1890s - On the evil of drink...

1851 Toast

New Year’s Eve seems an appropriate occasion to share something on the subject of temperance from the British Library’s collections. Alcohol’s Alphabet was published in London in the 1890s by the National Temperance League. Copies could be bought in bulk for distribution: 100 for one shilling, 1000 for six shillings.

A is for Alcohol, a deadly, poisonous thing,
    Which "biteth like a serpent", and doth "like an adder sting".

B is for Beer, a drink which English workmen love;
    And Brandy – stay of sickness: both not friends but foes oft prove.

C is for Cider, which a harmless drink is deemed,
    Yet which may work more mischief than the drinkers e’er have dreamed.

D is for Danger, which is always close at hand,
    When among alcoholic drinks weak human creatures stand.

E is for Enmity, which arises from the strife
    Engendered by the exciting draughts, and blights full many a life.

F is for the Fetters, which all drink-bound slaves must wear,
    Which heavier grow as time goes on, and drag them to despair.

G is for the golden Grain God sends to bless and feed,
    Which men pervert and change until it brings but great need.

H is for Hunger – the poor children’s dreaded foe:
    What pangs, through parent’s selfishness, e’en tender babes oft know.

I is for Idleness, which follows in drink’s train
    When men would rather tippling go than at their work remain.

J is for Jollity, which drinkers say they find –
    Though far from "jolly" are the aches and pains oft left behind.

K is for the sad death Knell, which solemnly doth sound,
    Telling when victims of the drink an early grave have found.

L is for the Licences, procured to buy and sell;
    Too often dealers in strong drink the drunkards’ list will swell.

M is for the Mourning which is heard all o’er our land
    O’er loved ones who on ruin’s brink with tottering footsteps stand.

N is for Nectar, to which men will liken wine,
    When on the glittering festal board its sparkling beauties shine.

O is for drink’s Odour, to the drunkard sweetest scent
    It tempts him past resistance when to drink he had not meant.

P is for the Prison, in which helpless captives lie
    Who’re found "incapable" in the street when the "man in blue" comes by.

Q is for Quarrels, which are rife where drink doth reign,
    And often end in fatal strife which brings the convict’s chain.

R is for the deadly Rum, which its thousands still will slay
    While it – with Gin – acknowledged is as the tippler’s cherished stay.

S is for the trusted Stout, which as medicine is given;
    It lends false strength, perchance, but oft to drunkenness has driven.

T is for the Tap, from which the toper is supplied:
    Frequently is it running fast, but ne’er for long is dried.

U is for Uselessness, to which drink will quickly bring,
    All who for strength in life and work to it for help will cling.

V is for the Vices which are nourished by strong drink
    Which will not vanish till the power of King Alcohol shall sink.

W is for Wretchedness, which the heart and home pervades
    In which this foe’s destructive hand has made its fearful raids.

X is the well-known X X – poor letter! much abused
    By being in the brewing trade as a distinction used.

Y is for life’s Youthtide, which should be bright and glad,
    But oft is rendered – by strong drink- gloomy and dark and sad.

Z is for the Zeal with which men seek their thirst to allay.
    If they would but as zealous be to keep from drink away,
    The evils which this alphabet has feebly tried to trace
    No longer would on our loved land affix such dire disgrace.

Illuminated Manuscripts - Welcoming the New Year

Lonely Monk in beer cellar celebrating (BLSloane2435,14th c).

Flowers for you...

Edouard Manet (French artist, 1832-1883) A bouquet of violets

Glory to God in the highest, And on peace on earth

Fra Angelico (Florentine artist, c 1400-1455) Alterpiece for the Chapel of San Niccolo dei Guidalotti in the Church of San Donmenico at Perugia

Flowers for you...

Johan Laurentz (J.L.) Jensen (Denmark, 1800-1856)

The Angels of American Abbott Handerson Thayer 1849-1921

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921)  1893

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Young Girl - Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel 1889

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel Seated on a Rock

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Noon 1920

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Seated Angel

 Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Angel 1903

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Winged Figure 1904

Precious gentlemen...

Lovis Corinth (German artist, 1858-1925) The Freemasons

If you read this blog regularly, you know that I seldom include paintings with completely male subjects; but this one is just too precious to pass by.  Oh my...

Saint Stephen's Day

Attributed to Antonio Tempesta (Florence 1555 - Rome 1630) The Stoning of St Stephen

In Acts of the Apostles, Stephen alarms the Jews with his preaching that the true temple is in the heart. He is charged with blasphemy, for which the penalty is stoning. Execution must take place outside the walls of Jerusalem; and Stephen is here shown submitting quietly to his destiny as the first of Christ's followers to be martyred. Since Stephen was not one of the canonical 12 Apostles, he was considered to be a deacon.

Saint Stephen's Day

Israhel van Meckenem (1445-1503), St. Stephen, engraving, circa 1480-1490.

In Acts of the Apostles, Stephen alarms the Jews with his preaching that the true temple is in the heart. He is charged with blasphemy, for which the penalty is stoning. Execution must take place outside the walls of Jerusalem; and Stephen is the first of Christ's followers to be martyred. Since Stephen was not one of the canonical 12 Apostles, he was considered to be a deacon.

Sleeping Baby

Abbott Handerson Thayer (American artist, 1849–1921) Sleep. 1880s

Illustrations from A Visit from Saint Nicholas, published in Boston by Louis Prang, 1864

Self-Portraits by Paula Modersohn-Becker 1876-1907

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self-Portrait 1898

Dresden-born Paula Modersohn-Becker was 12, when her family moved to Bremen. She was the 3rd child of 7 children whose father, the son of a Russian university professor, was employed with the German railway. He and Modersohn-Becker's mother, who was from an aristocratic family, provided the children a cultured & intellectual environment in the household. In 1892, she received her first drawing instruction, and a year later came to England to learn English. In 1897, she saw an exhibition at Bremen's Kunsthalle by the members of the "Worpsweders" commune, artists who lived on the moors outside Bremen protesting the dominance of the academy like the French Barbizon school, as they portrayed local farm families.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait on 6th Wedding Anniversary 1906

In 1896, she studied at the Society of Berlin Women Artists. She became close friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, but married Otto Modersohn & settled in Worpswede. She later left him to work in Paris, where she immersed herself in French art. A reconciliation led her back to Worpswede, where, in 1907, aged 31, she died of an embolism after the birth of her daughter...her only child. Her daughter Tillie (1907-1998) founded the Paula Modersohn-Becker-Foundation (Paula Modersohn-Becker-Stiftung) in 1978.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait 1897


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait with Hand on Chin 1906


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait with Pearl Necklace 1906


>Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1902


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1903


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1905


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1905


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1906


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) 1906-1907


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907)1907

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait with Red Flower Wreat and Chain 1907


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Holding her newborn daughter in 1907. She would die only days later.

Paula Modersohn-Becker 1876-1907

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Kopf eines jungen Maedchens mit Perlenkette in Profil nach rechts, 1901

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) is a compelling artist. Here we see a woman trying to find out about herself -- her role as a woman, her sexuality, and her potential role as mother to a young child such as those she paints. Unlike Mary Cassatt (1844-1926) who concentrated on painting mothers & children but early on decided that she would remain unmarried & pursue a career, this artist, obviously attracted to similar subject matter, was in conflict about the path she would take.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Self Portrait on 6th Wedding Anniversary

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paula: Self-Portrait on Her 6th Wedding Anniversary (1906)The Independent's Great Art series From The Independent, London, UK
By Sue Hubbard Friday, 24 August 2007

She stands there, naked to the waist, a young woman with big cow-brown eyes meeting the viewer's gaze. Her auburn hair is parted in the centre and swept up into a chignon, while her head is held on one side like that of a quizzical blackbird listening. Her eyes are level with those of the viewer, for the artist has portrayed herself life-size, as if painting her reflection in a mirror. Her smile is restrained and confident, yet knowing. A skirt of white cloth is tied loosely around her hips as she clutches her, apparently, pregnant stomach with raw, workman-like hands. Her right arm frames her upper body in a protective curve, while the left seems to protect her lower abdomen. Together they form an "S" that breaks the S-shaped stance of the otherwise static, slightly monumental pose. Around her neck she wears a necklace of lozenge-shaped yellow amber beads that glows warmly against her bare skin and falls between her breasts, close to her heart.

Her face has something of the land about it. The nose is broad, the cheeks rosy, the lips full and red. Yet for a pregnant woman, her breasts are still small and pert, the nipples and surrounding areola not darkened or swollen. The top of the cloth around her hips is level with her lower hand. Ethereal and white, yet with a tinge of blue, it is reminiscent of the loincloth that covers Christ in countless paintings of the Crucifixion, and seems to suggest some sort of spiritual sacrifice on the part of the artist.

The young German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker painted this, one of her most subtle and emotionally complex self-portraits, on the occasion of her sixth wedding anniversary, as she has written in olive-green paint in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. She has signed it "PB", for Paula Becker, her maiden name, leaving out the Modersohn, which she had acquired on marriage.

Paula Modersohn-Becker was 30 when she painted this self-portrait on 25 May 1906. She had recently left her native Germany to live and work in Paris. What was extraordinary about this move was that, at the time, she was married to Otto Modersohn, an academic painter some 10 years her senior, whom she had met when she lived in an artist's colony at Worpswede, on the moors in northern Germany, near Bremen. There, her fellow-artists, encouraged by Julius Langbehn's eccentric and now notorious book, Rembrandt as Educator, along with their interest in Nietzsche, Zola, Rembrandt and Drer, idealistically embraced nature, the purity of youth and the simplicity of peasant life.

In Worpswede, Paula not only came under Modersohn's influence but also fell in love with the dark moors and the peasants who inhabited them, making their modest living from cutting peat. Yet she was soon to realise, rather like Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, that she had to break free of the shackles of conventional matrimony in order to develop as a serious painter. So, very unusually for a young, well-bred woman of that period, she abandoned her husband, much against his wishes, to go to Paris to paint. There she joined her close friend, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, with whom she shared a complex relationship with the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

This painting, then, is not simply a nude self-portrait but a declaration of liberation. Not only from the ties and duties of marriage, but also from the constraints and expectations of Paula's time and class. As she wrote in a letter to Rilke before leaving for Paris: "I am myself..." For she has painted herself as blooming and quietly exhalant, set against a dappled surround of spring leaf-green. Here she is her own woman, on the brink of fulfilling her true potential, at one with herself. When she arrived in Paris, she wrote: "Now I have left Otto Modersohn, I stand between my old life and my new one. What will happen in my new life? And how shall I develop in my new life? Everything must happen now."

In fact, Paula was not pregnant in this painting. Only the previous month she had written that she did not want to have a child yet, particularly with Otto. The painting, then, is a metaphor for how she felt about herself as a young artist: fecund, ripe, able for the first time in her life to create and paint freely in the manner that she wished. What she is about to give birth to is not a child but her mature, independent, artistic self. Traditionally, nude portraits of women had been painted for the delectation of the male gaze, but here Paula creates a new construct: a woman who is able to nurture herself outside the trappings of marriage, who does not need a man to be fulfilled.

For there had always been an unequal relationship between the male painter (however radical and avant-garde) and his model and muse. Women were sex objects, and models were purchased in a financial exchange that, by definition, privileged the male painter. In this portrait, Modersohn-Becker confounded this norm simply by painting herself.

Her nudity is confident and unabashed. Implicit is a level of self- awareness, for Paula would not have been unfamiliar with the debates about the unconscious that were raging in Vienna around Freud, and beginning to infiltrate both art and literature. The solid monumentality of the pose, the flattened forms and stripping away of detail indicate her awareness of both Gauguin and Czanne, whose work she discovered in Paris between 1899 and 1906. Both of these artists had a huge effect on their peers. The mask-like features and Paula's easy, natural sexuality show not only a familiarity with their work but also an awareness of the "primitive" art that had so inspired them and other painters of the time, from Nolde to Picasso. She stands there in her amber necklace, just as Gauguin might have portrayed one of his Tahitian girls garlanded with tropical flowers. For, like Gauguin, she was seeking the expression of some primordial power in the natural world.

Yet, for Paula Modersohn-Becker, in this self-portrait and its companion painting, Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace (1906), there is no subtext of violence or the sexual exploitation and appropriation that can be read into some of Gauguin's colonised Tahitian nudes with their blank expressions or downcast eyes. What she portrays is the solid dignity of the earth-mother, the liberated woman painted with a direct and fearless gaze.

She gives birth to the expression of her new fearless, artistic self. She was among the very first women painters to explore these concerns. That she collapsed with an embolism and died just weeks after the birth of her daughter, a mere year later, in 1907, gives the painting a haunting poignancy.

Born in Dresden in 1876, Paula Modersohn-Becker was 12 when her family moved to Bremen. In 1892, she received her first drawing instruction, & a year later came to England to learn English. In 1877, she saw an exhibition at Bremen's Kunsthalle by the members of the "Worpsweders" commune, artists who lived on the moors outside Bremen & took the French Barbizon school as their model, rejecting city life.


In 1896, she studied at the Society of Berlin Women Artists. She became close friends with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, but married Otto Modersohn & settled in Worpswede. She later left him to live & work in Paris, where she immersed herself in French art. A reconciliation of sorts led her back to Worpswede, where, in 1907, aged 31, she died of an embolism after the birth of her daughter.

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Baby and Mother's Hand


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Young Girl


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Farm Child on Cushions 1904


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) The Pram


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Elsbeth 1902


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Sleeping Child


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Head of a Girl 1905


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Young Girl


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Head of a Girl Sitting on a Chair


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Elsbeth in the Garden 1902


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Girl with Black Hat


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) A Girl's Head in front of a Window 1906


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Old Peasant Woman 1905


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) The Old Farmer 1903

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Old Blind Woman 1899

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Old Woman with Handkerchief 1903

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Nursing Mother 1902

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Young Girl with Straw Hat and Flower in her Hand 1902

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Martha Vogeler 

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Two Children Sitting in a Meadow

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Child's Head with White 


Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) Woman with Child 1906