linocut/woodcut, Drew Christie
Everyone knows that in the course of ordinary, normal years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years – odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up.
Bruno Schulz, The Cinnamon Shops
1. This is one of the most famous portraits by Frans Hals – that great Dutch baroque master of portraiture. Nothing is known of the young man, apart from his age indicated in the upper right corner of the painting as 26. (image from wikimedia)
The Laughing Cavalier, Frans Hals (1624) (Source - Wikimedia)
2. This is a picture taken by Russian photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) in 1910, in Bukhara. Sergei Mikhailovich was compiling a photographic survey of the lands and peoples of the Russian empire on assignment by Tsar Nicholas II. Currently the entire collection resides in the Library of Congress.
Emir Seyyid Mir Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara, seated holding a sword in Bukhara, (present-day Uzbekistan), ca. 1910. (Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/ Library of Congress)
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