IN my journalistic youth, it was standard practice to keep cuttings books as an easily referenced record of one's triumphs and embarrassments. As I was already in the habit of making personal scrapbooks and have retained them, most of my life is covered until, rather reluctantly, I began to rely on computer records instead. It is often easier to find something quickly in the cuttings books, which is why from time to time I use them to compare today's objects and prices with those in my earliest COUNTRY LIFE columns, then headed 'Around the Salerooms'.
Recently, I was reading an article on the Mutualart website (www.mutualart.com) about an American artist, Thomas Kuntz, who was born in 1965. He makes automata often representing the inhabitants of the 'Uncanny Valley', as he calls the border region between reality and the world of spirits and Guillermo del Toro, director of the film Pan's Labyrinth, is a collector.
Mr Kuntz's inspirations include Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the 'father of stage magic' (whose name was adopted by Harry Houdini) and the best clockwork musical automaton dolls made by Vichy in Paris during the second half of the 19th century.
The latter rang a distant bell for me and a couple of moments with the cuttings books took me back to October 14, 1991, when, I now realise, I got the wrong end of the stick about one of Vichy's better-known models. Here is a belated erratum.
Esta historia es de la edición September 04, 2024 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición September 04, 2024 de Country Life UK.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
