Van Gogh’s artwork while in the asylum. The ‘surreal’ creatures of Bosch. Using marble to depict water.
Van Gogh was a great admirer of Millet, and during his stay in the Saint-Rémy asylum made over 20 copies of his works. His ‘The Siesta’ (1890) is closely based on Millet’s earlier pastel ‘Noonday Rest’, though with reversed composition, more vibrant colours & obvious brushstrokes pic.twitter.com/EWOHHHLmAK
— Journal of Art in Society (@artinsociety) June 16, 2026
Imagine the skill it took to make marble look wet. In The Nymph (1858), Italian sculptor Giovanni Lombardi carved solid stone to resemble water rippling around her bare feet.
Completed in 1858 for a private palazzo in Brescia, La Ninfa showcases the astonishing skill of Italian… pic.twitter.com/WknXOyYxVw
Mounted warriors pursue enemies. Illustration of Rashid-ad-Din’s Gami’ at-tawarih. Tabriz (?), 1st quarter of 14th century. Public Domain
“…Chroniclers recall the countless battles she fought while pregnant, covered in male armor, charging into war on horseback, and wielding a sword. Most famously, some legends recount that she gave birth on the battlefield during the reunification wars against the Oirats, a Western Mongol tribe. These tales record how she stopped fighting long enough to give birth to twin boys before immediately returning to the battle. …”
THE MALADY: BEING A RESTLESS WRITER, BRILLIANT THINKER & ARDENT FEMINIST
THE REMEDY: THE REST CURE
THE PROCEDURE: ISOLATION. CEASE ALL THOUGHT. STOP ALL WRITING.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a brilliant thinker, a ‘utopian’, a feminist, a writer and a philosopher who was punished for being ‘ahead of her time’.
She was raised in an environment laden with dysfunction and eventually married, had a child, and suffered from postpartum depression. This chain of events contributed to her experiencing an emotional and psychological suffocation.
The remedy prescribed? The Rest Cure.
Experiencing this ‘remedy’ drove her to write THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER, a piece of literature that exposed the horrors of ‘the rest cure’ and helped to define the subgenre of feminist psychological horror.
“Gilman believed that cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing should be done by professionals, not family members. She advocated for dress reform for women, partly as a way to promote physical fitness. She argued that women needed economic independence, not just suffrage, to achieve true equality with men.”
Courtesan with a Lute. 17th century. Nicolaes Pieterszoon Berchem, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
This week’s ‘finds from the web‘ that struck a chord and stirred:
“…we are all facing the same struggle: to feel safe, to feel seen, to wrest some meaning and some marvel from the ephemeral bewilderment of being alive. …”
“…Her conflicting emotions about the man she buried were crammed into a box to keep her from unleashing all her monsters onto the world today of all days. …”
I found this painting disturbing—and ‘disturbing’ is a ‘chord,’ nevertheless.
The Satyr and the Peasant Family, c.1620, Jacob Jordaens, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Is AI capable of becoming a monster of sorts? That question certainly strikes a chord…
“Martin Scorsese’s announcement that he has invested in an AI company and uses the technology to create storyboards has triggered a backlash from fellow members of the film industry….” … “ ‘For 70 years, I’ve been creating my own storyboards. There’s always been this problem of how do you communicate what you see in your head to your cast and crew. There are some things you have to see and feel. Now with this tool, I can share what I’m visualising more clearly and efficiently to my creative team. ‘…”
Speaking of ‘monsters’ and human nature—I came across an article about Mary Shelley’s half-sister—and the story of Mary Shelley, her mother, her stepsister, and her half-sister contains it all… from their love lives and their creative endeavors to their tragic outcomes.
What struck a chord? Both the article, which skillfully unwrapped this tremendous tale, and the actual hidden history of these people’s lives.
4 ‘powerhouse’ lines from the article:
“Fanny’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was famously disparaged by Horace Walpole as “a hyena in petticoats.” “… ” To write about Fanny is inevitably to write about how she was and is overshadowed by the originality and reputation of her mother, and by the fame and accomplishments of her half-sister.” … “What is known, thanks in part to a report in the Cambrian newspaper of October 1816, is that at the age of twenty-two, Fanny traveled alone from London to Swansea, locked herself in a room at the Mackworth Arms Hotel and drank enough laudanum to end her life. “
“She counted Aaron Burr (former USA vice president), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet), Humphry Davy (scientist), Charles and Mary Lamb (writers), and Robert Owen (industrialist, politician and philanthropist) amongst her acquaintances.”
Intrigued, like I am, to find out more about these tragic figures from the Romantic period?
Check out the book The Hyena’s Daughter by Juniper Jones.
While on the topic of books, I am eager to also share this book I came across this week. It is still on backorder—and well worth the wait and the read.
On society, human nature, and polished cruelty—it strikes a chord.
Stay tuned next week for more ‘finds’… or subscribe so you don’t miss a ‘stir.’
A 19th-century illustrator—Grandville. Radical absurdity. Shattering royal censorship.
The History
In July 1830, King Charles X of France made a fatal mistake. Terrified of a
growing liberal press, he signed the repressive July Ordinances.
suspending freedom of the press and demanding absolute censorship of all
printed graphics. He believed that by snuffing out the ink, he could control the
minds of Paris.
He underestimated the power of the satirists, artists, and thinkers.
The cartoonists didn’t back down; they revolted. Led by publishers like Charles
Philipon and artists like J.J. Grandville and Honoré Daumier, satirical journals
transformed into weapons of war.
When the government claimed it was bringing “order” to France, Grandville responded with Let’s Put Out the Light and
Rekindle the Fire!—exposing the regime as monstrous, bird-beaked bellows
actively choking human enlightenment.
The crown’s reaction was swift and brutal. Seizures, heavy fines, and prison
sentences were handed down. Daumier was jailed; Philipon’s presses were
raided. By 1835, political caricatures were entirely outlawed.
But censorship never stops the truth; it merely forces it to evolve.
Banned from drawing the King’s face, Grandville turned his eyes to nature—and the satire around the pear was created. The king’s face was likened at the time to the shape of a pear. If the free-thinking satirists could not mock the system, they would mock the society that built it.
In the following gallery, we track Grandville’s psychological transition from overt political warfare to the deep, subversive portrayal of the absurd.
Ⅰ. THE INOCULATION
Cultural inoculation to eradicate culture.
Led by the king and supported by the establishment/system, there was a ‘mindset’ that was ‘set’ to censor ideas as well as the principles of ‘the enlightenment’. In 1830, the French state realized that raw force alone could not kill an idea. They needed something far more insidious than force to accomplish this dampening of the mind: a controlled, everyday dose of manufactured nonsense was devised to dumb down and preoccupy the herds, using this diversion as a method to assist them in achieving their goal.
Before the Crown banned his political ink, Grandville targeted the physical vanity of the bourgeoisie. He saw the massive, ballooning 1830s sleeves and towering, wire-framed bonnets not as style but as symptoms.
Lithographie dans La Caricature. Légende : « Adoremus in aeternum sanctissimum philipoirum. » Grandville et Deesperret Date June 1833 Paris Musées
Ⅱ. THE SEDATIVE OF STATE
When fashion cinches the waist and pinches the mind.
Floodgates opening, the media with trivial obsessions DULLED the public’s senses. The system used the very tools of culture to systematically hollow out the critical thinking of society.
While the population obsessed over the inflation of their sleeves, they ignored the deflation of their liberties.
Folly was the sedative that prepared the herd to accept the cage.
Happened then…happened before…still happens again…and again. Then it was the ‘sleeves’—throughout history, the focus of folly changes, but the resulting blissful ignorance is the same.
The Fashions of 1830: A Further Degree of Perfection (Encore un dégré de perfection: Modes de 1830) Metropolitan Museum of Art
Ⅲ. THE ENFORCERS
When knowledge was as threatening as the plague.
We have witnessed a fact to be true—throughout history to the present day—that when the population is thoroughly numbed by state-sanctioned nonsense, the herd willingly transforms into the enforcers of their own captivity.
In this lithograph from 1830, citizens loyal to the ‘censorship cause’ wear ‘bellows’ that are disturbingly portrayed like the unblinking, bird-beaked guise of the medieval plague doctors. This print shows them treating independent thought not as a virtue but as a dangerous and life-threatening contagion.
In this print, armed with fireplace bellows and candle snuffers, their mission is absolute: To stoke the fires of ignorance and to extinguish the flame of enlightenment.
Anonyme, dessinateur-lithographe, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Ⅳ. THE UNDERGROUND
When the truth is outlawed, hide it in the soil.
By 1835, the iron fist of royal censorship completely outlawed political caricature. It was a crime to draw the King’s face. Grandville’s response? He went entirely underground and began drawing flowers.
To the state censors, it looked like a harmless children’s botany book. Beneath the petals lay pure venom for the corrupt establishment. When this artist/thinker was stripped of his voice, his rebellion simply moved into the garden.
Delord, Taxile; Grandville, J. J.; Raban, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Ⅴ. THE SENSORY BLACKOUT
The architecture of distraction began with vanity
Anne, Duchess of Cumberland (1743-1808) Gainsborough
By the 1700s, the damage had deeply set in. Manure and mice found their way to adorn the faces of the elite. 1
By the mid-19th century, who is to say how damaged the faculties of the elite were because of centuries-old traditions of poisoning their minds and bodies?
Centuries before Grandville, the elite suffocated by their own stifling, decaying, and incapacitating physical blackout that led to death. This was not a sudden trend; it was de rigueur. A generational poison of mind and body passed down like an inheritance.
To achieve the uniformity of compliance to elite aesthetics, the herds of the elite, throughout history, willingly rubbed corroding lead paste into their pores, used arsenic and venetian ceruse; dropped deadly nightshade into their eyes, and wore towering and weighing hairstyles sculpted out of the hair of the dead, plastered with rotting animal fat. They locked themselves in a non-stop sensory overload of chemical and physical pain.
A mind consumed by the agonizing noise of its own biological decay has no capacity left to demand liberty. 23
Besides masks and social status—vanity, beauty, and appearance—the pursuit of these illusions distorts and destroys all sense of self.
“The less talent they have, the more pride, vanity and arrogance they have. All these fools, however, find other fools who applaud them.“
– Erasmus
Pursuing The Illusion. A Collage by Sosanni V.
“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
The powdered wig was the ultimate wearable symbol of all things overindulgent, dramatic, fashionable, and social prominence, all in one. The powdered wig became the vehicle of grandeur and the proof of status. A whole lifestyle eventually grew around it—positions developed for those who created, tended, or stole these ‘things.’
The powdered and elaborate wig was not without its problems. They were notoriously heavy, difficult to maintain, and a hygiene menace.
“…So where did the hair for all these perukes and poufs come from? Cheaper wigs could be made from the hide of cows, goats and sheep, or from horses’ manes, but the majority used human tresses from the poor, peddling their locks to raise some desperately needed funds. Vendors travelled between villages, seeking young or elderly peasant women; silver, white, blonde and grey hair – curly being the most sought after. More alarmingly, hair was also taken from the corpses of prostitutes and criminals and even from plague victims. Once assembled, the peruke was not washable, and as you can imagine, soon smelled terrible. An entire wig care industry developed to try to combat this problem, producing items such as scrapers, salt flasks, lice and flea traps (one advantage was that lice lived on the wig rather than the wearer whose hair was often shorn) and wig curlers. …”
Taking ‘wigs’ a bit further along as a metaphor…and moving further along the timeline, I couldn’t resist adding this book to the post…witty, to the point. forward. a timeless read, and Nancy Mitford, a writer with a talent rarely seen today.
