September 1958 Vol I Num 1

Few early balloonists' flights attracted more attention than the one that carried Mrs. Letitia Ann Sage aloft from London in 1785 as the first Englishwoman to brave the skies.  Our cover painting, The Three Favorite Aerial Travellers, done that same year by J. F. Rigaud, presents the scene - with one major inaccuracy.  As shown here, Mrs. Sage's companions were Mr. George Biggin, a fellow passenger also on his first flight, and, resplendent in the uniform of the Honourable Artillery Company, the Italian aeronaut Lunardi, already famous as the first man to make an ascent in England.  At the last moment before take-off, though, pilot Lunardi found that the balloon would not lift all three together and so stayed behind and let his passengers soar away on their own.  They landed an hour later in a field at Harrow.  An article on ballooning begins on page 114.  The picture is reproduced courtesy of Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.

On his rearing charger, Jean de Bruges, the Lord of Gruthuyse, has lowered his visor to meet the Lord of Ghistelles in the famous tourney held at Bruges in 1392.  In memory of this event, King Rene of Anjou created his magnificent Livre des Tournois, whose illustrations are here presented with an article beginning on page 92.  Fortunately the book was preserved for posterity by Louis de Bruges, a descendant of Jean, who ordered two copies made and personally presented one to Charles VIII, King of France, in 1489.  Other copies were subsequently made, and the reproductions here are used from the parchment pages of French Manuscript No. 2692 in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

The unknown lady on the Cover sat for this luminous portrait in the middle of the fifteenth century.  Her cone-shaped hennin is fastened with a velvet loop beneath her chin and pushed back to reveal the high, plucked forehead so much admired in her time.  Aloof and tranquil, she gazes obliquely at her painter, the Flemish master Petrus Christus.  The Painting, Portrait of a Young Girl, is in the Gemaldegalerie, Museum Dahlem, Berlin.  For an article on modern painting, see page 95.

The water color Personnages devant le Soleil by Joan Miro, the Catalan painter, shows a red sun in an infinite sky of white in front of which stand two enigmatic figures.  The exuberant Miro often uses elements of nature, the sun, moon, and birds in his "cosmic children's corner" described in an article by Pierrre Schneider on page 70.  The painting, done in 1942, is in a private collection in Basel, Switzerland.

It is Wednesday.  Baham Gur, the king of Iran, is paying his weekly visit to his Egyptian queen.  Gay and pleasure-loving, Bahram Gur married seven princesses of seven countries, built for each a castle of a different color.  Bahram Gur was given to vivid imagery: his red Russian queen of Tuesdays was a "honeyed apple, sweet and rosy-hued."  To his Roman arus (doll) of Sundays and the yellow castle he said: "The shops close at night; but you, seller of beauty, you must open your shop at night."  Bahram Gur lived in the fourth century before Christ.  This fragment of a manuscript, dated 1589, is an illustration for the poet Nizami's (1140-1203) Khamsa, and is in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library.  It shows the king and his Wednesday queen seated in a garden pavilion.  An article on gardens begins on page 24.

One of the most celebrated paintings in the brilliant collection of old masters assembled by Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston at the turn of the last century is The Rape of Europa by the great Venetian, Titian.  The full painting, of which this is a detail, is reproduced on pages 38-39.  It hangs (all 70 by 80 inches of it) in a heavy gold frame in the Titian Room in the unique museum at Fenway Court, which Mrs. Gardner left to her fellow Bostonians when she died in 1924.  The story of the acquisition of this masterpiece along with many others sought after by the original and redoubtable "Mrs. Jack" is told in this article "Mrs. Gardner's Palace of Paintings," beginning on page 26.

Carved at the start of the fifth century B.C. or earlier, this head of a helmeted warrior was on of many masterly early Greek sculptures to adorn now-ruined pediments of the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina.  All the surviving figures are now in the Glyptothek at Munich.  An article on page 30 on the meaning and adventures of the marbles introduces a sixteen-page portfolio of gravure reproductions.

"And for the drink-offering thou shalt present the third part of a hin of wine, of a sweet savour unto the Lord."  In an action of final libation resembling that prescribed for the Hebrews in Numbers 15:7, Nebamun, superintendent of sculptors in Egypt, pours wine on the sacrificial pile of animals and meal.  As if to insure his safe passage to the other world, the ritual is executed to perfection under the watchful eye of Nebamun's mother, the house-mistress, Thepu.  This Egyptian wall painting of the Nineteenth Dynasty is from the Tomb of the Two Sculptors near Thebes.  An article on current progress in the field ob Biblical archeology begins on page 4.

In Tahiti the musical words Fatata te Miti mean "by the sea."  Paul Gauguin chose them as the title for the canvas of which this is a detail, and which he painted in 1892.  In it one encounters the blazing color and golden-skinned people that make up the enduring vision of the South Seas held by generations of Western travelers.  An article on the Dream of the South Seas begins on page 28, and is followed by a portfolio in gravure of some of Gauguin's greatest paintings of the area.  Fatata te Miti is in the Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

This pair of lovers caught in the act of fleeing, with drapery flying, from a sudden squall form the central images of the huge painting, The Storm, by Pierre Auguste Cot, reproduced in its entirety on page 60.  Painted in 1880 for the French Salon trade, it has belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1887.  Although most of the once fashionable academic paintings of the nineteenth century remaining in museum collections have long since been relegated to basement storage.  Cot's "classical" tour de force occupies a place on a gallery wall.  An article about Salon paintings both in their prime and decline begins on page 52.

This bearded visage, crowned with thorns, is that of Achelous, great river god of the Greeks, as represented in an Etruscan pendant of the late sixth century B.C.  The work, belonging to the Louvre, is testimony to Etruscan mastery of the goldsmith's art and to the fact that the Etruscans adopted this deity, like so many others, from the Greeks.  The Etruscans and their arts are the subject of an article beginning on page 56.

Using a palette of hot primary colors and his customary slashing brushwork, painter Richard Diebenkorn was trying to evoke on canvas the noonday glare of midsummer.  Ant the big, bold result, with its amusing hint of flags and bunting, is called - what else? - July.  Like two other San Francisco artists, David Park and Elmer Bischoff, Diebenkorn painted for several years in the abstract expressionist manner.  Now, with their styles loosened up and their colors ablaze, all three have abandoned the purely abstract to paint the human figure and the California landscape.  An article on this rising trio, together with a portfolio of their work in gravure, begins on page 16.  July is in the collection of Martha Jackson.

Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of France, points the way south across the Alps at the head of forty thousand troops about to cross the Great Saint Bernard pass to descend upon the Austrian army.  "I would be painted calm and serene on a fiery steed" were his instructions to his court painter, Jacques Louis David, for this portrait done after the victory at Marengo in June, 1800, and now in a private French collection.  By loot and treaty, Napoleon's forces gained many of Italy's greatest paintings and sculpture for the new museum wings of the Louvre in Paris.  For a history of the Louvre and Napoleon's part in it, see page 57.