Ever wondered what everyday life was like for people living 50, 100, or more years ago..? A rare thread 1. The crowded beach of Atlantic City photographed in 1908.

A view of Workers at the Harland & Wolff shipyard, with the Titanic in the background, leaving work along the Queen’s Road, Belfast, 1911, a year before launch.

'Hyde Park' (1931) by Sybil Andrews

Walter Benjamin: “An experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.” (“The Image of Proust,” tr. H. Zohn)

Andrii Kateryniuk Through The Shadows 2023

bbc.co.uk/archive/howard… Howard Hawks (audio only) interview with the BBC from 1974. Always great to hear Hawks talk, but for my money the interviewer seems more interested in Samuel Goldwyn, and wasted a big opportunity.

The streets of London in 1924. #oldlondon #1920s #colourised #englishhistory

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? -Philip K. Dick João Cabral 2021

“Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets.” — Haruki Murakami

'Willow in Winter', Blackheath Park (exhibited 1928) by Francis Dodd (Manchester Art Gallery)

In reply to a follower who asked my recommendations of artists involved in the 20thC etching revival, a favourite of mine is Robin Tanner - his skill is beautifully displayed in 'Christmas,' (1929) based on preparatory drawings he made in the Cotswold village of Castle Coombe.

“— These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.” Anton Chekhov

m.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Xfm8… #CitizenKane documentary.

Van Gogh’s drawings are often overlooked, but he felt they were “the root of everything” (Pollard birches 1884)

Leon de Smet's painting from 1941 is of his house in Sint Martens Latem in Belgium, a town where a second wave of a group of multi generational artists had assembled from the end of the 19thC. His depiction of interiors was a major subject matter for him throughout his life.

Aron Wiesenfeld Lost Track 2018

m.youtube.com/watch?v=hZi4sI… #UniverseInsideYou Do not feel lonely, the entire universe is inside you. Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion. ― Rumi

Landscape at Le Pouldu, 1890

Van Gogh’s letters are just something else

"In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self..." Marcel Proust