Often I want to ask others' opinion of a piece of artwork I've found that I don't understand or have questions about. So this can also be a place where art or artists can be discussed, it's not just a gallery thread. In other words, it's an open forum for art. If someone has art or photographs that they have created, they can post here as well.
I will kick things off with a photo I found at a wonderful place to explore, the Victoria and Albert Museum website -
http://www.vam.ac.uk/
Hosting one of the most fascinating art collections on the web, the V&A makes thousands of photographs, paintings, posters, textiles, and any number of other types of art available to look at from your home computer. I was looking for really nothing at all, a list of Victorian and Edwardian stage actors, when I came across this photograph, staring out at me from beyond time, which held me completely spellbound:
Meet John Martin Harvey, the Edwardian actor-manager who got his start in Henry Irving's company around 1882. His most famous role was as Sidney Carton in an adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities called The Only Way. As you see, he is the very character himself, brought to life. He seems to have led quite a happy, normal life for an actor, making his own way, first as a handsome leading man and then later as a married character actor and manager. He was the last in a long line of romantic types, modeling his style on Irving's own flamboyant and fervent approach to theatre. He toured the provinces and Canada with much more popular success than the theatre district in London, probably because his style was becoming outmoded by the early 1900's - appearing in less good plays where the focus was on the star rather than on the play itself. During the Great War, he raised funds for Britain's first nursing school, and in 1921, he received a knighthood. He lived to be 80, almost 81 and died at his home with his family.
One can certainly see how those provincial girls would have responded to him...he reminds me a little of Errol Flynn for dash, or perhaps a metal-head rocker from just a few years back, the kind who might leap into the audience at a moment's notice or sing a heavy-on-the-bass ballad for the ladies. There is a very modern look to him, a deep sense of the power of the camera. An old fashioned Hamlet-like thoughtfulness and intensity radiates from his photos. Obviously, he was the fascinating, doomed Carton completely in looks, but we can never really know what his acting was like, except from these photos. He's even mentioned in Ulysses:
So forgive me if I'm swayed by this Byronic, Victorian era 'rock star', a pretty face from out of the past.... I simply couldn't help it, for I am the spiritual descendant of a long line of stage struck Winny Rippinghams."His eyes burned into her as thought they would search her through and through, read her very soul. Wonderful eyes they were, superbly expressive, but could you trust them? People were so queer. She could see at once by his dark eyes and pale intellectual face that he was a foreigner, the image of the photo she had of Martin Harvey, the matinee idol, only for the moustache which she preferred, not being stage struck like Winny Rippingham..."
