Fun Facts: Maxfield Parrish's "Daybreak"

This young woman, in Parrish's "Morning"
(http://www.greatmodernpictures.com/mfp08lg.jpg)




was also the model for the reclining girl in 1922's "Daybreak"
(http://americanart.si.edu/eyelevel/images/parrish.jpg)



Her name was Kitty Owen.
And her grandfather was William Jennings Bryan.


Her mother - Bryan's daughter Ruth Bryan Owen - was a prominent feminist, and was later elected to Congress in 1928, and has a fascinating biography herself. Ruth Bryan Owen was the mother of four (two with the first husband, two with Maj. Owen), but if "Kitty" Owen is also known as "Helen Rudd Brown" (noted as "daughter of Ruth Bryan Owen"), then she ran for Congress herself, in 1958 and 1960 (and lost).

According to
http://politicalgraveyard.com/families/1185.html
Helen Rudd Brown - either the girl in "Daybreak", or, more likely, her half-sister - was still living in 2003.

(This family gets more interesting the deeper one looks:
http://www.nndb.com/people/098/000052939/
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/Cambridge/entries/061/Ruth-Bryan-Owen-Rohde.html
http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstory/jofreeman/polhistory/owen.htm

WJ Bryan's wife was a lawyer herself.
Not only was RB Owen the first woman Representative from the deep South, but FDR appointed her as America's first woman Ambassador. Ruth Bryan apparently dropped out of college in 1903 to marry and raise a family; was divorced in 1909, and only married Major Reginald Owen (a Brit, no less) in 1910 - so either the girl in the picture was about 11 years old, or she took her stepfather's name.)

Here's a photo of Eleanor Roosevelt and RB Owen:

http://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blyfdr143.htm

Anyway, let's take a moment to reflect upon Parrish's masterpiece, "Daybreak":

This was considered to be fine art in 1922, and it was the most popular art print of the 20th century (the figure "one for every four American homes" is commonly cited) - but let's note that over eighty-five years later, in today's climate of panic, it counts as kiddie-pr0n: the naked girl is Parrish's daughter Jean, who was all of eleven years old. Parrish couldn't have sold this to the American public in the 21st century; he'd be lucky to talk his way out of jail just for having painted it.

Times change.

It's turtles all the way down

There really is no bottom to this 'history' stuff.

Everybody knows that Bristol fishermen had discovered the cod of the Grand Bank well before Columbus "discovered" the New World - they were drying their catch ashore here for hundreds of years before European settlement.

In 1609, Henry Hudson wasn't even the first European to sail up his eponymous river; but, starting then, the Dutch returned every summer to trade for furs. After a few years, they set up a permanent trading post (1614) on Albany's "Castle Island".

And why was it called "Castle Island"?

Because "Castle Island" was the home of the extensive ruins of the French fort of 15-fucking-40.

(Which doesn't seem to have been built by Monsieur Cartier, who was poking around the St. Lawrence around then, but I can't seem to find any name at all attached to this expedition.)

(And just why were the Albany natives so happy to see the Dutch show up, and just why were they so eager to trade with them? Because the French had helped the Hurons rout the Albany locals (up on Lake Champlain) the previous summer,
about three months before Hudson showed up in the fall. They wanted guns.)

For all the Big Deal that Albany makes of the year "1609", you might think that somebody would have at least mentioned "1540".

Pretty soon I'll find out that Leif Eriksson actually built an early canal around the Cohoes Falls.

Today's Fun Facts

Catching up with The New Yorker, here's a quote from "Future Reading" by Anthony Grafton, Nov. 5, 2007 p. 53:

A conservative reckoning of the number of books ever published is thirty-two million; Google believes that there could be as many as a hundred million. It is estimated that between three and ten per cent of all known books are currently in print, and twenty per cent - those produced between the beginning of print, in the fifteenth century, and 1923 - are out of copyright. The rest, perhaps seventy-five per cent of all books ever printed, are "orphans," possibly still covered by copyright protections but out of print and pretty much out of mind. Google, controversially, is scanning those books although it is not yet making them fully available; Microsoft, more cautiously, is scanning only what it knows it can legitimately disseminate.

Jefferson's Library

About a decade ago, we realized that our books were more numerous than the library that Jefferson sold to replace the LC. Think of that: our late-90s collection - assembled by an ordinary couple in an ordinary suburban house - was numerically as big as the LC used to be, early in the 19th century. That's some sort of index of how rich our society is today.

Over on LibraryThing, they're loading in the catalog of TJ's library, the collection he sold to Congress to rebuild the LC after the British burned it.

"On Jan. 30, 1815, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950."

So that's an average price of $3.69 in 1815.

(As it happens, that was a high point for American prices - prices had jumped by fully a third due to the War of 1812, and, except for the Civil War, prices would generally decline for the rest of the 19th century.)

according to

http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppowerus/result.php

$23,950 in 1815 was worth $323,830.99 in 2006: $49.89 per book
(A further 3% inflation gives us $333,546 in 2007: $51.42 per book.)
So, say, roughly $50 per book, mostly leather-bound hardcovers.

So, Jefferson's collection was sold for more like "Folio Society" prices than like "bookstore" prices.

(Sidebar: Note that relentless inflation is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon - American prices were essentially the same in 1941 as they were in 1815:

According to this calculator:
$13,075.32 in the year 1900 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$15,645.41 in the year 1915 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$24,190.95 in the year 1918 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.
$23,660.87 in the year 1941 has the same "purchase power" as $23,950 in the year 1815.)

"We are stardust..."

This is one of my all-time favorite Fun Facts:


Harlow Shapely's quote has entered the larger culture - that "We are stardust, we are golden" as Joni Mitchell / CSN paraphrased it -- that every single heavy atom in us had to have been cooked up in the heart of an earlier generation of star.

Well, I've run across a factoid that's even neater. From Energies by Vaclav Smil, MIT Press 1999:

"High intensities of heterotrophic metabolism mean that living organisms surpass the Sun in power output per unit of mass.

Given the star's enormous mass (1.99 x 10 to the 33 g), its immense luminosity (3.9 x 10 to the 26 W) prorates to just about 200 nW/g of the stellar matter. In contrast, the daily metabolism of children (averaging about 3 mW/g of body weight) proceeds at a rate about 15,000 times higher, and respiring bacteria reach up to 100W/g, or 500 million times the Sun's rate. Stars astonish with their total energy fluxes, but ATP-driven energy conversions in heterotrophic organisms have unrivaled intensities of energy conversions per unit mass." (p.39)

In other words, not only are we made of stardust, but we burn brighter, too. I find that fact to be inexpressibly poignant.