Anna M. Thane

Detailed illustration of a ripe pineapple with green leaves, surrounded by butterflies, a caterpillar, and small red insects on a light background.

When women were expected to paint flowers as decoration, Maria Merian chose to study them.

Read 👉 https://artuk.org/discover/stories/maria-sibylla-merian-butterflies-botanicals-and-the-birth-of-scientific-illustration

#WomensHistoryMonth #IWD

Maria Merian (1647-1717) 📷 Royal College of Physicians

a daffodil blossom in the early morning sun

sun-bathing

violets have popped up on the lawn. Here are two blossoms and also a tiny dew -drop

suddenly

A bunch of liverwort in the early morning sun

this morning

#Scape #FlowerScape #BalconyScape Crocuses on the balcony. Have a brilliant Friday!!
🌿💜🤍💜🤍💜🌿 #FlowersOnFriday #FloralFriday #flowers #Gardening #Ancoats #sunshine #springtime #EastCoastKin #purple #FlowerReport #DailyFlowers #Manchester #MyBalcony

Two photographs of a late 19th‑ to early 20th‑century hand‑embroidered cream waistcoat displayed on a mannequin. The full view shows a deep V‑neck waistcoat with curved fronts, five turquoise‑coloured buttons, and floral embroidery along the lapels, pockets, and front edges. The close‑up image highlights the delicate pastel embroidery of flowers and ribbon motifs stitched along the lapel on the smooth silk fabric.

#FridayFrocks #Embroidery A man’s waistcoat of cream silk satin, c.1895 - 1905. It’s likely to have been a wedding waistcoat, with motifs that were meaningful for the wearer. These include baskets, bows and hunting horns.

A cream satin ball gown from around 1901 displayed on a dress form. The gown has elbow‑length sheer puffed sleeves, a draped neckline trimmed with lace, and an A‑line skirt. It is richly decorated with hand‑embroidered floral motifs, beadwork, and sequins in metallic tones. A close‑up image shows detailed embroidery at the bodice, including flowers, leaves, and looping ribbon designs worked in gold, green, and jewel-like beads. The gown is part of The Olive Matthews Collection at Chertsey Museum.

#FridayFrocks #Embroidery - gown, c.1901, by a ‘Court Dressmaker’ ‘Madame Clapham’. It is hand embroidered with floral sprays in silks, metalwork, opalescent sequins, paste stones, seed pearls and glass beadwork.

#FridayFrocks #SpringFlowers: A man’s waistcoat, c.1775–80 of fresh green silk satin with floral embroidery in tambour-work and satin stitch. This waistcoat may once have formed part of a three-piece suit.

Blüten

Sharing…

Gulf Fritillary and a female Black Swallowtail last August. 🧡🖤

First time posting this one.

#Photography99 📷 #Butterflies 🦋

Every house needs a secret door that leads to a secret room, but well, there are secret rooms and then there are...

exhale, my heart

A collage of photos from the National Costume Museum of Portugal. The top photo shows several Edwardian era women's dresses with a wide view of the historic room they are displayed in. The ornate design of the room is clearly visible from decorative mounding to ornate stenciling on the walls. The middle photos show details of Georgian era garments; an ornate pink bodice, an ornate cream vest and a silver satin jacket. The bottom picture shows a view of the room the middle garments are displayed in. The parquet floor and ornate architectural details are visible as well as the garments on display. Photo by Robert Emond.

#PalacesAndGardens | #FashionThroughTime

From my favorite museum the National Costume Museum housed in the Angeja-Palmela Palace in Lisbon.

#Photography 📸 #Museum
#WestCoastKin #EastcoastKin
#BlueskyPhotography
#PhotographersUnited
#FashionHistory #HistoricFashion
#Architecture #InteriorDesign

Luise Auguste Wilhelmine Amalie was born on 10 March 1776 in Hanover as a princess of the House of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. She lost her mother at just six years old and grew up in the care of her grandmother. At seventeen she married Crown Prince Frederick William of Prussia, and the two formed a genuinely loving partnership, rare in royal Europe. She became Queen of Prussia in 1797, and together they had ten children, seven of whom survived to adulthood, among them the future German Emperor Wilhelm I and Charlotte, who became Tsarina of Russia. In an act of personal courage, Luise met Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, pleading for lenient peace terms, he refused, yet his dismissiveness only deepened her people’s love for her. Luise bore the humiliations of defeat with dignity, becoming a symbol of Prussian resilience. The years of hardship, however, destroyed her health. She died on 19 July 1810 at Hohenzieritz Castle, aged just 34, officially of pneumonia, though her grieving subjects said she died of a broken heart. She rests in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg Palace, beneath a celebrated marble statue by Christian Daniel Rauch. Luise was equally iconic in fashion. She embodied the Empire or Neoclassical style that swept Europe around 1800, abandoning the rigid corsets and heavy brocades of the Rococo era. Her signature garment was a flowing white muslin chemise gown with a high waistline just below the bust, a wide neckline, and translucent fabric falling in soft folds to the ground. Over her shoulders she draped a fine dark shawl, a key accessory of the period. Her hair was short, unpowdered, and naturally curly, a deliberate rejection of earlier artificial styles. She consciously rejected padding and restrictive undergarments, modelling a “natural” look aligned with Enlightenment ideals. The portrait at Paretz captures this perfectly: a luminous figure in white muslin, reaching for a rose in a romantic landscape, embodying both the fashion and spirit of her age.

Portrait of Queen Luise of Prussia at Schloss Paretz. Painted around 1798, she wears a flowing white Empire-style gown, the epitome of Neoclassical fashion. Beloved by her people, she remains one of the most iconic figures in Prussian history.
#PalacesAndGardens #FashionThroughTime
#EastCoastKin

Costume known as the "Beautiful Strasbourg Woman" End of the 17th century

#PalacesAndGardens
#FashionThroughTime
#Photography
#EastCoastKin
#PhotographersofBlueSky

Rosa Blüten am Zweig.

Guten Morgen. 👋

replicas of two gowns, ca 1760-1780s, the right one in the style ‘robe à l’anglaise’, the left one in the style ‘robe à la française’

Ladies‘ fashlon around 1760-1780

for #PalacesandGardens, themed #FashionThroughTime

Photo taken at Berrington Court/ UK

The striking embroidery of both the coat and the waistcoat depicts mainly irises. The iris is the symbol of wisdom and hope – befitting for a man appreciating the ideas of the enlightenment as Francesco Melzi D'Eril was. The silk used for the embroidery is probably Italian, as Italy was one the main silk producers of the 18th century. The fabric of the gala dress-suit is textured velvet, the tailoring is Venetian. Read more: https://regency-explorer.net/galadresssuit/

The splendid coat and waistcoat of Duke Francesco Melzi D'Eril,
2. half of 18th century

for #PalacesandGardens, themed #FashionThroughTime

On display on the estate of Villa Melzi D'Eril in Bellagio / Italy

1860-1863 check dress, brown lines on grey silk, a three-piece-dress comprising a separate bodice, skirt and belt

Fabulous fringe

#PalacesandGardens, themed #FashionThroughTime

(Photo taken at Arlington Court/ UK)

Three tall arched windows dominate the curved rear wall of the lower circular hall, each crowned with a fanlight of radiating glazing bars. The central window opens onto a cool, leafy view of the park beyond, while the two flanking windows glow a deep, burnished amber-gold, warm light washing their reveals and lending the space a theatrical, almost stage-set symmetry. Between the windows, small framed black-and-white photographs hang on raw, exposed masonry: plaster long stripped away, the stone and brick surface mottled in ochre, grey, and brown, bearing every scar of wartime destruction and the decades that followed. The floor in the foreground is smooth and dark, its polished surface a deliberately modern counterpoint to the ruin above. At the very centre of the room, a circular raised platform with a clean pale wooden rim encloses the hall’s quiet centrepiece: rubble left exactly as it fell, broken tiles, crumbled plaster, fragmented masonry, gently lit and encircled by slender black rope barriers on stanchion poles, as if it were a precious exhibit. Which, of course, it is. The composition is perfectly symmetrical and utterly still. The photograph captures a space suspended between two states, attentively restored shell and deliberately preserved ruin, and the tension between the gleaming floor, the glowing windows, and the undisturbed heap of debris at the centre makes it a quietly unforgettable image. Built 1770–72 for Frederick the Great, the Belvedere auf dem Klausberg was the last Frederician project in Sanssouci Park. Artillery fire in April 1945 gutted it, leaving only bare walls. From 1990, the Münchner Messerschmitt Stiftung funded its reconstruction as a gesture of reunification; the SPSG took it back in 2002. The upper hall was fully restored, stucco marble, gilded ornaments, parquet floor, while the lower hall was deliberately left as found: rubble, raw stone, and ruin.

For #WindowsOnWednesday I take you to my beloved Sanssouci Park and the Belvedere, a lovely little place with an incredible history. As usual, more in my ALT text.
#photography
#PhotographersOfBluesky
#EastCoastKin

Text at top of plate: An 11. Costumes Parisiens. (496) Text at bottom of plate, numbers corresponding with different hairstyles and accessoires depicted on plate: 1. Capotes en taffetas et Rubans de Paille 2. Coeffure ornée de Perles 3. Turban 4. Corsages 5. Garnitures rabattues en demi Voile 6. Capote d’Organdie 7. Voile sur une Tête Fondue 8. Coeffures de fantaisie

Plate from Journal des Dames et des Modes, Costume Parisien, 2 septembre 1803 (Year 11), showing various hairstyles, bonnets and other fashion accessoires. #FashionPlateFriday #dresshistory #19thc

Révéler le féminin Présentée au musée Cognacq-Jay en collaboration avec le Palais Galliera, l’exposition « Révéler le féminin.

A great exhibition is coming up soon at the Musée Cognacq-Jay: Révéler le féminin. Mode et Apparences au XVIIIe siècle.
www.museecognacqjay.paris.fr/expositions/...
#fashion #portrait #France #C18th #earlymodern #exhibition

cluster of blossoms of Myrrhinium atropurpureum var. octandrum. the blossoms are white and pink and a bit fleshy, with long pink filaments. The plant ( a shrub) is widespread in temperate and subtropical South America and along the Andes to Colombia.

This fascinating plant is a Myrrhinium atropurpureum. It was first described as a genus in 1827 by Heinrich Wilhem Schott.

Schott (born in 1794) was a participant in the Austrian Brazil Expedition from 1817 to 1821. He later became a royal gardener in Vienna.

Illustration of a Chimæra Monstrosa, a fantastical sea creature resembling a hybrid fish with elongated, eel-like body and a large, rounded head with prominent eyes. It has multiple fins, including wing-like pectoral fins and smaller ventral fins, with intricate patterns and textures in brown, tan, and blue tones along its body. The image is from an 18th-century German natural history book, showing detailed line work and watercolor shading. Despite the rabbit keyword, the subject is a mythical aquatic creature, not a rabbit. The page is labeled “Amph. XIV” and numbered 168.

🐰 Gemeinnüzzige Naturgeschichte des Thierreichs bd. 4 plates
Berlin ;bei Gottlieb August Lange, 1780-1789.

[Source]

This late 18th-century painting detail by Katsukawa Shunkō depicts a "meisho-e" (famous place picture) featuring a woman from the village of Ohara, a region north of Kyoto known for its female peddlers. The woman is shown in a moment of respite, standing gracefully on a grassy riverbank beneath the delicate, pale blossoms of a cherry tree in full spring bloom. She is dressed in traditional regional attire, including a dark green kimono decorated with white floral motifs and a striking blue and red patterned sash. A white cloth is wrapped neatly around her head, and she holds a slender cherry branch in her right hand, its blossoms echoing those on the tree above. At her feet sits a bundled stack of firewood, a common sight for Ohara women who traveled to the city to sell forest products. The soft, earthy tones of the background and the refined, "luminous" rendering of her porcelain-white skin create a serene atmosphere that captures the poetic essence of spring in rural Japan.

Woman from Ohara Resting under a Cherry Tree
[detail]
by Katsukawa Shunkô
1794–1801, Japan
William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, MFA

The back of a fitted silk jacket the fabric in ombré stripes in shades of yellow, brown and pale blue. It has long sleeves and layered ruffled peplum at the bottom of the waist

There is so much to admire in this neat silk #1780s jacket. The ombré stripes run this way and that, making their own decoration and the ruffled peplum sits up at the waist emphasising the piecing of the centre back #madparisfr #FashionHistory 🗃️🪡

🥰

hundreds of pink and white cyclamen coum in the undergrowth

the enchanted wood

A long printed cotton dress with tight sleeves and bodice and a repeat printed in a green, pink and red motif against a cream background

A closer detail of the pattern covering the 1840s cotton dress with a complex design of stylised florals

An engraving from the 1840s that shows a calico printing workshop with the large expanse of cotton that was able to be roller printed in longer lengths

Cutting edge technologies are always at the heart of textile manufacture. In the 1840s that involved roller printing, the process that replaced wood block textile prints with a faster method and more complex patterns. I do love an #1840s printed cotton @ngvmelbourne.bsky.social #FashionHistory 🗃️🪡