Señorial / relajado - two images of José Martínez de Roda, later marqués de Vistabella

 

Portrait by Salvador Martínez Cubells, 1895.

José Martínez de Roda (30 October 1855, Motril - 18 December 1899, Madrid?), Spanish aristocrat and senator. He married in 1892, in New York, as the second husband of Francisca Aparicio y Mérida, widow of Justo Rufino Barrios, president of Guatemala. He was granted the marquisate in 1898, a year before his death at the age of only forty-four. In the portrait, he wears the uniform and badge of a knight of the Real Maestranza de Caballería de Ronda - the Royal Cavalry Academy of Ronda in Málaga.

Circa 1870s-80s.

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Salvador Martínez Cubells (9 November 1845, Valencia - 21 January 1914, Madrid), Spanish painter and art restorer and conservator, who specialized in history painting, portraiture, and Costumbrismo.

Miss West, coming and going, 1947-48

Arriving in England on the Queen Mary in the fall of 1947 to begin a successful revival of Diamond Lil.

Again on the Queen Mary, arriving home in the spring of 1948; she would revive Diamond Lil on Broadway the following year.

Brotherly - Portrait de deux frères, by Édouard Pingret, 1830

 

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Édouard-Henri-Théophile Pingret (30 December 1788, Saint-Quentin - 3 July 1869 - or 1875, Paris), French painter and lithographer. Born into a middle-class family, his father was yet related to the highest spheres of the Protestant aristocracy. The son studied under painter Jacques-Louis David as well as Jean-Baptiste Regnault, and also at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He exhibited in the Paris Salon from 1810 onward, and was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur in 1831. From 1850 to 1855 he lived and worked in Mexico City, exhibiting annually at the Academia de Bellas Artes. His most important works in Mexico were costumbrista genre scenes.

Pour jouer au château de cartes - four paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, circa 1735-37

 

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The last painting was also produced as an engraving. And, as is frequently the case when copying a painting as a print, the resulting image is reversed.

You wrongly mock this adolescent

And his useless work,

Ready to fall at the first wind

You old fogeys, at the very age when one ought to be wise,

From your brains frequently emerge

Far more ridiculous castles

Cor, Vincent's other brother - three photographs of Cornelis van Gogh

 

Cornelis "Cor" van Gogh
(17 May 1867, Zundert, The Netherlands - 14 April 1900, Brandfort, now Winnie Mandela, South Africa), younger brother of Vincent van Gogh, and third son and youngest of his parent's six children. I've been able to find little about his earliest life, but he apprenticed at an engineering factory, and then worked manufacturing steam boilers and locomotives. In 1887 he traveled to Lincoln in England, where he spent two years at the same occupation. 

But in 1889 at the age of twenty-two, he travelled to South Africa to work in the gold-mining industry in the Transvaal Republic and to build locomotives and harvesters for the Netherlands-South African Locomotive Company. In 1899, he joined the Boer forces to fight the British. Six months into the Second Boer War, aka the Anglo-Boer War, he was wounded and, a few weeks later, died in a military hospital at the age of thirty-two. His grave is unmarked.

There are conflicting stories about his death. Some sources say he was killed in action, others claim that he was hospitalized with debilitating bouts of fever. And I've even read that, while in hospital, he took his own life, shooting himself.