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It’s taken me years but the recent obsession with UK psychedelia led me to finally watch Joe Massot’s piece of cinematic fluff from 1968, Wonderwall, a film distinguished primarily for its score by George Harrison (with Ringo Starr and Eric Clapton playing pseudonymously), and its title which was swiped years later by a bunch of [...]

L’Androgyne by Alexandre Séon (1890).
Related to yesterday’s post, I’ve been re-reading various books this week for details of the most curious character associated with the French Symbolist movement, novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan (1859–1918), also known as Sâr Peladan, a Babylonian title he bestowed upon himself as more befitting his adopted role as Rosicrucian mystic. [...]

Thus the judgement of a reviewer examining Aubrey Beardsley’s work in The Graphic for May 23, 1896. The work in question was Beardsley’s Rape of the Lock illustrations being unveiled for the first time in the second number of The Savoy, the magazine which Beardsley co-founded with Arthur Symons and Leonard Smithers as a rival [...]

Pan teaching Daphnis to play the panpipes; Roman copy of a Greek original from the 3rd-2nd centuries BCE by Heliodoros.

“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer. “Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He [...]

The Flapper by Frank X Leyendecker, Life magazine (1922).
When I posted this splendid cover last July I said that I ought to make a post of Butterfly Women, so here is one. Don’t expect this to be at all comprehensive, women with butterfly wings are as legion as mermaids, these are merely a couple of [...]

A typically splendid fin de siècle cover design by Léon Rudnicki for an 1898 volume of childhood memoirs by Jean Lorrain (1855–1906). The author was a flamboyantly homosexual poet, novelist and journalist whose addiction to ether and other excesses ended his life at the age of 50. Philippe Jullian is quoted on glbtq.com as saying [...]

Le Sphinx Mystérieux (1897).
Charles van der Stappen’s most impressive sculptural work and one I missed including in this earlier post. Van der Stappen doesn’t seem to have done anything else like this which is a shame as it’s a very iconic fin de siècle image, conveying a sense of enigma without resorting to the [...]

Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).
Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.
My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with [...]

Colette.
Work this week designing a CD of readings from Colette had me searching books for pictures of the author. Of the few I found this is the most interesting, one of several Colette portraits made by photographer Leopold Reutlinger and one of at least two from 1907 which Colette used to promote her Moulin [...]

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892).
The surreptitious skull is another of those perennial motifs that recur in art from time to time and one which has become especially prevalent since the late 19th century. There seem to be a number of reasons for this, the most obvious being that if you’re going to [...]

Continuing the theme of the fin de siècle feminine, there’s this bizarre (undated) piece by Marcel Lenoir representing…what? A witch? Some demoness? Or woman in general? Considering the often overt misogyny of the period, the latter interpretation is quite possible; there were more than enough artists prepared to see women as the foundation of all [...]

Sarah Bernhardt by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1895).
You can’t be a fin de siècle fetishist and not develop a fascination with actress Sarah Bernhardt, a woman who was muse to many of the era’s finest artists, most notably Alphonse Mucha, who she employed as her official designer. Mucha’s marvellous posters are endlessly popular, of course; less well-known [...]

The Empusae, we’re told, were daughters of Hecate in Greek mythology, sent to harass the unwary traveller on lonely roads, as if travellers on lonely roads didn’t have enough to worry about from human malefactors. The sinister femme fatale of mythology was a popular subject among fin de siècle artists which perhaps explains why CH [...]

Maléficia (1905).
Much of the jewellery and sculpture produced by Phillipe Wolfers demonstrates the tendency of Art Nouveau and decorative Symbolism to evolve from Decadence to full-blown Gothic. The sinister recurs in Wolfers’ creations whether in the form of baleful females such as Malèficia and his Medusa pendant, or in the shape of bats, insects [...]

Random browsing this week turned up some nice high-res photos of Harmony in Blue and Gold, as James Abbott McNeill Whistler named the room he decorated for Frederick R. Leyland in 1878. Leyland had bought one of Whistler’s paintings, La Princesse du pays de la porcelaine (1864), and architect Thomas Jeckyll was concerned that the [...]

I first came across Sascha Schneider’s art some years ago when reading about German writer Karl May (1842–1912), and it was as May’s illustrator that Schneider initially gained recognition. May was one of Germany’s most popular novelists, his Western adventures about Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Warrior having sold up to 100 million copies. Albert [...]

The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects by Alexandra David-Neel & Lama Yongden, City Lights Books (1972).
One of the additional pleasures of buying old books besides finding something out-of-print (or, it has to be said, something cheap) occurs when those books still possess traces of their previous owners. A recent posting on The [...]

Or Lust (1919), Envy (1919) and Pride (1918). Very Beardsley-esque posters by Carlo Nicco for a series of Italian films from the silent era starring Francesca Bertini. Doubtless the prolific Ms. Bertini’s demonstrations of the Seven Deadly Sins inspired similar promotional artwork for the other films in the series but these are the only [...]

Laocoön and His Sons attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros
and Polydorus of Rhodes (c. 160–20 BCE).
No jokes about snakes in a frame, please. Bram Dijkstra’s Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin de Siècle Culture (1986) is a wide-ranging study of the “iconography of misogyny” in 19th century painting. Dijkstra examines the numerous ways that [...]

We tend to think of cinema as quintessentially 20th century and a modern medium. But the modern medium was born in the 19th century, of course, and the heyday of the Silent Age (the Twenties) was closer to the fin de siècle Decadence (mid-1880s to the late-1890s) than we are now to the 1970s. This [...]