Nightlife

 The older I get the more I want to sleep and the less I seem able to. It's a peculiar arrangement.

The dream I remember from last night had some boys I was at school with featuring as fellow priests and close friends of mine- musch closer than in "real life". We were attending a conference and I couldn't make head nor tail of the presentations or how they related to a common theme and they- my friends- were trying to explain it all to me...

AI Portraits

 The first image in this selection shocked me rather. I'd wanted an image of Noel Coward, but wasn't bargaining on getting something that could pass as a genuine photo by the great Cecil Beaton. AI imagery is still in its infancy but when it truly comes into its own it's going to play havoc with the historical record.

The second image was also meant to be a picture of Noel, but I don't think it looks much like him so I'm simply taking it as a picture of an elderly gent walking on the North Downs. Perhaps he was a WWII airman. Perhaps he's thinking "Up there is where we fought the Battle of Britain..."

The third is a "portrait" of the Rev Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll.) I think it's a plausible likeness of the man in middle-age, several years on from the best known photos. He's sitting by the River Isis, somewhere outside Oxford, remembering a certain day when he and some friends went boating. I wanted him in 19th century clerical dress but AI doesn't have that kind of thing stored in its memory....

1. Darling Noel



2. On The North Downs



3. Still She Haunts Me Phantomwise...

"Portraits" Of Charlotte Bronte

 We don't really know what Charlotte Bronte looked like. There is a group portrait of the teenage Bronte sisters by their brother Branwell which is naff, and there's the "society" portrait by George Richmond which is idealised. These are the only pictures we possess that we know she sat for. There are a few 'disputed" portraits and photographs- but they just muddy the water.

It's tantalising to learn- as I did while doing some research this morning- that John Everett Millais very much wanted to paint her portrait but withdrew when he learned that Richmond had got there first. Millais was a greater artist than Richmond and it's a shame he didn't get his chance. He said that she represented his idea of female genius, that her eyes were remarkable and that she "looked tired with her own brains"

AI clearly knows a thing or two about Bronte portraits because the pictures it gave me do bear some resemblance to Richmond's. I wanted to have 19th century Brussels in the background because the Yorkshire Moors would be a bit hackneyed and Brussels was important to her. Also it's the setting of what I regard as her greatest novel, Villette.

Through The Looking-Glass

 

John Tenniel's Alice was modelled on a niece or the daughter of a friend and not on the girl who inspired the Alice books. The actual  Alice Pleasance Liddell had dark hair and- to judge by the photographs of her by Carroll and Julia Margaret Cameron-  a brooding, not to say sulky demeanour.... Plenty of broodiness in these Ai images....