Unidentified artist, Rev’d Meekly Obstinate Pious vs. the Fegee Islanders. January 1858 [England, mid-19th century]. Fourteen watercolors in oblong album. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired a pictorial narrative set on the island of Fiji and dated January 1858. It tells the story of a British missionary known as Rev. Meekly Obstinate Pious and his wife, who sail to Fiji in order to convert the indigenous people to Christianity. Through a series of events, they build a church and make friends with their neighbors but ultimately are killed and eaten. When British sailors arrive in search of Rev. and Mrs. Pious there is a battle and everything on the island is destroyed.

The story is told through fourteen watercolors and brief captions. It is unclear if the sequential narrative was meant to be reproduced and published, nothing similar can be traced. Some images are disturbingly racist and only a selection are reproduced here.

The presentation of savage cannibals in the South Seas was routinely found in English books, newspapers, and theatricals, such as in the 1831 Theatre Royal, Covent-Garden performance Neuha’s Cave, or, The South Sea mutineers, partly based on Lord Byron’s poem “The Island, or, Christian and his comrades” (1823).

Actual missionaries might have served as the basis for this parody. From 1838 to 1856, James Calvert (1813-1892) and his wife Mary Fowler Calvert (1814-1882), along with John Hunt (1812-1848) lived in Fiji, promoting Christianity. Calvert quickly learned the native language and over time, published religious books in Fijian as well as Fijian dictionaries for English speakers. Hunt published a Memoir of the Rev. William Cross, Wesleyan missionary to the Friendly and Feejee islands (1846) and after Hunt’s death in 1848, the missionary Thomas Williams wrote a memoir of Hunt’s life and work, also know under the Fijian title: Tukutuku kei Misa Oniti (1848).

Walter Lawry’s 1850 book Friendly and Feejee Islands: a missionary visit to various stations in the South Seas, in the year 1847 emphasized the practice of cannibalism and painted an unflattering portrait of a primitive society. Here is a section:

Their cannibal propensity is well known. They do not attempt to disguise it. The eating of human flesh is not confined to cases of sacrifice for religious purposes, but is practised by them from habit and taste. There can be no question that, although it may have originated as a sacred rite, it is continued in the Feejee group for the mere pleasure of eating human flesh as food. Their fondness for it appears from the custom they have of sending portions of it to their friends at a distance, as an acceptable present; and the gift is eaten, even if decomposition has begun before it is received. So highly do they esteem this food, that the greatest praise they can bestow on a delicacy is to say, “ It is as tender as a dead man.”

50 years after: {39:2} Expectans expectavi. Dominum, et intendit mihi = I have waited expectantly for the Lord, and he was attentive to me.

Fragment from Nisha Jha, Incarnation of God as a Corona Warrior, 2020. Ink and acrylic on paper. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

The wonderful thing about these posts is the discussion and research and rethinking they initiate, either immediately or over time. Such is the case with this intriguing new acquisition. We are re-posting with new information and a slightly new interpretation thanks to Ellen Ambrosone and Peter Zirnis.

In this painting, Nisha Jha pairs two figures in one: the god Vishnu and a contemporary medical doctor taking a patient’s temperature with one hand while administering the COVID vaccine with the other: a Corona Warrior! The lifesaving syringe also forms a border isolating and protecting Mithila residents from the virus elsewhere.

This composite figure immediately brings to mind the union of the god Shiva and his wife Parvati in a form known as Ardhanarishvara, the god who is half female. But the chakra, a discus used as a weapon, in the god’s raised hand as well as the conch shells in the border tell us this is Vishnu, the god who periodically comes down to earth to rid the world of evil and restore the divine order.  In Corona Warrior Nisha Jha says she presents Vishnu in the form of a doctor to celebrate brave doctors everywhere, their sleepless nights and their absence from their homes. It is through their hard work that “Corona will lose soon and we will win.”

Nisha Kumari’s decision to focus on Vishnu and, purposefully or not, to invoke the easily recognizable male-female form of Shiva and Parvati, allows for a feminist interpretation of the painting. In this work, Vishnu is on the left (for the viewer) as Shiva would be in an image of Ardhanarishvara, and the doctor is on the right as Parvati would be in the same image. Parvati is no ordinary goddess but a form of Shakti, the supreme female force in the universe. Here we see a contemporary expression of the goddess in the form of a doctor battling covid-19 and cleansing the world of an epidemic. One could say we have multiple paintings before us. It’s a matter of looking. If you just see Vishnu you see one painting, if you see Ardhanarishvara you see a different painting.  Or you can see them both at the same time for a more complex view of the world expressed in the Corona Warrior.

This is one of a small group of contemporary Mithila paintings Princeton has acquired, also including work by Amrita Jha, Dulari Devi, Shalini Karn, and Naresh Kumar Paswan. Our sincere thanks go to Susan S. Wadley, professor emerita of anthropology at Syracuse University, for her invaluable help in forming this collection. A virtual session will be held in March entitled: Mithila Art in 2020: Life, Labor, and COVID-19 in South Asia.

Nisha Jha has been painting since she was a child and now works with her mother Vinita Jha refining her skills in a village near Madhubani town. She also has a bachelor’s degree in economics. “Nowadays wives and daughters also learn to paint and supplement family income with their work. Instead of going from village to village to show their scrolls, the patuas now exhibit at craft fairs and melas, and sometimes at venues abroad. Their paints were all made from natural plants, but now some of them admit to buying commercial products.” -Geraldine Forbes

Drury Lane Christmas Pantomime, Hop O’ My Thumb, Boxing Night. [London, ca. 1864]. Ink and watercolor on paper. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2021- in process

Not all our students know that “hop-o’-my-thumb” (or hop on my thumb) is a reference to a very small person. The character first appeared as one of eight fairy tales by Charles Perrault (1628-1703) in Histoires ou countes du temps passé in 1697, translated to English by Robert Samber thirty years later. This is only one of many small characters in literature. There is Tom Thumb or Thombe, who dates back to 1621, along with Der kleine Däumling (Germany), Little One Inch/Issun-bōshi (Japan), Thumbikin (Norway), and many others.

Tom Thumbe, his life and death: wherein is declared many maruailous acts of manhood, full of wonder, and strange merriments: which little knight liued in King Arthurs time, and famous in the court of Great-Brittaine. London : Printed [by A. Mathewes?] for Iohn Wright, 1630.

In the 1850s George Cruikshank (1792-1878) published a series of fairy tales, including Hop-o’-My-Thumb, implanted with his personal abstinence pledge and commitment to the temperance movement. He altered the stories so that villains were alcoholics or gamblers. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was one of Cruikshank’s detractors, writing “Frauds on the fairies” and “Whole hogs,” in Household Words (October 1, 1853), to which Cruikshank responded with his own widely circulated letter that began:

George Cruikshank (1792-1878), A letter from Hop-o’-My-Thumb [i.e. G. Cruikshank] to Charles Dickens, esq.: upon “Frauds on the fairies,” “Whole hogs,” &c. (London : D. Bogue, [1854?]) Graphic Arts Collection Cruik 1854.

See also a draft: George Cruikshank (1792-1878), The Controversy between Charles Dickens and George Cruikshank concerning George Cruikshank’s Fairy Library; autograph letter, 1853. Manuscripts Collection C0256 (no. 36) Gift of Richard Waln Meirs, Class of 1888.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane staged its first pantomimes in the 18th century and by 1761 they became a regular feature. From 1852 to 1888, E. L. Blanchard was the author of 37 pantomimes performed at the Theatre Royal and the first to present Hop-o-My-Thumb within the Christmas pantomime series. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230291782_2

1861 – The House That Jack Built; or, Old Mother Hubbard and Her Wonderful Dog
1862 – Little Goody Two Shows; or, Harlequin and Cock Robin
1863 – Harlequin Sindbad the Sailor; or, The Great Roc of Diamond Valley
1864 – Hop o’ my Thumb and his Eleven Brothers!; or, Harlequin and the Ogre of the Seven-Leagued Boots
1865 – Little King Pippin; or, Harlequin Fortunatus and the Magic Purse and Wishing Purse
1866 – Unknown
1867 – Faw-Fee-Fo-Fum; or, Jack the Giant Killer
1868 – Grimalkin the Great; or, Harlequin Puss in Boots and the Miller’s Son
http://www.its-behind-you.com/drurylanepantos.html

The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired an original ink-and-watercolor advertisement designed as a poster or a program cover for the 1864 production. Note in particular the figures that form the letters of the word Pantomime.

In their review, The Times of London praised the performers of the show for executing their craft “in the best manner that circumstances will allow” and for the “great importance” they attached to their pantomime. The Times continued with further accolades: “All the artists are the best….The painter is Mr. William Beverley, the acknowledged chief of faery illustration, the genius to whom the ‘transformation scene’ in the present sense of the word may be said to owe its existence.”

It is hard to make out the artist’s signature in the bottom right corner. Can you recognize the name?

Read more: Jeffrey Richards, The Golden Age of Pantomime (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, [2015]),

Dulari Devi, Corona Effect in Patna, 2020. Acrylic on paper. Purchased with funds from South Asian Studies and Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2020- in process

On March 24, 2020, Prime Minister Modi gave the 1.35 billion citizens of India four hours’ notice before he imposed a complete lockdown of the country, hoping to prevent the spread of Covid 19. It is hard to imagine the rush this instigated, as thousands of people pressed into trains, boarded ships, borrowed bicycles, and in any way possible struggled to reach family. Many were stranded, many became unemployed, and many were infected.

Second only to the United States, India has recorded the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world. Over the last year indigenous artists of India turned their attention to this subject matter, chronicling the 2020 exodus and its aftermath.

This week in January 2021, India’s health minister declared its COVID-19 epidemic contained. Also this week, the Graphic Arts Collection acquired the first of a group of paintings by the artists of the Mithila region, responding to the events of the last year. We follow their work through the Mithila Art Institute: http://mithilaartinstitute.org/Home/Artists

The red arrow indicates the town of Madhubani in the Mithila region in northeast India. Traditionally, the women of this area decorated the walls of their homes for special events, eventually putting these designs onto paper and selling them to a growing international market.

Our first acquisition is by Dulari Devi, a Master Painter and Instructor at the Mithila Art Institute. Her biography states “A resident of Ranti, she received the State of Bihar Award for Excellence in Art in 2013, and authored the first autobiography by a Mithila painter, the award winning, Following My Paintbrush (2010). She learned to paint from Karpoori Devi one of the early Masters. She is now in great demand for her murals, closely observed village scenes, and paintings of Ganesh and Durga.” She writes,

“Corona positive patients are reaching [the] hospital but [there] is not enough space for large number of patients. Four patients are in critical position lying on the floor. Some people are carrying patients on their shoulder, as there is no ambulance available. In another scene, one person is distributing food packets among the people. And then a government employee is distributing among the people. And then a government employee is distributing mask among people. Finally, the lockdown has been imposed in Patna city. All the daily wage laborers are now unemployed and are coming to Madhubani, to their villages by bus. One family is traveling on the Ganga in a boat.” — Dulari Devi, Mithila Art in the Time of Covid 19 https://indd.adobe.com/view/b42ffd50-92eb-4c53-b8be-cad71851cee7

http://mithilaartinstitute.org/Home/History

See also:
Bharti Dayal, Madhubani art (Durbuy, Belgium: Museum of Sacred Art ; New Delhi, India : Niyogi Books, 2015). Marquand Library N7310.D39 A4 2015

Mulk Raj Anand, Madhubani painting (New Delhi, India: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 1984). ReCAP ND1006 M26 An14

Martine Le Coz, Mithilâ: l’honneur des femmes (Paris: L’Harmattan: Michalon, 2013). ReCAP 14-14284

In March there will be a free live webinar focusing on Princeton’s new collection of Mithila paintings. Details coming.

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001), Sagan Moonikin, ca. 1977. Signed by the artist. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process.

Ammons’ friend Emily Wilson noted, “This is one of a few pictures that Ammons titled: Sagan Moonikin. It was made in a period in which Carl Sagan (1934-1996) had joined the Cornell faculty and was very much in the news of the scientific community. Ammons includes in this modernist watercolor the image of a small farmhouse, which he uses in a number of pictures as a reference to his North Carolina home [not Sagan’s], but he sets it in the granite landscape of Ithaca. Sagan moved to his house on the gorge after Ammons had made this picture and that requires more discussion and research.”

A.R. “Archie” Ammons (1926–2001) was among the first recipients of the MacArthur Fellows Program, unofficially known as the “Genius Grant,” when it was established in 1981. The poet, who taught at Cornell University from 1964 to 1998, received many awards for his writing, among them two National Books Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Less known or celebrated were Ammons visual arts, including the six watercolors recently acquired by Princeton’s Graphic Arts Collection.

Our continuing thanks to Susan Stewart, Avalon Foundation University Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Princeton University and to Emily Herring Wilson, longtime friend of Ammons, for their help with this acquisition. In her remembrance of the poet, Wilson noted the year he took up painting with a vengeance:

“Moving back into their house on Hanshaw Road, Archie set up a table in the upstairs bedroom looking out into the backyard he loved so much and had written about so often, and he began painting water-colors. In 1977 he was painting as many as six or eight hours a day. In 1981, he described the process in one of the most revealing statements he ever made about the sources of his creativity:

‘The is a poetics of tears, of smiles, of ecstasy (sensual joy and the harsh inspirations of the religious heights): there is a poetics of quietude and deep study, a poetics of fear—and a poetics of anger. During Christmas vacation in 1976, I got the notion which I had had passingly but often before, to try watercolors. I’m sure I was attracted to the possibility of bringing together in one visual consideration the arbitrariness of pure coincidence with the necessity of the essential, the moving form the free, as the work of art begins, through the decisions of pattern and possibility, and into and through the demands of the necessary, the unavoidable, the inevitable. This “change” is in another from the oldest of journeys, that from exile to community.

Having had dozens of tries at real pictures, I began to feel what events on the paper “meant”—that is, I began to learn the joining of what happened on the paper to its emotional counterpart, the feelings generated and expressed by the events. I discovered that I was stirred by the thin, loud, and bright, the utterly blatant effect like a smack in the face, the anger felt, expressed, reacted to. And then I thought that not a very nice thing to be into. But I was angry, sizzlingly angry for whatever reasons, and I found myself, when I could endure the emotions at all, released by letting the anger go and become the splatters and the sheer control of the paint. And then I thought that since we must after all at times be angry, how fortunate we are that art allows us to transform blistering feelings int the brilliance, the sweep and curve, the dash and astonishment (along with the cool definition, judgment, and knowledge) of still completed things.’” –Emily Herring Wilson, When I go back to my home country: a remembrance of Archie Ammons (Fountain, NC: R.A. Fountain, 2019).

A.R. Ammons, Untitled [Abstraction in sections with pink, red, green, and yellow], ca. 1977. 9 x 12 inches. Signed by Ammons. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process.

Note from Wilson “I love this. Because it seems to me to be the North Carolina landscape we have near black lakes in eastern NC and lots of red/pink clay used by potters. Also sandy coasts and sunshine and lots of creeks. For me he has his sizzling anger under control with the beautiful reds.”

See also: Literary Vision. November 1988, A.R. Ammons, John Ashbery, William Blake, William Burroughs, E.E. Cummings, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, D.H. Lawrence, Henri Michaux, Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen, and Kenneth Rexroth (New York: Jack Tilton Gallery, 1988).

A.R. Ammons, Untitled [Abstraction with verse], 1977. Signed and dated by Ammons. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process.

“Over a forty-five year span, A. R. Ammons gained readers, recognition, financial reward, and international acclaim for his verbal creations, not his visual ones. Although longtime subscribers to EPOCH may re member that one of his watercolors graced the 1986–87 cover of the magazine (35:3), most readers of Ammons’s twenty-five poetry collections remain unaware that he also painted more than one thousand watercolors. He did not hide that pursuit; in fact he was proud of his paintings, and from time to time, he promoted them.

From 1977 until 1993, he entered his work in twelve separate exhibits at sites from the Johnson Art Museum at Cornell to the Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City, where four of his paintings appeared in the show “Literary Vision,” along with [others]. He also exhibited his paintings in North Carolina, at the Reynolda Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem and at the University of North Carolina’s Morehead Gallery in Chapel Hill. More recently, in October 2002, The Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, Ammons’s alma mater, presented an exhibit of fifty of the poet’s paintings; watercolors from that show subsequently appeared on the March and August 2003 covers of Poetry.” — Elizabeth M. Mills, “An Image for Longing,” Epoch 52 no.3 (2003).

A.R. Ammons, Untitled [Self-portrait, abstract], 1977. Signed and dated by Ammons. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process.
Wilson notes “Ammons painted a number of these faces, which seem to be self-portraits but require more study to have a clearer understanding.”

See also: Jonathan Dembo, A.R. Ammons’s poetry and art : a documentary exhibit : exhibit catalog (Greenville, N.C. : J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, 2008).
and
Donald Friedman and John Wronoski, The writer’s brush : an exhibition of artwork by writers (New York, NY : Anita Shapolsky Art Foundation, 2014)

A.R. Ammons, Untitled [Abstraction with nature in blue, red, and brown], 1977. Signed by Ammons. Graphic Arts Collection 2020- in process.