural life unsullied by many aspects of today. But dentistry was bad; and life could be short for the unfortunate.
A website on Margaret Dovaston can be found at http://sueburton.co.uk/dovaston/margaret/moremargaret.htm

A man and a woman

'Marriage of Convenience' by Orchardson

'Garden of Eden' by Riviere

These two paintings show a great deal about relationships. In the first, a beautiful young wife sits listless at the dinner table, bored with her much older husband in a wealthy Victorian household. In the second, painted around 1900 and much more 'modern' in style, a young couple walk in a London park. Her face is eager and she is plainly in love with the young man, who is probably in a modest white-collar job - perhaps a solicitor's clerk? Where can happiness really be found?

One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic

So said the Soviet leader Josef Stalin, in an oft-misunderstood quotation. His own death came in March 1953 and here his acolytes carry his coffin. The two front figures are (left) Malenkov, and (right) Beria, the notorious head of the secret police, who only a few months later was despatched by his colleagues. Other figures in the picture are the veteran foreign minister Molotov (black hat, behind soldier), and the Jewish Lazar Kaganovich (with moustache, two behind Molotov). Both, like Malenkov, managed to die in their beds. A few year's before Stalin died, his own suspicious nature and the rivalry between his associates had led to the murder of two promising younger men, Kuznetsov and Voznesensky, in the 'Leningrad Case'. Only three years after this photograph was taken, Stalin was denounced by Khruschev, who was himself implicated in many of the regime's less savoury activities in the 1930s. Being a comrade is hard, tovarisch!

Are things as we see them?

This is Galaxy M104, sometimes know as the Sombrero Galaxy. It is approximately 29 million light years from Earth (just under 290 million million million kilometres), so what we see today was the galaxy as it was 29 million years ago. No doubt a lot has happened there since then; it certainly has here. What's it like there now?

This picture of somewhere almost unthinkably remote from our own lives (but still quite close in galactic terms) reminds me of Elizabeth Jennings' beautiful short poem 'Delay':

The radiance of that star that leans on me

Was shining years ago. The light that now

Glitters up there my eye may never see,

And so the time lag teases me with how

Love that loves now may not reach me until

Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse

Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful

And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

The moral of which may be summarised as: someone may be trying to tell you something......