A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
I have a peacock-heavy piece of art out next month so with that grasping for spurious relevance here’s a few more peacock discoveries.
Antoine Helbert‘s untitled peacock man is one of a number of striking portraits turning humans into birds. Via Chateau Thombeau.
Peacock styles, Anchor Buggy Co. (1897) at the Library of Congress.
Mayuri means “peacock” and although this splendid instrument doesn’t look like a European lute, a lute it is, albeit styled for Indian court performances. Via Wunderkammer.
Popular at nineteenth-century Indian courts, this bowed lute borrows features of other Indian stringed instruments, such as the body shape of the sarangi and the frets and neck of the sitar. There are four melody strings and fifteen sympathetic strings, which sound when the instrument is played to accompany popular religious song. The peacock is the vehicle of Sarasvati, the goddess of music, and it appears in Indian poetry as a metaphor for courtship. (More.)
As a complement, here’s something I’m still hoping to find in a good colour reproduction, all one usually sees are details. The Peacock Garden (1889) was one of a number of wallpaper designs created for William Morris by Walter Crane. This copy showing the full pattern is from an 1897 issue of the German arts periodical Pan, part of a section highlighting arts and crafts in England. Walter liked his peacocks, here’s Juno and her birds from The Baby’s Own Aesop (1887).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jaipur peacocks
• Maruyama Okyo’s peacocks
• Louis Rhead’s peacocks
• The White Peacock
• Peacocks
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé
Peacock and Peahen (18th c.).
I’ve had an untitled Japanese painting of a peacock as a desktop image for a while now, its origin forgotten, and I’ve wondered a few times who the artist was. A recent posting about Maruyama Okyo (1733–1795) at Bajo el Signo de Libra made me think that Okyo might be the artist responsible. As it turns out, he wasn’t, my bird is by one of his pupils, Nagasawa Rosetsu (1754–1799), and looks like a copy of the picture below. Mystery solved anyway, and the search gives me a good excuse to link to some of Okyo paintings. These differed from the prevailing style of the period, Okyo having studied Western artists and their methods in order to produce work which was more realistic than that of his contemporaries.
Peony and Peacocks (1781).
• A realist and an eccentric | Okyo and Rosetsu profiled.
Peacock (no date).
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Louis Rhead’s peacocks
• The White Peacock
• Peacocks
• Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Beardsley’s Salomé