Degas At The Opéra

“The combination of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very loveable. She has a sweet and childlike nature, from which her intellect is completely separate. I have never known anyone who was so profoundly sensitive, and who makes less of a business of that sensitiveness.”

Vita Sackville-West, describing Virginia Woolf, from a letter c. August 1928

shamarra_alpacas on ig

Erté, La vampire (Illustration for Les Fleurs du mal of Charles Baudelaire), 1917

Erté, La dionée dite gobe-mouches (Illustration for Les Fleurs du mal of Charles Baudelaire), 1917

Forest Fabric | William Morris

All i do is screenshot and forget it’s in my camera roll

Persephone 🦋

i cant believe this is a real photo

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

BAUHAUS band posters

Musician Maurice Baquet, Chopin and his Muse, circa 1950

by  Robert Doisneau