Word: splendid
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...medium was so handy and quick-drying that it could serve almost as photography, recording a fascinating panorama of costume, manners and habits. The master of social observation was Thomas Rowlandson, with his scenes of 18th century London-like the splendid Old Vauxhall Gardens (circa 1784), in which portraits of such notables as Dr. Johnson, Boswell and the Prince of Wales are mingled with the faces of anonymous revelers. Other artists went farther afield. George Chinnery fled his family in 1802 and settled in India, where he turned out a stream of elegant, precise topographical studies like Figure Seated...
...YLib loonies." A harried husband, she says, "should stand up and clout the Old Lady a couple of times just to let her know he's still boss." Pauline was the John Wayne of madams, with an admixture of Mae West. Like her book, she was a splendid period piece...
...that tawny palimpsest on the Tiber. It was left to a failed 18th century architect, who built one long-ignored church on the Aventine, to give the city its definitive shape: the word Piranesian, as a synonym for phantasmagoric grandeur, has entered the language of art. This month, a splendid exhibition of Piranesi's studies and engravings opened at Columbia University in Manhattan; its centerpiece is a set of 23 wash drawings for Piranesi's intended remodeling of San Giovanni in Laterano. These rare sketches cast a fresh light on the unique junction that Piranesi maintained between Baroque...
Survival Shelf. The splendid set pieces of the book explain the intricate classic art of building a log cabin, notch by hand-hewn notch, the principles of stone chimney construction, the shingles split from the white oak log with wedges, go-devil, maul and froe. And how to feed up, slaughter, dress out, pepper cure, smoke, cook and eat a hog, with two opinions about what one does with the ears, which are gristly. Not to mention a dissertation on moonshining as a fine art-by men who practiced it well...
Oppression. Many of these courses emphasize a long history of discrimination and denigration. Joanna Russ, an English instructor at Cornell, is trying to change the rules whereby, as she recalls her own education, "we studied E.M. Forster but not Virginia Woolf. We read Thackeray, who was splendid, but not Charlotte Bronte, who was considered eccentric, minor and dull." In history, too, the emphasis has been changed to the study of "invisible women" whose achievements have been largely forgotten: Dorothea Dix, whose exposes revolutionized conditions in mental institutions a century ago; Sojourner Truth, a former slave and influential abolitionist...