It’s too hot to think properly. So it’s lucky then that some interesting bits and bobs connected with past posts have come my way.
Firstly, Hans Unger. Four years ago now, I wrote a piece about his life and his work not just in graphic design but also stained glass. It’s worth going back to read that post, even if you’ve looked at before, simply for the comments, which are still arriving even now. Clearly he was a man who was beloved by very many people.
The post came about because Mr Crownfolio had been reading about Unger’s work on St Columba’s Church in Chester. Their website person, Bernard Payne, got in touch recently and has sent me two more photographs of Unger’s work for the church.
Sadly, these two windows aren’t in existence any more – they were taken out in 1986 because the timber was rotting and the mullions deteriorating, and clearly no one at the time thought they were worth saving. Which is a great shame.
Also a while back, I posted about the symbolism of blue skies on post-war airline posters like these two Lewitt-Hims.
My speculation was that, after the Second World War, these clear blue skies might have had more meaning that we might at first suspect. Now the fighters and the bombers were gone, there were no more looping white trails signifying a dogfight any more. The skies, and by association the aeroplanes that fly in them, were now safe, to be celebrated rather than feared.
So I was very pleased with the discovery I made when I was researching James de Holden Stone the other day. In 1945, when the war ended, he was the Art Director of Vogue, and this was the cover he designed for their October issue.
And this is how Vogue themselves described it:
With the war in Europe and the Far East finally having come to an end in September, Vogue has no suitable cover commissioned for this issue. James de Holden-Stone, the magazine’s art director, makes his point aptly with a painting of blue skies – denoting the end of the blitz over London.
The cover comes, incidentally, from a whole archive of them which is now online and well worth a browse through, even though it is a bit of a pig to search (the link starts you off in the 1950s, just to make it a bit easier).
Finally, while we are on the subject of ways to waste time on the internet, Mr Crownfolio has been disappearing into the British Newspaper Archive in order to find out more about the history of our house. And from his searches I can also tell you that Daphne Padden was a bridesmaid in Bathwick, in 1934. She wore blue taffeta and was given a vanity case and a rope of pearls for her troubles. Sadly that’s all that the archive can tell us about her. I do wish I knew more.