Category: Art

Vincent Van Gogh and the Case of the Missing Ear

3/10/2023

Jan Greenberg
celebrates the arts
(with Sandra Jordan)

Self-portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889, with an easel and a Japanese print in the background. The artist collected these prints when he lived in Paris

Who was Vincent Van Gogh? Ask around and most people come up with the same answer. He was the famous artist who cut off his ear. What is the truth about Vincent Van Gogh? Was he a great painter because he led a life of extremes? Or was he a great painter despite his disordered life?

Several years before his death, he began to experience seizures and blackouts during which he heard voices and behaved strangely. Are the pulsating spirals, undulating lines and dizzying stars of his late paintings what he saw when he was having an attack? Or are they the result of a style he developed painstakingly through years of hard work?

In 1888, Vincent moved to Arles in the south of France. He planned to establish an artists’ commune where his friends could live together to create a new direction in painting. Vincent persuaded the artist Paul Gauguin, who was desperate for money, to move to Arles to help him. Vincent also was lonely.

For two months Gauguin lived in the Yellow House Vincent had lovingly filled with paintings hoping to impress his friend. Gauguin bossed Vincent around and criticized his artwork. Eventually, when Gauguin sold a few paintings, he threatened to abandon Vincent.

Finally, on Christmas Eve, after a quarrel at dinner, Gauguin stalked off into the streets. Vincent followed him. What happened next is unclear, but Vincent returned to the Yellow House alone and cut off his earlobe (not the whole ear) with a razor. Vincent couldn’t remember the details of this terrible night. But when he was discharged from the hospital a few weeks later, he went right back to work.

There have been many theories about Vincent’s condition. The theory most generally accepted is that he suffered from epilepsy, a disease that could have caused his seizures and hallucinations and for which there was no medication. In Vincent’s case, another reason for his “attacks” might have been his habit of drinking absinthe, an alcoholic drink popular in 19th century France. It contains a strong nerve poison, now illegal in most countries.

Today many popular performers advertise how dangerous and extreme their lives are by writing shocking lyrics and acted outrageously on stage. They are mimicking the lives of artists such as Van Gogh. But he was not advertising or pretending. He just wanted to be useful—to make art that would last. His glorious paintings are the result of his discipline and dedication, despite the turmoil of his life.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Yellow House, 1888, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. This is the house at 2 Place Lamartine, Arles, France, where, on May 1, 1888, Vincent van Gogh rented four rooms and where Paul Gauguin lived for nine weeks from late October, 1888. The left wing housed a grocery (French: Comestibles, inscribed on the signboard over the marque). Van Gogh indicated that the restaurant, where he used to have his meals, was in the building painted pink close to the left edge of the painting.

If you are interested in finding out more about Vincent Van Gogh, Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan have written an award-winning book on the subject. Click here for more information.

MLA 8 Citation
Greenberg, Jan. "Vincent Van Gogh and the Case of the Missing Ear." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 20 Oct. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/vincent-van-gogh-and-the-case-of-the-missing-ear.

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The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum

1/13/2023

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Cheryl Harness
She’s historical!

While helping to win his country’s independence from Great Britain, Captain C. W. Peale painted General George Washington’s portrait. Cleveland Museum of Art via Wikimedia

It was December 24, 1801, when bundled-up Philadelphians bought their 25¢ tickets and entered Peale’s Museum on Fifth Street. Once inside, they saw the owner’s paintings. And I’ll bet you have too—even if you’ve never heard of Charles Willson Peale. This one, for instance, of his fellow Revolutionary War soldier:

Visitors to the museum had seen Peale’s collections of butterflies, too, and other nature specimens, such as the fossilized teeth of mysterious beasts. (Who knew then that animals went extinct? Hardly anybody!) But on this extra-special Christmas Eve, people probably hurried past Peale’s handmade dioramas, with the lifelike bodies of birds and mammals that he’d stuffed and posed. Today, Mr. C.W. Peale himself was introducing his NEW ATTRACTION. People had paid an extra 50¢ just to see it! Now they looked up, up, UP at it, and were astonished.

What animal’s skeleton was eleven feet tall? Seventeen and a half feet from its bony tail to the tips of its giant, curving tusks? It was a mastodon.

It was not clear, in 1801, that mastodons weren’t the same as wooly mammoths. Wikimedia

No one had seen a live mastodon in more than ten thousand years. So how did one’s bones get to Philadelphia? Mr. Peale and other naturalists such as Thomas Jefferson, the new President-elect, wrote to one another about their studies, collections, and the latest discoveries, such as like these huge, mysterious bones in southern New York state. Some of North America’s long-gone mastodons ended up there, by the Hudson River. As soon as he heard about them, Peale hurried to see them. Then he not only figured a way to dig up the bones, but he also painted a picture of the huge excavation!

In Peale’s painting “Exhumation of the Mastodon,” he shows some of his children (He had seventeen!) and how he had to pump water out of the beast’s muddy grave. Wikimedia

Peale’s son, Rembrandt helped to draw and assemble the bones:

Rembrandt Peale drew the mastodon skeleton that he’d helped his dad to assemble. C.W. taught his many children – seventeen in all, many named after artists and scientists he admired – to draw, study, and help with his nature exhibits. Wikimedia

For years, people paid to marvel at the enormous, sensational skeleton. Later on, after Mr. Peale’s death in 1827, his museum slowly went broke. P.T. Barnum, the circus showman, bought a lot of his exhibits. Later still, they were destroyed in a fire. And the mighty bones of the mastodon wound up lost for a hundred years, until the skeleton turned up in Germany, where you can see it today.

Mr. Peale painted himself in his marvelous museum, where people could marvel at and learn from the works of Nature. Wikimedia

Hessisches Landesmuseum (Hessian State Museum), Darmstadt, Germany, where Peale's mastodon still stands today.

In Thomas Jefferson, her sixth presidential biography for National Geographic, Cheryl Harness illuminates the many sides of Thomas Jefferson: scientist, lawyer, farmer, architect, diplomat, inventor, musician, philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia, and third president of the United States. Readers meet this extraordinary man of contradictions: a genius who proclaimed that "All men are created equal" and championed the rights of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness," while at the same time living a life that depended on the enforced labor of slaves.

MLA 8 Citation
Harness, Cheryl. "The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum." Nonfiction Minute, iNK
Think Tank, 18 Apr. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/
The-Big-Deal-in Mr-Peales-Museum.

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The Birth and Growing Pains of the First National Park

1/9/2023

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Jim Whiting
The Running Encyclopedia

Though people have lived in the Yellowstone National Park region for at least 10,000 years, it was only “discovered” in 1807 by mountain man John Colter. People scoffed at his descriptions of the famous geysers and other features as “fire and brimstone.” Succeeding descriptions by other men during the following decades received similar dismissals.

An expedition led by geologist Ferdinand Hayden in 1871 established the reality of Colter’s observations. Its members included noted landscape painter Thomas Moran and photographer William Henry Jackson. Hayden immediately realized the potential of the area. Aided by the stunning images Moran and Jackson produced, he persuaded Congress to set aside the area as a national park—the first in the United States and perhaps the world. President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing the park on March 1, 1872.

It was hardly an instant success. The new park’s remoteness and lack of amenities made it accessible only to the hardiest of travelers. Only about 300 people visited it in the first year.

Compounding the problem of access was the disapproval of many people who lived near the park. They wanted to continue to hunt its wildlife and cut down its trees for lumber as well as begin to mine its minerals.

It was difficult to exercise any control over the situation. Congress refused to provide more than a pittance for the park’s protection.

A key development came in 1886 when US Army General Phil Sheridan, acting on his own authority, ordered troops to take control of Yellowstone Park. They built Camp Sheridan (later renamed Fort Yellowstone) inside the park boundaries. Though their presence helped curb poaching and mining, they had little authority to punish offenders.

George Bird Grinnell, publisher of Forest and Stream magazine and founder of the Audubon Society, had long promoted the park even though he lived in New York City. He linked up with rising politician (and future president) Theodore Roosevelt to take advantage of a notorious poaching incident in 1894 and help pass the Lacey Act the same year. The new law provided “teeth” to prosecute lawbreakers.

By then, travel to Yellowstone had become a little easier. Railroads dropped off visitors near the park entrance. They boarded stagecoaches which took them to newly established lodging facilities. And by 1916, when Yellowstone became part of the newly established National Park Service, automobiles were making the park much more accessible. Today more than 3 million people thrill to Yellowstone’s natural wonders every year.

Ferdinand V. Hayden's map of Yellowstone National Park, 1871

Thomas Moran painted Tower Creek, Yellowstone, while on the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871.

Union Pacific Railway Brochure Promoting Travel to Park (1921)

Great Falls of the Yellowstone", U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories (1874 - 1879) Photographer: William Henry Jackson

Old Faithful geyser erupts about every 91 minutes. "Old Faithful Geyser Yellowstone National Park". Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

National Grand Canyon located in the Yellowstone Park

Jim Whiting was a voracious reader when he was a kid, and now he has turned into a voracious writer. He writes books on adventure, sports, history, and most of all, he writes about people. One of his biography series is "Modern Role Models," featuring such popular titles as David Beckham, Jeff Gordon, and Tim Duncan. For more information on the series, click here.

MLA 8 Citation
Whiting, Jim. "The Birth and Growing Pains of the First National Park."
Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 8 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/
the-nonfiction-minute/The-Birth-and-Growing-Pains-of-the-First-National-Park.

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The Unbreakable Secret Code: Kryptos

11/2/2022

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Carla Killough McClafferty
Illuminating lives from the past,
impacting lives in the present

Kryptos stands in the shadow of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia−waiting to be revealed. No, Kryptos is not a foreign spy. It is a mysterious sculpture. The large, curved copper monument is covered with 1800 cut-out letters that together form four separate coded messages.

The sculpture was created by artist Jim Sanborn who was chosen to create it for the grounds of the CIA. When Sanborn began the work, he was not an expert in codes. He learned about writing codes and breaking codes from Ed Scheidt of the CIA.

Kryptos stood there, like a silent challenge, after it was installed in 1990. Two years later men from the National Security Agency (NSA) set out to crack the code and they did solve the first three messages. Then in 1998 one man at the CIA also solved the first three. But neither agency publicly announced they had done it. Nine years after Kryptos was unveiled, Jim Gillogly was the first person who did not work for a government agency who solved the first three of four messages. These three messages are a poetic phrase, coordinates for a location on the grounds of the CIA, and an account of the opening of King Tut’s tomb.

The fourth message is the shortest and only has 97 letters. For more than twenty years people all over the world have tried to figure it out. Sanborn, the creator of Kryptos, has grown impatient that the last section of Kryptos has not been solved. In 2010 he released a clue and revealed that one six word section of letters were code for the word “BERLIN.” Still no one could solve it. In November 2014, Sanborn announced another clue, a five word section of letters were code for the word “CLOCK.”

Still the fourth message on the Kryptos code has not been broken. It remains one of the world’s most famous unsolved mysteries.

Would you like to try to crack the fourth code of Kryptos? Here it is:

OBKR

UOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFLRVQQPRNGKSSO

TWTQSJQSSEKZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYP

VTTMZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEKCAR

This image of the CIA's Kryptos sculpture is provided by the sculptor, Jim Sanborn, via Wikimedia Commons.

Carla Killough McClafferty writes about international intrigue in her book In Defiance of Hitler: The Secret Mission of Varian Fry. In this book you will learn the true story of how one American man traveled to France during World War II with the intention of rescuing refugees from the Nazis. Fry lived a double life as he secretly smuggled people out of Europe. Ultimately Varian Fry’s efforts saved the lives of more than 2000 people.

Carla McClafferty is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
McClafferty, Carla Killough. "The Unbreakable Secret Code: Kryptos." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 26 Oct. 2017. Accessed 21 Oct. 2017

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How to Interview a Historic Building

10/12/2022

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by Andrea Warren-Giving Voice to Children in History

St. Paul's Cathedral during the blitz of World War II.

When I interview people in my work as a writer, I soak up the stories they share about their lives. This is what brings history alive. I’ve always wished for a way to interview historic buildings, because they could tell stories from such a different perspective, having seen it all and heard it all. My dream interview would be St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a place rich with history—and therefore, with stories.

     I have learned that those with the most to say can be wary of interviewers. Sometimes employing a little charm can help them warm up. So I would begin by complimenting St. Paul’s on how wonderful it looks for a building that opened in 1708. I would reference its great architect, Christopher Wren, who was also an astronomer and mathematician, as is evidenced in many of its design elements. I’d mention its magnificent dome and its massive booming bells that can be heard for miles.

    “You’re the prize jewel in a city rich in architectural beauty,” I’d say. “No wonder so many notables have been baptized, married, and had their funerals here.”

      Flattered but still reserved, St. Paul’s might ask me what I like best about it. “I have two favorites,” I would reply earnestly, mentioning first the Crypt, where many of England’s war heroes are buried, along with famous painters and poets. (Writers and composers are at nearby Westminster Abbey). Other notables, like Florence Nightingale and Lawrence of Arabia, are here, too. It’s altogether quite a congenial place.

    Starting to thaw a bit, St. Paul’s might wonder aloud about my second favorite, and I would single out the American Memorial Chapel, located behind the High Altar and dedicated to the memory of the 28,000 Americans who died defending England in World War II.

    “And speaking of that war,” I would tell St. Paul’s, “I am awed by Londoners’ resolve that you, their national treasure, would not be destroyed during the Blitz when so much of the city burned. Volunteer firefighters, both men and women, were stationed at all times on your roof. When bombs exploded, starting fires, they were right there to put them out, a number of them sacrificing their lives.”

    St. Paul’s would nod, remembering.

“The British love you very much,” I would say.

St. Paul’s would pause, clear its throat, and then reply, “Let me tell you some of my stories.”

© Andrea Warren, 2014

You can learn more about Charles Dickens and his stories in Andrea Warren’s book Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London and on her website, AndreaWarren.com.

Andrea Warren is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.

MLA 8 Citation
Warren, Andrea. "How to Interview a Historic Building." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 13 Sept. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/category/warren-andrea.

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Vincent Van Gogh and the Case of the Missing Ear

The Big Deal in Mr. Peale's Museum

The Birth and Growing Pains of the First National Park

The Unbreakable Secret Code: Kryptos

How to Interview a Historic Building

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