Charles Méryon – { feuilleton }

The art of Martin Monnickendam, 1874–1943

Gevel van de Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois.

Martin Monnickendam was a Dutch artist whose work caught my attention not for his paintings but for this series of etchings showing views of the streets and older buildings of Paris. The Rijksmuseum gives the series a date of 1896, when the artist was a mere 22 years of age but already working with a proficiency that makes me wish he’d done more in this style. Monnickendam’s subject and medium brings to mind Charles Méryon’s celebrated etchings of Paris but Méryon’s depictions of Notre-Dame and elsewhere generally place the buildings at a distance. Monnickendam fills his plates with closer views of architectural detail, showing how good the etching medium can be in capturing Gothic crenellations. All of which is of particular interest to me now that I’m working again on The Dunwich Horror. Lovecraft’s story doesn’t feature any specifically Gothic architecture but the detailed shading I’ve been doing is closer to etching than anything else.

Gezicht op de Saint-Gervais.

Impasse des Boeufs.

Marché des Carmes.

Notre-Dame van Moret-sur-Loing .

Continue reading “The art of Martin Monnickendam, 1874–1943”

Weekend links 461

Le Stryge (The Vampire) (1853) by Charles Méryon.

• Notre-Dame-de-Paris in art and photography. Related: Chris Knapp on the Notre-Dame fire, and John Boardley on the print shops that used to cluster around the cathedral. Tangentially related: Mapping Gothic France.

• The Bodies Beneath: The Flipside of British Film & Television by William Fowler and Vic Pratt will be published next month by Strange Attractor. With a foreword by Nicolas Winding Refn.

• “In his new biweekly column, Pinakothek, Luc Sante excavates and examines miscellaneous visual strata of the past.”

I also gathered underland stories, from Aeneas’s descent into Hades, through the sunken necropolises of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and the Wind Cave cosmogony of the Dakota Sioux, to accounts of the many cavers, cave-divers and free-divers who have died seeking what Cormac McCarthy calls “the awful darkness inside the world”—often unable to communicate to themselves, let alone others, what metaphysical gravity drew them down to death. Why go low? Obsession, incomprehension, compulsion and revelation were among the recurrent echoes of these stories—and they became part of my underland experiences, too.

Robert Macfarlane on underworlds real and imagined, past, present and future

• Mixes of the week: FACT Mix 703 by Mary Lattimore, and The Colour Of Spring by cafekaput.

• A witty appraisal by Anna Aslanyan of a lipogrammatic classic and its smart translation.

• “Unseen Kafka works may soon be revealed after Kafkaesque trial.”

• “Why do cats love bookstores?” asks Jason Diamond.

• Sunn O))) pick their Bandcamp favourites.

• Le Grand Nuage de Magellan

• Cathedral In Flames (1984) by Coil | The Cathedral of Tears (1995) by Robert Fripp | Cathedral Et Chartres (2005) by Jack Rose

The Turgot Map of Paris

Yesterday’s map of Portmeirion presented a style of mapping I’ve always enjoyed, with the scale of buildings and roads exaggerated in order to give a better impression of the various locations for navigation purposes. The most elaborate example of this kind of isometric projection—indeed, the undoubted nonpareil—is the Turgot Map of Paris, named after its commissioner Michel-Étienne Turgot. The map was issued originally in a series of 20 engraved plates from 1734–1736, and for a long time I only knew of it via the (frustratingly uncredited) details printed on endpapers of the German first edition of Perfume by Patrick Süskind. Once again the web managed to solve another of those nagging artistic riddles.

We’re told that one Louis Bretez was contracted by Monsieur Turgot to draw up the plans of the city which apparently took him two years. Once you start scrutinising the detail it’s surprising it didn’t take a lot longer. Claude Lucas was responsible for the meticulous engravings which show how Paris appeared before Baron Haussmann set to work demolishing many of the medieval streets.

Wikimedia Commons has the entire map in a variety of sizes up to a hefty 6,552 × 5,101 pixels. At the Kyoto University Library it’s possible to view the plates individually with each plate subdivided into detailed views. There’s also a 1908 reprinting of the plates at the Internet Archive. Despite the depredations of Hausmann and co., central Paris has survived a lot better than many other European cities. London suffered so badly during the Second World War it’s a shame we don’t have an equivalent view of the pre-Luftwaffe capital.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• In the Village
• Compass roses
• Charles Méryon revisited
• The art of Sydney R Jones, 1881–1966
• Perfume: the art of scent

Charles Méryon revisited

Le Petit Pont (fifth state) (1850).

A short piece about the Paris etchings of Charles Méryon (1821–1868) was one of the first posts I made here. I’ve little to add to what I said four years ago other than to point out that the Internet Archive has The Etchings of Charles Méryon available for download, a rather fine collection of the artist’s Piranesi-like renderings of the city. The view below of Pont-Neuf through one of the Seine bridges is very Piranesian indeed and makes me wish Méryon had been as productive as his predecessor was with his Vedute di Roma.

La Galerie Notre-Dame (third state) (1853).

Le Pont-Neuf et La Samaritaine (third state) (1855).

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vedute di Roma
• Charles Méryon’s Paris

On the move

Le Stryge by Charles Méryon (1853).

“These writings, which deal with the Parisian arcades, were begun under a clear sky of cloudless blue that curved over the arcade; even so they are covered with a dust hundreds of years old by the millions of pages in which the fresh wind of diligence, the heavy breath of the scholar, the storm of young zeal and the slow gentle breeze of curiosity rustled. For the painted summer sky, which looks down from the arcades to the study of the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale, has spread its dreamy, lightless cover over them.”

Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk.

Off to Paris again for a week to explore some of Walter’s arcades.