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The Victoria and Albert…

Posted in Art, Biographical with tags , , , , , on July 4, 2026 by telescoper

I can’t remember when I was last in the Victoria and Albert Museum but it’s long enough ago for me to have forgotten how big it is. It being free to get in and very near to why I am we are staying it was an easy decision to head there this morning before going to the Pride festivities. In fact it was so enjoyable and so extensive we were a bit late leaving. It’s definitely well worth a visit if you’re in London.

I remember the Raphael Cartoons from when I was last at the V&A. They’re very well done – an example is on the right below – but I didn’t find them very funny. In fact I couldn’t see the joke in any of them!

Just so you don’t think I’m a complete ignoramus, the “cartoons” are complete designs for tapestries – they would be placed underneath the loom as a template for the weavers to follow. Incidentally, the Bayeux “Tapestry” – currently on display in the British Museum – is not a tapestry at all. Being stitched rather than woven, it’s an embroidery not a tapestry. The Raphael cartoons were made for tapestries that hang on the walls in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, intended to complement Michelangelo’s famous ceiling. I still don’t know who did the floor.

I’m not very good at taking pictures in galleries, especially when I’ve got company as I had today, but in the light of yesterday’s post I couldn’t resist this:

It’s a plaster study by Alfred Stevens for a sculpture that would form part of the memorial to the Duke of Wellington in St Paul’s Cathedral. It’s called Truth and Falsehood (there is another called Valour and Cowardice).

In this work Truth tears out the double tongue of Falsehood and pushes aside the mask concealing his grotesque features. His serpent-tails are exposed beneath the drapery. 

Another thing I was reminded of by today’s visit is the prominent role played in the early days of the Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington by the artist Frederic Leighton, who featured in a recent post.

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Out and About in London

Posted in Art, Biographical, LGBTQ+ with tags , , , , , , , , , on July 3, 2026 by telescoper

I spent today in London, wandering about and visiting various locations I haven’t seen for a while, including the Science Museum (near where I’m staying) and Tate Modern (not near where I’m staying). The Science Museum has changed quite a bit since my last visit there many moons ago, but it still reminded me of Toby Esterhase’s description in Smiley’s People:

In the Science Museum, top floor. All those airplanes. Lot of kiddies eating crisps.

There was indeed a lot of kiddies, this being peak season for school trips, and the aeroplanes are still there. On the way from the Science Museum to Tate Modern, I bumped into some members of the union Unite from the Institute of Cancer Research who were at outside South Kensington tube station protesting about pay and conditions, and promised to send a message of solidarity on social media, which I hereby do.

Unite Members
On the way to Tate Modern

Tate Modern was really good, if also busy with a lot of kiddies. I particularly enjoyed The Tanks, in one of which there is an eerily lit exhibition of Giacometti scupltures and another an installation by Nora Chipaumire called Gadzi, which includes sculpted and audio elements between which you can sit or move around. One of the interesting things about installations like this is watching what other people do: some were sitting on the large loudspeakers playing the music, others moving around to experience changes in the sonic experience.

After Tate Modern I dropped in at the HQ of the Elon Musk Appreciation Society Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace. This is the time of year for the annual Summer Science Exhbition. Note the Pride Progress flag flying outside. Inside was another lot of kiddies but quite a few adults too. Out of the thirteen exhibits, three were directly relevant to my own science area: one from the Simons Observatory, one from Durham University about galaxy formation simulations, and also one from Euclid. Here is Andy Taylor from Edinburgh at the latter, explaining B-modes to visitors:

The Pride Progress flag reminds me to explain, as if you hadn’t realized, that tomorrow (4th July) is the day of the Pride in London parade. Having a meeting to attend this week and another thing to do in London next week, it proved impossible to resist staying over the weekend. Now I’ll have to finish this blog as I have to meet a certain person off the train who is coincidentally flying in especially tonight to stay with me for this very special weekend.

P.S. It was very warm today, and set to get even warmer going into next week…

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Flaming June – Frederic Leighton

Posted in Art, Biographical, History with tags , , , on June 28, 2026 by telescoper

Flaming June by Frederic Leighton (1895, Oil on Canvas, 120 ×120cm, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico)

Since this June has seen a heatwave across Europe and even here in Ireland, I was reminded of the expression “Flaming June” which I thought until relatively recently was some sort of folk expression or quotation from a poem, but it is instead the title of this Pre-Raphaelite painting by Frederic Leighton of a lady wearing what looks like a dress made out of old curtains. Apparently the oleander branch seen in the upper right symbolizes the fragile link between sleep and death. It looks to me like she must be attending a seminar. You can read more about this painting here.

As well as a hugely popular artist in his lifetime (though his reputation has not endured), Leighton holds the record for the shortest ever peerage: he was made Baron Leighton just the day before he died. The title he had been given was to be hereditary but as he had no offspring the title became extinct at his death.

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The Football Players – Henri Rousseau

Posted in Art, Football, Rugby with tags , , , , , , on June 19, 2026 by telescoper

The Football* Players (Les joueurs de football) by Henri Rousseau (1908, Oil on Canvas, 100.3 x 81.1 cm, Guggenheim Museum, New York)

(Obviously it’s Rugby Football…)

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R.I.P. David Hockney (1937-2026)

Posted in Art, LGBTQ+, R.I.P. with tags , , on June 12, 2026 by telescoper

Today brought sad news of the death of artist David Hockney at the age of 88. Hockney was one of the leaders in the pop art movement, which involved assimilating and distilling ideas from popular culture and his career spanned painting, drawing, photography, printmaking and stage design. The last exhibition I saw by him consisted of wonderful drawings done on an IPad. That was about 15 years ago; he remained remarkably active and productive well into old age.

Throughout his career, Hockney’s work was often inspired by his fascination with light, especially its interplay with water, as well as his unique sense of space and unusual use of colour. His most famous early expressions of these were realised in California, where he became obsessed with the bright sunshine and the plethora of swimming pools.

As Hockney’s fame grew his work became very collectible, commanding huge prices at auction, so much of it ended up in private collections. This large-scale work, A Bigger Splash, painted in 1967, followed a smaller painting, The Splash (1966). The earlier work fetched around $30M at auction and is in a private collection, but A Bigger Splash can be seen at Tate Britain. The spare composition and distinctive palette are his instantly recognisable trademarks.

A Bigger Splash by David Hockney (1967, Acrylic on Canvas, 242.5 × 243.9 cm, Tate Britain, London)

Update: here’s a very poignant cartoon by Ben Jennings.

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Heat – Florine Stettheimer

Posted in Art with tags , , , , on May 27, 2026 by telescoper

Heat by Florine Stettheimer (1919, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 92.7 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York)

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Cats – Natalia Goncharova

Posted in Art with tags , , , , , on May 12, 2026 by telescoper

Cats (Rayist percep. in rose, black, and yellow) by Natalia Goncharova (1913, Oil on Canvas, 85.1 x 85.7 cm, Guggenheim Museum, New York).

This is a Rayist (or Rayonist) composition in which the artist tries to capture rays of light reflected off objects in the material world. Dynamic lines are added to suggest crystalline forms and the movement of light and energy. The style was influenced by scientific discoveries on the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity suggesting a reality beyond the direct perception of the naked eye.

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M.C. Escher and CP Violation

Posted in Art, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on April 28, 2026 by telescoper

I’ve had these pictures for quite a while and can’t remember where I got them from, but I used to show them in my lectures on Theoretical Particle Physics when I was in Nottingham to illustrate CP-violation and used them in this morning’s lecture at Maynooth.

The following picture by M.C. Escher is called Day and Night:

If you look at it you can see two kinds of symmetry emerging. One is a kind of reflection symmetry about a vertical axis drawn through the centre of the picture that applies to shapes but not to colour. The other is between black and white. But it is obvious that the picture doesn’t display these symmetries separately: to get a picture unchanged from the original you would have to do the mirror reflection and change black to white (and vice-versa).

The mirror reflection in the image can be taken to represent parity (P). Strictly speaking parity refers to a reflection through the origin in 3D rather than a mirror reflection, but it’s just for illustration. We know that a parity symmetry is violated in weak interactions just as it is in the picture.

The other possible symmetry, between black and white can be taken to represent charge-conjugation (C), the operation that converts particles into anti-particles and vice-versa.

While P is not an exact symmetry of weak interactions, it was long thought that the combination of C and P (CP) would be. Actually it isn’t. The story of the discovery of CP-violation is fascinating but I don’t have time to go into it here. It suffices to say that the Escher print also displays CP violation.

First lets do `C’, i.e. convert black to white and vice-versa. The result is:

Now reflect about the vertical mid-line to illustrate `P’:

If `CP’ were an exact symmetry then that image would be identical to the original, which I reproduce here:

You can see, however, that while some elements of the picture do look the same after this combined operation (e.g. the birds), others (e.g. the buildings at the bottom) do not. Although CP is not an exact symmetry of this picture, it is almost (just like it is in particle physics).

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The Red Disk – Joan Miró

Posted in Art with tags , , , on April 24, 2026 by telescoper

The Red Disk by Joan Miró (1960, Oil on Canvas, 45.7 × 54.9 cm, New Orleans Museum of Art).

From here:

Set against a dark blue, almost black surface, a white splotch of paint has been hurled out impulsively, and loses itself in innumerable spots and spatters, a cosmic gesture thrust against the empty void of nothingness – almost a metaphor of the artist’s creative activity. Some spots of colour flare up among this galaxy of creativity, of which the largest and most irregular is the red one which gave the painting its title. Minute symbols are scattered around the edges of the entire constellation – stars of hair and little hooks which give this action painting a new poetic dimension and connect it unmistakably with Miro’s world of symbols.

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Estella Solomons

Posted in Art, History with tags , , , , on April 20, 2026 by telescoper

Following yesterday’s post about the 1926 Irish Census I fell down a metaphorical rabbit hole following a request from a former colleague (who happens to be Jewish) to help find a relative of his who lived in Dublin at the time of the census. I found the person, which was nice, but was then sent this article  about an unrelated lady called Estella Solomons who was on the rebel side in the Easter Rising and helped the cause by hiding weapons in her garden.  It turns out that there was a significant Jewish presence in Dublin back then. In the North Side, around Portobello, there was an area dubbed ‘Little Jerusalem’.

Estella Solomons, self-portrait

I hadn’t heard of Estella Solomons before yesterday but she was a significant artist whose work was featured in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Dublin in 2022 (which I did not see). There is also a Wikipedia page about her. I found the above self-portrait online. I find it very striking.

Estella Solomons was born in 1882 and died in 1968 at the age of 86. She was 34 at the time of the Easter Rising and would have been 44 at the time of the 1926 census. I did find her in the online census but her age is recorded as 40. She married the poet Seumas O’Sullivan in 1926 but she is listed as “single” on the census form, so presumably they married later in the year.

There are two other women at her 1926 address, both servants, so she was obviously quite well off, but no sign of her husband.

More surprisingly Estella’s sex is given in the 1926 census as Male. She is in the 1911 census too, but recorded there as Female. I did consider the possibility that she might have been living as a man, but that does not fit with other details of her life. I think it is just a mistake.  Such records are not entirely free from errors.

I think this an example of the sort of confusion historians have to contend with when looking at historical documents!

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