The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.
― E.B. White, Charlotte’s Web
Champagne arrived in flûtes on trays, and we emptied them with gladness in our hearts... for when feasts are laid and classical music is played, where champagne is drunk once the sun has sunk and the season of summer is alive in spicy bloom, and beautiful women fill the room, and are generous with laughter and smiles... these things fill men's hearts with joy and remind one that life’s bounty is not always fleeting but can be captured, and enjoyed. It is in writing about this scene that I relive this night in my soul.
― Roman Payne
Illustration of five Victorian ladies in summer hats plus two bonus illustrations of fleeting summer scenes; originally published 1896. You can download this high-res collage sheet as an 11” x 8.5” @ 300 ppi JPEG here.
Breakfast-Time, 1887
by Hanna Hirsch-Pauli (1864–1940)
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Alice laughed. “There's no use trying,” she said.
“One can't believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven't had much practice,” said the Queen.
“When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll
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About the painting:
An open-air painting, “Breakfast-Time” depicts a tranquil scene with a table set for breakfast on a sunny morning. Placed at the bottom right of the picture is a table covered with a white tablecloth alongside a bench and two chairs. It is positioned under a tree with its branches stretching over the table. A maid is approaching the table carrying a tray in her hands. The light is reflected from the shiny objects on the table and from the white tablecloth. The artist has been partly inspired by the impressionists' way of suggesting volumes and depth by using coloured lights and shadows, causing the table, the table setting and the foliage to dissolve in shimmering light reflexes. The painting was popular among contemporary Swedish artists of the time.
Hanna Pauli had an education of the wealthy middle class that adopted many of the features of noble life in the 18th century, such as learning to draw and paint with watercolour. However, she decided to pursue this further and became a professional artist. Many Swedish artists of the time studied at the Düsseldorf art school and in Paris, and Pauli was also tutored there. She was mainly influenced by the work of Carl Larsson, Peder Severin Krøyer, Laurits Andersen Ring and French artists like Jules Bastien-Lepage. The painting was not as popular among the broad public of the time as it was among her Nordic artist colleagues. The use of light, the vibrant brushwork applied in intervals, separately from each other without any blending or mixture, and the light spots fields composed by broad brushwork among other things, angered many contemporary Swedish critics. They saw Hanna Pauli's techniques as too radical and a critic derisively pointed out that perhaps the thick paint on the tablecloth was there because the artist was using it to clean and dry her brushes on it.
Sources:
[1] Original image and description from Wikipedia.
[2] The Real Victorian's digitally enhanced version of the painting (seen above), downloadable as an 8” x 8” @ 300 ppi JPEG.
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Here is a video on how to prepare kedgeree,
a popular Victorian breakfast dish for the upper classes:
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
― e.e. cummings
Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.
― Nora Ephron
Two pages of antique illustrations showing Victorian ladies in head-dresses and of various dresses from 1864. You can download the images as a high-res 10" x 14" @ 300 ppi JPEG (first) here and a high-res 15" x 10.5" @ 300 ppi JPEG (second) here. Both instantly downloadable images are watermark-free and suitable for collage, graphic design or scrapbooking projects.
