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Robbing the Past: London and Paris
Librarian and art dealer Abbé Luigi Celotti was born on 12 August 1759 in Treviso in the Veneto region. His name appears as an art dealer after the Napoleonic invasion of Italy in 1796 when he was...
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Burking the Italian Boy | Nova Scotia Gardens (Shoreditch)
Before being pulled down in 1910, the Fortune of War was a notorious public house located on the junction of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane in Smithfield. Here the London Burkers met, a criminal gang...
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Puzzled Europe | St Martin’s Lane (Covent Garden)
The Enlightenment (‘siècle des lumières’) was the age of European Union proper. Enlightenment was an outlook and an attitude: rational, inclusive, and outward-looking. Geography was its preferred...
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A Belgian at the Bodley
The Victorian establishment preached that art and literature fulfilled crucial ethical roles in society. If a creator dared to stray from the moral code, he was taken to court to be punished for his...
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Unshaven, Brooding, Magnificent | Little Holland House (Kensington)
In 1842, Edward Lear began a journey into the Italian peninsula and made the strenuous effort of travelling to the Abruzzo region where he fell in love with the harsh landscape and its hardy...
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Vampires and Other Foreigners
In September 2009 workers in a mass grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo dug up a female skeleton with a brick lodged between her jaws. The person had died during the plague epidemic of...
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Losing One’s Head: Prince’s Square (Wapping)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydriotaphia,_Urn_Burial In 1658, physician and author Thomas Browne published his reflections on death and burial in Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall which made him a pioneer...
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Fag End Patriotism – Commercial Road (Whitechapel)
Linguist Luis de Torres accompanied Columbus on his first voyage to America as an interpreter. A Jew at the time of the Inquisition, he was forced to convert to Catholicism before setting sail in...
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Canaries and Other Migrants
Birds represent crucial aspects of Christian teaching. The dove signifies the Holy Spirit as well as marking peace and purity; the eagle, like the phoenix, is a symbol of the Resurrection; the pelican...
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Dr Marten’s Poxy Book (Hatton Garden (Camden)
In June 1660, Charles II left the Low Countries, departing from Scheveningen beach. Many Royalists who had been exiled for over a decade made their way back to London, together with the various...
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Painter, Poet, Pimp | Bow Street (Covent Garden)
The death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II marked the end of a period of state control and repression. The overthrow of the Interregnum unleashed an explosion of energy. London...
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PISSING IN THE WIND: Great Queen Street (Covent Garden)
The Atlantic slave trade began in the mid-1400s and lasted into the nineteenth century. By the 1600s the Dutch contested the English and French for control of the trade, but England emerged as the...
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A Fickle Friend: Lime Street (City of London)
The so-called album amicorum is a book of ‘autographs’ collected by wandering scholars as they roamed between universities. The craze started in the middle of the sixteenth century. A typical album...
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Holbein at the Steelyard: Cannon Street (City of London)
During the high and late Middle Ages the majority of strangers in London were individual members of a multi-national merchant class. In 1303, Edward I had signed the Carta Mercatoria (Charter of the...
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FAKE NEWS FROM FORMOSA: Ironmonger Row (Islington)
When in 1737 Samuel Johnson left Lichfield for London to start his career as a writer, he faced years of financial hardship before finally achieving fame in the early 1750s. One of many competing...
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Lay Down Your Weary Tune : Palace of Westminster (Westminster)
The Renaissance held music in high regard. It played a prominent part in religious, court and civic life. The interchange of ideas in Europe through ever closer economic and political contact brought...
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Beyond the religious divide: Rubens and Mayerne in London St Martin’s Lane...
By Jaap Harskamp / you can find more articles by his hand here Peter Paul Rubens was a painter with a Baroque brush. He was admired by his contemporaries as the creator of dramatically charged and...
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Porn and Pansies – Red Lion Street (London)
During the later nineteenth century middle class society was obsessed with righteousness and ill at ease with modernist art. Whilst the writer depicted the bourgeois as a malicious fool (le père Ubu...
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SCHWITTERS AND JARRY AT THE GABERBOCCHUS PRESS | Randolph Avenue (Maida Vale)
Franciszka Weinles was born on 28 June 1907 in Warsaw, the daughter of the Jewish artist Jakub Weinles. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw in 1931. Stefan Themerson was born on 25...
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European Londoners
After a long silence we are going to revive our blog – recently we published this great book, by Jaap Harskamp: European Londoners. We will publish it on line, in installments. But you can get the...
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