Month: January 2018

Thirteen Televisions

Photographer Unknown, (Thirteen Televisions: The Abandoned Adler Hotel, Silver Springs, Florida)

The Hotel Adler, was a 150-room, five-story hotel that operated from 1929 until 2004. Known for its therapeutic sulfur spa, it catered primarily to a Jewish clientele who travelled to Sharon Springs in the summers. It was kosher, with two kitchens. It was built in the Spanish Colonial Style and was adjacent to the Pavilion Hotel (demolished in 1941), which had been a summer destination for guests such as the Vanderbilts, Rensselaers, and Oscar Wilde. Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch worked as a busboy at the Adler Hotel in 1946. As of 2017, the hotel was still vacant.

Calendar: January 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of January, Solar Year 2018

A Bed of Green

January 10, 1863 marked the beginning of the London Underground when the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s oldest underground railway, opened its route between Paddington and Farringdon.

The Metropolitan Railway was a goods and passenger railway that served London from 1863 to !933. Its main line headed northwest from the financial heart of the city to what became the Middlesex suburbs. The first section built was beneath New Road between Paddington and King’s Cross and then in tunnel and cuttings besides Farringdon Road to Smithfield, near the city. It opened on January 10 with gas-lit wooden carriages hauled by steam locomotives. It is the world’s first passenger carrying underground railway.

The line was extended from both ends, eventually extending to Verney Junction in Buckinghamshire, more than 80 kilometers from the Baker Street station to the center of London. In 1905, electric traction was introduced and by 1907 electrical multiple units operated most of the services. The Metropolitan developed land near the rail lines, promoting after World War I housing estates using the “Metro-land” brand. In July of 1933, the Met was merged with other railways, tram lines, and bus services to form the London Passenger Transport Board. After the amalgamation in 1933 the “Metro-land” brand was discontinued.

The spirit of “Metro-land” was remembered in a television documentary “Metro-land”, first broadcast on February 26, 1973. A comedy-drama film, starring Christian Bale and Emily Watson, called “Metroland” was released in 1997. That film explored the tension between the youthful idealism of a hedonistic existence and that of the inevitable middle-class establishment. The film title referred to the London suburbs which were served by the expansive London Underground network, an environment that the lead characters had always promised themselves they would escape.

William Bruce Ellis Ranken

William Bruce Ellis Ranken, “The Garden Door”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 218.4 x 162.6 cm, Glasgow Museum Resource Center

William Bruce Ellis Ranken was a British artist and an Edwardian Aesthete. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, he attended Eton College and then proceeded to the Slade School of Art in London, studying under British darftsman and painter Henry Tonks. While at the Slade School, Ranken became a life-long friend with actor Ernest Thesiger, whose portrait Ranken painted in 1918.

Ranken first exhibit was at the Carfax Gallery in 1904 where he was well received by fellow artists and art critics. At this time he became friends with the Impressionist painter Wilfrid Gabriel de Glehn and painter John Singer Sargent. Upon traveling to the United States, Ranken recieved commissions for portraits of the wealthy, including the Banderbilts, Havermeyers, and the Witneys, working in oils, pastels and watercolors. Returning to Britain, he painted many portraits fo the aristocracy and the British royal family.

William Bruce Ellis Ranken died suddenly in London in 1941 at the age of sixty. He was buried near Warbrook, at Saint Mary’s Church.

Note: A more extensive biography, with images of his work, can be found in the September 2023 archive of this site.

Gennady Spirin

Gennady Spirin, Illustration for the “Black Hen, or Living Underground”, Antony Pogorelsky, 2003, Simply Read Books

Gennady Spirin was classically educated at the Moscow Art School at the Academy of Arts and at the Moscow Stroganov Institute. Influenced by Russian Renaissance painters,  he has developed his own unique style of illustration using traditional Russian art techniques. His work appeared four times on the annual New York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books of the Year list. He currently lives and works in New Jersey.

Calendar: January 9

Year: Day to Day Men: January 9

Betty Boop Coffee

On the ninth of January in 1839, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre presented a full description of his daguerreotype process to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences held by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, the man who proved the wave theory of light. 

The first permanent photograph from nature was made by French inventor Nicéphore Niépee in 1826 through his heliographic process; however, the quality of the image was poor and the process required an exposure time of eight hours. Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, the first practical process of photography, improved the quality of the image and reduced to exposure time to thirty minutes.

Born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, in November of 1787, Louis Daguerre apprenticed in theater design, architecture and panoramic painting under Pierre Prévost. He was originally a revenue officer and later a scene painter for opera sets. In 1822, Daguerre opened the Diorama, an exhibition venue in Paris which presented three-dimensional pictorial views that changed with various lighting effects. He later opened a second establishment in London’s Regent Park.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône in March of 1765, Nicéphore Niépee initially began experimenting in 1813 in the recently developed printing technique, lithography. Unskilled in drawing and unable to obtain a proper lithographic stone, he sought a way to make images automatically. Niépee made experiments and developed the heliographic process of using light and light-sensitive supports to produce images. He initially used a substrate of light-sensitive bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light, to obtain an image on glass. With the use of a camera in 1826, he was able to fix an image on a metal plate made of pewter. However, Niépee was unable to reduce the exposure time by either optical or chemical means.

In 1829, Nicéphore Niépee agreed to the repeated requests by Louis Daguerre for a partnership to perfect and exploit his heliography process. After four years of working without any advancement, Niépee died in July of 1833. Deguerre, building upon Niépee’s discoveries, eventually succeeded in greatly reducing the exposure time. He also discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then made permanent by a solution of common salt. 

For this discovery, Louis Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1839, he and the heir of Nicéphore Niépee were assigned annuities of six-thousand and four-thousand Francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process. 

Notes: Lithography was invented circa 1796 in Germany by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder. By chance, he discovered the ability to duplicate his scripts by writing then in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and them printing them with rolled-on ink. As the local limestone retained the crayon marks on its surface, multiple images, called lithographs meaning in Latin stone marks, could be printed in large quantities. It was not until 1820 that lithography became commercially popular.