Jean Zimmerman

Category: Art

  • Wonderful Characters

    It’s the time of year when literary critics tote up the outstanding reads of the previous year, as well as some of the failures. I’m never into ranking books, though I might at some point on this site share a few of those that really knocked me out in recent months. For now, I thought…

  • Mirror on the Wall

    It was a tiny room in the middle of the vast museum. An intimate space. We had already paid obeisance to the Neapolitan Christmas Tree, the eighteenth-century confection that materializes each year in the courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We had admired the intricate architecture of huts and sheepfolds leading up to the…

  • From the Chimney With Care

    They’re waiting. Waiting in plain sight, hung from the chimney with care, assembled of felt and yarn and sparkles. Everyone in the house for the holidays is an adult now, but still we hang our stockings. The practice of hanging a Christmas stocking… why hang a sock to collect treats, or put out a shoe…

  • A Grimm Tale

    Recently I checked out my reader reviews for The Orphanmaster – not always a good thing for a writer to do, but Amazon makes it so easy – and after the wonderful, wonderful, wonderfuls I was stopped short by this extremely erudite criticism: Yick. One of my readers actually had to put the book down…

  • Desert Desperados

    My favorite blogger-in-arms Peter Zimmerman is tall, lean, sun-loving and more than occasionally prickly. So I knew that when he wanted to write about the saguaro there would be no better perspective on the cactus. Hard to believe [he writes] that it’s been 43 years since I saw my first saguaro. I was twelve years old…

  • Ever Abustle

    What exactly was the Victorian bustle, and why did it become a fashion staple? In Savage Girl, the main character follows a trajectory of fashion changes, from a threadbare shift to simple girlish day dresses to glamorous evening wear, including what is generally thought to be the ball gown of the century. She is not…

  • The Calico War

    A dispatch from guest post-er Peter Zimmerman. In the 1840s, a band of Calico Indians wrought havoc in Delaware County and probably enjoyed doing so. They were based in the sleepy hamlet of Bovina Center, New York, where I lived last summer for a spell, as well the neighboring communities of Roxbury, Andes, and Kortright.…

  • Bit by Bit

    Stitch after stitch. The easiest in knitting is the knit stitch, worked over and over, row after row, dignified by its pattern name the garter stitch. Time honored and simple, it’s the foundation of sweaters and scarves all around the world. I man the couch (woman the couch?), man up (woman up?) to knit stitch…

  • To the Lighthouse

    Recently I visited the Saugerties Lighthouse, a time-worn red brick structure that has stood just off the shore of the Hudson at the mouth of Esopus Creek since 1869. It replaced the original fire-decimated one built in 1835 — engraved by William Wade, who produced a remarkable picture of the length of the Hudson from…

  • Of Hand Muffs and Weather Masks

    Wenceslas Hollar, the finest etcher and printmaker of the seventeenth century, had a thing about fur hand muffs. He had nearly 3,000 prints to his credit, having fled war-torn central Europe for England in 1636 under the patronage of the Earl of Arundel. The extremely fashionable London lady in Hollar’s “Winter” Dress from 1643-44, in…

  • Some Odd Fellows

    A guest post from writer Peter Zimmerman: A couple of weeks ago I moved into an old brick building circa 1880. It’s in one of those little sleepy Hudson River valley towns not far from where Rip Van Winkle dozed off……. It turns out that it used to be an Odd Fellows Hall. Over the…

  • Hudson River Haunts and Hustlings

    For my whole life I’ve lived up and down the Hudson River, in Hastings, in Ulster Park, in Ossining. New York City crouches on its shoreline, and I lived there for twenty years. The Hudson happens to be my favorite river in the world – although to be precise it is an estuary. I’ve written…

  • The Spirit of Electricity

    I finally saw “The Spirit of Electricity,” the costume worn by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II at an outrageous fancy dress party she gave with her railroad tycoon husband that was one of the highlights of the Gilded Age in New York City. Textiles perish, and you don’t often get to see the famous gowns of…

  • Victorians Striking a Maternal Pose

    The photos published in The Guardian today haunt me. A series of Victorian babies, each one posed against a fabric-draped… mother. They’re from a new book called The Hidden Mother by Linda Fregni Nagler, which archives 1,002 photographs, daguerreotypes and tintypes, cartes de visite and cabinet cards. As a reporter describes it, the requirements of…

  • Thank You for Reading

    I am thankful. This is a post about this blog. At Thanksgiving, in a lot of families, a blessing is performed before the turkey comes on in its golden, crispy glory. The blessing consists of going around the table with every guest sharing some thing they are especially grateful for. On the occasions I’ve taken…