Following an Eastern Star to The Wilder Shores of Love

The Wilder Shores of Love is the exotic true-life stories of some key women in western history. This is a terrific tale about four women summoned by the exotic eastern star. They all lived their lives lustily and swayed the course of empires. They were Isabel Burton, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby, and Isabelle Eberhardt. All were stifled by conventional living and took great risks, whether it was their choice or not, ending up either pursuing their passion for romance or in Aimee Dubucq de Rivery’s case, making the best of it. For the four women included in this classic volume of biography, the wilder shores of love lay east of their native Europe—in Arabia.

Isabel Arundell was a romantic idealist and an impoverished Victorian lady who married the defiantly unorthodox social outlaw and adventurer Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton KCMB FRGS (1821-1890) an English explorer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, ethnologist, linguist, poet, hypnotist, fencer and diplomat. Whew! His many adventures, included traveling to Mecca in 1853 disguised as a pilgrim. His service in the diplomatic corps took he and Isabel to Syria and Palestine and she wrote a book about their travels together.

During his final years as British Consul at Trieste he translated and privately printed books on erotica. They are buried together in a tomb designed as a Bedouin Tent. How great it is, although the author found it neglected. On a marble plaque is inscribed Justin Huntly McCarthy’s sonnet to Burton

O last and noblest of the Errant Knights
The English soldier and the Arab Sheik,
O Singer of the East

Aimee Dubucq de Rivery was a convent girl, who grew up on the island of Martinique with her friend Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie (later Empress Josephine). Aimee was abducted by Corsair pirates when she was on the way to France to attend ‘finishing school’. She was presented to the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, ending up in his Harem and bearing him a son.

Aimee underwent many hardships and lived to see her son Sultan. She supported her friend and cousin Empress Josephine from afar when Napoleon Bonaparte divorced her. She had a quiet, back seat, mostly unknown effect on his and France’s future. You will have to read the book to find out how, where, when and why.

The story of her survival, against all odds, is perhaps my favourite of the four.

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Modernism – Innovating Design Styles in the 20th Century

By the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe, England and America immense wealth generated a youthful society, one who had very different priorities and objectives than their parents or grandparents. They were clamouring for the best that life could offer. Their aspirations and expectations were different, their views less dogmatic, manners much smoother, prose lighter and morals and codes of conduct easier. At the time England was indisputably the greatest and richest nation in the world with no rivals seriously threatening its trade and industry. The upper and middle classes were enjoying supremacy.

Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality author and art critic John Ruskin 1819 – 1900 declared. A moral guide or prophet, if you like during the latter years of the nineteenth century in England, Ruskin resented social injustice and the squalor that was a direct result of the ‘greed is good’ mentality that accompanied the unbridled capitalism brought about by the Industrial Revolution. As it progressed rapidly during the nineteenth century it changed the face of the western world. Ruskin’s influence would be profound on his both his contemporary colleagues and the next generation of artists and craftsmen. They would lead the way towards establishing Le Style Moderne.

Window from Hill House by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Modernism is a term the art and design community of our contemporary western world has adopted to describe a diverse range of architectural and interior decorative styles, as well as applied and graphic arts created between approximately 1880 and 1940 on an international scale.The styles that made up the modern movement are known as: Arts and Crafts 1875-1915,  Art Nouveau (1880- 1910), Wiener Werkstatte (1903-1933), Bauhaus (1919-1933) and Art Deco (1920-1940).  Vienna’s art world in the latter years of the nineteenth century, finally accepted the leadership role of the United Kingdom in the world of innovation and design. English Arts and Crafts leader William Morris and Scottish creative Charles Rennie Mackintosh fought to combat goods produced by machines by championing hand manufacturing.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh cultivated a rigorous formal economy of design, which appealed to members of the newly established Viennese Secession. They were a group of primarily young artists, painters, sculptors and architects in Vienna who seceded from the prestigious Kunsterhaus (Artists House) to set up a Society of Austrian Artists – the Vienna Secession. in I897. It included the painter and illustrator Gustav Klimt. His brilliant individualism would dominate the era and his paintings, including The Kiss, have become symbolic of the age. He set a stylistic tone that would resonate in far off places and his paintings, which today line the grand ascending staircase of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, reveal his movement toward the hallmarks of a style that would become known as Art Nouveau.

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