Thursday, April 25, 2013

1900

The year 1900 is now on the outermost edge of living human experience and there are but few people drawing breath today who drew it over a century and a decade ago...

Director Bernardo Bertoluccci released, in the year 1976 when far greater numbers of souls had a few fading memories of that last year of the 19th Century, an epic film that explored the lives of two men born in Italy during a time of great unrest.  1900 is a very long movie with Bertolucci's vision running to 317 minutes and shorter heavily edited versions clocking in at over 200 minutes...


Paintings completed in 1900: Paul Cezanne: Still Life with Onions.  As his work matured, Cezanne strove to create depth
on his canvases through the use of color.  He also became increasingly interested in interpreting the world around him in
terms of geometric forms, primarily the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.


1900 tackles profound subject matter: deep and abiding personal friendships tinged by love and hate, wealth and poverty, political struggles to find a middle way between the lures of fascism and socialism as quick fixes to economic and political confusion...


Political Cartoon: Election of 1900.  The Presidential Election of 1900 in
the United States was essentially a rematch of the one in 1896.  William
McKinley's success against William Jennings Bryan repeated itself.  The
cartoonist here mocks conspiracy minded populists who supported Bryan.

 
Among the subjects Bertolucci explores is the role of women in society...


Painting completed in 1900: John Singer Sergeant: Sir George and Lady Ida Sitwell and Family



In the real year of 1900, novelist Theodore Dreiser published Sister Carrie.  The story follows Caroline Meeber as she leaves her family's farm in rural Wisconsin and travels to New York City where she takes work in a shoe factory and eventually rises to great fame and wealth as an actress.  Dreiser's novel sold very poorly when the Doubleday publishing firm reluctantly honored its contract with the writer to put his book into print.  Normally, a rags to riches story would entrance audiences...


Luftschiff Zeppelin One

 
But Sister Carrie was a different kind of tale about success.  Dreiser pulled no punches in exposing the brutality and coarseness of working class life in the big city.  Worse, he scandalized middle-class America.  Carrie Meeber was a beautiful girl and it didn't take her very long to realize men would gladly pay her for the privilege of sexual intercourse and even "keep" her in a nice apartment and adorn her with both jewels and expensive clothing...


Paintings completed in 1900: Pablo Picasso: Le Moulin de la Galette.  Many painters, including Renoir, have celebrated
the windmill with an associated café in the Montmartre district of Paris where people came to enjoy a glass of wine and a
bite of brown bread.

 
Painter John Singer Sargent, an American who preferred life among the better classes of Europe, had the reputation of being the finest portrait artist of his day when he took brush to canvas in 1900 to give a bit of artistic immortality to Sir George Sitwell, fourth baronet of Renishaw, and the Lady Ida, his wife, and their children-- Edith, Osbert, and Sachaverell.  Sargent's genteel approach to art was more to the liking of most people who considered themselves refined than was Dreiser's in the year 1900... 


Novels published in 1900: Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim.  Conrad's psychological novel, seen
here in comic book adaptation, originally appeared as a magazine serial.  It explores the life
of a man branded as a coward for abandoning a sinking ship and its passengers.

Anglophiles and students of British literature know the Sitwell children grew up to lead a clique of fashionable artists and writers.  It was a group they formed in response to a scandal, a public besmirching of the family name that traumatized Lady Ida's children for they loved their mother dearly.  Pursuers of the obscure fact and the trivial may know Lady Ida became involved with confidence men who used her as a gateway to upper crust society.  In 1913, Sir George refused to pay her debts resulting from lawsuits that grew out of this involvement, preferring to see his wife be prosecuted as a criminal and sent to prison for fraud in 1915 for three months...


On the Continent, 1900 saw a technological breakthrough that would ultimately reshape personal transportation, the transfer of cargo from one place to another, and the foulest of human inventions-- warfare.  Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin conducted the first test of Luftschiff Zeppeline One, a rigid airship, over Lake Constance.  The successful LZ One flight vindicated what appeared to be the Count's obsession with lighter-than-air flight, a fascination which had first seized his mind in 1884 after hearing a lecture by Heinrich von Stephan who envisioned a future where the postal service would employ aircraft...


Novels published in 1900: Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie


[Across the Atlantic, millions of Americans were more than familiar with the concept of dirigible like airships.  Newspapers across the United States had spent most of 1897 printing bizarre, outlandish stories about a mysterious aircraft, or aircraft, traversing the continent from California to Connecticut.  A number of the accounts included witness claims of conversations with the occupants of the Great Airship who occasionally said they were Martians but more often hinted the craft was the work of a brilliant and very rich scientist.  Public fever and speculation over the identity of this mysterious genius  grew so great that inventor Thomas Edison was forced to issue a public denial that he was involved with these odd stories.  No proof that the Airship ever existed has come to light but perhaps it simply returned to the Red Planet.  A fortunate gentleman who lived Saint Louis, Missouri, had reported spending a rather pleasant afternoon conversing with the navigator of the Great Airship, a lovely woman "clad only in Nature's garb", as she made minor repairs to her craft.]


Paintings completed in 1900: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: La Modiste.  Heir to one of the oldest titles
in France, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec drank heavily to compensate for the taunts he'd endured as a younger
man due to his deformed appearance.  This portrait of a milliner was done roughly a year before his
death from the ravages of drink and syphilis.  He was not yet forty when he died.
 
Yet, despite the mystery of the Great Airship (be it newspaper hoax or something more profound and dark), Americans are not the sort to be long troubled.  They will turn their minds to other things.  In 1900, ballroom dancers were gleefully dancing the Cakewalk, a little bit of fancy footwork that had originated, some scholars believe, on plantations in the Deep South, among slaves mocking the pretentious manners of their masters and mistresses...

 
The Cakewalk Dance lives on today in many common phrases such as
"that takes the cake" and "it was a piece of cake".

THE MARKETPLACE

One easy and inexpensive way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and photographers:  Greeting cards from Fine Art America. 

Easier still: browse Louis R Nugent's gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.
http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

 
Louis Nugent: Soda Fountain


Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.

 
Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by 30 artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas and the American Southwest.

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

 
Avis Noelle: Spirit of the Longhorn

Fine Arts America now features work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

Susan Bordelon: New Orleans Mardi Gras Masquerade
 
 
Fine Arts America now features work celebrating Art inspired by Art:

http://fineartamerica.com/groups/art-inspired-by-art.html

 

Alexandra Jordankova: Birds on a tree After Picasso
 
CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  none. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: none.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Images Of Ambiguous Women, Possibly Being One And The Same Person, Of Multiple Identities

"His (Merlin's) dearest pupil... whose name was either Niniane or Vivian... (and) who was in her lifetime honored by the title "Lady of the Lake," has generally been dismissed as 'wily Vivian," just as King Arthur's learned and royal half sister, Queen Morgan, has been scorned as "Fay," or Fate, or crazy."-- Norma Lorre Goodrich, Merlin, New York, 1988

Sir Edward Burne-Jones: The Beguiling of Merlin, 1874: Medieval
morality dictated that Arthur's adviser, the wizard Merlin, be punished
for his pagan origins.  As the Arthurian Romance cycle evolved, he
was transformed from wise magus to a foolish old man, besotted and
ultimately imprisoned by the devious Nimue.
 
"Three medieval texts speak of her (Morgan) as a goddess... (she) is also related to the many, frequently nameless lake fairies of modern Welsh folklore."-- entry for "Morgan le Fay," by Roger S Loomis, in Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, New York, 1972


Aubrey Beardsley: The Lady of the Lake Receives the sword
Excalibur from Sir Bedivere, 1894: The image of a bodiless hand
and arm holding an upraised sword appears to tap into a Jungian
archetype of  some sort and can be found in the mystical imagery of
the Rider-Waite Tarot deck as the Ace of Swords where it is
used to symbolize the essence of "Air" as opposed to "Water". 

Walter Crane: King Arthur asks the Lady of the Lake
for the sword Excalibur, late 19th Century: This illustration
evokes the bird symbolism associated with Celtic goddesses
but retranslates it into terms more palatable to Christian
readers of the late 19th Century-- rather than being
associated with ravens flocking around the battlefield,
the Lady moves across still waters of the Spirit as the
guardian of a righteous king's weapon in the battle against
dark forces.
 
"Vivien or Vivian: The name given by Tennyson and Mathew Arnold to the enchantress who beguiled Merlin...(her name) appears in the French manuscripts in many forms... (such as) Nyneue or Nymue.  She was identifified with the Lady of the Lake... and the fairy lady Rhiannon..."-- entry for "Vivian," by R Roger S Loomis, in Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, New York, 1972

Unidentified: The Lady of the Lake, Date Unknown: Some variants
of the story of Arthur and his knights of the Round Table have it that
Vivian, Lady of the Lake, was foster-mother to Lancelot, both the man
who loved Arthur dearest and the man who betrayed him greatest.


Frederick Sandys: Morgan le Faye, 1864: The character of
Morgan first appears in the Arthurian Romance cycle in
Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, circa 1150, where she
is a healer who dwells on an island paradise with her eight
sisters and tends to the wounded king Arthur.  A decade or so
later, Chretian of Troyes writes of her as a loving healer and
informs us that she is also the noble king's sister.
 
"As for Morgen, she was one of the characters with a clearly divine origin, recognized even in the Middle Ages.  She began as the Celtic goddess Matrona, who became Modron in Welsh.  Touches of an Irish goddess were added to her, so that she too was a composite.  Geoffrey (of Monmouth) made her a healer, heading a benevolent sisterhood, and nursing Arthur after his last battle.  In romance, however, the hardening of (religious) orthodoxy gradually told.  As an enchantress she simply could not be good.  She became a malicious witch, ensnaring knights, and mischief-making at Arthur's court."--  Geoffrey Ashe, The Discovery of King Arthur, New York, 1985


Unidentified: The Lady of the Lake With Mortal Women, Date Unknown: The
mythologist Joseph Campbell has noted that there are very few masculine figurines
from the early European Neolithic period but many that are feminine.  The ability
of woman to bring forth and nourish life transferred itself into many cultures into
the identification of water and earth as female forces.



Alan Lee: Rhiannon, 1984: Students of the mythology and legends of
the British Isles see a connection between the story of Nimue galloping
into King Arthur's Great Hall on a white palfrey and the Mabinogion's
account of  the Rhiannon riding past Pwyll and his courtiers on a
white horse of almost supernatural speed.
 
"Morgan (le Faye) in Irish legend is 'the Morrigan', meaning "Great Queen"... Robert Graves, The White Goddess, New York, 1948


Mike W Barr and Brian Holland: Morgan Le Fay from an issue of Camelot 3000,
DC Comics, 1982-1985: This graphic novel series plays on the theme of Arthur
reawakened in Britain's Darkest Hour in the distant future.  His half-sister Morgan,
originally a goddess with profound insight into the cycle of life, appears in the
graphic novel in much the same light as she does in the late Arthurian Romance
cycle: a cunning, evil, and sexually charged female presence whose sole role in
creation is to destroy the purity of a good man who would serve God.
  

THE MARKETPLACE

One easy and inexpensive way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and photographers:  Greeting cards from Fine Art America. 
Easier still: browse the Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.

http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

 
Louis Nugent: Fan Dancer

Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.


Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by 30 artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas and the American Southwest.
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

 
Megan Miller: Bright Spot

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

Susan Bordelon: Cypress at Old River 2
 

Artwork by Nekoda Singer is also available from Fine Art America: 

http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/nekoda-singer.html

Nekoda Singer: Three Graces
 

CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  none. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: Unidentified artist's undated print of the Lady of the Lake from David Nash Ford, Early British Kingdoms 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Picasso In Blue

"Picasso arrived in France just a few days before his nineteenth birthday, speaking no French and having no place to stay...." Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, New York, 1988


Pablo Picasso's traveling companion to Paris during this first visit to the cosmopolitan capital of La Belle France was Carles Casagemas, also a painter, and his flat-mate in Barcelona.  It was an unlikely friendship between two very different young men-- one reserved and a son of prosperous diplomats, the other an extroverted carouser rarely shy in the face of either beauty or wine...
Death of Casegamas, 1901

The Greedy Child, 1901


He and Casegamas returned home to Spain but Casegamas found himself drawn back to Paris, enticed by the charms of a model named Germaine Gargallo.  She did not see him as the centerpiece of her future, sadly, and Casegamas dramatically (and publicly) chose to end the affair by executing himself with a single bullet to the head at the Cafe Hippodrome as he dined with Germaine on the evening of 17 February 1901...
Blue Nude, circa 1902

Naked Woman with Dripping Hair, 1902

Art historians and biographers tell us that Picasso was in Madrid when he learned of his friend's death.  Young Pablo (like the old Pablo) moved through life like a bull in a china shop or a force of nature-- depending on your preferred cliche.  He'd faced the cruelty of the Grim Reaper before, in 1895, when diptheria claimed the life of Conchita, his seven year old sister.  The trauma deeply affected his family-- after the loss of his young child, Picasso's father no longer wished to live in the town of A Coruna where he taught at the School of Fine Arts.  Taking a similar position in Barcelona, he took his family with him...
The Old Guitarist, 1903

For the next few years, Picasso traveled back and forth between Barcelona and Paris, grappling with Casegamas' suicide and deep personal poverty in cities that delighted the senses of even jaded rich men, sinking ever deeper into depression as arbiters of artistic taste failed to recognize his talent and he was forced to burn his own canvases in the fireplaces of shabby apartments if he hoped to survive the brutal winter cold...
The Blind Man's Meal, 1903

The Tragedy, 1903

Yet his intellect remained restless.  Through his friend Max Jacob, Picasso met many of the men and women who transformed the literary and artistic world of France during the early years of the 20th Century.  He was a master of realistic drawing and continued to paint in a fashion influenced more by Spanish tradition than revolutionary French ideas-- but there was a subtle difference emerging in his work: Picasso's mind now guided his hand toward experiments with form and color...

These were his Blue years...

  
Les Noces de Pierette, 1905

THE MARKETPLACE


One easy and inexpensive way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and photographers:  Greeting cards from Fine Art America. 

Easier still: browse the Louis R Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.
http://louis-nugent.artistwebsites.com/

 
Louis Nugent: Chicken a la Picasso
Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.

 

Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by 30 artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas and the American Southwest.
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

 
David Pike: Bringing Light

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

 
Susan Bordelon: The Storm



CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows:  none. All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: none.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

A Texas Kaleidoscope

DNA is a funny thing...

It exposes unsuspected connections, confirms a quickly formed conclusion or proves that conclusion to be a half-baked notion, and sometimes it leaves questions unanswered...

Last week, a man was convicted of murder in the southwest Texas town of San Angelo after DNA evidence ended a twenty-five year nightmare behind prison bars for another man whose trial jurors were obviously willing to believe anything prosecutors and police had to say about his character.  He had been the victim's husband and was, as is sadly common practice, automatically Number One on the list of usual suspects.


DNA, a nucleic acid, consists of two strands
of nucleotide wound around each other in a
double helix.  It is found in all living things
and attests to the uniqueness of each member
of a species while confirming their common
characteristics.
On the other hand, a recent article by Carol Christian of the Houston Chronicle shows another assumption long held to be gospel by Texans does have basis in fact...

Most people outside the Lone Star State probably don't devil their minds with questions about the origin of Longhorn cattle unless they happen to have a strong interest in the history of ranching in the western and southwestern states.  Some, who know cows are not indigenous to the Americas, might assume Elsie's bovine ancestors ambled across the famed Bering Straits land bridge in prehistoric times with the distant great-great-great-grandparents (many times removed) of today's Native Americans in hot pursuit of a tasty meal...

The historically-inclined chuckle at this fanciful assumption since they know the Spanish brought cattle with them to the New World and that the cowboy culture of the Old West owes far more to Mexican vaqueros than it does to brave lads who sought opportunities in the Great Desolation past the 100th Meridian in the years following the hell called the Civil War...


The rare birth of a "white buffalo" held great spiritual significance for many
Native American cultures inhabiting the plains and prairies of the modern day
United States and Canada.  One example of this can be found among the Lakota
who were taught many of their sacred traditions by a beautiful woman with the
power to transform herself into a white buffalo.  After instructing them, she
disappeared while crossing the grasslands, leaving behind a promise to return to
inaugurate a time of peace among men.

[Early Americans did hunt large bovines we call bison or the American Buffalo.  Steppe bison, ancestors of these grazing beasts, crossed the Bering land bridge, back and forth from North America and Asia, as early as 500,000 years ago.  While bison and modern cattle share a distant common ancestry, they evolved separately.  Today's cows belong to one of two species-- Bos indicus or Bos taurus-- whereas the prairie-roaming buffalo (of whose home cowboys sang lonely songs as they remembered places where the deer and antelope also played) belong to genus Bison, species bison.]

By 1521, cattle were being bred in Mexico.  Spanish colonies in the New World spread northward into present-day Texas and southward to modern Peru onto the vast grassy Argentine pampas.  The colonists brought their cattle with them.  Of course, there were challenges-- it took cows longer to adapt to the humid and hot Central American climate than it did other domesticated animals like pigs and horses.  But adapt they did, serving as work animals in sugar fields and mine camps.  They even indirectly gave rise to one of our names for pirates who favored them as a meal: the French word "boucan" refers to their smoked meat.  And those who enjoyed the taste became "buccaneers"...


The Argentine Pampas are semi-arid grasslands in South America
with grazing conditions similar to the short grass prairies of the
United States and Canada.  Both Texas Longhorns and many of the
cattle now living on the Pampas descend from animals brought to the
New World by Spaniards in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries.
It has long been an article of an almost Biblical faith among Texans that our rugged and cantankerous Longhorns are cattle royalty -- they are the distant children of the very first cows to graze the grasses of the New World...

Modern DNA research at the University of Texas Austin and the University of Missouri, Ms Christian reports, can attest the truth of this bit of Texican braggadocio...


This fanciful rendition of a Mexican vaquero
was featured in a children's jigsaw puzzle from
the 1950s.  American cowboys learned their trade
from the vaquero who practiced techniques first
used on the Iberian peninsula by herdsmen
mounted on horseback.
Longhorns, it seems, descend in part from a herd of cattle brought to the Americas by Christopher Columbus during his second voyage of 1493.  The article does not go into great detail about the study itself but notes the Spanish shipped cattle to the New World for approximately two decades.  Presumably the research involved comparing genetic markers of the cattle on Caribbean islands where Columbus' cows are known to have been placed with genetic markers of Longhorns...



Cattle came into modern-day Texas during the late 1600s.  It was a grassy land-- ideal for the cows and too vast for the men who herded cows to entirely keep them in herds.  Some escaped, forming feral herds in rugged country where animals with longer horns survived longer than animals with shorter horns...

Wild cows usually have four legs...

Occasionally, these critters take two-legged form as they did in the persona of Phantly Roy Bean, Jr, born in Kentucky circa 1825.  Columnist Paula Allen of the San Antionio Express-News, recently chronicled a few of Beans pecadillos in the erstwhile Lone Star Republic after his arrival in San Antonio in 1864.  He was a bully and a thief who'd tried his hand at gold mining in California and cargo freighting (and killing men in bar fights) down Mexico way before deciding to marry a daughter of one of Texas' oldest families so he could sponge off her relatives...

A longhorn cattle drive through a Mexican pueblo drive provided
an anonymous painter with his subject in an undated 19th Century
work.
The marriage ended in 1881 when Bean abandoned Maria Chavez and their children to head out into the West Texas desert where he ran saloons catering to railroad workers and rowdy cowpokes.  It was an unhappy marriage and Maria had even once had Bean arrested for savagely beating her in one of his frequent drunken rages.  The case was dismissed when the judge demanded she remove her clothes publicly in the courtroom so male jurors could examine her bared body for signs of abuse and Maria refused...


Phantly Roy Bean, Jr, portly and white-bearded, stands in front of
the Jersey Lilly, his combination courtroom and saloon, in Langtry,
Texas.
Here, with the end of his marriage and the establishment of a saloon called the Jersey Lilly in the semi-arid wilderness of a town called Langtry, Roy Bean steps into history as the law west of the Pecos...

Judge Roy Bean, as he called himself, had no actual formal training in the law, but he had earlier been appointed Justice of the Peace for precinct 6 in Pecos County in the settlement of Vinegaroon (likely named after a particularly large desert scorpion) after the Texas Rangers sought to establish law and order in the area.  (He used the 1879 Revised Statutes of Texas to guide his decision making process and liked the results well enough that he burned subsequent updates to the law that found their way to him.)  His first act as Justice of the Peace was to use his authority to bust up the saloon of a Jewish competitor for the railroad workers' drinking money and ensure his monopoly in the local whisky trade...
Bean followed the tracks as the rail crews laid them down and moved on...


He eventually settled down roots twenty miles west of the Pecos River at the town first named Eagle's Nest (and then renamed Langtry in honor of the lovely English actress who also gave her name to Bean's Jersey Lilly saloon according to romantics or after an engineer on the railroad according more mundane souls).  He continued to dispense an eccentric brand of frontier justice in this stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert...
"Judge" Bean, the Law West of the Pecos, tries a horse thief on
the front porch of the Jersey Lilly.  Despite his reputation as a
hanging judge, Bean was loathe to execute anyone save a cold-
blooded killer.  He much preferred to fine miscreants and pocket
the money without sending the state of Texas its share of the
financial proceeds.
 
Although Bean has been called a "hanging judge" by many, he sentenced only two men to that fate.  His preference was to fine men for misdeeds (even horse thievery, provided they returned the stolen mounts to their rightful owners) and set them loose with the fine usually being the exact amount of cash in their pockets or wallets at the time of their conviction.  No portion of these monies ever went to the state of Texas as required by law, remaining instead in Bean's own pockets...

Life in Langtry was simple enough for townsfolk or visitors provided they observe one very simple rule: to never, in any way or shape or form, besmirch either the beauty or honor of Miss Lily Langtry.  Her name was not to be spoken aloud in his saloon unless the speaker first raised a glass to toast her (A film version of Bean's life offers us the probably not-true-story that he shot dead a drunk who discharged a pistol whose bullet came perilously close to a portrait of Miss Langtry gracing a wall of Bean's saloon)...
[Note: This week's Marketplace (below) features a photograph of the Jersey Lilly's interior, complete with infamous portrait of Miss Langtry, by Canadian photographer Avis Noelle.]


Stage Actress Lily Langtry as Cleopatra in an 1891 performance.
Among the most celebrated and scandalous women of her day,
Langtry was courted by European nobles and American
millionaires.  None of them proved as devoted to her as Roy Bean
who exchanged letters with her regularly until his death.
Today, the "Judge" would probably be considered an obsessed fan of Lily (sometimes "Lillie") Langtry.  He wrote to her often and she replied to his letters as time and her career as one of the great stage actresses of the late 19th Century permitted.  A friend of Oscar Wilde and mistress to a multitude of English noblemen and American multi-millionaires, Langtry began her stage career in the early 1880s and eventually toured America.  She appeared in San Antonio in 1888.  Bean paid a very large sum of money for a front row seat but despite his rough and rowdy ways, was too shy and awestruck to meet her after her performance...

Correspondence between the two continued for many years more and Langtry decided during a 1903 trip through the American Southwest she would travel to the dusty town where her most devoted fan lived because she was puzzled as to why he'd suddenly stopped writing and she was hoping she'd not somehow offended him.  Stepping off the train in the town that may or may not have been named in her honor, Lily Langtry learned Roy Bean was dead of a fever that claimed his life some months before her arrival.  Townsfolk gave her a tour of the hamlet and the Jersey Lilly saloon, presenting her with the Judge's pistol before she reboarded the train.  She placed the pistol on the mantle in her home in fond memory of "that odd little man" who sent her so many letters and it sat there until her own death more than a quarter century later...

Yet another wild cow of man came to Texas more than fifty years after Judge Roy Bean performed his last marriage ceremony that concluded with his hope for bride and groom that, like a scoundrel sentenced to drop through a trap door with a 13 knot rope around his neck, "may God have mercy on your souls"...


Elvis Presley: King of Rock 'n' Roll in the 1950s
Frank Sinatra, one of America's most famous crooners, dismissed this wild man's music as deplorable, going on to describe it as "a rancid smelling aphrodisiac"...

Old Blue Eyes was referring to Elvis Presley who reported to Fort Hood on the outskirts of Killeen, Texas, in late March in 1958, not as the reigning King of Rock and Roll who'd already sold more than 10 million records but as a buck private earning a princely $78 monthly and ready to be trained in the art of being an armored tank gunner...

Presley probably irked Sinatra for more than one reason.  The boy was no tuxedo clad gentleman who warbled love ballads and his gyrating hips suggested he took a rather physical approach to courtship and romance.  His music sounded, to the civilized ear of the late 1950s, like the raucous, frenetic bastard child of a lascivous bluesman and a churchgoing hillbilly spinster inclined to supplement that good old time religion with nips of root cellar medicine...


Teen idol Elvis Presley earned the respect of his fellow soldiers
for his refusal to seek special privileges and his willingness to
carry his share of the workload.  He served two years in uniform,
training at Fort Hood before an overseas assignment in West
Germany.
Fort Hood wasn't Presley's first Texas experience.  Two years before reporting for his military duty, he'd thrilled 4,000 squealing young people at the Heart O' Texas Coliseum in Waco.  It was his third trip to that city.  Bea Ramirez covered the concert for the local newspaper.  She seems to have shared Sinatra's opinion of Presley to a degree, writing "he shook in epileptic like movements while thousands of teenagers moaned, groaned, and attempted to push their way nearer the stage" where the Pride of Memphis twisted the night away, howling at the top of his lungs...

Ramirez had an opportunity to interview Presley before his performance.  He told her, in words oddly prophetic for a man who would earn sergeant's stripes in under two years and die before he saw forty-three full years, he was both grateful for his meteoric rise to fame and fortune and scared by it...

"I could," he told Bea Ramirez, "go out like a light just like I came on"...

 
Ava Gardner, seen in a publicity photo, played the role of
Lily Langtry in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, a
1972 tongue-in-cheek movie "biography" of the irascible
and eccentric desert magistrate.

  

THE MARKETPLACE

One easy and inexpensive way to build a collection of work by today's finest painters, sculptors, and photographers:  Greeting cards from Fine Art America. 

Easier still: browse the Louis Nugent gallery at Fine Art America.  Choose from 250+ unique ideas for home and office decor or holiday and birthday cards for yourself or special someones who deserve something extraordinary.  Individual cards cost less than $5.  Wall prints from $22.
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Louis Nugent: Downtown Cholla I

Follow and Like Louis R Nugent Photography on Facebook @ louisnugent22.



Fine Art America now features painting, drawings, and photographs by twenty-nine artists who celebrate majestic and uncompromising landscapes, settlements, people, plants, and flora and fauna scattered across the vast emptiness called West Texas.
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/west-texas.html

Avis Noelle: Jersey Lilly Saloon
 

Fine Arts America now features  work celebrating the mysterious and lovely Bayou State of Louisiana and its unique lifestyle:
http://fineartamerica.com/groups/cajun-country-louisiana.html

John Malone: Bourbon Street Buskers
 

CREDITS

Note: Information for this essay is taken primarily from readily available sources such as Encyclopedia Britannica, Wikipedia, and almanacs.  When other sources are employed they are credited either in the text or as follows: Information about the early history of cattle raising from "The Age of Exploration" at marinersmuseum.org; Frank Sinatra opinion of Elvis Presley and Presley central Texas concerts quotes from "Elvis rocked region reporting to Fort Hood" by Don Bradley of the Waco Tribune-Herald.  All photographs are taken from Wikipedia or Google Images without source or authorship credits available, except as noted: DNA from neatorama.com; Longhorn Cattle Drive through a Mexican Pueblo Town from etsy.com; White Buffalo postcard from Northern Rockies Heritage Center; Pampas from Wikipedia; 1950 Doubleday Vaquero Puzzle from etsy.com; Judge Roy Bean standing in front of the Jersey Lilly from baffledspirit. blogspot.com; Jersey Lilly Saloon from postcardroundup.com; Lily Langtry as Cleopatra and Elvis Presley Army Days from fanpop.com; Ava Gardner from Ava Gardner Museum, Smithfield, North Carolina; Elvis Presley album cover from howstuffworks.com