Ruralists

This painting is by Annie Ovenden and is entitled Storm Gathering Over St German's. Ms Ovenden and her husband were members of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a distinctly English group of painters who depicted nature in a very special way - not naturalistic but with a very keen eye for the feel of a place. Although no longer in formal existence, the group still has a website here. There is also a good book about their work, which is listed on Amazon here.

Gentlemen at leisure

This painting by Emerson shows the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) reclining with friends outside the Northumberland house of Cragside, in 1884. This house was the first in the world to be lit using hydroelectricity.

Tribute to Oscar Wilde

Depending on which account you read, the relationship between the Anglo-Irish playwright Oscar Wilde and his friend Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas (above) seems either quite unpleasant or a thing of poetic beauty. It put Wilde into prison in 1895, where he wrote a long letter of recrimination ('De Profundis'). Their contact afterwards was sporadic, although Douglas was chief mourner at Wilde's funeral in Paris. After Wilde's death Douglas put a lot of effort into rewriting the relationship. But whatever his subsequent denials, the poem he wrote shortly after Wilde's death is a moving and beautiful tribute to Wilde's immense talent:

The Dead Poet

I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress,
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress
And all the world was an enchanted place.

And then methought outside a fast locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds.
And so I woke and knew that he was dead.

The thrill of a uniform

This picture taken in the 1930s shows two of the famous (or notorious, depending on your point of view) Mitford sisters, posing with a group of quite amiable-looking SS officers. On the left (notwithstanding the filename of the photo)is Unity, who had spent some considerable time in Munich hanging around Adolf Hitler during his rise to power. Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, so distressed by the conflict between her country and Germany, she tried to commit suicide in a public park by shooting herself in the head. She did not die but was repatriated to England via Switzerland through Hitler's intervention on her behalf. She made a partial recovery but soon after the war died of meningitis, probably precipitated by her wound.
On the right, her sister Diana, who had already come to fame in the 1930s, married first to one of the Guinness family. She was regarded in her youth as one of the most beautiful women in England:



and she became the mistress of the Blackshirt leader Oswald Mosley. She was married to Mosley in Germany in the presence of Hitler and Goebbels in the 1930s. When war broke out Mosley ordered his blackshirts to fight in the British forces (one of the first armed forces casualties was a member of Mosley's party); but the couple were regarded as a security risk and were both interned, at first separately and then together in Holloway Prison. After the war they decamped to Paris and lived in some luxury there, Mosley making periodic unsuccessful attempts to revive his political career. Their marriage was a very happy one, and Diana a woman of great charm with many friends. But she never quite seemed to have got over the hypnotic effect of Der Fuhrer. Did she ever bother to read Mein Kampf?