James Lucas engagement report

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• Jul 30, 202617x their median

  This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at... The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power. Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually. That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made... Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept. There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it: "Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."

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• Jul 31, 202613x their median

  This is one of the most beloved paintings in America, and it puts its finger on something we all pass through, first as the child, and one day as the parent left behind... The painting is Breaking Home Ties, by Norman Rockwell, on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. A father and his teenage son sit side by side on the running board of a battered farm truck, waiting at a railway stop. A single track runs along the bottom of the picture. A ticket pokes from the boy's pocket. His suitcase is stacked with schoolbooks and wears a "State U" pennant. The train is coming to carry him off to college, away from home, for the first time in his life. Everything is in the way they sit. The son sits upright, scrubbed and dressed in his best, eyes fixed on the horizon, on the track, on the future rushing toward him. He is already half gone. For him that train is the beginning of everything. His father sits beside him in worn work clothes and scuffed boots, looking the other way, down the line, as if he cannot bear to watch it arrive. The same train means the opposite thing to him. For the son it is the start of a life. For the father it is the day the house grows quieter, the chair at the table sits empty, and the person he built his world around walks out into a life that no longer has him at its centre. Look at his hands. He is holding two hats. His own battered one, and resting on top of it, his son's crisp new one, held carefully together, because it is the last small thing he can still do for the boy... And then the dog, its head laid in the son's lap, gazing up, refusing to look away. Rockwell knew exactly what that was for: "The father couldn't show how he felt about the boy's leaving," he said. "The dog did." It has moved people for 70 years because every leaving is a beginning for one person and an ending for another. The child steps out into the world, as they should. And someone stays behind, watching them go, and loving them enough to let them go anyway...

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• Aug 14, 202611x their median

  This is real footage from 81 years ago Penn Station in 1945 https://t.co/3ALp7sGr5y

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• Aug 19, 20265.2x their median

  Van Gogh painted this in one of the darkest years of his life, and it might be the most hopeful thing he ever made... The painting is Almond Blossoms, made by Vincent in 1890. Branches of white blossom open against a clear blue sky, and there is nothing sad in it anywhere, which is remarkable, because of when he painted it. His brother Theo, the person who had loved and supported him his whole life, had just had a son, and named the boy Vincent, after his struggling uncle. When the news reached Van Gogh, he started painting right away. He chose almond blossom on purpose. In the south of France the almond is the first tree to flower, sometimes as early as February, breaking into blossom while winter is barely over. It is the tree that announces that life is starting again. For a new baby carrying his own name, Van Gogh painted the most beautiful symbol he knew for new life. He was, at that very moment, seriously ill. This was the period of his breakdowns in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and not long after finishing the picture he suffered one of his worst attacks and could not paint for weeks. And yet what he made for his nephew has no shadow in it at all. He gathered whatever strength he had and poured all of it into something joyful, a gift for a child he wanted to welcome into the world. Theo and his wife hung it above the piano in their home, and it stayed one of the most treasured paintings the family owned. The baby it was painted for, Vincent Willem van Gogh, grew up, kept it safe, and went on to found the museum in Amsterdam that holds most of his uncle's work to this day. This, to me, is what makes the painting extraordinary: a man at the limits of his strength, who would be gone within months, looked at a new life just beginning and painted hope. He reached past everything that was breaking in him and made, for a baby, a picture that says the same thing the almond tree says every year: winter does not get the last word. Something is starting again…

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• Jul 28, 20265.1x their median

  This is real footage from nearly 100 years ago A street in Shanghai, China https://t.co/UH0J0NUTI0

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• Aug 16, 20264.2x their median

  This is one of the most beautiful paintings of Christ ever made, and for over a century people have walked past the one detail that holds its entire meaning... It is called The Light of the World, painted by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt. Christ stands at night in an overgrown garden, holding a lantern, his hand raised to knock at a wooden door. It illustrates a line from the Book of Revelation: "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock." The door is choked with ivy and weeds. It has clearly not been opened in a very long time. Now look at the door itself, and you will see what holds the key to understanding the entire artwork… there is no handle. No latch, no knob, nothing on the outside at all. Hunt left it off on purpose: this door can only be opened from within. The door is the human soul, and the point is that Christ can stand there and knock forever, but he cannot let himself in. The handle is on the other side. It has to be you who opens it. The ivy has grown thick over the frame because this particular door has stayed shut for years, and yet his lantern is still burning, and he is still standing there, still knocking, waiting for a door that may never open. Fifty years after he painted it, Hunt felt he had to spell the meaning out: the shut door, he said, was “the obstinately shut mind.” The light has not gone out and whether that door ever opens was always, only, up to you...

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• Aug 20, 20264.1x their median

  This is one of the most romantic paintings in American history, but the artist hid a second story in it, one that only reveals itself once you know who the tired old man in the corner really was... The painting is Marriage License, made by Norman Rockwell for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1955. It is late on a Saturday afternoon in a small-town clerk's office. A young couple leans over the desk to fill out the paperwork for their marriage license, the man's arm around her, the woman up on tiptoe in a yellow dress to sign her name. The whole room is dim and brown, and a shaft of golden light falls through the window and lands on just the two of them, as if the day itself knows what is happening here. Rockwell built it out of contrast: the couple glow with the beginning of everything, and, slumped in the corner, the old clerk waits, ready to go home, because for him, couples in love are just the ordinary traffic of an ordinary day. But here is what almost no one knows: the clerk was a real man, a local shopkeeper named Jason Braman, and Rockwell chose him for a reason. Braman had recently lost his wife. Rockwell knew it, and he asked him to pose, in his own words, "as a way to give him something else to think about." So the tired old man watching two young people promise themselves to each other is not acting. He is a widower placed by Rockwell right beside the very thing he has just lost. Once you know that, the whole painting deepens because it is no longer only about young love. It is about the full arc of it, the beginning and the end in one room, the couple who have everything ahead and the man who had it and lost it, sitting a few feet apart in the same afternoon light. And here's the best part: the young couple were real too, engaged in life, Joan and Francis Mahoney, and Rockwell gave them the oil sketch as a wedding present. They married. And they stayed married for the rest of their lives...

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• Aug 3, 20263.9x their median

  At first glance, this looks like nothing more than two lovers holding each other against a garden wall. But look at what her hands are doing... The painting is by John Everett Millais, and the scene is set in Paris, on a specific and terrible date: the 24th of August, 1572, the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of French Protestants, the Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets by their Catholic countrymen. On that night, there was only one way for a man to be spared: if he tied a white cloth around his arm, a sign that he was a Catholic, the killers would pass him by. The man in this painting is a Huguenot. And the woman who loves him is desperately trying to save his life... she is winding a white band around his arm, gazing up at him, pleading with him to just wear it, to tell the small lie that will let him live and stay with her. But gently, without anger, he is stopping her. With one hand he loosens the cloth she is tying. He will not wear it. To wear it would be to deny his faith, to save his body by betraying his soul, and he cannot do it, not even for her, not even to live. Millais fills the scene signs of what is coming: she wears a ring, he wears none, a marriage that will never happen. And the two of them are pressed so close that you cannot tell, at a glance, whether this is an embrace or a struggle. It is both. It is a woman trying to hold a man in this world, and a man who has already made his peace with leaving it…

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• Aug 25, 20263.4x their median

  Dolly Parton wrote "Jolene" and "I Will Always Love You" on the same day Rest in peace legend https://t.co/1nnFn19fgl

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• Aug 24, 20263.0x their median

  Three thousand years ago, in the space of a single lifetime, every great power in the eastern Mediterranean collapsed at once. Almost every great city on earth was burned to the ground within a few decades, writing itself was forgotten, and no one has ever fully worked out why... We call it the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and to understand how strange it is, you have to see how advanced the world was before it. Around 1200 BC the eastern Mediterranean was a connected web of superpowers: the Mycenaean Greeks, the world of Homer's heroes. The Hittite Empire in Anatolia. The wealthy port kingdom of Ugarit. Egypt at the height of the New Kingdom. They traded metals and gold across thousands of miles, sent letters back and forth, married into one another's royal families, and ran vast economies that had held together for centuries. And then, within roughly two generations, nearly all of it was gone... The cities burned: Mycenae, Pylos, the Hittite capital of Hattusa, Ugarit, and dozens of others were destroyed by fire, many never rebuilt. The Hittite Empire vanished so completely that its capital was lost for three thousand years. In Greece the palaces fell, the population dropped, and the Greeks forgot how to write, plunging into a dark age so total that literacy did not return for roughly four hundred years. No one has ever agreed on what caused it, only a list of overlapping catastrophes that struck at once: waves of mysterious searaiders the Egyptians called the Sea Peoples, decades of drought and famine, earthquakes, and the breakdown of the trade routes that every kingdom depended on. What should make us reflect is that these were the most advanced civilizations of their age, and they never saw it coming. Once it began, they could not stop it. As the historian Robert Drews once wrote: "Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again." The people who lived through it did not know they were living at the end of an age. No one ever does...

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