This one is a "can you spot the low probabilities and connections?" story. A "Coincidences-R-Us" story.
A
BBC story reports that Salisbury 'visiting research fellow' Brian Edwards discovered both the photographer and the subject of the photograph at bottom right:
Source: BBC
The image is better known as this , from a Led Zeppelin record:
Source: The Guardian
The story is being widely reported. The
BBC and
The Guardian are just two examples.
The crucial pieces of luck were:
- Edwards' guess that the photographer was a chemist in the Salisbury area
- that enough of the chemist's handwriting (presumably his signature) was available online to match against this and other photograph captions
- unspecified research that 'suggested' the subject was a thatcher named Lot Long (or Lot Longyear)
What's odd about the lucky chemist guess, given the other facts available, is that the report goes on to say the photographer - Ernest Farmer - was head of photography at London's Regent Street Polytechnic.
Where you would expect he would have access to plenty of kit for developing film and printing photographs.
We're told, for example, that Farmer was no mere master of technical photography. He was pushing its boundaries.
From
The Guardian:
Ernest Farmer, who today is little known but was a leading figure in the development of photography as an art form.
So the amazing luck here is that a man running a photography school in London was identified as the photographer because he took the pictures near Salisbury... near the premises of his chemist father. His chemist father on whom Farmer - this detective story has it - would have been dependent for one or more parts of his photograpy process.
Yet it seems Farmer didn't live near Salisbury and was probably not dependent on local chemists to get his film processed. What a stroke of luck then, that this photographer was found by this 'show me the chemist and I shall show you the photographer' method.
There are other coincidences and long leaps of luck in the report (and hints of connections in other online reports of this story).
Farmer worked at the Regent Street Polytechnic just after it changed its name. That puts him in the institution at the same time it was run by John Samuel Phené:
I'd need to dig through my notes to get Phené's timings but IIRC, Phené was in charge of setting up the polytechnic as a technical college (for want of a generic description) for the working class (the former slave class).
From Brenda Weeden's history of the University of Westminster - '
The Education of the Eye':
The directors included John Phené, the first managing director of the new Institution, and Thomas Twining, a member of the wealthy family of tea merchants, who was an authority on technical education.
How Thomas Twining became an authority on technical education sounds like it might be worth researching.
Like Farmer, Phené was also interested in art.
From
Proceedings Of The Society Of Antiquaries Of London 2nd Series Vol.24, 1912:
His views and practice on the subjects of art and architecture were equally remote from the normal
You can get a sense of Phené's taste in art from the photographs in
Dr Phene in His Garden:
Though I don't think he was collecting this for the love of it.
Phené crops up in a IHASFEMR context as a person who
documented and explained 'serpent mounds' and 'reptile tumuli' (and
here) He said they were ancient sacrifice and serpent worship sites. I think his interpretation of them was very judicious. And that in reality he may have been part of
the Tennyson group - based around
Cheyne Row, Chelsea - involved with:
- documenting surviving IHASFEMR remnants
- decisions about which remnants to remove and which to retain
- decisions about how to re-explain retained remnants(eg Clare Castle, Suffolk. Which may have been judiciously mis-interpreted as a 'serpent mound' - along with some other mottes - when it was something else entirely)
- helping create His-Story as we understand it
- selecting which technical knowledge to pass on and which to suppress or to redistribute as cargo cult.
We see a variant of this role in Joseph Beldam,
some of whose activities may be interpreted as diluting memories of 'prehistoric' stock farming around east Anglia.
The house shown on the left-hand page of the top image is King John's House. It too played a role in developing art history. Or at least our modern understanding of art history.
From
Rethinking Pitt-Rivers - King John's House:
Pitt-Rivers wanted his art collection to show the progression of art through history, 'a series of small and for the most part original pictures, illustrating the history of painting from the earliest times' as he said himself. He took a strict approach, mixing schools and countries' art as appropriate.
The chronological approach followed the German model as put forward by
Gustav Waagen in Berlin for the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in the 1830s and 1840s, and was also the way that the Louvre in Paris was hung (with greater emphasis on chronology than stylistic format). Pitt-Rivers may even have been to see this model on one of his many holidays in Germany,,,
As Yallop remarks:
Waagen's displays ... presented objects within their chronological and social contexts, supported by explanatory labels and catalogues. This allowed visitors to get a sense of how one artist's work related to another's, and how practice had evolved across time and in different places.
In other words, Pitt-Rivers was working with the German Romantic movement to develop our backstory about art history. This description of Pitt-Rivers' art collection augments evidence that the Tennyson group were recreating British history with a romantic twist. A less brutal twist. A much less brutal twist.
The Led Zeppelin stickman story suggests Ernest Farmer was part of these processes.
And that connectable dots are brought to our attention in oblique ways.
As the BBC report comments: it's quite a revelation.
Marge Simpson! 4 toes, 5 toes...
Oldest papyrus ever?
wow, soon we'll all read what's on the cooked roman papyri folks \o/
