Weird Little Art Stories

Being a graduate student at Enema U mostly means languishing in the library for long hours, reading long articles.  While these can be interesting, most of you are unlikely to keep a scholarly article about the iconography of some painting on your nightstand for a bit of leisure reading, even though some are very effective at inducing sleep.

Still, while reading various monographs, I keep discovering little tidbits of humor that are usually hidden away in footnotes… tiny little stories that are too weird not to be true.  I’ve been collecting them in the Moleskin notebook that is my constant companion, and this week I’ve decided to share a few.  Everyone of these is absolutely true (give or take a lie or two).

• Vincent Van Gogh, while an incredible artist, obviously had a few inner demons.  (Or as we would say in Texas, “the jalapeño had slid off the top of his nacho”.)  We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps he developed those demons at a young age.  As a child, he walked to school in the village of Zundert in the Netherlands and had to walk past the cemetery containing the grave of Vincent Van Gogh, his older brother.  After his brother died in infancy, his parents decided to recycle the name for the next child.

• Clementine Churchill wanted her tombstone to read:

Here Lies a Woman Who was Always Tired

For She Lived a Life Where Too Much was Required.

Proving that those requirements continue after death, here is what the family actually put on her tombstone:

Wife of Winston Churchill

The Life of the Nation is Secure

• There are at least two documented cases of a family mistakenly using a Ming vase as an umbrella stand.  The Duke of Wellington used a larger than life statue of a nude Napoleon to hold wet umbrellas.

• 
  In 1955, Salvador Dali borrowed a Rolls-Royce Phantom II from a friend because he needed to drive to Paris to give a lecture.  He neglected to tell the friend that he was taking with him 1100 pounds of cauliflower—enough to fill the interior of the priceless car to the ceiling. 

• Louis XVI didn’t lose his head; it is still around.  Well, kind of:  When Louis XVI was beheaded, only his body was buried.  His head was displayed but  later went missing.  At roughly the same time, the life-size statue of him was toppled and beheaded, and once again the head was seized by the mob.  After the restoration of the monarchy, the body of Louis XVI was buried at Basilica of Saint-Denis, alongside the headless remains of Marie Antoinette, while the headless remains of the statue were melted down.  Eventually, the head of the statue was recovered and today is on display at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris.

• In 1880, Édouard Manet was commissioned to paint A Bundle of Asparagus by Charles Ephrussi for 800 francs.  When the painting was delivered Ephrussi was so delighted by the work that he insisted on paying 1000 francs.  Manet then painted a smaller work, A Sprig of Asparagus depicting a single stalk of asparagus.  Along with the second painting Manet included a note:  "There was one sprig missing from your bundle."  Both valuable works are now in art museums.

• The portrait painter, John Singer Sargent, had a peculiar habit of asking his subjects to pose in uncomfortable or awkward positions, which he believed would help capture their true character and personality.  He also liked to read all the works of an author, one after the other.  He called this “reading in a wedge.”

• 
  When the avant-garde artist Cristo displayed his Package on a Wheelbarrow at the Galleria dell'Obelisco in Rome, in 1969, he left to the imagination of the viewer what the lump was under the tarpaulin.  The local bishop, who evidently possessed a vivid imagination, ordered that the exhibition be closed on the grounds of indecency.  Exactly what the bishop believed remained hidden was never explained.

• The most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, was missing for 24 hours before the Louvre realized it had been stolen.  Four different men hung the Mona Lisa in their bedrooms for their own enjoyment.  Leonardo da Vinci kept the painting for four years before gifting it to Francis I, the King of Spain, who displayed it in the royal bedchamber.  After the death of Francis, the painting was moved to the Louvre.  When Napoleon became Emperor, he moved the painting to his bedroom.  In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a handyman at the museum, stole the painting and kept it in his one room apartment for two years.  

• Some of the sketchbooks and notebooks of Gustav Klimt are missing.  The artist, who kept several cats in his studio, used cat urine as a fixative on his drawings.  The resulting sketch books reeked.

• Pablo Picasso famously doodled on some of his checks, often adding small sketches or drawings.  He would sometimes write a check for a relatively small amount, knowing that the recipient might never cash it.  One of those checks recently sold at auction for $10,000.

• The Two-For-One Van Gogh painting.  The Boston Museum of Fine Arts had its Van Gogh painting, Ravine, x-rayed with astounding results.  It turned out that the penniless Van Gogh depended on his brother Theo to provide the necessary funds to purchase art supplies.  In 1889, Theo was late and Van Gogh had an overpowering urge to paint, so Ravine was painted on top of a finished work, called Wild Vegetation.  

• An Andrew Wyeth painting, Braids, was incorrectly labeled at the Farnsworth Art Museum attributing the work to his father.  The mistake was not caught for thirty years.  

• The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen art museum in Germany recently admitted that a modern art piece by Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for 75 years.  The piece, New York City I, was discovered to be upside down after comparing the work to a photograph of Mondrian working on the painting on an easel.  Despite discovering that the work had been hung incorrectly for over seven decades, the museum plans has no plans to correct the mistake for fear of damaging the aging work.

• In the 1920s, Picasso created a fake artwork and signed it with the pseudonym "Léon," which was a name he used when he wanted to remain anonymous.  He then had a friend take this piece to a gallery and present it as a genuine work by a "new artist."  The gallery staff admired it and accepted it, unaware that it was actually Picasso's own work under a false identity.  The whereabouts of the Léon artwork is unknown today.

I don’t know of any scholarly work on the humor of art history.  Maybe I’ll work on that.

Up to Snuff

Without a doubt, my favorite movie is Secondhand Lions, a movie that could have only been made in Texas.  I like this movie so much that I have forgiven Michael Caine for imitation Texas/Cockney accent.  According to Caine, the secret to talking like a Texan was “to let the words lean on each other”.

Note.  Yes, I have a Texas accent.  I prefer to believe that after decades of education--not to mention having given over 6000 lectures--my Texas accent only comes out when I tell stories or jokes.  The reality is that I’m probably kidding myself.  A few years ago, I started the semester in one of my history classes by going over the syllabus for five minutes, then launching into the first lecture.  At the end of the lecture, I asked the class if there were any questions.  A young female exchange student from Japan politely asked in an impeccable British accent, “Will you ever be teaching in English?”

There is a scene in the movie, in which Robert Duvall gives a young Haley Joel Osment his first—and probably last—taste of a pinch of Beechnut chewing tobacco.  The rest of the scene shows a bent-over Osment imitating a wing-flapping chicken as he pukes his guts out.  

Been there, done that.

My experience wasn’t with chewing tobacco—it involved a brown glass bottle with a real cork, containing Levi Garret Scotch Snuff.  I don’t remember how old I was, but it was definitely before I started school.  Periodically, my father would take me to his grocery store where I was put to work sweeping the produce department and prying bubble gum off the floor with a single-edged razor blade.  (Yes, I know—children shouldn’t be allowed to use razor blades.  Back then, we must have been smarter than children today.  I also walked to school past a field that held a half dozen buffalo and never once felt an urge to climb the fence and try to pet one.)

One of the men who worked in the produce department used snuff, taking a pinch and deeply inhaling it.  I think I was more impressed with his ability pull the cork out of the bottle with his teeth more than with the actual dipping snuff followed by the inevitable sneeze.  In any case, I just had to try snuff for myself.  As soon as he left the back room where I was sweeping, I located the forbidden brown jar and helped myself to a generous amount that I snorted deeply into my lungs.

Almost immediately, I felt like someone had just inflated a basketball inside my head.   I accomplished a minor medical miracle by simultaneously sneezing and vomiting at the same time.  Each time my head went down, my elbows went up behind my back, and I choked out what was left of my breakfast.  Finally exhausted, I just sat on the concrete floor and let the tears run down my face while, I tried to breathe again.  I’ve never, ever been tempted to try any other form of snuff or chewing tobacco since that day more than six decades ago.  There are some lessons (like peeing on an electric fence or working with a single-edged razor blade) that no boy has ever had to learn twice.

I was reminded of my brief encounter with snuff by studying art.  You would not believe the number of elaborately jeweled or hand-painted snuff boxes displayed in the world’s art museums.  If you go to the online index of the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are just under 6000 entries.  It seems that every 18th and 19th century member of royalty collected, gifted, and occasionally stole elaborate snuff boxes.  And as a historian, I wanted to know how all this got started.

The indigenous people of Brazil were the first to produce snuff.  Tobacco leaves were finely ground up with a rosewood mortar and pestle to produce a fine powdered tobacco that could be inhaled.  These same people were also the first to produce a form of snuff box—actually a wood-stoppered tube made from bone—to keep the tobacco from drying out and losing the delicate rosewood aroma.  

The use of this finely ground tobacco spread across Central and South America and on the second voyage of Columbus, a Franciscan friar traded with the Taino and Carib natives for some of the tobacco, which he brought back to Spain.  The Spanish Crown, eager to make money, quickly established a monopoly on the product and established the Real Fábrica de Tabacos (Royal Tobacco Factory) in Seville.  The king’s snuff factory quickly grew in size to become the second largest building in Spain.  Obviously, tobacco quickly became popular.

By 1563, Jean Nicot, whose name was given to nicotine, a French diplomat discovered the joys of snuff while stationed in Lisbon.  The ambassador not only wrote of the great medicinal properties of ground tobacco, but he convinced Catherine de Medici that it was a wonder drug capable of curing her persistent migraines.  She was so impressed that she decreed that  (the Queen’s Herb).

The name didn’t take off, but the use of the tobacco certainly did.  With the influential blessing of Catherine, the use of powdered tobacco became a royal fad across Europe.  Part of the appeal, of course, was that it was both exotic and expensive.  By 1560, it reached Flanders where it acquired the name “snuff.”   It won’t surprise you to learn that the word comes from the Dutch “snuffen,” which means to “sniff.”

Ironically, powdered tobacco was never used by Native Americans in North America.  It was introduced to North America by John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas.  While never very popular among the ordinary colonists, like in Europe, it became popular with the wealthy and aristocrats.  It was not until the Great Plague of London (1665-6) that the use of snuff became popular with ordinary people.  The widespread belief that using snuff would provide medical relief from a host of medical ailments soon spread fromEngland across Europe.

With the popularity of snuff in both of the two great trading nations of the day, the English and the Dutch, the use of snuff quickly spread to Africa, China, and Japan.  And everywhere that snuff went, so did snuff boxes.  Once snuff has dried out, it becomes harsh and loses whatever aroma has been added to it.  By the 17th century, you could purchase snuff scented with everything from whiskey to chocolate.  

To keep the snuff from drying out, it was stored in large containers called “mulls”.  Traditionally, the best mulls were ram’s horns decorated with silver, but frequently, snuff was stored in boxes much like a cigar humidors.  An apple slice or a damp cloth kept in the container ensured the tobacco would not dry out.  Every morning a quantity of snuff sufficient for the day was transferred from the mull to a small airtight snuff box.

It did not take long for those individual snuff boxes to become highly decorated gold or silver works of art that were decorated with jewels.  The presentation of these ornate snuff boxes became a prominent display of wealth and prestige by nobility.  Denied the option of  compensating for sexual inadequacy by purchasing either an expensive sports car or a massive pickup truck, the rich could pay a small fortune for a jewel-encrusted box of snuff.

Frederic the Great, for example, became a enthusiastic snuff taker.  When a snuff box deflected a bullet during battle, he became an ardent collector of snuff boxes.  After his death, one of those fabulously expensive boxes became the property of, first the Romanovs, then of the Communist government.  When the Russians were desperate for cash, the box was sold at auction and then passed through several hands until it was purchased by Queen Mary of England, the wife of King George V.  (Yes, there were a lot of Kings named George, so let me make it easy for you, these were the grandmother and grandfather of Queen Elizabeth II, the mother of the current King Charles III.)

By the beginning of the 19th century, it seemed like everyone of note was using snuff.  Pope Urban VIII was so angry at parishioners using snuff during services that he banned the use of snuff on church grounds and threatened to excommunicate users.  A century later, Pope Benedict repealed the ban and encouraged the use for medical purposes.  Queen Charlotte was such an enthusiastic user that she converted a room at Windsor Castle into her personal tobacco storeroom.  The people of England privately referred to her as “Snuffy Charlotte”.  Marie Antoinette, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison were all snuff users.  And at the battle of Waterloo, both Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington dipped snuff while they observed the battle.  

By the 20th century, the use of snuff was…well…being snuffed out.  The rise in cigarette smoking all but eliminated the use of snuff.  While my father’s grocery store sold the brown bottle of snuff that I had sampled, today snuff is available only from specialty tobacco stores.  

While I was researching the history of snuff boxes, I found dozens of fascinating stories about who used them, who gifted whom a box, or how much they spent for a tiny airtight box.  I can’t end this without one more story.

After smoking became common in England, the clouds of dense smoke in the House of Commons became so annoying that smoking within the chamber was banned in 1693.  The ministers, however continued to use tobacco in the form of snuff.  A special floral-scented snuff, English Rose, was kept by the door in a communal snuff box.  During World War II, the Palace of Westminster was the target of a German bombing raid.  While Westminster Hall suffered little damage due to a strong medieval timber roof, the House of Commons was destroyed by fire.  When it was rebuilt, Winston Churchill gifted the chamber with a new communal snuff box, made from the salvaged timber of the old hall.  It is still kept full of snuff, at the personal expense of the doorkeeper, but has not been used by a member in several decades.  When a member of the Green Party recently tried to have the box removed, noting that since 2006 it has been illegal to publicly offer free tobacco, his request was denied since Westminster is still technically a royal palace, thus exempt from acts of Parliament.  

The U.S. House of Representatives, with no appreciation of tradition much less a sense of humor, got rid of both its communal snuff box and its spittoons back in 1914.  The Senate, composed of more somber members, still maintains itsp spittoons and the two snuff boxes installed by Vice-President Millard Fillmore 175 years ago, one for Democrats and one for Republicans.  

The Wreck of the San Telmo

If you are a fan of adventure and expedition stories, you probably know that credit for  the “discovery” of Antarctica (in February, 1819)  south of the 60° south latitude, part of the Antarctica Treaty Area.  Close enough.

The second caveat is that he didn’t actually initially land on the distant island, since 

the area is known for tricky fog banks and, frankly, when he reported the sighting of the land, no one believed him.  So, several months later Smith went back and landed on an island (Which he promptly named for his monarch, King George, the Batshit Crazy.)  Mapmakers (being known for their puritanical nature) just recorded it as King George Island, which is the northern-most island of the Southern Shetland Islands, now also known as the Smith Islands.

William Smith also reported that he found the washed-up wreckage of a sailing ship.  We will never know if Smith found anything else because his logbook has never been located.  Since there was only one recent missing ship from the area, everyone assumed that this was the wreckage of the San Telmo.

A year later, the Royal Navy financed a larger expedition by William Smith and his ship.  On this third expedition the rest of the Southern Shetland Islands was charted and the landmass of Antarctica was spotted for the first time.  

But, what of the San Telmo?

Napoleonic France took King Ferdinand VII of Spain captive in 1808, touching off the Peninsular War.  It was during this time that most of the Spanish colonies in the new world took advantage of the power vacuum and launched their revolutionary wars for independence.  By the time the king was returned to his throne by the British Army, most Central and South American nations either had achieved independence, or had started revolutions that had progressed too far along to be quelled.

By 1819, both Argentina and Chile had broken free and were united to help Peru achieve independence.  Since Spain depended on Peruvian Silver to maintain what was left of her empire, the fighting was fierce.  In 1818, Spain sent the San Telmo, a 74-gun ship of the line to Peru—in part to carry enough soldiers to reinforce the garrisons there, as well as to escort a load of silver back to Spain.  The San Telmo was the flagship of a Spanish naval squadron under Brigadier Rosendo Porlier y Asteguieta.

Although Spain had lost a significant portion of her navy in the 1805 battle of Trafalgar, she still maintained a powerful navy of excellent warships, including the San Telmo, which was listed as, “a second-rate ship of the line”.  At two-thirds the length of a football field and 52 feet width, she was a floating, heavily armed castle, with 24-pound guns on her upper deck and 18-pound guns on the lower deck.  Including officers, sailors, and marines, she carried a  crew of 644 men.

In order to reach Peru, the San Telmo had to sail around Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America, then through the tempestuous waters of the Drake Passage—one of the most dangerous sea passages in the world.  The San Telmo would also have to sail head-on into a strong eastward current, against fierce winds and avoid floating ice while encountering constantly choppy seas.  This frigid area is known for its bad weather and the constant threat of rogue waves as high as 65 feet.  A wave like that would have towered forty feet over the deck of the San Telmo.

On September 2, 1819, another ship in the convoy observed that a powerful wave had knocked out the tiller of the San Telmo, rendering the ship impossible to steer.   While the sails could have been set to compensate for the loss of the tiller in calmer seas, in the rough waters of the Drake Passage, the ship was doomed.  The ship was thus presumed to have sunk with her entire crew.

But the mystery remains:  where did the crew perish?

William Smith knew that he was being credited for discovering a new land mass and it was very much to his advantage to be recognized as the first man to set foot on a land whose existence had been theorized but that had never actually been seen.  But could the San Telmo have drifted far enough south to have reached the island first?

The British made several expeditions to the area, in part for exploration, and in part in search of good hunting areas for both whaling and seal hunting.  James Weddell, who was in those locations between 1822 and 1824, recounted that, on Livingston Island, a great number of seal bones were found dispersed on a beach on said island along with the scattered timbers of a wrecked vessel.  As he later wrote:

On a beach  in  the  principal  island,  which  I  named  Smith’s  Island,  in  honour  of  the discoverer, were found a quantity of seals’ bones, which appeared to have been killed some years  before,  probably  to  sustain  the  life  of  some  ship-wrecked  crew ;  suggesting  the melancholy reflection that some unfortunate human beings had ended their days on this coast.

The bones had to be relatively recent, since while there are no timber-eating worms in the far southern seas, but there are worms that eat both whale and seal bones.  For shipwrecked sailors, surviving any length of time on the island would be very tough, with the average daytime temperatures hovering around the 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and dropping below freezing at night, accompanied by strong winds, frequent rain and snow.  There are not enough trees or other vegetation to provide a significant source for fuel. 

Did the surviving crew of the San Telmo reach the Southern Shetland Islands and manage to survive for a short time before they died of exposure?  If so, they were the true first discoverers of Antarctica…and they were the first to die there.

Hoarding Toilet Paper

Evidently, the local stores are out of toilet paper…again.  There is not really a shortage, but we have a panic.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of toilet paper used in the United States is made domestically, the port strikes brought up fears of a supply line disruption which caused people to begin panic buying.  Other shoppers, noticing the steadily decreasing supply, joined the stampede.  The strike is over…for now, but it may take a few days for the shelves to be full again.

To start with, I’ll confess:  I have a three-month supply of toilet paper in the garage.  This is not something new, nor did I start hoarding because of Covid, I’ve bought such non-perishable commodities in bulk and kept a large supply on hand ever since I lived on Galveston Island and kept the house stocked for potential hurricanes.  I still keep candles in the freezer and have a couple of gallons of kerosene for the lanterns stowed away in the shed, too.

Come to think of it, each of the cars has an emergency roll of TP safely stored in a one-pound coffee can.  Since Folgers moved to an 11.5 ounce can a couple of decades ago, it might be time to change the rolls.  Does toilet paper go bad?

According to the people at Cottonelle, however, I’m running perilously low on TP.  Their research, independently confirmed by several other studies, shows that the average American uses between 130 and 150 rolls of wiping paper a year.  Some of the other data collected is interesting.  Women use a little more than five times as much toilet paper as men, and people in the South use 16 rolls a year more than people living in the West.  

Periodically, toilet paper is hard to find, and usually it’s for a good reason.  When I lived on Galveston, if a hurricane’s track in the Gulf showed there was a significant chance of the storm landing near the island, days before the storm hit, people flocked to the stores and bought up all the flashlight batteries, bottled water, Spam, and toilet paper available.  The shortages were only local, and everyone in Galveston knew that even after a bad storm, the stores would be stocked up again within a month or two.

Residents of the island expected this, and if you were smart, you bought such items in bulk during the spring, and if a storm didn’t hit, you slowly consumed the extra items over the fall and winter.  This was a regular cycle and everyone on the island expected it.  Just like we knew that you could pick up a good deal on a second-hand Honda generator—never used and still in the box—right around

And then, of course, there was The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020, due to Covid.  This was both a panic and a shortage.  While there is no doubt that some people began panic buying:  some stores were shut down and some factories shut down, so at least some of the shortage was real.  I suspect that the shortages of 2020 will always be on our minds every time there is a hint of a potential disruption of the supply line.  We’ll once more rush out and fill a grocery cart with crap we don’t really need.

The first panic I remember occurred back in 1973 and came from a surprising source:   there was a genuine gasoline shortage.  OPEC—particularly the Arab member countries—was angry over our support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War and had stopped exporting oil to us.  Gas prices shot up and there were shortages.  This in turn caused a devaluation of the dollar, resulting in foreign countries buying up large sums and amounts of American beef creating another shortage.  Faced with these very real shortages, consumers were already nervous.

In December of 1973, Congressman Harold Frolich was concerned about the paper industry in his district.  At a press conference, he announced that "The U.S. may face a shortage of toilet paper within a few months," adding that the only solution might be rationing.  This was all nonsense as there was no shortage, nor was the government even remotely considering rationing it.

This was a joke, whether Frolich intended it as such or not.  A week later during his monologue, Johnny Carson told his television audience "There is an acute shortage of toilet paper in the good old United States. We gotta quit writing on it!"

Carson had an audience of 20 million people and evidently every one of them rushed out the next day and started buying toilet paper.  The news spread and people across the nation started buying up toilet paper as fast as the stores could stock it.  Since Japan bought most of their paper products from the United States, the panic reached their country.  Japanese women stood in long lines for hours to buy small packets of paper.

After a few weeks, officials from the Scott Paper Company had several press conferences trying to reassure the nation that there was no shortage.  For the most part, these notices were ignored.

The problem, of course, was that people could see that there was a shortage, since there was no toilet paper on the shelves.  As fast as the factory could ship it, and as fast as the stores could put it on the shelves, people were grabbing it up.

CBS had Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, make an announcement on the evening news, “Unfounded rumors of a shortage has caused excessive demand at retail outlets.”  Several nights later, Johnny Carson told his audience, "For all my life in entertainment, I don't want to be remembered as the man who created a false toilet paper scare.  Apparently, there is no shortage!"

Perhaps these televised reassurances worked, or maybe people just observed that every week, more toilet paper was on the shelves, no matter how temporarily.  Or maybe everyone eventually just had enough toilet paper to last them for a while.  The panic was over.

Economists have studied why people willingly engage in such panics even though they suspect they aren’t real.  Our willingness to participate is rooted in something called “zero risk bias”.  When uncertainty threatens, people find comfort in taking action, even if they understand that the action does little to reduce the overall risk.  Effectively, we are saying that maybe we can’t control the big picture, at least we can wipe our ass.