Tue Oct 9, 2018 08:06 AM

Morning Modelbuch (10/9/2018)

I have a bit of an obsession and play Six Degrees of Separation with modelbucher and basically everything, but a really good one fell in my lap. I was watching “Brushstrokes: Stories of Great Paintings,” with Waldemar Januszczak and he was talking about a painting by the portraitist William Dobson called “An Old Man and a Young Man.” He had done a bit of investigating and determined that the subjects were two poets associated with water, Sir John Denhem (the young man) and John Taylor (the old man.)

John Taylor was only familiar to me because he published one of the first English modelbuch. His 1631 _The Needles Excellency_ is a poem called “In Praise of the Needle” and an accompanying set of sonnets followed by plates taken from Siebmacher. They come from both the 1597 and the 1604 books with the plates mixed up and some are condensed so more can fit on the pages. They are also flipped/reversed.

I had no idea who Taylor actually was, however. And now I know cool stuff. He called himself The Water Poet, because he started his working life as a water boatman. He rowed people to and from the bad part of town where theaters, brothels, and other marginal businesses were relegated in a small boat. The boatmen were known for being rude. Taylor invented a palindrome to describe himself “Lewd did I live and evil I did dwel.”

He decided to be a writer and became incredibly prolific, publishing 150 works during his lifetime. Taylor was one of the first English writers to completely support himself as an author and marketability was definitely a priority for him.

Since the painting is cool and all but not a pattern and I intend to talk more about the poems another time, I included two pages with patterns and examples of the patterns found on samplers. http://www.cassone-art.com/art-news/2011/09/william-dobson-a-portrait-revealed/ (info on Dobson’s portrait.)

https://trc-leiden.nl/trc-needles/texts-films-customs-and-event/poems/praise-of-the-needle (Transcriptions of the poems)

http://www.shipbrook.net/jeff/bookshelf/details.html?bookid=25. (PDF of the book)

http://m.vam.ac.uk/item/O70144/sampler-unknown/ (sampler with parrots )

http://m.vam.ac.uk/item/O70148/sampler-unknown/ (Sampler with unicorn)