The Failure of French Gunpowder

For any student of military history, it frequently seems that more ink has been spilled over French failures in the Napoleonic Wars than the blood spilled on the battlefield.  This will not stop me, however, from pointing out that the centrally planned economy of revolutionary France resulted in the production of inferior gunpowder that seriously hampered both the French Army and the French Navy,

Gunpowder began as a happy accident in medieval China, when alchemists chasing immortality mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter, discovering the recipe for very mortal fireworks.  By the 900s, the stuff powered fire lances, bombs, and rockets; by 1044, writers of Chinese manuals were jotting down secret formulas like proud cookbook authors.  The idea zipped along trade routes to the Islamic world, where engineers refined siege craft, and then to Europe in the 1200s, where monks and monarchs promptly asked, “Does it make castles go away?”

Early European “serpentine” powder was a fussy, dusty blend that separated into useless components at the worst moments—think salad dressing with a temper.  Around 1500, makers started “corning” it into grains, giving a more predictable bang for the buck, and handheld guns and big bombards multiplied.  The 1600s brought flintlocks, paper cartridges, and generals who standardized calibers so that cannonballs finally fit the cannon.  In the 1700s, European chemists like Lavoisier tidied French production, while Britain built Waltham Abbey into a gunpowder campus and imported ultra-pure Indian saltpeter by the shipload.  By the time the Napoleonic Wars rolled around, Europe had turned black powder into an industrial science—equal parts chemistry, logistics, and earplugs—setting the stage for continent-wide warfare that flashed—and boomed—from Portugal to Moscow.

From the very beginning of the war in the late 18^th century, the British had an advantage: they imported high quality saltpeter from India.  The French, on the other hand, created a huge domestic program to make and gather salpêtre—building nitre beds (nitrières) per official manuals, and ordering citizens to scrape “nitrous earth” from cellars, stables, barns and rubble for sale to the gunpowder administration. Chemists like Lavoisier/Guyton de Morveau helped standardize and teach the process and authorities used requisitions to keep supplies flowing—so wartime French saltpeter was largely home-produced rather than imported.  The poor-quality homemade saltpeter was hygroscopic—it literally pulled moisture out of the air—not only making the powder less effective but leaving a residue fowled the barrels of the weapons.

To produce the gunpowder, the three ingredients are combined in a process called corning.  In broad strokes, English corning in the Napoleonic era was a tidy, factory-forward affair: mills like Waltham Abbey first compressed the damp “mill cake” into dense press-cakes, then broke and sieved those cakes into consistent grain sizes—an assembly line for bang that prized uniform density and repeatable burn from batch to batch.  The British then polished the powder by tumbling it in a wooden barrel with a small amount of graphite.  This glazing helped prevent clumping and made the powder even more resistant to moisture, while at the same time preventing the buildup of static electricity that could spontaneously detonate the gunpowder.

By contrast, French corning was carried out across a patchwork of state poudreries, but with techniques that varied more between sites: the official instructions emphasize milling and granulation steps, and in the Revolutionary/Napoleonic scramble some works pressed before granulating while others effectively corned from damp cake as equipment and throughput allowed—producing fairly good powder, but with more variability in grain density than Britain’s heavily standardized press-then-corn routine.

There was a significant difference in how the gunpowder was stored.  The British standardized in 25-, 50-, and 100-pound barrels equipped with copper hoops.  The French had a wide variety of barrels, some weighing more than 200 pounds and all them made with iron hoops.  If two barrel hoops bumped together, the resulting spark could ignite all the powder in the magazine.  Perhaps this is why French powder works blew up at least four times during the war.

By the 1790s, plenty of French powder men could see why British stuff went “boom” so politely while French powder frequently either didn’t blow up or blew up prematurely, but the obstacle wasn’t brains…it was bureaucracy.  In France’s centrally-run system, every tweak to grain size, press pressure, or glazing seemed to require a memo to Paris, two committees, and a stamp the size of a wagon wheel.  Nitre inspectors had quotas, poudreries had fixed procedures, and purchasing officers couldn’t just splash out on new presses or hire extra coopers because a clever foreman had an idea: they needed approvals, inventories, and—oops—another approval. Add wartime scarcities and blockade headaches, and even sensible changes moved at the speed of a courier on a muddy road.  Meanwhile the British, who sunk capital into a factory model earlier, could swap dies, retool, and standardize faster than you could say “pass the priming flask.”  The French knew where they wanted to go, but the central planning machinery kept tapping the brakes.  So they made lots of perfectly serviceable powder—sometimes very good indeed—but catching up to Britain’s consistency and scale meant loosening paperwork, freeing procurement, and investing mid-war—none of which a bureaucracy excels at.

The results of this difference in quality were evident in the field.  The French army used a 12-pound field gun.  Due to the increased power of British gunpowder, they achieved nearly the same result with a 9-pound cannon.  Since the British gunpowder produced less fouling, the British army could fire the cannon more frequently than their enemy, while using fewer horses to maneuver the guns. 

For the British Navy, there was an even bigger advantage.  After the Battle of Trafalgar, French captains estimated that because of the difference in powder strength, the British guns could hit targets 15-20% farther than French guns, with a corresponding effect on hull penetration.  The British could score hits while still out of range from return fire.  And when those shells hit, they did more damage than the French shells.  Due to a combination of cleaner barrels and better discipline, British ships fired 50% faster that their French counterparts.

Britain decisively won the Napoleonic Wars.  Better gunpowder wasn’t the only reason, but it contributed.  And the French centrally-planned economy, as it usually does, created more problems than solutions.

Going Bananas

Back in 1964, Roy Drusky released a song with the unlikely title of “Peel Me a Nanner”.  The song, a minor hit, is a playful, tongue-in-cheek take on a heartbroken narrator who is lamenting a failed romance, using the whimsical imagery of bananas, peanuts, and a coconut tree to add humor. The full chorus goes:

Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, I'll come swingin' from a coconut tree
Peel me a 'nanner, toss me a peanut, you sure made a monkey out of me. 

 

I mention this because this week I’m going to talk about bananas, and I can’t stop humming the damn tune.  This is probably an early warning sign for the onset of dementia.

 

With apologies to both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Chiquita Banana Lady, bananas are not native to either Africa or Central America.  Bananas originated in Indonesia and quickly spread across Asia and Africa along trade routes.  By the 16^th century, the Portuguese had introduced the fruit to Central and South America, where bananas became an important food source since the fruit grows year-round and is easy to spread.

Bananas were not available in the United States until the last decades of the 19^th century because even if the fruit was picked before it was ripe, it would ripen and spoil before it could reach the consumer.  Finally, by the 1870s, with the use of railroads and steamships, green bananas could be picked and rapidly shipped to American ports, the fruit ripening during the trip.  It didn’t take long before the entire process had been  standardized into a well-oiled machine that was controlled by large corporations like United Fruit and Standard Fruit (which later became Chiquita and Dole).

 

Since Americans almost exclusively consume only one variety of yellow banana, it might come as a shock for you to learn that there are approximately a thousand varieties of bananas and that bananas come in almost every color from red to gold and from blue-green to black.  Long ago, the banana importing companies decided to specialize in one variety—the yellow Big Mike (Gros Michel) banana—because it ripened relatively slowly, and had a thick resilient peel, which protected it from bruising during long sea voyages to Europe and North America.  Its dense, large bunches facilitated efficient shipping, and its sweet, creamy flavor and firm texture made it appealing to consumers.  To consumers on both continents, the Big Mike was the banana.  

 

Plantations specialized in the Big Mike, and shipping boxes were built to accommodate their size.  Cargo ships were built to precise specifications to accommodate those boxes and to keep the cargo holds at precisely 55 °F—the temperature that keeps a green Big Mike from ripening from three to four weeks.  After the bananas were unloaded, special processing warehouses would expose the still green bananas to a mild amount of ethylene gas at 63 °F that would rapidly ripen them, turning them into the yellow color consumers expected.  (If your banana is still too green to eat, you can ripen it overnight by putting it in a paper bag with an apple or a tomato.)

 

Everything was perfect…until in the 1950s, when a soil fungus called, “Panama disease” (technically Fusarium oxysporum, Race 1) began devastating Big Mike plantations in Central America.  When a disease shows up in most plants, the answer is to search for the few plants in the plantation that are resistant, then replant the field with the offspring of the resistant plants.

 

You can’t do that with bananas.  You see, all of the bananas you have eaten in your life were clones.  You may have noticed that the bananas you eat are “seedless” (those little black specs you see are undeveloped seeds that can’t germinate); all the banana plants are cuttings—technically pups—from another banana plant.  Genetically, all the Big Mike banana trees are the same plant, so if one of the plants is susceptible to the fungus, they all are.

 

You can imagine the panic in the boardrooms of Chiquita and Dole.  Stopping the spread of the fungus across Central and South America was (and still is) impossible.  The companies spent a small fortune convincing us that their long yellow fruit was the perfect thing to slice up and put on our cornflakes, so it was going to be a little difficult to now convince the public to switch to a short red fruit that they claim is a banana.

 

Fortunately, there was a similar variety of banana, the Cavendish.  It was about 10% smaller, and the bunches were about a third smaller, but it would fit in the boxes, ripen the same, and most importantly—it was yellow.  If you didn’t know better, you could mistake a Cavendish banana for a Big Mike…At least until you ate it.  The Cavendish banana is not as sweet as or as creamy in texture as Big Mike and it is much milder in flavor.  Anyone who has eaten both will tell you that the Big Mike is a much better banana.

 

Unfortunately, grocery stores in the United States stopped selling the Big Mike by 1960.  I know I ate bananas in the 1950’s, but I don’t remember it.  But, in the 1990’s, I found a specialty shop in San Pedro Sula, Honduras that sold long fat Big Mike bananas.  Boy, is there a difference.

 

Now that the Cavendish is literally the top banana—there is a bit of a problem.  These bright yellow beauties, which we’ve all munched for decades, are now facing their own extinction, under assault by a new strain of Panama disease, (Fusarium oxysporum Tropical Race 4)—a fungus with a flair for drama.  It’s like a bad comedy plot where the star keeps tripping over the same banana peel!  This soil-dwelling troublemaker clogs the banana plant’s roots, turning lush green leaves into sad, wilted props, and it’s spreading faster than gossip at a garden party.  And once again, since Cavendish bananas are clones that are all genetically identical, they’re like one big, unhappy family with zero immune system variety.

 

Scientists are scratching their heads as they race to save the day.  They’ve tried everything from funky soil treatments to breeding new banana buddies, but the Cavendish just pouts and says, “I’m too pretty to change!”  Some suggest a wild banana remix—think funky flavors and colors—but good luck convincing the world to swap its morning smoothie staple.  It could happen, all the bananas shown at left are real.  Meanwhile, farmers are doing a hilarious dance, rotating crops and praying for a miracle, and banana companies, like Chiquita and Dole, are probably sweating bullets behind their corporate smiles.

 Barring a scientific breakthrough, it is likely that, in the next few years, we will see an extensive advertising campaign trying to convince us that a banana doesn’t have to be yellow.  Or alternatively, that the new and improved yellow banana that tastes like wet cardboard is better for you. 

Lord Cardigan: The Model of a Modern Major General

Lieutenant-General James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan KCB is one of those improbable characters more likely to be found in a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon than in a history book.  Lord Cardigan was a hot-tempered, duel-happy brain-damage snob of an aristocrat who blundered into history by leading a disastrous cavalry charge—yet somehow left his name forever stitched into the cozy cardigan sweater.

James Brudenell was born in a “modest home” in Buckinghamshire in 1797.  In this case, modest means several stories, a dozen or so bedrooms—a manor just barely large enough that King Charles I once visited it.  Thankfully, for young James, his father soon inherited the earldom of Cardigan, which besides the title came with huge estates, a large income, and a house large enough to befit the lifestyle that the now Lord Cardigan, the son of the Earl of Cardigan, would grow to consider his due.

Though James had suffered a bad fall from a horse in childhood that resulted in brain damage, he was sent to Harrow for an education that was cut short after a violent fistfight with another student.  Educated at home with his seven sisters, James became something of a bully, who was used to getting his own way.  To further his education, where else could such an obvious rising star be sent, but to Oxford, where aristocrats were automatically accepted without examination.  Furthermore, it won’t surprise you to learn that he left Oxford after 3 years, without completing a degree.

During his first year at Oxford, the Earl thought his son should gain some experience in Parliament, since as the only male heir, James would eventually become a member of the House of Lords.  Luckily, his cousin owned a pocket borough, a parliamentary constituency where the few voters either worked for an aristocrat or lived at his pleasure, on his land.  Effectively, the voters were in his pocket.  As a member of the House of Commons, Brudenell was chiefly noted for his defense of the rights of the aristocracy.  When he voted against the wishes of his cousin, his safe seat was withdrawn, so with his father’s funds, he bought a rotten district, a constituency with so few voters that they could be easily bribed.  When this district was abolished in a reform movement, Lord Cardigan spent £20,000 (equivalent to £2,000,000 in 2023) to bribe the voters in a third district. 

All of this was not exactly legal, but as a Galveston policeman once told me, “You can’t break the law when you is the law.”

By now, you may have the impression—utterly correct—that Lord Cardigan was constantly fighting with everyone.  In the 1820s, he began courting Elizabeth Tollemache Johnstone, despite the fact that she was married to his childhood friend, Lt.-Col. Christian Johnstone.  Eventually, his friend divorced his wife, calling her "the most damned bad-tempered and extravagant bitch in the kingdom".  Cardigan married Elizabeth, paying Johnstone £1,000 in damages.  After 11 years, they separated and Brudenell openly began a notorious relationship with Adeline de Horsey (I swear I did not make up her name!), whom he eventually married after his first wife’s death.  Adeline was evidently an agreeable soul, even remaining friends with the Lord’s many mistresses.

More than anything else, Lord Cardigan is remembered for his military career.  His extraordinary, rapid rise through the officer ranks was not due to merit, but the result', of the practice of aristocrats’ purchasing positions in the army.  In just five years, he was a lieutenant, a captain, a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel of the Hussars (a form of cavalry).  Despite his youth and lack of experience, this put him in command of officers who had fought at Waterloo and who had been serving in the Army from before Cardigan had acquired his first mistress.

Lord Cardigan’s career in the army was not trouble free, either:  He was involved in frequent duels, arguments and newspaper scandals.  Known for having his men flogged for the slightest infractions, he also brought spurious charges against his junior officers.  The “Black Bottle Affair” was one of those gloriously absurd Victorian military squabbles, in which Lord Cardigan, ever the stickler for appearances, discovered that an officer of his beloved 11th Hussars had dared to bring a bottle of wine in a black glass decanter to the mess table—an unthinkable breach of regimental etiquette, since only brown bottles were deemed suitably distinguished.  Outraged, Cardigan treated this vinous misdemeanor as though it were high treason, summoning courts-martial and blackening reputations over nothing more sinister than the shade of the glass.  The public roared with laughter, Punch had a field day, and “the Black Bottle Affair” became shorthand for Cardigan’s ability to turn a dinner-table trifle into a scandal fit for Parliament.

After Lieutenant Tuckett repeated some of the criticism in the London papers, Cardigan challenged him to yet another duel, in which he wounded the lieutenant and for which he was tried in the House of Lords.  He was found not guilty on a dubious technicality; (the House of Lords being unwilling to convict one of their own).

All of the above made Lord Cardigan a colorful character, but there is one more story that will secure his place in British history books.

When history hands out its memorable moments, few are as gloriously doomed as Lord Cardigan’s gallop into legend at the Charge of the Light Brigade.  Cardigan was not famous for brilliance, for warmth, or even for good humor.  What he had, however, was impeccable tailoring, an impressive set of whiskers, and a talent for quarreling with just about everyone—including his own brother-in-law, Lord Lucan.  In October 1854, at the Battle of Balaclava, those traits were not especially helpful when he was ordered (through a muddled chain of command) to lead his 600-member light cavalry straight down a valley bristling with Russian cannon.

Since Cardigan and Lucan were furious at each other and would only communicate through a third and junior officer, we are still uncertain exactly who misinterpreted the orders that day…But everyone in the Light Brigade (even Lord Cardigan) knew that cavalry is never launched in a frontal charge into artillery.  Well, that day it was.

With all the certainty of a man who never doubted his own correctness, Cardigan rode at the head of his brigade, scarlet jacket gleaming, sword flashing, mustache blowing dramatically in the Crimean wind.  His men, knowing perfectly well the order was madness, followed because that’s what cavalrymen did.  The result was predictable: cannon roared, horses fell, sabers clashed, and by the time it was over, half the brigade was dead, wounded, or horseless.  Cardigan, himself, was the first to reach the enemy cannon, then he immediately turned around and trotted back, alive and entirely unruffled, as though he’d just been on a brisk morning ride.  He was one of the lucky 107 still fit for duty after the battle.

After the battle, Cardigan retired to his private yacht in the bay and had dinner.  The next day, he declared himself medically unfit for further service and returned to England aboard his yacht.  As one of the first high ranking officers to return to London, his version of the battle was the first to be widely printed in the papers.  Welcomed by cheering crowds, he was presented to Queen Victoria.

Back in Britain, the disaster was miraculously transformed into a stirring tale of duty and gallantry, thanks in no small part to Alfred Tennyson’s thunderous verse.  The Light Brigade became immortal, and Cardigan—despite his highly questionable leadership—soaked up the applause like a man convinced it had all been his idea.  Even though the charge was the most hopeless cavalry action in British history, it was also one of the most heroic, and Cardigan’s place in memory is forever astride that doomed ride: half a legend, half a punchline, and wholly unforgettable.

In the months that followed, a better understanding of the battle was eventually reported.  To much of the press, Cardigan became the symbol of aristocratic military buffoon, a walking caricature.  The truth didn’t  really matter:  the Earl of Cardigan remained in royal favor, he was promoted to Lieutenant General, he became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, he published his self-serving memoir, and then he retired back to his grand estate. 

In 1868, at the age of 70, the man who led the Charge of the Light Brigade without receiving so much as a scratch, fell off his horse while riding across his estate and died.

Dances With Witches

The late medieval and early modern world was never short on drama and violence, but few episodes conjure up as much fascination—or horror—as the witchcraft trials.  Picture a Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, where long winters dragged on endlessly, crops frequently failed, and neighbors kept a wary eye on one another. Into this anxious mix came the belief that witches were not only real, but lurking behind every bad harvest, sick cow, spoiled milk or stubbed toe. 

If your bread didn’t rise or your butter refused to churn, it was entirely reasonable, in the popular imagination, to suspect the woman across the lane had been consorting with the Devil.  If your husband no longer loved you, he must be under a spell.  Courts across Germany, Switzerland, and France dutifully obliged, staging some of the most notorious witch hunts in history—often with tragic consequences.

Fast-forward across the Atlantic to colonial New England, and you’ll find a community every bit as excitable.  In 1692, the quiet village of Salem, Massachusetts, suddenly found itself center stage in what felt like a supernatural courtroom drama.  A cluster of young girls began twitching, shrieking, and blaming local townsfolk for afflicting them with unseen forces.  Ministers thundered, magistrates scribbled, and soon half the community was accused of flying through the night sky or signing Satan’s ledger in blood.  Salem’s brief but intense hysteria left an indelible mark on American history, providing fodder for plays, novels, and more than a few Halloween movies.  (Sadly, Practical Magic 2 with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman is scheduled for release next fall.)

From the forests of Germany to the meetinghouses of New England, the story of the witch trials is a tale of fear, faith, religious zealotry, and the very human urge to explain the inexplicable.  Why people were so ready to see broomsticks and black cats at every corner is a mystery we’ll soon explore—one strange loaf at a time.

So, what sent otherwise sensible villagers into a frenzy of pointing fingers and shouting “Witch!”?  The usual suspects of politics, religion, lack of education, and old grudges certainly played their part, but there’s another, stranger candidate waiting in the wings: a humble grain of rye.  More specifically, what sometimes grew on that rye.

Ergot is a pesky little fungus that thrives in cool, damp fields.  It doesn’t look like much—just dark, shriveled kernels hiding in the harvest—but its effects can be spectacularly weird.  Baked into bread, it can make people twitch, convulse, and see things that aren’t there.  Imagine having a perfectly ordinary breakfast and then suddenly deciding your neighbor has a pet demon besides that ugly child that won’t stay off your lawn.  That was the kind of day ergot could deliver.

Some historians have pointed out that the timing is awfully suspicious.  The great waves of witch trials in Central Europe happened during the “Little Ice Age”—a long period of years of poor weather and soggy harvests.  Salem, too, had endured a string of damp summers just before its own outbreak.  In both cases, rye bread was a staple food, which means the fungus had every chance to sneak onto dinner tables.

Back in the day, folks didn’t know it by its modern, clinical name—ergot poisoning was more colorfully called St. Anthony’s Fire.  The title sounds saintly, but the experience was anything but divine.  Imagine nibbling on your daily rye bread and suddenly feeling as if your limbs were aflame, your fingers tingling like they’d fallen asleep, and your legs determined to dance the Charleston centuries before it was invented.  Some unlucky souls endured spasms and visions so vivid that heaven and hell seemed to be hosting a joint carnival right in their kitchens.  Others, in the grimmer cases, watched their toes or fingers blacken and drop away as if the Devil himself were claiming a tithe.  St. Anthony’s Fire was the ultimate party crasher: half delirium, half horror show, and fully guaranteed to set tongues wagging about witches, demons, and dark forces lurking in the rye.

While city leaders scratched their heads and hired musicians to “play it out” (possibly the worst prescription ever), later scholars suggested a fungal culprit.  If rye bread laced with ergot was on the menu, those convulsions and trancelike states start to look less like a supernatural dance plague and more like a very bad bake-off.  Add in a dash of mass hysteria, and you’ve got a medieval flash mob powered not by music, but by mold.

In Salem, the devil seemed to have a suspicious preference for housewives, widows, and spinsters.  While a few men did end up in the dock (poor Giles Corey got the worst of it, pressed to death under a pile of stones), most of the accusations landed squarely on women’s shoulders.  Why? Because Puritan culture already imagined women as more “temptable,” neighbors found quarrelsome widows easier to blame than landowning men, and the young (mostly female) accusers pictured witches in the form of cranky old ladies rather than cranky old farmers.  In short, witch-hunting followed the path of least resistance: accuse the people who were least likely to fight back, and who were most likely to fit the part.

Now, does this mean every cackling witch trial was really just a case of bad baking?  Not exactly.  Human fear, social tensions, and a taste for drama carried plenty of weight.  But it does raise the deliciously odd possibility that behind the bonnets, broomsticks, and burning stakes lurked something far more mundane: moldy bread.

So, perhaps, the great witch panics and curious outbreaks of old remind us of something bigger than broomsticks and bonfires..or ought to, anyway.  Communities in crisis often reach for the most obvious explanation, especially when fear is already in the air, and the result can be disastrous—or at least wildly misguided.  What looks like possession, a curse, or a devil’s dance may, with calmer eyes, be nothing more than bad luck, or bad harvests, (or…yes, bad bread).  The real cautionary tale isn’t just about moldy rye, but about how quickly people leap to blame the neighbor, the stranger, or the outsider when strange things happen. 

History’s lesson?  Before we kindle torches and rally the mob, it’s worth taking a breath—and maybe a second look at what’s really on the table.  The quick, popular fix is rarely correct.

Van Gogh’s Lost Sunflower Painting

In October 1888, Vincent van Gogh was already suffering from mental illness when he invited the Paul Gaugin, his friend and artistic mentor, to move in with him in Arles, France.  The two were to share what van Gogh called the “Yellow House”, which was to be the start of a planned artistic community.

According to the letter van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, the artist planned to make twelve paintings of sunflowers to decorate the house, particularly Gaugin’s bedroom.

"I would like to make a decoration for the walls. Nothing but large sunflowers . . .  Well, if I carry out that plan, there will be a dozen panels of them.  The whole thing will therefore become a symphony in blue and yellow.  I work at it every morning from sunrise, for the flowers wilt quickly and it is a matter of doing the whole thing in one go."

Unfortunately, van Gogh had finished only four of the paintings before the two artists had a falling out and Gaugin moved out.  Van Gogh went into a deep depression that ended with his self-mutilation of his ear and his hospitalization.

After being released, van Gogh returned briefly to Yellow House and completed Vase with Five Sunflowers (F459).  Just to make sure that the painting would be terribly confusing to future art history students, the painting—done in January 1889—is also known as Six Sunflowers 1888.  You can count the number of flowers in the painting (right) for yourself.  (Ironically, as you will soon see, the Yellow House was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.)

Van Gogh typically didn’t frame his own works, preferring to leave that to dealers or buyers, but in 1888, when he was preparing to decorate his Yellow House in Arles for Paul Gauguin’s visit, he put extra care into this sunflower still life.  He crafted (or at least had made to his design) a simple, bold orange wood frame that he painted in a complementary tone that was likely to heighten the impact of the vivid yellows and golds of the flowers.  The intention was to create a unified, almost ceremonial presentation of the piece, turning it from “painting” into “altar” for the artistic friendship he hoped to cement with Gauguin.

Only one of the sunflower paintings sold during the artist’s lifetime: Fifteen Sunflowers, which sold to Anna Boch for 400 francs ($1600 today).  The rest were part of the 800-850 paintings and drawings that van Gogh’s brother inherited after the artist died in 1890.   Six months after the artist’s death, Theo died leaving the paintings to his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger who carefully exhibited his work, slowly selling off the paintings as the artist became famous posthumously. 

Vase with Five (Six) Sunflowers was exhibited three times in Holland, then Johanna placed the painting for sale by consignment with her uncle, Cornelius M. van Gogh’s art dealership.  Fritz Meyere-Fierz, of Zurich, purchased the painting in 1908 for £250 and held onto the painting until 1820, when he sold it by consignment via the Paul Vallotton gallery, Lausanne) for £3,200 to Koyata Yamamoto.  (Koyata Yamamoto is not related to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.)

Koyato Yamamoto (seated at left in the photo) was a wealthy cotton textile merchant who purchased the painting on the advice of his friend, the writer and artist Saneatsu Mushanokoji (seated at right).  Shipped to Japan aboard the mail steamer Binna, the painting was exhibited in both Tokyo and Osaka.  At the second exhibition, the heavy frame caused the painting to fall from the wall, slightly damaging the artwork.  Angry at the lack of safety for the painting, Yamamoto vowed to never allow it to be exhibited again, taking the Sunflower painting to his home in residence in the Uchide district of Ashiya.

 After the start of World War II and the Allied bombing raids on Japan, Yamamoto became concerned about the painting’s safety.  He tried to convince a bank in Osaka to store the painting in its basement vault for safety, but the bank, fearful that the damp basement would harm the painting, refused.  Unable to find a suitable location at which to store the painting, Yamamoto left the painting in its usual location, hanging on the wall in the drawing room of his home.

Starting on August 1, 1945, the United States Army Air Force began the largest bombing raids of World War II, on the urban areas of Japan.  Thousands of tons of explosives were ripped on Japanese cities by a fleet of 836 B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers.  In several of these missions, M69 and M47 incendiary bombs were dropped in such a manner as to produce firestorms in Japan’s wooden urban structures and industrial facilities. 

Ayisha was not a major industrial city but an airfield that was a vital part of Japan’s air defense system was located there.  The destruction of this field was an integral part of  Operation Olympic, the planned invasion of Japan that was scheduled for November 1945.  Because of Ayisha’s dense population of wooden structures, it was decided that creating a firestorm would be the most effective tactic to use against the city.  The raid dropped a total of a thousand tons of incendiary devices on the city, causing widespread destruction.  In a sad coincidence, the raid occurred on August 6, 1945, the same day as the first use of an atomic weapon, in the bombing of Hiroshima.  The use of atomic weapons forced Japan to surrender, thus eliminating the need for Operation Olympic.

When the air raid sirens alerted the people of Ashiya to go to the air raid shelters, Yamamoto tried to save his beloved Sunflower painting, but the frame was too heavy for him to move, so he was forced to leave the painting behind.   The home, with all of its contents, was one of 2833 homes destroyed that night.

Yamamoto survived the air raid on Ayisha and remained in Ayisha until his death in November 1963.  He never mentioned his Sunflower painting again.

Japan acquired its second Van Gogh Sunflowers painting—Sunflowers (F457)—in 1987, when Yasuo Goto purchased it at a Christie’s London auction for a then-record-breaking £24.75 million (about $39.9 million USD at the time).  Goto intended it as both a prestige acquisition and a cultural gift to the public, eventually displaying it at what is now the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo.  We can probably safely assume (this time, anyway) that the van Gogh painting will remain safe, since Goto owns the Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company.

The Dollar Princesses

One of the byproducts of the industrial revolution in Europe was the slow death of the great landed estates of the aristocracy.  Steamships and railroads enabled massive imports of cheap grain from the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Russia.  Refrigerated shipping also brought cheap meat and dairy from overseas. 

European grain and meat simply could not compete with the low production costs of the vast overseas farms, especially those in North America.  Even as the price of food dropped, the cost of labor was steadily climbing, cash-hungry parliaments were raising taxes, and even the nature of farming was changing.  While a few aristocratic estates modernized with mechanized plows, fertilizers, and scientific breeding, most of the inbred and undereducated nobles simply refused to do anything different than their grandfathers.

If the aristocrats wanted to continue those leisurely fox hunts across their fields, they desperately needed to locate a new source of money.

Luckily, the same industrial revolution was affecting the United States and this new  industry created the nouveau riche, who were eager to trade money for social position.  If you’ll pardon the pun, it was a marriage made in heaven. 

American “new money” families wanted the social prestige of membership in Europe’s rigid, aristocratic class system while European aristocrats wanted the funds to maintain the estates that were increasingly expensive to run in the industrial age.  So, the crass Americans provided their daughters with dowries sufficient to make them desirable to even the haughtiest of aristocrats.   These rich American brides were referred to as “Dollar Princesses.”

The Dollar Princesses brought in the money and their husbands brought in the drafty ancestral homes, the priceless silver, and the invitations to royal garden parties.  It was—more or less—a fair trade.  This didn’t stop English newspapers, like Puck, from lampooning the marriages, however.

Starting just after the American Civil War, when American fortunes exploded, and lasting until World War I, when the entire European aristocracy system imploded, roughly 350 rich, young American brides provided rich, (mostly young) dowries to their new aristocratic husbands, thus transferring hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s money) to prop up those old noble estates.  The peak of such marriages occurred during the 1880s and 1890s—the Gilded Age.

Jennie Jerome, later Lady Randolph Churchill, was an early example of a “Dollar Princess,” though the term had not yet entered common use when she married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874.  Jennie was born in Brooklyn in 1854, to financier Leonard Jerome, who was known as the “King of Wall Street”.  She was introduced to Lord Randolph during the Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight and, after a whirlwind romance of just three days, they were engaged.  Her father’s considerable fortune helped smooth over any aristocratic concerns about her American birth and it provided the much-needed cash infusion into the Churchill family’s strained coffers.  Not only did Jennie’s dowry save the Churchill Estate, but it can be argued that her son, Winston Churchill, saved all of England.

If Jennie Jerome’s marriage was a whirlwind romance, Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 union with the 9th Duke of Marlborough was more of a hurricane, engineered by her formidable mother, Alva Vanderbilt.  Consuelo, heiress to one of the largest fortunes in America, was essentially marched down the aisle as a living trust fund who was intended to shore up Blenheim Palace’s leaky roof and the Duke’s equally leaky bank account.  The bride wept through the ceremony (and those were not tears of joy), while society wits whispered about the “wedding of the century” being less a love match than a high-society merger.  Still, the Vanderbilt millions accomplished their architectural rescue mission, even if the marriage itself crumbled into divorce—proof that, while money could buy a dukedom, it couldn’t always buy happiness.  The saga of this dollar princess is the inspiration for the television show, The Gilded Age.

If you were one of those American heiresses in the late 19th or early 20th century, who had just swapped your posh Fifth Avenue address for a drafty English manor, you had two urgent needs: a lady’s maid who could unpack your trunks without fainting at the sight of all that Paris couture and a portrait by John Singer Sargent.

Sargent was the undisputed Instagram filter of his day—minus the phone, but plus a lot of oil paint and the ability to make even the most nervous sitter look as if she had been born knowing how to carry off a tiara.  That kind of talent made the $5,000 price of a Sargent portrait a bargain (Roughly $177,000 in today’s dollars!)

So, why Sargent?  Well, he was the portraitist of choice for anyone who wanted to announce, “I have arrived,” without having to shout it over tea at Claridge’s.  His brushwork had a way of making pearls gleam, gowns ripple, and the sitter’s expression hover between approachable charm and “I summer in the south of France.”  For an heiress, commissioning Sargent wasn’t just about vanity—it was a social credential, the equivalent of having one’s own heraldic crest or of getting a glowing profile in Vogue.  The portrait of Jennie Churchill above is by Sargent.

The families themselves weren’t shy about it, either.  While the official purpose of the portrait was to “capture the likeness for posterity,” it also served as an elegant, full-length calling card.  When a Sargent painting of ‘Lady So-and-So’ was unveiled at a London salon, it might as well have been accompanied by a discreet footnote:  “Yes, the family’s finances are once again in order, thank you, and the young lady is available.”

Sargent painted these women with a knowing blend of flattery and truth.  He understood the subtle alchemy they represented—American steel, railroad, or banking money poured into Old World titles and estates.  Often, the dollar princess, herself, was more modern, witty, and independent than her aristocratic husband’s family quite knew what to do with.  Sargent let just a glimmer of that spark peek through: the tilt of a head, the faintest smile, a glint in the eye that seemed to say, “Yes, I paid for the roof, and no, I don’t regret it.”

And how many did he paint?  Roughly two dozen confirmed dollar princess portraits are  scattered today among major museums, family estates, and auction houses.  In every one, you can see why these women paid (or had their fathers pay) the equivalent of a small townhouse for the privilege.  The gowns may be Edwardian and the backdrops might be grand, but there’s a hint of steel under the satin—exactly what Sargent knew to show.

Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1903 portrait (right) by John Singer Sargent is the very picture of aristocratic poise—though knowing her story, you can almost imagine her thinking, “If only I could trade this tiara for a ticket back to New York.”  Draped in sumptuous satin and crowned with the Marlborough jewels, she stands like the perfect Edwardian duchess she was trained (or coerced) to be.  Sargent, ever the diplomat with a paintbrush, caught her elegance without betraying the fact that her marriage to the 9th Duke was about as warm as a Blenheim Palace corridor in February.  The result is dazzling—she looks every inch the society goddess—but if you look closely, you might detect the faint glimmer of a woman who knew she had rescued a palace roof (And knew she had  provided the requisite “heir and a spare”!) yet found her own happiness leaking away.

In the end, a Sargent portrait was less about recording a face than about sealing a chapter of social history. The dollar princesses’ marriages may have been transactions, but on Sargent’s canvases, they became triumphs—proof that money, titles, and art could meet on equal terms…at least for the span of one dazzling sitting.