An Edwardian evening gown, angry with coal-jet beads, for a desperate night of thunder & spite-forked lightning & heavy rain on lake water & drifts of pale apricot roses, for the dog days of a hard & blasted summer, for the blue smoke & pale distant light of September.
@blackwellbooks Good evening! So exciting to see Reynard out and about in the world at last!
@blackwellbooks The character of the trickster fox, humorously winning through his superior wits, stretches all the way back to Ancient Greece, to Aesop’s fables. Reynard’s essential traits & many of the supporting characters are rooted there, such as Noble the Lion or Isengrim the Wolf. 1/7
@blackwellbooks There’s the fable of the Fox & the Crow, for example, where the cunning fox outwits a crow through bare-whiskered flattery & steals her extremely tasty wedge of cheese. 2/7
Does anyone know what this is or where it might be from? It seems like a magical artefact of some kind - it was in an old suitcase, bought from a house sale, I believe, a number of years ago.
@Pitt_Rivers - I wonder if you might know where this is from?
It has lots of inscriptions on the thin bands of wood. Here’s a closeup:
Martinmas Eve & the wolves are gathering up by Gallow Down farm. The November sky is dark with snow. She puts on her velvet dress of apple-red, of sour haws & blood, & makes him borage tea & fries eel over the fire. He is lost, oh, he is as lost as a man can be.
Ivan Shishkin (1832–1898), In the Wild North, «На севере диком..», 1891, Kyiv National Picture Gallery.
The dress is a Worth ensemble from c.1893-5, which had two different alternative bodices to pair with the long velvet skirt, for day and for evening - a transformation gown.
The poet Ono no Komachi 小野 小町 praying for rain.
Attributed to Torii Kiyomitsu
ca. 1765 @metmuseum
Once, during a drought, Ono no Komachi inscribed a poem on a slip of paper & placed it in a little boat, which she then set sail on a pond in the Shinsen-en Garden to pray for rain. Her poem was so powerful that the rain began to pour, continuing for three days.
Another version by Utagawa Toyokuni II. Ono no Komachi was a very popular subject in the Edo period due to her legendary beauty, with numerous prints, often parodies (mitate-e) of contemporary beauties, depicting instantly recognisable scenes from her life, such as the rain poem.