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On 25 February 1603, Queen Elizabeth I’ s cousin and friend - Katherine Howard, the countess of Nottingham - died. Although Katherine had been ill for some time, her death hit the queen very hard; indeed one observer wrote that she took the loss ‘muche more heavyly’ than did Katherine’s husband, the Charles, Earl of Nottingham. The queen’s grief was unsurprising, for Elizabeth had known the countess longer than almost anyone else alive at that time.

The post The death of a friend: Queen Elizabeth I, bereavement, and grief appeared first on OUPblog.

Much of the comment on the official photographic portrait of the Queen released in April this year to celebrate her 88^th birthday focussed on her celebrity photographer, David Bailey, who seemed to have ‘infiltrated’ (his word) the bosom of the establishment. Less remarked on, but equally of note, is that the very informal pose that the queen adopted showed her smiling, and not only smiling but also showing her teeth.

It is only very recently that monarchs have cracked a smile for a portrait, let alone a smile that revealed teeth. Before the modern age, monarchs embodied power – and power rarely smiles. Indeed it has often been thought to be worrying when it does. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endlessly flashing teeth caused this powerful statesman to trigger as much suspicion as approval. The negative reaction was testimony to an unwritten law of portraiture, present until very recently in western art. According to this, an open mouth signifies plebeian status, extreme emotion, or else folly and licence, bordering on insanity. As late as the eighteenth century, an individual who liked to be depicted smiling as manifestly as Tony Blair would have risked being locked up as a lunatic.

The individual who broke this unwritten law of western portraiture was Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun whose charming smile –- at once twinklingly seductive and reassuringly maternal – was displayed at the Paris Salon in 1787. It appears on the front cover of my book, The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris. The French capital had witnessed the emergence of modern dentistry over the course of the century – a subject that has been largely neglected. In addition, the city’s elites adopted the polite smile of sensibility that they had learned from the novels of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Madame Vigée Le Brun’s smile shocked the artistic establishment and the stuffy court elite out at Versailles, who still observed tradition, but it marked the advent of white teeth as a positive attribute in western art.

Yet if Vigée Le Brun’s example was followed by many of the most eminent artists of her day (David, Ingres, Gérard, etc), the white tooth smile took much longer to establish itself as a canonical and approved portrait gesture. The eighteenth century’s ‘Smile Revolution’ aborted after 1789. Politics under the French Revolution and the Terror were far too serious to accommodate smiles. The increasingly gendered world of separate spheres consigned the smile to the domestic environment. And for most of the nineteenth century, monarchs and men of power in the public sphere, following traditional modes of the expression of gravitas, invariably presented a smile-less face to the world.

Probably the first reigning monarch to have a portrait painted that revealed white teeth was Queen Victoria. This may seem surprising given her famous penchant for staying resolutely ‘unamused’. Yet in 1843, she commissioned the German portrait-painter Franz-Xaver Winterhalter to paint a delightfully informal study, that showed the twenty-four year-old monarch reclining on a sofa revealing her teeth in a dreamy and indeed mildly aroused smile. Yet the conditions of the portrait’s commission showed that the seemly old rules were still in place. For Victoria had commissioned the portrait as a precious personal gift for her ‘angelic’ husband, Prince Albert. What she called her ‘secret picture’ was hung in the queen’s bedroom and was not seen in public throughout her reign. Indeed, its display in an exhibition in 2009, over a century after her death, marked only its second public showing since its creation. This was three years after Rolf Harris’s 2006 portrayal of the queen with a white-tooth smile, a significant precursor to David Bailey’s photograph.

If English monarchs have thus been late-comers to the twentieth-century smile-fest, their subjects have been baring their teeth in a smile for many decades. As early as the 1930s and 1940, the practice of saying ‘cheese’ when confronted with a camera became the norm. Hollywood-style studio photography, advertising models and more relaxed forms of sociability and subjectivity have combined to produce the twentieth century’s very own Smile Revolution. So it is worth reflecting whether the reigning monarch’s early twenty-first century acceptance of the smile’s progress will mark a complete and durable revolution in royal portraiture. Seemingly only time – and the Prince of Wales – will tell.

The post Royal teeth and smiles appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Elizabeth I, the People's Queen: Her Life and Times, 21 Activities Kerrie Logan Hollihan

This is in the same series as Thomas Jefferson for Kids: His Life and Times with 21 Activities, and was also nominated for a Cybil.

The biography portion is overall well done. It does a great job of explaining the domestic and international politics and events that really shaped Elizabeth’s life. It also covers many of the cultural aspects, mainly Shakespeare.

My only complaint is that Hollihan sometimes quotes primary sources, complete with Elizabethan spelling and doesn’t offer any translation, gloss, or explanation. I mean passages like this: ...paraventure your Lordeship and the rest of the Counsel wil thinke that I favor her ivel doinge for whome I shal speake for, whiche is for Kateryn Aschiley, that it wolde please your grace and the rest of the Counsel to be good unto her... First, bicause that she hathe bene with me a longe time, and manye years, and hathe taken great labor, and paine in brinkinge of me up in lerninge and honestie, and therfore I ougth of very dewtye speke for her, for Sait Gregorie sayeth that we ar more bounde to them that bringeth us up wel than to our parents, for our parents do that wiche is natural for them, that is bringeth us into this Worlde; but our brinkers up ar a cause to make us live wel in it. were hard enough for me to understand. And I’ve dabbled in Anglo-Saxon! The ONLY help was that she points out that “Kateryn Aschiley” was Kat Ashley.

The activities though, are all over the place, which is a complaint I often have about this series. Some are really basic, such as the “Elizabethan Cloak” which involves cutting a cloak out of felt and pinning it together. Some are much more difficult, like singing a madrigal, which assumes you and your friends can all read music, or have ready accompaniment. These are complaints I’ve had about other titles in this series. It must be really hard to come up with 21 activities for some of these historical figures and time periods-- it’s not a job I envy. But... I often wish they had come up with 21 different activities.

Book Provided by... my local libary

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Yesterday I started my Fall line for Tweedy Crab. My poor little shop on etsy has been empty for too long! The theme is going to be CABLES. Yes, they're fiddly to knit. But look at them! They're worth the bother. You really do have to concentrate though, I will say. No wandering thoughts, or you'll end up with bits crossed the wrong way and an ugly mess.

This is one repeat of this pattern. Multiply this by 12, and we'll have a scarf I think.
I have an idea for lining these scarves with wool or some other fabric, but am afraid it will make them cost prohibitive. Maybe I'll do a few and see what happens. I'm torn between wanting to do all 'high end' pieces, and doing pieces that regular people can afford. I'm afraid my tastes run to 'high end', but there's a good practical side of me as well, so I'll try to make them work together and hopefully will have something for everyone.


This is a new Debbie Mumm yarn that I couldn't pass up in the shop. Its acrylic and wool and wee bit of "other", which will remain a mystery I guess. It does have a bit of stretch to it, which I'm guessing is the mystery "other" ingredient. Its gradated, as you can see, and is wonderfully soft, and really yummy (or I wouldn't be bothering with it). I usually don't like yarns that are mostly acrylic, (translation = "cheap") like those "buy it by the pound" jumbo skeins ~ you know the ones I'm talking about. Euw, cooties. I only use better yarn that feels nice and looks expensive (and sometimes IS, very).

There was a cute little old lady in the shop while I was buying this. She had a bag with an almost-done sweater that she'd run out of the yarn for. She was trying to match it, and had a skein that was close but not it, and wondered if I could help her. I did, and she was lucky, we found the perfect match! She was so grateful and wanted to repay me, it was very sweet. I said just knowing she'd wouldn't be walking around in a sweater with mismatched yarns was payment enough, but no, she insisted on telling me a joke, if I'd like to hear it. So here goes:

Dolly Parton and Queen Elizabeth are at the Pearly Gates.
St. Peter greets them, and says "There's only room for one of you."
Dolly struts up to him with her famous chest stuck out.
Then Queen Elizabeth, who has brought her commode with her (?) sits, and flushes.
St. Peter says "OK Your Highness, you're in!"
Dolly protests, and he tells her "Sorry Dolly, but a Royal Flush always beats a Pair, no matter how big."

Its cuter told with a little old lady acting it out, but it made me laugh!