Rua das Flores (Lisbon)

The Rua das Flores is a narrow steep street in the old town of Lisbon. Two monuments stand close together at the southern end of the Bairro Alto, the statue of Luis de Camões, the celebrated poet, and, a few steps down the Rua do Alecrim, that of Eça de Queiróz, the national novelist, looking serenely over the female figure of Truth. Ever since Bernini created his famous sculpture (Borghese Palace in Rome) truth has been personified as a naked woman. De Queiróz’s fictional output tends to suggest that the naked body may well be the moment of truth, but the naked truth itself is something we prefer to ignore. The unmasking of hypocrisy in bourgeois society was one of his main motivations for putting pen to paper.

In 1703 England and Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty. At the start of the War of the Spanish Succession Portugal allied with France because the French had guaranteed naval protection. However, in 1702 the British Navy sailed close to Lisbon on the way to and from Cadiz, proving to the Portuguese authorities that the French could not keep their promise. Talks with the Grand Alliance about switching sides began soon after. The resulting treaty was negotiated by John Methuen, the British Ambassador to Portugal. It established closer trading relations between the two nations, allowing English woolen cloth to be admitted into Portugal free of duty and, in return, Portuguese wines imported into England would be subject to a third less taxation than those brought in from elsewhere. Port was about to hit Britain. The real impact was felt during and after the Napoleonic Wars when French products were virtually unobtainable. Soon British wine merchants migrated to Portugal and established the famous port houses of Cockburn, Croft, Dow, Graham, Osborne, Sandeman, Taylor and Warre. The British aristocracy became addicted to port and afflicted by gout, whilst English poets fell in love with Portugal – and with Sintra in particular.

The name Sintra evokes a series of cultural memories. In 1825, Almeida Garret published his poem ‘Camões’. It signalled the beginning of the Romantic obsession with the village of Sintra in Estremadura, near Lisbon. Sintra had been part of the itinerary of English Grand Tourists. William Beckford, a wealthy aristocrat, art collector, and author of the Gothic (spiced up with Oriental elements) novel Vathek, landed in Lisbon in 1787. Having spent time at Sintra he praised the area as a ‘vast temple of nature’. The following decade he rented the estate that would later be known as the Palace of Montserrate (having been expelled from Britain for sodomy). Robert Southey spent some years in Portugal.

In his 1808 Letters Written during a Journey in Spain and a Short Residence in Portugal he describes Sintra as ‘the most blessed spot on the whole inhabitable globe’. Lord Byron visited Sintra in 1809. In a letter of 16 July he refers to the village as ‘the most beautiful perhaps in the world’. He subsequently immortalized the place in ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ as a paradise on earth (‘Cintra’s glorious Eden’). What makes the place so special and atmospheric? The sudden eruption of Sintra’s steep hills in an otherwise flat landscape has an effect on its climate. The mellow mists that shroud it through much of the summer have attracted rich Lisboans for centuries as an escape from heat in the city. Mistiness lends its ruins their special charm. The medieval Capucin monastery with cork-lined walls (known as the Cork Convent) is hardly ever exposed to sun light. The gardens of Montserrate offer vegetation in rainforest humidity. Even now, many of art shops in town sell engravings by English artist William Burnett who, in the 1830s, captured the splendour of the area.

Few Portuguese artists on the other hand were attracted to settling in Britain – with one notable exception. Novelist José Maria Eça de Queiróz was a master of realism. Many contemporary authors admired his work. Émile Zola rated his fiction higher than that of Gustave Flaubert. Others compared the novelist to Dickens, Balzac or Tolstoy. Born an illegitimate child in 1845, he was officially recorded as the son of José Maria de Almeida Teixeira de Queiróz, a Brazilian judge and an unknown mother. He studied law at the University of Coimbra, the oldest academic institution in Portugal and one of the earliest universities in Europe. Eça’s first known work was a series of prose poems, published in the Gazeta de Portugal, which eventually appeared in a posthumous collection edited by Batalha Reis entitled Prosas bárbaras.

In 1869/70, Eça travelled to Egypt where he was present at the opening of the Suez Canal. The experience left a mark on several of his works, most notably the murder mystery O Mistério da Estrada de Sintra (The Mystery of the Sintra Road, 1870), written in collaboration with Ramalho Ortigão. The novel was turned into a film in 2007. When he took up a post in Leiria to work as a municipal administrator, Eça de Queiróz wrote his first realist novel, O Crime do Padre Amore (The Sin of Father Amaro), which is set in the city and first appeared in 1875. In his fiction the author regularly attacked Christianity and was highly critical of the role of the Catholic Church plays in society.

Eça made his way up in the Portuguese consular service and spent two years in Havana before being posted in England. For five years, between 1874 and 1879, he was stationed at no. 53 Grey Street in Newcastle upon Tyne from where he dispatched his diplomatic reports on British affairs and industrial conditions. In spite of a dislike of country and climate, his long stay proved to be productive from an artistic point of view. His output included a series of ‘Cartas de Londres’ (London Letters) which were printed in the Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias and afterwards appeared in book form as Cartas de Inglaterra. As early as 1878 he had at least given a name to his masterpiece Os Maias (The Maias), though this novel was largely written during his later residence in Bristol and published a decade later. All in all, Eça stayed in England for some fifteen years, suffering the damp weather and the ‘indecent manner of cooking vegetables’, which nevertheless stimulated a considerable creative output. Whilst in Manchester, Friedrich Engels formulated his social criticism by observing the excesses of capitalism and its disastrous effects on the working population. Accordingly, Eça found a cutting edge to his fictional social realism by reporting on the appalling industrial conditions in the North-East of the country. In 1888, he finally moved to his beloved France becoming Portuguese Consul-General in Paris where he died in 1900.

Written between 1877 and 1878, the manuscript of A tragédia da Rua das Flores (The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers) was discovered amongst the author’s papers after his death. For more than a hundred years it remained in the hands of Eça’s family who judged the contents to be shocking and refused its publication. It was only in 1980, when the author’s estate was handed to the Biblioteca Nacional, that (two) editions of the embryonic novel were published in quick succession. The first English translation was timed to coincide with the centenary of Eça’s death. One night at the theatre, Vitor da Silva, a young law graduate, sees a strikingly beautiful woman: Genoveva de Molineux. She claims to have been born in Madeira and to have lived for many years in Paris. The truth about her past gradually begins to surface, as does the dark secret that lies behind the deep mutual attraction between her and Vitor. The Rua das Flores is not mentioned until the second half of the novel and appears when Genoveva’s sugar daddy Dâmasio sets her up in a third floor apartment on the corner of the street. Whilst the house was fitted out for her the couple – much to the anger of Vitor – spent some time away at Sintra’s famous Lawrence hotel. The tragedy at the street is Genoveva’s suicide (one of numerous cases of female suicide in late nineteenth century fiction) when she learns the awful truth about the real relationship between herself and Vitor and jumps from her balcony.

The tragic side of the story does not preclude humour and caricature. The author masterly dissects a world in which only surface counts by providing a gripping portrayal of a class consumed by hypocrisy and greed, drawing such characters as the fat pleasure-seeking libertine; the love-sick gin-drinking middle-aged English governess; the maid of many lovers; the aspirant painter who changes his aesthetic theories more often than his pants; the poetically inclined lawyer whose masterpiece is published in a women’s magazine, and the classy concubine short of cash but with aristocratic mannerisms. Within a framework of very precise topography and geographical location (one can literally follow Vitor’s footsteps) Eça’s Lisbon society is a colourful mosaic of vanity, self-delusion, and sexual intrigue. His fiction is characterized by great narrative fluency, a sharp eye for detail, and ruthless satire. Life is dominated by sordid affairs, corruption and a cheap moralism. To this rich mixture, his later writing added a new dimension. The theme that dominates both The Maias (his most acclaimed novel) and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers is incest. The dynamic of both novels derives from the inevitability of a relationship between lovers who are unaware of their blood ties.

In Oedipus Rex Sophocles turned a tale from Greek mythology into a play in which the title character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Freud introduced the concept into his psycho-analytical framework. De Queiroz’s plot to his novel can be read as reiteration of the catastrophe enshrined by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex. While the dramatist presented only the fact of the unnatural crime, De Queiroz describes all its allure and physicality. In The Maias, the protagonists are brother and sister; in The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers, they are mother and son. Incest appears regularly in the nineteenth century novel, although rarely in explicit terms. It is a suggestion, an undertone. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Pendennis (1848/50) however the theme of incest is blatantly evident. Helen Pendennis, mother of the main character Arthur, seems to lust after her son. A lonely but sexually alluring widow, she is aware that the object of her desire is her own boy. She broods over his affairs, even throwing one young lady into the street because of her flirting with him. She sabotages any opportunity Arthur might have at an affair. In line with other Thackeray’s works, Pendennis offers a satiric picture of human character and aristocratic society. Both tone and subject-matter of his writing would have been appreciated by Eça de Queiróz. It is most likely that he read this novel during his stay as a diplomat in England.

Avenue & Rue Frochot (Paris)

Near Place Pigalle is a leafy cul-de-sac, closed by a wrought iron secured gate, which is called Avenue Frochot. Developed in the 1830s, the avenue has an enticing artistic history. Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo lived here at one time; Toulouse-Lautrec had a studio at no. 15 which at the entrance shows a fine example of Art Deco stain glass; Théodore Chassériau, residing at no. 26, was neighbour to Gustave Moreau. Later film director Jean Renoir and gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt settled in the avenue. Composer Victor Masse died at number no.1. The property, partly visible from outside the gates, is supposed to be a haunted house, because of an unresolved murder and various unexplained deaths.

Pablo Picasso with his partner and model Fernande Olivier (real name: Amélie Lang – Picasso painted some sixty portraits of her) had started their stay in Paris at a Bateau Lavoir apartment. The Bateau was a gloomy mass of dirty premises made of beams and planks where between 1904 and 1914 a number of artists and poets would settle. In September 1909 however the couple moved from there into a furnished place on the Boulevard de Clichy with two windows overlooking the gardens of Avenue Frochot. There he painted ‘L’avenue Frochot, vu de l’atelier de Picasso’.

Nearby Rue Frochot is less exclusive, but certainly more lively. For a start, the street has a place in the history of the artist’s portrayal of onstage performers and performances. In 1886, twenty-two-year-old Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec entered the Dihau apartment at no. 6 Rue Frochot. He had come there to meet his cousins, and to gaze at a painting that had been given to the Dihau family fifteen years earlier by its creator, Edgar Degas.

The painting was ‘L’orchestre de l’Opéra’. Its central subject was bassoonist Désiré Hippolyte Dihau. Toulouse-Lautrec was inspired by the canvas. Within the decade, he would try his own hand at three portraits of the musician. Both Degas and Lautrec portrayed Dihau playing his bassoon. Both subsequently turned from music to stage and dance – ballet and cabaret – for subjects in their creative work. At one time, no. 4 Rue Frochot was the location of one of the most famous salons in Paris. A salon was a gathering of people who were invited by an inspiring hostess. Such social meetings were held for the refinement of taste and knowledge through conversation and exchange of ideas. The salon was an Italian invention of the sixteenth century. The word ‘salon’ first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian word salone which itself is derived from sala or reception hall). Before the end of the seventeenth century, such gatherings were often held in the bedroom of the lady of the house. Reclining on her luxurious bed, she invited close friends who would gather around her. The salon flourished in Paris throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and served as a meeting ground for political, social, and cultural discussion. And there was plenty to discuss between 1770 through 1830, years in which France experienced a plethora of change and growth, politically, socially, and culturally. The arrival and departure of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the Restoration, each left their marks on the Parisian salon. The presence of a beautiful and educated patroness gave additional charm to the concept of the salon. Aristocratic and upper bourgeoisie women known as salonnières organized salons from their homes.

The first renowned salon in France was the Hôtel de Rambouillet (formerly the Hôtel de Pisani), close to the Louvre, where from 1607 until her death Rome-born Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, entertained her guests. She received her visitors in a salon painted in blue, the ‘chambre bleue’. Almost all major personages of the French aristocracy and literature of the time frequented her salon, including Corneille, Malherbe, Jean de La Fontaine, Madame de Sévigné, Paul Scarron, and many other prominent figures in social and cultural life of the age. The gatherings at the Hôtel de Rambouillet established the salon’s rules of etiquette which resembled the earlier codes of Italian chivalry.

Molière’s satire Précieuses ridicules was levelled at the numerous coteries which in the course of years had sprung up in imitation of Rambouillet. The idea of the salon and the role of the ‘salonnière’ were from the beginning controversial. Some argued that the salon offered women an education and a way out from the shadows of a pre-determined place in society. It granted her independence. To others, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, these ladies represented the corruption, idleness and emptiness of aristocratic life. The controversy lingers on in contemporary historical debate.

The salon persisted into the nineteenth century, not just in Paris but in most European capitals (Berlin, Vienna, and elsewhere), and became woven into the fabric of cultural and political life. The role of salonnière however was increasingly taken over by a different type of lady. By the late nineteenth century courtesans – the ‘grandes horizontales’ – had reached a level of social acceptance in many circles and settings. As a figure, the courtisan appeared widely in a fictional context.

Honoré de Balzac wrote about the Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes; Alexandre Dumas fils published La dame aux camélias which centres around the courtesan Marguerite Gautier (Verdi chaged her name to Violetta Valéry in his opera version of the novel – ‘La Traviata’ translates as the Wayward One); Émile Zola introduced Nana into fiction; and Marcel Proust gave immortality to Odette Swann. In real life a number of courtesans started hosting a salon. Esther Lachmann, later Mme Villoing, later Mme la Marquise de Païva, later Countess Henckel von Donnersmarck, a lady of Polish Jewish descent born in a Moscow ghetto where her father worked as a weaver, was the most successful of nineteenth century courtesans.

When sharing a bed with the celebrated pianist Henri Herz in Paris, she invited various guests to attend her salon – these included Richard Wagner, Hans von Bülow, Théophile Gautier and Émile de Giradin. At a Baden spa she met Portuguese marquis Albino Francesco de Païva-Araujo. She married him on 5 June 1851, acquiring a fortune, a title, and her nickname, ‘La Païva’. She left him the next day. Her final conquest was Prussian Count Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck (who gave her the famous yellow Donnersmarck diamonds). With his money, she erected the elegant Hôtel de Païva at the Champs-Élysées (designed by Pierre Manguin), a mansion notorious for lush parties that became symbolic for the decadent taste of the Second Empire.

Adolphe Monticelli’s painting ‘Une soireé chez La Païva’ gives an indication of the sumptuous surroundings in which these gatherings took place. Apollonie Sabatier, nicknamed ‘La Présidente’ by Edmond de Goncourt, was a bohémienne and courtesan who during the 1850s hosted a splendid salon at no. 4 Rue Frochot, a spacious apartment consisting of seven rooms built in 1838. There she met and entertained the élite of French art at the time, from Gérard de Nerval to Gustave Flaubert, Maxime Du Camp, Alfred de Musset, Hector Berlioz, Victor Hugo, Sainte-Beuve Jules de Barbey d’Aurevilly, and Édouard Manet.

Between 1852 and 1854 Charles Baudelaire addressed a number of poems to Apollonie, celebrating her as his Madonna and Muse (later collected in Les fleurs du mal). Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier dedicated articles to her, fashionable Vincent Vidal painted her portrait, and in 1847 Auguste Clésinger sculpted her figure in marble as ‘Femme piquée par un serpent’ (woman bitten by a snake) which created a scandal at the Salon of that year. Belgian aristocrat and industrialist Alfred Mosselman who had made a fortune in civil engineering paid her bills (this eventually caused his bankruptcy which forced him to auction his famous art collection in the early 1860s). Gustave Courbet portrayed the pair in his famous painting ‘L’atelier du peintre’. After Mosselman’s death, Sabatier became mistress to art collector Sir Richard Wallace. Over the years she had developed a fine and costly feeling for aesthetics.

The name Frochot holds an honourable place in the annals of Parisian history. In the Middle-Ages, one of the Eastern hills near the capital was named ‘Champ-l’Evêque’ because it belonged to the Bishop of Paris. In 1626 the Jesuits acquired the land and property which they turned into a convalescence home. François d’Aix, Seigneur de La Chaise, also known as the Père Lachaise, spent most of his time in the Jesuits’ house and contributed to its beauty by creating idyllic gardens. The Jesuits left in 1762. The domain was acquired by Count Nicolas Frochot who, at the time, was prefect of Paris (in 1806 his portrait was painted by Andrea Appiani the Elder). He decided to use it as a burial ground.

The cemetery was designed by leading architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. Originally simply known as ‘cimétìère de l’Est’, it became soon known as the ‘Père Lachaise’, in loving memory of the confessor of Louis XIV. The cemetery was styled in the shape of an English garden and its broad avenues were decorated with lime and chestnut trees. When it opened for business on 21 May 1804, it was meant for Parisians living in one of the four districts of the Right Bank. However, affluent people did not want to be buried in what was considered a poor district. Many traditional superstitions concerning interment remained unchanged. Christians refused to have their graves dug in a place that had not been blessed by the Church. The opening of a new graveyard posed a particular challenge. No one would volunteer one of their deceased relatives to be the first to be interred, because of the widespread belief that the Devil would claim the soul of that particular corpse for himself.

The seventeen hectares of the cemetery remained empty until, in 1817, Frochot decided to take the initiative of transferring the ashes of Héloïse and Abélard there, as well as those of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière. The latter had died from pulmonary tuberculosis, possibly contracted when he was imprisoned for debt as a young man. His death had become a legendary tale: on 17 February 1617 he collapsed on stage in a fit of coughing and haemorrhaging while performing in his last play, which ironically was entitled Le malade imaginaire. He insisted on completing his performance. Afterwards he collapsed again before being taken home, where he died a few hours later, without receiving the last rites because two priests refused to visit an actor while a third arrived too late. The superstition that yellow brings bad luck to actors may originate from the colour of the clothing Molière was wearing at the time of his demise (in medieval religious plays yellow was the colour worn by the actor playing the devil). The Church refused to bury actors on consecrated ground, just like heretics, sorcerers or usurers. The stage was considered suspicious. Molière’s widow asked Louis XIV if her spouse could be granted a ‘normal’ funeral at night. The King quietly agreed. Molière was most probably buried in a dark corner of Saint Joseph Cemetery which had been reserved for those who had committed suicide or those who had not been baptized.

To remove Molière from St Joseph to Père Lachaise therefore presented the authorities with a particular problem: which one was his corpse? It has been suggested that the commissioners in charge simply dug up a random skeleton from the plot and introduced him as Molière. The same was done for De La Fontaine (despite the fact that the poet had been buried in a different cemetery). Molière’s sarcophagus in Père Lachaise bears his name but does not contain his body. The alleged tooth, jawbone, and vertebra of the playwright, which had once been honoured as relics, probably were taken from the ‘false’ Molière as well.

Nicholas Frochot’s plan worked out well. In the years 1820 to 1830, the cemetery became fashionable amongst the Parisian upper middle class. Everyone wanted to be seen dead in Père Lachaise. Among the famous residents stand the tombs of Honoré de Balzac, Guillaume Apollinaire, Frédéric Chopin, Jim Morrison, Alfred de Musset, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, Marcel Proust and, of course, Frochot himself. Apollonie Sabatier is buried in the old cemetery of Neuilly-sur-Seine, but many of the celebreties who frequented her salon on Rue Frochot were later buried at Père Lachaise. If life is indeed a preparation for death, then Sabatier assisted her guests in a fine manner for their departure and final meeting with Frochot/Lachaise.

St Patrick’s Street (Cork)

God created the Dutch out of mud and clay. The Netherlands, as that cheerful Cromwell admirer Andrew Marvell wrote in his 1653 poem on ‘The Character of Holland’, is composed of ‘indigested vomit from the sea’. Out of this vomit the Dutch created bricks, one of the oldest and most lasting building materials. Fabricated of sun dried mud, they were first found in southern Turkey and around Jericho. Fired bricks proved to be resistant to harsh weather conditions, which made them more reliable for use in permanent buildings. Introducing mobile kilns, the Romans spread bricks throughout the Empire.

That included the Netherlands where no natural stone is found suitable for construction purposes. However, as the Romans retreated, the technique of brick making disappeared with them and most medieval buildings were constructed using perishable materials such as timber, loam and thatch. For more substantial buildings stone was imported which was costly and laborious. As a consequence, around 1200 brick reappeared in the building process. The use of bricks at the time was associated with the clergy and nobility (it is assumed that monastic orders reintroduced the skill of brick making to the country). As bricks were fire-resistant, their use was stimulated by local authorities. In a 1450 statute issued at Leiden the use of brick or stone was made compulsory for façades.

Brick production around Leiden had started at an early date along the Oude Rijn, using clay from the old river bed. A brick kiln is known to have existed there as early as 1283. The colour of bricks depends on the raw materials and firing process. Clay rich in chalk produces yellow bricks, whereas the presence of iron will result in red bricks. The old river clay cut from the bed of the Oude Rijn must have been rich in iron, since old bricks in Leiden are mostly red of which paintings by Vermeer or Pieter de Hooch bear witness.

The yellow brick was a more common type. These ‘klinkers’ were produced in Gouda on the banks of the River IJssel since the fifteenth century and were known as Gouda bricks. Clay from the area is distinctive in the lack of iron oxide that accounts for the pale fired colour. Gouda bricks are typically dense, hard fired and were commonly used for paving and floors. The bricks were excellent for export and traded widely, from Scandinavia to the Channel Islands, they were imported through the eastern and southern ports of England, and they found their way to Ireland.

St Patrick’s Street in Cork is the main shopping street running in a curve from Saint Patrick’s Quay to Daunt Square, where it meets Grand Parade. The street obtains its curved shape due to its location over an arm of the River Lee. During the late 1700s Cork was well represented by a series of elaborate paintings and maps.

The most detailed of the paintings was John Butt’s ‘View of Cork’ (c.1750), a panorama of the city seen from an elevated position to the north of the River Lee. The artist depicted a myriad of quays and canals in the city on what is now St Patrick’s Street. On either side of the canal, merchants built warehouses to hold their goods on the ground floor and their staff on the first floor. The painting is a reminder of a time that Cork played an important role in trade with the Dutch in the North Atlantic. The architecture of the buildings in Butt’s painting reflects a strong Dutch influence in their brickwork, a characteristic unique to Cork City. In the early 1700s, the first bricks were applied in buildings and many were Dutch imports. These were unmarked, yellowish in colour, very chalky in texture and generally used as ballast for ships. These imports were not in use for long as local manufacture soon commenced at the Brickfield Slobs, north of the river.

The architectural character of Cork changed considerably during the course of the nineteenth century, and few eighteenth century buildings survive in their original condition. The Dutch character of its narrow streets and quays effectively disappeared being replaced by the more severe look of a ‘modern’ city. The earliest brick-built structures in Britain – apart from those like St Alban’s Abbey that used recycled Roman brick – are to be found in the eastern counties where many people from the Low Countries had settled and where trade links with the Continent were strong. Lack of local stone and an increasing shortage of good timber in the thirteenth century led to the importation of brick from Holland. Bricks were often used as ballast in returning ships. In 1278 a shipment of more than 200,000 Dutch brick arrived in London for use in the Tower. By the early fourteenth century brickmaking was happening in East Yorkshire and down England’s east coast, but the impetus, and some of the craftsmen, came from Holland. Not only the bricks, but the methods of laying them also show influence from the Low Countries. In the art of brick-laying (bonding), both the Flemish and Dutch bond proved popular with British builders. By the Tudor period the brick makers and brick layers had emerged as separate craftsmen well able to rival the masons.

London’s Brick Lane is a reminder of the importance of the industry. Winding through fields, the street was formerly called Whitechapel Lane but derives its current name from former brick and tile manufacture that began in the fifteenth century. Until the nineteenth century brick makers were held in high esteem. After that their reputation tumbled. The Black Boy was one of the most notorious taverns in the so-called ‘Potteries and Piggeries’, the area of Notting Dale (Notting Hill as it is now known) in West London. It was so named because the first people to move into the area were brick and pottery makers. Pottery Lane, then known as Cut-throat Lane, took its name from the brickfields at its northern end where high-quality clay was dug from about 1818. The resulting bricks and tiles were stored in sheds along the lane and fired in a kiln which is still standing in Walmer Road. The brick-makers were ‘notorious types’ known for ‘riotous living’.

Gouda bricks have been recovered in Maryland, Virginia, and other colonial parts. Washington Irving’s fictional narrator Dietrich Knickerbocker describes the houses of Rip Van Winkle’s pleasant village at the foot of New York’s Catskill Mountains dating from the time of Peter Stuyvesant (Governor of New Netherland) as ‘built of small yellow bricks brought from Holland’. L. Frank Baum’s Yellow Brick Road in his novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is another reminder of the American passion for Dutch bricks. In 1626 the Dutch had bought the island of ‘Manhattes’ from Native Americans. Though they only controlled New York for sixty years, their influence on the city’s architectural identity has been pervasive. New Amsterdam was built with an irregular street pattern, narrow winding streets, and a variety of houses with intricate brick façades and stepped gables. Re-creating the architectural patterns of their homeland, settlers applied late-medieval Dutch forms such as roofs with terra-cotta tiles, brick façades, wooden stoops, and leaded-glass casement windows. Colonists initially imported yellow bricks from Holland, which imparted a Netherlandish character to the architecture of the city. The abundance of local clays soon made it unnecessary to import bricks from across the Atlantic.

The word Haverstraw (originally pronounced ‘Haverstro’) is one of the oldest in the geography of North America. It is derived from the Dutch meaning ‘oat straw’, descriptive of the waving straw of grain and vegetable farmers who were the first to settle in Haverstraw. They shipped their products down the river to be sold in the New York City Markets. Having discovered that the Hudson River shore in this area contained large deposits of yellow and blue clay, Jacob van Dyke began to produce bricks in 1771. The industry grew quickly and many brickyards appeared along the Hudson River. Schooners and barges were used to transport the bricks to New York City. By the 1880s there were over forty brickyards in the Haverstraw area furnishing building material that transformed the island of Manhattan into the sprawling metropolis that it is today. After the British took control of the colony in 1664, Dutch architecture continued to persevere for some considerable time. After 1750, English elements started to creep in. Wealthy colonists turned away from the medieval architecture of the Netherlands and imitate the fashionable Georgian style.

In the nineteenth century, Dutch culture experienced a renaissance when Washington Irving revived awareness of America’s origins with his invented romantic folklore of the Hudson Valley. It led to a resurrection of Dutch-American architecture, a movement that sought to impose qualities of early building into a modern context. Remarkably, a similar development took place in England itself. In the 1870s and 1880s Sir Ernest George and his firm of architects in Kensington and Knightsbridge developed a style known as ‘Pont Street Dutch’ (Pont Street is located in Knightsbridge). The style is characterized by stepped and ornamented gables, rubbed and moulded red brickwork, and other elements derived from the Low Countries. For fifteen years such houses proliferated in the Chelsea, Kensington, and Earls Court districts of London.

If historians refer to the ‘Dutch character’ of a city (or part thereof) they point to architecture, streetscape, planning, etc. They rarely mention brick. The same applies to the tradition of city- and streetscape in Dutch painting. But it is brick that makes these paintings unique. As cities like Amsterdam, Delft, Haarlem or The Hague enjoyed a booming economy during the seventeenth century, they vied with one another for aesthetic as well as political pre-eminence. Jan van Goyen, Gerrit Berckheyde, Jan van der Heyden, Jacob van Ruisdael and other painters created vividly realistic, yet idyllic images that made their cities seem like parcels of heaven on earth.

The dark end of the street is missing. None of the evils of city life – crime, poverty, or injustice – are to be seen. Images of towns and cities had figured for centuries in European art, but mainly as background scenery in pictures devoted to religious, historical or mythological subjects. The painters of the golden age in Holland brought the city onto center stage and made the cityscape a genre unto itself. Two parallel developments stimulated the painter and enhanced the desire in putting his city on the artistic map, one of which is the emergence of a refined level of carthography that was developed in Flanders and Holland which led to the publication of a number of sophisticated city atlases, and the other the clever (commercial) cultivation of the Italian ‘vedute’ in which artists from the Low Countries were actively involved.

These included the towering figure of Lieven Cruyl who worked in Rome during the 1660s (his Prospectus locorum urbis Romae insignium – prospects of Rome’s significant places – was published in 1666 by Giovanni Battista de Rossi), and that of the attractive rogue Gaspar van Wittel – he joined the notorious bohemian group of Dutch/Flemish ‘Bentvueghels’ in the eternal city – who created his work in the 1680s. Often called called Vanvitelli, Van Wittel influenced Venetian artist Luca Carlevarijs who in many ways paved the way for the master of the Italian cityscape, Canaletto. In England, topographical prints became popular during the seventeenth century. Vast numbers of books were published containing views of country estates which their owners could have illustrated on the payment of a subscription fee. Numerous immigrant artists from the Low Countries were involved in the profitable business of architectural engraving. In 1686, Amsterdam-born topographical draughtsman and engraver Johannes Kip had arrived in England shortly after William of Orange’s usurpation of the English throne. A major part of his work consists of topographical prints and he is above all remembered for his engravings of country houses in the sumptuous Britannia illustrata (the first volume appeared in 1708).

Art historians tend to look at the 1660s as the decade in which the veduta came of age. It was a period in which the representation of city views and streetscapes became a more common theme, foremost in etching and engraving, but also in painting. The Dutch ‘Golden Age’ expressed intense pride in its flourishing city culture. In a time when the notion of nationhood was almost non-existent, Holland was effectively made up of cities. This city-culture created a society that did not nurture the leading role of an aristocracy. Socio-economic life was dominated by well-to-do burghers who lived and worked in cities. Equality of chance gave society a sharp competitive edge. It was an atmosphere in which the arts flourished, including the art of printing. There have been unsubstantiated suggestions that in the seventeenth century more books were printed in the Netherlands than in the rest of Europe put together. One kind of publication that became increasingly popular in the course of the age was the description (beschrijving) of cities like Amsterdam, Haarlem or Delft.

These books were accompanied by engravings of architectural splendours and/or social activities. Olfert Dapper’s Historische beschryving der stadt Amsterdam is a classic example of such (expensive) publishing undertakings. The art of engraving runs parallel to the painting of Pieter Saenredam in Haarlem or Jan van der Heyden in Amsterdam. All these reflections on priotities and influences have their merit if one tries to establish a chronological sequence of the emerging new genre of city- and streetscape. In this context, it is more illuminating to point at the specific conditions that made the genre both popular in appeal and sophisticated in execution. Always keen to identify a ‘starting point’, some critics have placed Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Gezicht op Delft’ (View of Delft – Marcel Proust considered this to be the most beautiful picture in the world) at the beginning of what turned out to be a rich tradition of urban images.

Vermeer’s meticulously composed townscape of Delft (seen from the south) dates from 1660/1 and is widely acknowledged as one of his masterpieces. At the famous auction of the collection of Jacob Dissius on 6 May 1696 in Amsterdam (which included twenty-one canvases by Vermeer), it was the most expensive picture, fetching 200 guilders. In 1822 the picture was bought by the Mauritshuis in The Hague for the considerable price of 2,900 guilders, a purchase said to have been instigated by King Willem I. Despite the impression of accuracy, Vermeer did not make a precise representation of the view in order to produce a more harmonious composition. In depicting the streets of Delft Vermeer had a competitor in the talented Pieter de Hooch.

The latter’s ‘Binnenplaats van een huis in Delft’ (Courtyard of a house in Delft) preceded Vermeer’s view by a couple of years. De Hooch and Vermeer have been instrumental in raising the street- and cityscape (the city of Delft) to a new level in painting. They have been praised for their detailed architectural images, for the intimacy of their subjects, depicting a world of domestic tranquillity where women, children and pets gather around in the neatness and safety of their homes. What makes their paintings unique however is this: De Hooch and Vermeer are the ‘Barons of Brick’. Their paintings reveal a catalogue of building materials. Due to a lack of building stone, Dutch houses were constructed of brick, which gave visual warmth to their exteriors. Delft moreover took enormous pride in its faience and tile fabrication which was central to the town’s prosperity.

Delft blue was valued not only within the Dutch Republic, but also in other countries such as England where they were imported to decorate home interiors. Both Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer used various tiles, bricks and flagstones which they arranged in tessellated patterns on the surface of household flooring and walls. They were proud representatives of their city. It was through their influence that the cityscape in Dutch painting became a celebration of bricks. The intriguing fact concerning Pieter de Hooch is that he was the son of a Rotterdam stonemason and brick layer. He knew the crafts through exposure to his father’s trade. Pieter de Hooch is Holland’s most notable brickie.

Prospect Street (Gloucester, Mass)

In 1934 Edward Hopper created his oil painting ‘Sun on Prospect Street’. Its subject is an ordinary street in an ordinary American seaside town. The geometric image showing a row of houses and three parked cars is completely devoid of people. The architecture on Prospect Street is recorded with detailed precision. The artist has removed all superfluous elements of the scene, inviting the viewer to add the narrative to an image that is both familiar and strangely foreign. The painting typifies Hopper’s style. Trained by William Merritt Chase, an impressionist; Kenneth Hayes Miller, an urban realist; and Robert Henri, the inspiration behind the Ashcan realists, Hopper is often defined as an American scene painter in line with his predecessors who depicted aspects of everyday city life. Hopper’s intensely personal art, however, does not fit well into this category. His contemplative and introspective figures appear to be alienated from life and society. They occupy a world devoid of interaction and communication, provoking questions about human relationships, the social roles people play, and about the meaning of life itself.

Born on 22 July 1882 in Nyack, New York, Hopper was a loner who experienced acute discomfort in interpersonal relationships. From the outset, his work permeates isolation. He enrolled at the New York School of Art (Chase School), and between 1906 and 1910 made three trips to Europe where he admired the work of Gustave Courbet and Edgar Degas. He was especially drawn to artists whose work included ordinary scenes of people in mundane situations. In 1924 Hopper married Josephine [Jo] Nivison. The couple honeymooned in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a landscape that would become a favourite subject for the painter. They made Greenwich Village their home, sharing time between city and country. During the 1920s Hopper’s career started to take shape. Hooked on travel, he frequently treated themes related to transience such as lodging rooms, restaurants, and trains. His interest in the hotel lobby, a temporary space where strangers briefly congregate but rarely communicate, was sparked by films and novels, especially the detective-story depiction of this area as a meeting place for the protagonists.

In 1941 the second version of The Maltese Falcon appeared on screen. Starring Humphrey Bogart, it is a mystery thriller in which the private-eye confronts the gangster in a hotel lobby. Hopper was attracted to this style of filming with its shadowy settings, eerie lighting, and complex plots. All these elements came together in the 1943 painting ‘Hotel Lobby’, one of his more intriguing works.

The emphasis on a dysfunctional relationship in this painting is not unusual for Hopper. The theme of discontented couples returns regularly in his work. Alternatively, the detailed architectural qualities of Hopper’s painting influenced film makers. His ‘House by the Railroad’ (1925), an ugly dwelling in an uninspiring setting, inspired Hitchcock’s choice of location for Psycho. The painting’s grey mansion is a melancholic reminder of the damage inflicted on the countryside by the demands of progress. At the time railroad tracks were associated with the rapid and noisy change of modern life, but this scene is curiously silent. It is as if the maelstrom of industrialization has passed it by.

Hopper, working in the period between two world wars, feared that urbanization would wipe out the pastoral character of the New World. In the picture, the railway track has been given the colour of earth as if taking the place of the pleasant stream that once formed the background of the American landscape. The painting expresses a tone of regret that reminds one of John Ruskin’s famous outbursts against the industrial pollution of the English countryside.

By the end of the nineteenth century streetscapes had become associated with Paris and the Impressionists. Napoleon III had appointed Georges Haussmann to realize the ambitious project of turning the French capital into a modern metropolis. Once this massive task was completed, the revitalized city turned into one of the favourite pictorial subjects. From Édouard Manet to Gustave Caillebotte, from Pierre Auguste Renoir to Camille Pissarro, Parisian boulevards were considered the ultimate source of inspiration by many outstanding painters of the era.They grasped the atmosphere and dynamics of everyday life on the newly created boulevards and avenues. The cityscape was exported from Paris to America by such talented painters as James McNeill Whistler and Childe Hassam who preceded the artists of the Ashcan School.

As American society became increasingly urbanized, art took a grittier and less romantic direction. Ashcan artists focused on depicting everyday life in Manhattan and the bustling streets of early twentieth-century New York. Leading figures such as Robert Henri, John Sloan, Everett Shinn, and George Bellows, insisted that artists should face urban realities to find their subject matter. They urged young painters to step aside from sterile academic orthodoxy and develop a harsh style reflecting the essence of metropolitan life. Earlier paintings of New York were characterized by distance, being either impressionistic blurs or bird’s-eye views of the city. By contrast, Ashcan artists looked for street level realism. Their gaze was directed at the perspectives of the street itself, their ambition to communicate the ‘theatre’ of inner city streets.

In the commemoration of ordinary lives, the Ashcanners put New York on the artistic map as the city that defines metropolitanism. In their images the crowd effectively becomes the city itself and serves as its primary imagery. Ashcan art offers an intimate feeling for the pressures of inner-city life. The best of these paintings are evocative observations of day to day experiences presented in such a manner that the viewer can emphasize with the ordinariness of the subject matter. The anonymity of city life may be stressed, but the image invites the viewer to participate, to become involved, and to enter into a dialogue. These snapshots of city life are dramatized stories of a struggle for survival in the urban jungle. As such, critics tend to consider the Ashcan creative output as a visual equivalent of Walt Whitman’s poetry.

George Bellows was a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. When he died in 1925, aged only forty-two, Bellows was hailed as one of the greatest artists America had yet produced. His paintings and drawings of tenement children and New York street scenes are iconic images of the modern city. These were produced during an extraordinary period of creativity that began shortly after he left his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for New York in 1904. He selected contemporary subjects that challenged prevailing standards of taste, depicting the city’s impoverished immigrant population in ‘River Rats’ (1906) and other paintings. Bellows’s New York scenes portrayed the crudity of deprived neighbourhoods. Fascinated with the full spectrum of life of the urban working classes, he chronicled a variety of subjects and applied an array of palettes and painting techniques. From 1907 through 1915, he executed a series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. To the artist, these paintings were a testing ground in which he developed a strong sense of light and visual texture. However, his signature contributions to art history are the paintings recording brutal boxing bouts.

To circumvent a state ban on public boxing, fights were illegally organized by private clubs in New York at that time. In three acclaimed masterpieces, ‘Club Night (1907), ‘Stag at Sharkey’s’ (1909), and ‘Both Members of This Club’ (1909), Bellows’s slashing brushwork matches the violent action of the fight itself, and relates the aggressive participation of a grim-faced and chain-smoking audience. These pictures are powerful and disturbing – raw reflections on life in the metropolis. They have become iconic depictions of the American inner-city struggle. The spirit of tough desperation these paintings evoke has been maintained by Paul Simon in his celebrated 1968 song ‘The Boxer’ (first recorded by Simon & Garfunkel).

European Impressionists (and their American followers) created a model of visuality that has been associated with the figure of the disinterested flâneur, the prototypical urban spectator celebrated artistically by Charles Baudelaire or Louis Couperus and critically by Walter Benjamin. The flâneur was a gentleman-dandy whose independent means allowed him to cultivate the arts and rise above the crowd. He would stroll about town without particular direction, purpose, or destination, infiltrating society to see up close and yet maintaining his distance. For Baudelaire, this detached but inquisitive gaze embodied the urban human condition. It originated in the need to protect individual integrity against the threat of metropolitan anonymity. Ashcan painters focused on the city’s inhabitants for their diagnosis of the nature of modern life. They were part of a wider group of urban observers such as Walt Whitman or Stephen Crane who felt involved with the people they depicted. Art was engaged and a statement of social commitment. However, viewing the street as theatre carries with it the dangers of artistic license and misrepresentation. Both sentimentalism and sensationalism are part and parcel of the process. Scenes of poverty, crime, and immigrant life were often described as picturesque scenes and ‘entertaining’ sights.

Slumming became a pastime for a number of curious New Yorkers. A few decades earlier a parallel process had taken place in London where urban deprivation was associated with the East End. The area was by all accounts a social nightmare, a gothic tale of contemporary suffering.

One of the more bizarre aspects of London’s poverty was that by the 1890s the idea of ‘slumming it’ in the dark East End had become a leisure activity of the urban rich. Oscar Wilde’s hedonistic Dorian Gray gave the idea a literary status. The hero of the novel travels into Whitechapel’s shady alleys to sample the rude delights of entertainment that were on offer there. Various studies on London’s poorest districts provided both images of dreadful social conditions and descriptions of crude merriment in clubs and caves.

The most outstanding work of this type was London: a Pilgrimage, published in 1872 by playwright and journalist (William) Blanchard Jerrold. The word ‘pilgrimage’ is a reminder of the fact that such a journey was considered to be one of great moral significance. Illustrated by Gustave Doré, the book is a hellish vision of East End poverty. Doré’s London, with its stark contrasts between affluence and apocalyptic misery, captured the public mood at the time. Of the many social investigations undertaken in the Victorian era, the Pilgrimage had the most enduring appeal. Vincent van Gogh’s admiration for these illustrations led him to paint a version of Doré’s haunting image of dehumanized convicts circling a bleak exercise yard.

The New York Ashcanners were contemporaries of the Camden Town Group in London. Yet there are telling differences between the two traditions. Camden realists were keen to dispel all elements of sympathy or dialogue from their painting. They were interested in the systems and structures of the city to the point of exclusion of the human presence in their paintings. Their outlook was harsher, more clinical, and at the same time more anxious. The cause of this crisis feeling was not war or economic depression, but the speed of change that took place within urbanized society. Anxiety and city images are frequently paired in Camden art. The treatment of urban subjects projects the vitality of the city, but also expresses unease at the effect of massification.

People are cut off from one another, isolated, alienated. The city-dweller has lost his identity. Hopper went a step further. His most intriguing works are his interiors (which links him to the Camden realists). Composed like stage sets, these paintings depict everyday scenes populated with introspective figures that seem oblivious to their surroundings. They suggest a sense of abandonment and uncomfortable repose. The rat race has stopped. Thrown into the isolation of the night people sit back, alone, seemingly questioning the meaning of it all. Stillness pervades – the paralysis of despair. In 1900, young Hopper had made a pen and ink drawing of a ‘Dutch Girl’ in traditional costume with hat and wooden shoes. She personifies the innocence of childhood, yet she is an isolated observer, surveying a scene in which she does not participate. The image indicates that as a student Hopper was already preoccupied with Dutch art (he may have been of Dutch descent himself). The young girl has a prim demeanour – very much like the maidens Vermeer portrayed.

In his famous streetscape, through an extraordinary economy of means, Vermeer succeeded in creating an atmosphere of stillness and puritanical dignity. In painting the street he protects its dwellers – façades of a house show the viewer nothing but the outside of its intimate existence. The artist keeps his distance as if not to interrupt the locals in their daily routine. It is a technique that Hopper applies in a similar manner. Vermeer casts his endearing images in a beautifully warm light. Hopper by contrast presents his isolated characters in a glare of electricity that exposes a brutal urban milieu. The scenes created by Vermeer are tranquil and harmonious, those painted by Hopper ominous and threatening. Hopper is the Vermeer of the contemporary streetscape.

Heddon Street (London)

Heddon Street is a small side-street and alleyway off Regent Street, close to Piccadilly Circus. Yet, the Handbook Guide to Rock and Pop (1997) lists the street as an historic London music site. The reason is David Bowie. His 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars was based on a story of a fictional rock star named Ziggy Stardust. Ziggy is the human manifestation of a ‘space invader’. He is also the definitive rock star: sexually promiscuous, hooked on drugs, but with a message of peace and love. He is destroyed by his own excesses and by the fans he inspired. A film of the same name, directed by D.A. Pennebaker, was released in 1973. The cover of the album shows Bowie posing as Ziggie in front of no. 23 Heddon Street. Photographer Brian Ward created the photograph for the cover. Originally shot in black and white, Ward tinted the photographs to achieve the storybook style of the album sleeve. More importantly, however, it was in the basement at no. 9 Heddon Street that in 1912 England’s first cabaret club opened its doors.

The concept of cabaret is a Continental one. The first modern nightclub, the Chat Noir, opened in Montmartre in 1881. The club presented itself as a ‘cabaret artistique’, a new kind of public meeting place for writers, poets and artists. In an obituary of its founder Louis Rodolphe Salis, the New York Times of 23 March 1897 specifically referred to the artistic clientèle of the Chat Noir: ‘Here Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Daudet, and the frères de Goncourt assembled to write verses and eat their dinners, including wine, for twenty sous. Here Guy de Maupassant came nightly, brooding alone, at a table apart from the others. Paul Verlaine wrote verses here, seated at a marble table, with ink and a bottle of wine before him, and a quill pen in his hand’. The Chat Noir staged the integration of the artist as a social outcast, the ‘poète maudit’, into the gallery of criminals, revolutionaries, and libertines long associated with the shady underworld of pubs and clubs.

This, the first modern nightclub, was both a place of adversarial culture and a shrewdly planned commercial venture. Almost as soon as the Chat Noir opened in 1881, Salis turned the club into a money making enterprise, in part to advance the careers of writers and artists associated with the club. The Chat Noir exploited the medium of print to disseminate its brand of bohemianism. The club published its own weekly journal in tabloid format, with a print run that grew from 300 to 20,000 copies per week in a matter of seven years. Other publications included the Chat Noir Guide, a brochure listing art works that were for sale at the club; the Album du Chat Noir, a portfolio of drawings to be sold by subscription; song sheets of lyrics recited or sung at the club, and collections of stories concerning the club. Bohemianism was good business.

A significant aspect of the new nightclub was the design of its interior. Again, the Chat Noir had set a precedent. Its rooms were decorated seemingly at random. In reality, the cabaret’s environment had been carefully planned. It featured furniture and artifacts of the Louis XIII period, but arranged in such grotesque settings as to make them incongruous. Walls were covered with green paper or drapes. Panels were made with glazed doors of Louis XIII design. On all available wall space were hung paintings and prints created by the cabaret’s resident artists (the ‘artist-in-residence’ was also a new concept). Pots, plants, plates, and antiques hung from the ceiling or were stacked in corners and niches. The deliberate attempt was to mix the ancient and the modern, to blend the rococo and the commonplace, to combine the luxurious and the obnoxious, to fuse style and kitsch. Many clubs adapted themselves to specific themes.

One of the more outrageous attempts was made at the Cabaret du Ciel. Waiters were dressed as angels with wings and wigs. As guests sipped on the ‘ambrosia of the gods’, they were treated to ‘mystical illusions and celestial music’ while beholding burlesque religious rites (striptease in other words). Heaven was situated on the second floor of the house. The 1903 Pleasure Guide to Paris describes this abode in the following terms: ‘It is a vast grotto, in which hang stalactites of a golden colour. Here Saint Peter is represented by a robust mulatto, armed with a long key, with which he opens the door for the elect … Gorgeous transformations now take place in a mysterious manner, so as to favour the illusion that it is no longer this sad earth of ours, but a region ethereal and serene where all the angels are represented by women’.

At the Café du Néant visitors entered a dark chamber lit only by wax tapers suspended on a chandelier composed of human skulls and arms. Customers were welcomed by waiters dressed as undertakers and seated at tables made of coffins, from where they could ponder images of death, carnage and assassination that adorned the walls. After drinking ‘les microbes de la mort’, clients would be directed to the Hall of Incineration where they could enjoy a spectacle of death and decay. A chosen member from the audience was placed in an upright coffin. Using a projected image, glass and mirrors an illusion was cast to make it appear as if that person was slowly decomposing into a skeleton.

In 1885, Aristide Bruant opened a club called Le Mirliton. Its famous owner – the man in the red scarf and black cape featuring on Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters – composed and performed accusatory songs in Parisian slang about the fate of the poor and downtrodden, and about crime and violence in the city. His mix of song, satire and entertainment was popular with the affluent classes slumming in the Montmartre district. The ‘chanson réaliste’ made an instant impact and became part of the repertoire of most cabaret performers in the European capitals. This repertoire consisted of poems of loss and hopelessness. It listed songs that dealt with the struggle for life in poorest parts of the city, and with the thugs, pimps, and tarts that called them home. Its themes were poverty, abandonment, deprivation, combined with socio-political commentary. Novelists had been a major influence on the development of the genre which had been preceded by such literary movements as Realism and Naturalism. Later, the art form was performed mainly by female vocalists. It was brought to perfection by Édith Piaf.

Once the madness of the Great War was behind them, Parisians rebounded in a carnival of cosmopolitan hedonism known as ‘les années folles’. There was a new aspect to this particular orgy of pleasure: the influx of American youngsters who were sick of prohibition and puritanical small-mindedness back home. Some of them had plenty of dollars in their pockets taking advantage of the strong exchange rate, while others arrived with the sole ambition of making it as an artist. Many nightclubs cultivated a deliberately coarse and promiscuous atmosphere. In Berlin, these were known as ‘Tingeltangel’ clubs.

The sleazy atmosphere of such establishments is captured in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film Der blaue Engel (based upon a novel by Heinrich Mann) with lusty Marlene Dietrich as the chanteuse Lola Lola.

The story line was inspired by clubs such as Zum hungrigen Pegasus (opened in Berlin in October 1901 by artist Max Karl Tilke), where one could enjoy performances by a poet named Dolorosa (real name: Maria Eichhorn) reciting erotic and sadomasochistic verses, or artists performing ‘niggersongs’.
The identification of jazz with the ‘spirit of the times’ formed the essence of many articles and essays during the 1920s. When in May 1938 Hans Severus Ziegler organized the ‘Entartete Musik’ exhibition in Düsseldorf, he included work by Schönberg, Kurt Weill, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Mahler, Krenek, and many others. He specifically turned against the Berlin craze for jazz. Ernst Krenek had incorporated jazz influences into his opera Jonny spielt auf (1926). Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill were interested in the means of expression found in jazz, but in the Nazi interpretation of German high culture there was no place for ‘Niggermusik’.

With an audience consisting of artists, scholars, writers, financiers, well-connected ladies, prostitutes, and criminals, the nightclub was a place where middle-class citizens could pretend to be bohemians and, for one night at least, release themselves of all shackles of respectability. These weekend bohemians introduced the recreational practice of ‘slumming’. Middle-class city dwellers visiting naughty clubs in marginal neighbourhoods became an ingredient in the allure of modern European urban nightlife. The OED dates the first use of the word ‘slumming’ to 1884. Social commentators and reformers visited London slum neighbourhoods in order to observe social life in those parts. Once Oscar Wilde incorporated the theme of ‘slumming it’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray the idea became fashionable and held a fascination for authors and artists alike. Nocturnal club life added spice to the concept.

Outside France, the authorities looked at such developments with a degree of concern. The presence of cabaret performer Hans Hyan, the owner of Zur Silbernen Punschterrine (The Silver Punchbowl) which had opened in Berlin in November 1901, was closely watched by the police. After all, Hyan had a criminal record. In 1891 he had been sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for aggravated burglary; ten years later he was (unsuccessfully) investigated for robbery. He was fined for libel and suspected of writing and publishing pornography. For a while, Hyan was the talk of the town. He was celebrated as Berlin’s counterpart to Aristide Bruant.

Like his French model, he used local slang, sang songs about criminals and outcasts, and verbally insulted the curious audience that came to see his cabaret. To be treated rudely and abused aggressively was all part of the fun of slumming. Hans Hyan was a master of this game. He had the skill to imitate the speech of various social groups in the city, in particular the slang of the criminal fraternity. His command of the Berlin dialect was masterful. No one less than Kurt Tucholsky remembered Hyan for his capacity of capturing phonetically the ‘Berlin manner of thought, the Berlin soul’. Hans was Berlin, Berlin was Hyan. The relationship with the authorities worsened when Dolorosa started to perform regularly at the Punschterrine. Her list of explicitly erotic and masochistic songs, of which ‘The Song of Songs of Pain and Torture’ was a particular favourite of the club’s clients, became morally intolerable to many respectable observers. Cabaret had become a celebration of immorality. The club was finally shut down in 1904.

Frida Strindberg was very much a product of the European avant-garde of the early twentieth century. Born in Austria as the daughter of the editor of the Wiener Zeitung, Frida Uhl worked as a writer and translator in Vienna. In 1893, at the tender age of twenty years, she met forty-three year old Swedish writer and dramatist August Strindberg, who had achieved fame as the author of more than twenty plays, several novels, autobiographical works and collections of stories, poems and essays. He was a controversial figure whose sexually frank works had incurred the intervention of Swedish and German censors. Fame was not accompanied by money. At the time Strindberg proposed to Frida, the writer was heavily in debt and being pursued by his first wife for child support payments. Friedrich Uhl opposed the marriage, doubting the author’s ability to support his daughter.

Frida and August married soon after their first meeting in spite of her father’s disapproval. Strindberg’s reputation allowed her access to the bohemian circles he frequented, and make lasting contacts with some outstanding artists of her day. In marrying Strindberg, a morose misogynist if ever there was one, she sacrificed not only the relationship with her family but also her career as a writer and critic. Taking his financial affairs in hand, she at once tried to organize a production of his work in England. However, Strindberg did not approve of the active role Frida was taking in his business affairs, and the marriage in which one daughter was born ended in divorce in 1895. It has been suggested that their stormy relationship inspired Strindberg’s tirades against women in general and against married women in particular. Frank Wedekind, the German playwright who in his work laid bare the shams of sexual morality in his time, was the father of Frida’s second child. She sent both her children away to be cared for by her parents.

Fin de siècle Vienna was a major centre for arts and culture. It was the most exciting period in the capital’s cultural history. The literary and artistic movement known as ‘Jung Wien’ (Young Vienna) was composed of such remarkable artists as Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, and others. Frida was closely involved with several writers of the Young Vienna movement, such as the poet Peter Altenberg for whom she organized a subscription, and the journalist and outstanding satirist Karl Kraus whom she convinced to sponsor a reading of Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box. Her affair with the writer Werner von Oesteren was particularly problematic. She threatened him on two separate occasions with a revolver. Details of this relationship were made public in 1905 when she sued Werner for harassing a detective she had hired to follow him. In 1908, on New Year’s Day, she fired a gun in a Viennese hotel. This may have been an attempt to take her life.

The event caused such publicity in her native town that she decided to move to London where, in 1912, she opened the Cave of the Golden Calf (named after one of the rooms in the Parisian Chat Noir) at no. 9 Heddon Street, off Regent Street, England’s first ‘Cabaret Club’ housed in a large basement below a warehouse. She intended her club to be a meeting place for writers and artists, an avant-garde rival to the nearby Café Royal where Oscar Wilde once was one of the regulars. The club offered a cheap meal and reduced admission to young artists. The Cave served as a kind of avant-garde soup kitchen. For better-off clients, of course, there was lobster salad on the menu.

The Continental inspiration for the club, apart from the Chat Noir, was the Kaberett Fledermaus in her native Vienna. In her ‘Preliminary Prospectus’ to the opening of the club, issued in April 1912, Frida proudly announced that the interior of the establishment would be ‘entirely and exclusively’ decorated by ‘leading young British artists’. The ‘Prospectus’ was illustrated with woodcuts by Wyndham Lewis. It claimed that the cabaret would do away with the necessity of crossing the Channel in order ‘to laugh freely and sit up after nursery hours’. As this comment suggests, the Cave of the Golden Calf looked to the Chat Noir for inspiration. Moreover, the Cave opened only three months after Marinetti’s notorious first visit to London, which gave an added Futurist impetus to Frida’s plans for her club. Among its ‘resident’ artists were Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Wyndham Lewis. Frida insisted that the club presented itself properly in print, from its ‘Preliminary Prospectus’ to programs, announcements and menus.

Typography was essential. All printed materials were designed by Wyndham Lewis according to the latest Continental styles. Sculptor Jacob Epstein transformed the cellar’s structural columns into plaster female figures described by Ford Madox Ford in his 1923 novel The Marsden Case as ‘white caryatids with heads of hawks, cats, and camels picked out in red’. Opening night saw performances by Norwegian cabaret singer and founder of the Oslo Chat Noir Bokken Lasson, shadow plays by Wyndham Lewis, an actor reciting Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, and, in true cabaret fashion, a young cockney shouting foul mouthed abuse at the audience.

Ezra Pound admired Frida’s achievement. Other luminaries who frequented the establishment included Katherine Mansfield, Ford Madox Ford, and – of course – Augustus John. The Cave attracted London’s bohemian set, the mad, bad and decadent. It contributed to the erosion of class identities in the capital. Here guests could enjoy the full cabaret repertoire, plays and poetry, jazz and ragtime music, song and dance, with champagne served until dawn. The Cave went bankrupt in 1914, but not before Strindberg herself had become disappointed by its failure as an artistic experiment. It proved nevertheless to be an influential venture and became the model for a number of nightclubs of the 1920s. The Cave of the Golden Calf had certainly made a contribution to modernism in Britain. The club had served as the after-hours headquarters for what would become the vanguard movement of Vorticism. London’s first avant-garde movement was born in Frida Strindberg’s nightclub. After closure of her club, Frida left for the United States, where she secured a job with Fox Film.

Nollendorfplatz (Berlin)

Nollendorfplatz is a square in the Schöneberg district, one of Berlin’s oldest gay neighbourhoods, colloquially called ‘Nolli’. It is dominated by the ornate Metropol Theatre which started life in 1906 as the Neue Schauspielhaus. The adjacent area in the south around Motzstrasse is the city’s most prominent pink village. Already the camp capital of Europe by the late 1920s, Berlin had at least 160 gay bars and clubs. Uncertainty of the future, at an era suspended between the hedonism of the waning Weimar era and the ominous shadow of Nazism, created a ‘so what’ atmosphere. Berlin was an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time.

In Schöneberg, theatres, cabarets, and clubs catered to homosexuals, lesbians, transsexuals, and sadomasochists of Berlin’s liberated sub-culture. The Nazis attempted to eliminate all traces of that sub-culture, but today the district is once again a centre of gay life. A small memorial plaque near the south entrance of Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station commemorates homosexual victims of the Nazi era.

Photographs from the early twentieth century show Nollendorfplatz as a bustling urban square filled with people on parade. It was this kind of libertine atmosphere that enticed gay novelist Christopher Isherwood. On 29 November 1929 he had packed two suitcases and a rucksack and set off for Berlin on a one-way ticket, rejecting his upper-middle-class background and the social values to which his mother, widowed in the First World War, was desperately clinging.

Isherwood had dramatized the family quarrel in his first novel, All the Conspirators, published in 1928. In Berlin he would work on a second novel, The Memorial, which further explored the gulf between the generations caused by the war. It was, however, the novels he wrote about Berlin, Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935) and Goodbye to Berlin (1939), that made his reputation as one of the leading writers of his generation, providing an indelible tragic-comic portrait of a city teetering on the brink of catastrophe as Fascism gained in popular support.

To Isherwood, ‘Berlin meant boys’. Boys he could find aplenty in bars such as the Eldorado, on the corner of Motzstrasse and Kalckreuthstrasse, haunt of a demi-monde that included Marlene Dietrich and chanteuse Claire Waldorff. The Kleist Casino, between Nollendorfplatz and Wittenbergplatz, just a stone’s throw away from Isherwood’s lodgings, was perhaps the oldest gay bar in Europe, and remained in operation until a decade ago. Isherwood was attracted to Berlin by the ready availability of homosexual partners, but he also communicated a strong sense that he was experiencing historical changes around him. In Berlin he observed ‘a brew’ of history in the making. This brew seethed with unemployment, hunger, prostitution, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potentially explosive ingredients. With his portrayal of Berlin between the late 1920s and early 1930s Isherwood has left us images that are still associated with this period. The Berlin novels look at history at street level, showing how ordinary people were affected. His eye for physical detail and human oddity means that his characters are never merely representative of their class or condition. Many of them live on in the memory.

In the feckless cabaret singer Sally Bowles (on whose story the stage musical Cabaret was later based) Isherwood created one of literature’s lasting figures. Her character was based on Jean Ross, the young British actress whom Isherwood met in 1930, when he moved into a boarding house at no. 17 Nollendorfstrasse, owned by Fräulein Thurau. The apricot-coloured house still stands.

Depictions of the city in the paintings of German Expressionists employ abstract formal elements such as distortions of perspective and unnatural colour in order to convey the artist’s emotional reaction to the city. The treatments of urban subjects project a sense of the speed, energy and vitality of the city, but also express fear of the effect of urbanization upon individual city dwellers.

Depictions of the city in the paintings of German Expressionists employ abstract formal elements such as distortions of perspective and unnatural colour in order to convey the artist’s emotional reaction to the city. The treatments of urban subjects project a sense of the speed, energy and vitality of the city, but also express fear of the effect of urbanization upon individual city dwellers.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s 1912 oil painting ‘Nollendorfplatz’ shows a busy junction with converging trams. Its composition is filled with stark tensions. The painting features a crowd of people, but the lack of individuation of these small figures (many of them are nothing more than a single brush stroke) brings out the anonymity of urban living. Kirchner’s city-dweller has lost his identity. The urban area the figures inhabit causes a feeling of unease by its colouring and distorted perspective. The image suggests speed, motion, and congestion – but trams and people seem to be running in circles lacking any purpose or direction.

Tyburn Road (London)

The name of Tyburn Road does no longer exist in London. At one time, Tyburn was a village close to the current location of Marble Arch. It took its name from a tributary of the Thames which is now completely covered over between its source and outfall into the river. Tyburn is recorded in the Domesday Book. The predecessors of Oxford Street and Park Lane were roads leading to the village, then called Tyburn Road and Tyburn Lane respectively.

Until 1783 Tyburn served as London’s primary place of execution. Public displays of executions were a vital part of the criminal justice system which relied upon fear of retribution. On hanging day, the condemned were brought to the site from Newgate prison, which included a two mile procession through London along Holborn, St Giles and Tyburn Road to the Tyburn Tree (triangular gallows purposely built for multiple executions introduced in 1571).

Prisoners were transported on open carts, be they criminals, traitors, and religious martyrs. There are probably more historic prints of Tyburn than any other location in London. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Francis Thompson dedicated a poem ‘To the English Martyrs’ that starts with the following lines:

Rain, rain on Tyburn tree,
Red rain a-falling;
Dew, dew on Tyburn tree,
Red dew on Tyburn tree,
And the swart bird a-calling.
Thence it roots so fast and free,
Yet it is a gaunt tree,
Black as be
The swart birds alone that seek,
With red-bedabbled breast and beak,
Its lank black shadow falling.

Public hangings were a fair day. A rowdy and drunken mob followed the procession through the streets, pelting the condemned with rotten vegetables and stones. The procession to Tyburn and the executions served according to Henry Fielding in An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers (1751) ‘to add the Punishment of Shame to that of Death; in order to make the Example an Object of greater Terror’. After the procession and having reached Tyburn the condemned person was allowed to make a ‘gallows speech’. Then a prison chaplain would urge the criminal to repent in a final prayer. As soon as the hangman appeared the noose was adjusted and a bag drawn over the criminal’s head. The horse would be lashed to move the cart and leave the criminal hanging in the air. Executions drew large number of spectators. Men, women and children enjoyed the carefree atmosphere. It was a great day for vendors, pickpockets, whores, pimps and broadside sellers. There were literally hundreds of gallows songs in circulation telling the stories of murderers, pirates, traitors and other felons.

The first readily available accounts of crimes and criminals in England were broadsheets and chapbooks. A broadsheet is a single sheet of paper with typically four pages printed on each side in such a way that the buyer could fold, stitch and cut it to form a booklet. A chapbook is one of these sold ready made up. Both were cheap and peddled at fairs and executions. Many of these included complete accounts of the execution, including the last words of the condemned man sometimes before he had even spoken them. The first so-called ‘Newgate Calendars’ were collections of these accounts, and as the eighteenth century progressed, more and more crimes were added. The various collections plagiarized their predecessors shamelessly. Some of them added morals to the stories. It was because of the didactic message that they were considered uplifting reading. Crime was also a frequent subject matter of contemporary engravings and prints. There was a flourishing market in these works, particularly in London. On first view many of such prints were morality tales, but the rich details in some, notably those of William Hogarth (in particular ‘Industry and Idleness’, 1747), contained different levels of meaning and social criticism. Although many prints celebrated the virtues of English law, there were frequent criticisms of lawyers, watchmen, and the police, thus providing a running commentary on crime and punishment in the metropolis.

The market for accounts of criminals’ lives was buoyant. It was not unusual for a condemned person to sell his biography to the highest-bidding prospective author. The expansion of detailed information about criminal cases available in newspapers and trial reports meant that the more sensationalist and moralistic forms of this literature became increasingly implausible, as readers could compare these tales with more explicit accounts. From the early eighteenth century, an increasing number of newspapers were published that provided detailed reports of crimes, trials, and punishments. There were accounts of murders and highway robberies; of trials at the Old Bailey; of executions of notorious criminals; and accounts of rarer punishments such as burning at the stake. And there was plenty to report.

The Bloody Code is a term used to refer to the English system of laws and punishments that was in use from 1400 to 1850. By the early nineteenth century there were more than 200 offences carrying the death penalty. Crimes that were punishable by execution included stealing anything worth more than five shillings, stealing horses or sheep, right through to arson, treason and murder. In 1823, the mandatory death penalty was made discretionary for all crimes except treason and murder. Gradually the number of capital offences was reduced, and by 1861 brought down to five (murder, piracy, arson, espionage, and high treason).

The criminal biography became a popular genre after the publication of The History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highwaymen by Captain Alexander Smith in 1714. Ostensibly such books were meant to teach moral lessons by illustrating that crime does not pay. The wealth of titillating details however made these books highly entertaining. Publishers who were seeking material frequently visited Newgate prison looking for notorious criminals willing to sell their stories. Some attracted more than one biography, and some of the biographies went through multiple editions. Some of these publications purported to be autobiographies. Although heavily edited by publishers, the ‘authenticity’ of the tale was an important selling point. It was crucial that the voice of the criminal could be heard in these accounts. Every publisher was chasing a ‘good’ story. Changing standards of morality led to a toning down of the more lurid sexual details found in early publications. Consequently, by the 1770s some of the more racy publications were in decline.

Even so, throughout the nineteenth century crime, continued to be an audience-puller for authors ranging from George W.M. Reynolds with his long-running serial novel The Mysteries of London to the better remembered novels and stories of Wilkie Collins, Dickens and Trollope. One could argue that Truman Capote’s nonfictional novel In Cold Blood (1966) and the subsequent movement of New Journalism has in its documentation of true murder stories been preceded by a long history of English semi-fictionalized crime reporting.

Late October 1783 John Austin attacked John Spicer, robbed him and left him near to death in a field outside Bethnal Green. He was arrested and identified as a repeat offender. He was condemned to hang. On Friday morning 7 November 1783 he embarked upon his final journey when the procession took him through the streets of London from Newgate prison to the site of execution. He was the last man to be hanged at Tyburn. Making his gallows speech, Austin attempted to show the repent that authorities expected of a condemned man. He acknowledged the justice of his sentence. He continued warning his listeners to stay clear of crime and live a peaceful God-fearing life. It was a perfect moral tale that would have bored the hardened spectators. They expected bravado from a condemned person. They wanted him to show contempt for the judge, to be fearless towards the hangman, to face death with indifference. They demanded a proper show, not a sermon. The crowd became restless. Death came slowly for Austin. The noose of the halter having slipped to the back part of his neck, it took ten minutes before he was dead. Some of the unhappy mob had no sympathy for his prolonged demise. Whereas conventional practice allowed the body of felons executed for crimes other than murder to be turned over to their friends and family for burial, a disorderly element in the attending crowd gained possession of Austin’s mortal remains, carried them back to Newgate, and dropped them there to be buried. The unruly scene deepened unease with the increasingly rowdy atmosphere on execution days. Pressure increased to close procedures at Tyburn. Suburban development in the immediate vicinity of the place of execution had been fast and furious during the later part of the eighteenth century. Residents objected to the Tyburn carnival. Austin’s execution was the last to involve a procession through London and the hanging at Tyburn. Hangings from then on were to be conducted at the newly erected gallows immediately outside Newgate prison.