More from the Vaughan bequest transfer (see last post.)

Fittingly, this one is of Edinburgh:-

The West Gate, Canterbury:-

Shipping:-

The Doge’s Palace and Piazetta:-

Storm at the Mouth of the Grand Canal:-

Bellinzone, Switzerland:-

Ostend Harbour:-

Plymouth:-

Every January the Scottish National Gallery in Princes Street, Edinburgh, displays its bequest of works by J M W Turner. The terms of the bequest by Henry Vaughan dictated that these works could only be shown in January in order to protect them from damage by light.

In 2025  there was a variation to this practice in that the Edinburgh Gallery swapped its collection with that of the National Gallery of Ireland.

The day we went there was a long queue to get in (in normal years there isn’t) but we did we get to see a lot of Turners new to us.

Clovelly Bay North Devon:-

Chatel Argent above Villeneuve:-

Beech tree:-

A river in the Campagne:-

Old Dover Harbour and Shakespeare’s Cliff:-

For some reason the title the Scottish National Gallery has given to its exhibition featuring the painter John Lavery is “An Irish Impressionist.”

I had always considered Lavery to be a Scottish painter, even if he was born in Ireland. He moved to Scotland as a child and started his career in Glasgow.

The Exhibition is on till 27^th October.

Lavery’s early work resembles paintings by The Glasgow Boys. This is The Intruders, very reminiscent of a painting by James Guthrie:-

His style soon developed as he took to painting more impressionistic works such as these two of the Bridge at Grès (Grez-sur-Loing):-

Then we have Windy Day:-

and The Harbour of St Jean de Luz:-

There are two versions of On The Loing in the exhibition. This one was a study for the larger painting exhibited beside it.

A couple of weeks ago myself and the good lady went to the Grayson Perry Exhibition at the National Gallery in Edinburgh. It’s called Smash Hits.

I wasn’t expecting much as what I’ve seen of his work on television didn’t inspire me. However we are Friends of the National Galleries and that has various benefits – among them a discount in their cafés  (the one in Modern Two is excellent) and free entry to exhibitions such as this. (I would not have paid the entrance fee of £19.)

I had known Perry made his name as a potter and has an alter ego as Claire whom I find tiresome in the extreme.

I was, though, pleasantly surprised to see in the first gallery two sculptures which to me had a Japanese look.

Our Father and Our Mother. Clicking on the links should take you to my photos of the blurb accompanying each:-

The next gallery had a series of tapestries collectively titled The Vanity of Small Differences and based on Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress but updated for the Twenty-First century:-

Note the cafetiere and “literature” mugs in the second one above. Apparently these are emblems of being middle class. I admit to using a cafetiere. I don’t have literature mugs though.

The background in the last one seemed to me to sum up life in Britain in latter years:-

Another huge tapestry illustrated Perry’s lack of originality. It’s titled Morris, Gainsborough, Turner, Riley:-

His “Battle of Britain” ended up as a conscious channelling of Paul Nash. It’s quite effective though:-

The entrance display room to the Ocean Liners Exhibition, V&A, Dundee, displays advertising posters from the earliest liner eras up to the time when they were replaced by air travel.

My eye was mostly taken by classic Art Deco ones such as this for an Italian shipping line:-

Not to mention the classic SS Normandie:-

And the SS Empress of Britain:-

This brochure is from the NYK line:-

These are pages illustrating the high life of ocean liner travel:-

Finally and not Art Deco, the cover of a brochure for the QE2, whose first voyage down the Clyde to take her sea-trials we were all given a day off school to witness. Even then everyone knew there would never be such a ship built on the Clyde again:-

Angry Robot, 2011, 379 p.

Camera Obscura is the second of Tidhar’s tales of The Bookman Histories. Whether it is desirable I can’t say as I’ve not read the previous volume but familiarity with the first is not necessary as this book did stand alone. Yet how to classify this blend of steampunk, altered history, murder mystery and SF? Best not to, perhaps. Let it all wash over you in an overwhelming wave.

Milady de Winter, once Cleopatra, The Ferocious Dahomey Amazon in Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, sometime wife of a late English Lord, now works for the Quiet Council, a group of machines which rules in Paris. Across the channel Queen Victoria is on the throne – but she is a lizard, one of the set of creatures awakened by Amerigo Vespucci when he ventured over the Atlantic to Caliban’s island. As a result, in this universe inhabitants of the New World are referred to as Vespuccians.

As the above perhaps indicates, various homages are made in the course of this tale. We encounter Viktor, a scientist who experiments on dead bodies, Edison players which operate using perforated discs, a representative of the Empire of Chung Kuo, Mycroft Holmes (an agent for British intelligence,) Citizen Sade – who likes to inflict pain, Sitting Bull, Buffalo Bill; the list is almost endless. We hear, too, of a man named Moreau, off to carry on his work on a Pacific island. There was even the sentence, “A man came through the door with a gun,” but that was inserted only to subvert the cliché it implies. Earlier it had reminded me the film of The Maltese Falcon. At a ball Viktor utters a line that reads as if it could have come out of Treasure Island. “The dead don’t dance, and they seldom drink,” begs to be followed with, “Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum.”

The first section of the book is entitled Murder in the Rue Morgue and at this point it looks as if we are going to be reading a steampunk (secret) police procedural. The starting point is misleading though, as the murder story morphs into a different kind of tale. There is the sense that Tidhar is packing too many allusions and references into his novel, at the expense of a tighter story. Not that the journey isn’t enjoyable just that the focus becomes diffuse, though pointers to the resolution are distributed throughout.

It all builds to a climax set four years after the Paris Exposition Universelle, at The World’s Vespuccian Exposition in Chicago – Ferris Wheel and all. Compare The World’s Columbian Exposition (a World’s Fair whose buildings became known as The White City) of which there are some pictures here.

While Tidhar can write there really is too much going on here for the characters to grow and develop – but that is, I’m sure, deliberate. Read it for the adventure story, for the references and allusions. For its brio.

Pedant’s corner: Except for the one occasion where automata appeared the word automatons is used as a plural throughout the book. Milady at one point has “another death on her hand.” (Hand, singular. This was before she lost one of the relevant appendages and it was replaced with a Gatling gun.) “Apart for them” was used for “apart from them,” and in “as if she and the jade have come to some sort of understanding” (have should be had) – plus a “sank” for sunk.