In Greek mythology, the island that many of us in the English-speaking world know as Cythera (or, if we’re French, Cythère) was renowned as the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The Romans knew her as Venus, as many of us still do today.
I’m mentioning these facts in order to introduce one of my favorite paintings, The Embarkation for Cythera (L’embarquement pour Cythère) by French painter Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). This magnificent Rococo work, which the artist completed in 1717, is routinely thought to be a celebration of love and of the island’s mythological reputation as the abode of love, although the details of the painting are a bit hazy. The presence of what appears to be a statue of Venus on the right suggests that the figures are actually leaving the island. And then there are those puttidisporting themselves on the left. Are they suggestive of memory or anticipation? Perhaps both? In keeping with the ambiguity, the work is also known in English as Voyage to Cythera and Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera.
Pilgrimage to Cythera
Watteau died at the young age of 36, making his accomplishment in this big, dreamy work all the more extraordinary. It seems that he himself thought highly of it, for he soon painted a second, clearer version, Pilgrimage to Cythera (c. 1718-19), in which the statue of Venus is more obvious. However, both these works derive from an earlier, much less accomplished painting dating from 1709-10 (below).
“Kythira” seems to be today’s preferred English spelling for the actual, physical island, but I routinely see the spelling “Kythera” as well. However it’s spelled, it lies off the southeastern tip of the Peloponnese Peninsula, and was one of the Greek islands ruled for centuries by the Venetians, who called it Cerigo. Those centuries account for its inclusion, for political purposes, in the Ionian Islands group, the rest of which lie far to the northwest off the western coast of Greece. These days, it’s also tied administratively to a much smaller island to the south, Antikythera, in whose waters the famed Antikythera Mechanism was discovered in 1901. Kythira has undergone a veritable kaleidoscope of administrative reclassifications over the past few decades, but I think I’ll leave it at that.
Kythira was the site of the Temple of Aphrodite Kythera, thought to date from the 6th century BCE and said to be the oldest Greek temple dedicated to the goddess, so the island’s reputation as the island of love has at least some basis. In reading more about the temple, however, I notice that it may well have been built, not by the Greeks, but (according to Herodotus) by the Phoenicians!
If, as Lawrence Durrell wrote in his 1960 novel Clea, “truth is what most contradicts itself,” then we have a good example here.
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Besides proofreading (and copy editing and fact-checking) for Boise Journal and its companion publication Boise Home, I had a chance to write articles on a variety of fun subjects. Today’s post originally appeared in the Spring 2009 issues of those late-lamented magazines.
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They’re the most glamorous fruit available in my part of the world, living gems that seem to glow with an intense inner light. And, like proper gems, they come in a dazzling variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. They’re citrus—the fruit of a tropical genus that, with our encouragement, has spread into the subtropical and even the temperate zones.
When I was growing up, citrus were harder to find in the stores, and there weren’t many varieties. There were oranges and grapefruit and lemons, and that was about it until the holidays, when tangerines—wonderful, easily peeled and sectioned tangerines!—made their tantalizingly brief appearance. But I’m getting ahead of myself …
Conveniently enough, all the trees we call citrus are part of the genus Citrus, with one possible exception, and all are native to South or East Asia, the islands of Melanesia, or Australia. They grow as shrubs or small trees, evergreens that live for a century or so. Their rind tends to be bitter and bright with essential oils, as squeezing a piece into the flame of a candle makes delightfully clear.
Citrus are a promiscuous bunch. They mutate and hybridize easily, and through the efforts of Mother Nature and ambitious horticulturists, there is now a befuddlingly complex array of varieties, familiar, unfamiliar, and—in one instance—bizarre. A fascinating mixture of hard science and questionable history has attached itself to them, so what follows is only the proximate truth.
Pomelo, lithograph, 1900s
Botanists think that there may have been only three original citrus species—the citron, the pomelo, and the tangerine. Citron (C. medica) seem to have been cultivated for the first time in Persia, whence Alexander the Great’s soldiers brought them back to Greece about 300 BCE. They were introduced into Palestine a century later, and, as etrog, became a fixture of the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Citron pulp is dry and characterless, but the fruit’s peel is candied for use in fruitcake—about which, ‘nuff said.
Big, green pomelos (C. macima) are the largest citrus fruit, with some varieties growing to the size of basketballs! They’ve have a spongy rind and taste like milder, more aromatic grapefruit. They’re been making an appearance in local stores for several years now, and are so gorgeous that I’ve forced them upon my somewhat puzzled friends as gifts.
My old favorites, sweet, aromatic tangerines (C. × tangerine) were more popular in ancient China than the characterless oranges of the time, but apparently didn’t travel west until the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were first shipped to Europe from the Moroccan port of Tangier, hence their name.
Most citrus have a bright, almost ecstatic flavor, a bracing mixture of sweet and sour. At one end of that flavor spectrum are the most popular citrus, sweet oranges (C. × sinensis), which may be a cross between tangerines and pomelos that appeared in Europe in the late fifteenth century. Those known as navels contain a second, smaller fruit at their base and are said to have developed from a mutation on a single tree in Brazil in 1820. That sine qua non of the healthful lifestyle, orange juice, was first marketed by advertising man Albert Lasker in 1910 as a means of reviving the failing American citrus industry.
Grapefruit, lithograph, 1900s
Grapefruit (C. × paradisi) are a cross between pomelos and oranges. They’re harder to peel than the latter, hence the popularity of the half-grapefruit on our breakfast tables.
Gnarly tangelos (C. × tangelo) are hybrids of oranges and grapefruit, or maybe tangerines and grapefruit, or maybe tangerines and pomelos—you get the idea.
Toward the far end of the citrus spectrum are lemons (C. × limon), which may have reached Europe around the beginning of the Christian era. A millennium and a half later, Columbus is said to have carried their seeds, along with those of citron and orange, on his second voyage to the West Indies, where they thrived. Thanks to their acidity, lemons are useful in cooking, particularly in Near East foods. They also have more vitamin C than any other citrus, making lemonade a doubly fine beverage.
My sources assure me that limes (whose scientific classification is complicated) generally have more acid than lemons, although their distinctive flavor makes them seem milder to me, and certainly accounts for their popularity in mixed drinks. Despite their identification with the Florida Keys, key limes (C. aurantiifolia) were cultivated there for only a brief period of time in the early twentieth century.
Alexandre Poiteau, Orange de Malte (blood orange), 1846
Blood oranges (C. × sinensis) are sweet oranges that appeared as a mutation in Sicily several centuries ago. They’re tastier than most oranges I’ve tried, have blood-red flesh and—in some varieties—a rusty red rind. Their distinctive color is a chemical reaction to the chilly nights on the mountain slopes on which they thrive.
Bitter oranges (C. × aurantium)actually beat sweet oranges to Europe, arriving as early as the eleventh century, but were eclipsed by their sweet cousins. They’re still grown for marmalade, and their essence makes it into such triple sec liqueurs as Grand Marnier and Curaçao. The latter is also flavored with the oil of larahas, descendants of sweet oranges that turned bitter when grown on the Dutch island of Curaçao in the Caribbean.
Herman A. Kohler, Bergamot (lithograph), 1887
You probably haven’t seen a bitter orange known as bergamot (C. bergamia) but if you drink Earl Grey tea, you’ve tasted its oil and inhaled its marvelous aroma. Bergamot trees thrive along the coast of Calabria in southern Italy, and are now being grown successfully in the African nation of Ivory Coast.
You can pop little kumquats (possibly C. japonica) in your mouth whole, since their thin, sweet skin compensates for their sour flesh, but you’ll still want to spit out the pips. Kumquat trees flourish on the Greek island of Corfu, where the enterprising Corfiotes produce a delectable liqueur called, naturally, kumquat.
Mark White, Buddha’s Hand, 19th century
The strangest fruit in the citrus spectrum is surely the Buddha’s hand (C. medica var. sarcodactylis). A citron that looks uncomfortably like a withered hand with too many fingers, it’s guaranteed to frighten dogs and small children. Buddha’s hands are fragrant, and, in some parts of the world, they’re used to perfume clothing, although I’m not sure I’d want to find one lurking in my closet every morning.
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If you’ve ever collected stamps, you may have learned of the existence of “cinderellas”—paper labels resembling postage stamps but printed by private concerns for advertising purposes. Interpreted loosely, the category can also include revenue stamps issued by genuine governments for non-postal purposes and even stamps printed by railway and steamship companies for the private transport of newspapers and correspondence.
When I ran across a reference to the stamps of the Central American Steamship Company a few days ago, I assumed that they probably fell in this last category, but I wanted to know more, and after several days of research, I do, but …
To begin with, the stamps seem to have been the creation of one Brewster Cox Kenyon, a stamp dealer from Long Beach, California, who at one time was the Vice-President of the Western Philatelic Union. However, in “Fakes, Forgeries and Their Creators,” a paper read before London’s Royal Philatelic Society in April 24, 1997, Christopher G. Harman explains that Kenyon (alias Kenyon Brewster Cox), “was always prepared to involve himself in producing and selling forged stamps. A number of completely bogus issues are also attributed to him.”
Kenyon is identified online as a one-time major and paymaster of the United States Volunteers, a reference to actual forces organized to support and reinforce regular United States Army troops. In this capacity, he was apparently responsible for printing several phony “Army Frank” stamps in 1898. More information about the issues can be found in the September 1898 issue of Filatelic Facts & Fallacies and in Phantom Philately, by John Frederick Melville (Worthington, Ohio: Janet van den Berg, 1950).
The site Join California: Election History for the State of California identifies Kenyon Brewster Cox as having been born on February 7, 1864, in New York. He married one Blanche M. Healey in 1892, and, subsequently, someone named Ada “by 1940.” He and Blanche (or was it Ada?) had a child named Dorothy. The site adds that Cox was Speaker pro Tem of the California State Assembly in 1897 and that he died on March 19, 1956, in Long Beach. We further learn that he was “a fairly well-known forger of postage stamps, having forged 1892 Hawaiian stamps and the 90¢ inverts”— that is, stamps with inverted images.
The site Family Search refers to one Standish Brewster Kenyon as the son of Brewster Cox Kenyon and states that his mother was Blanche M. Healey.
And yet … stamps for the Central American Steamship Company were listed in the 1894 and 1903 editions of Scott’s Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue, the latter of which I’ve been able to consult online. They also appear in Billig’s Handbook of the Private Local Posts (1950), which states that they were lithographed in Boston, Massachusetts. Had both publications, which are highly respected, been fooled?
The Private Ship Letter Stamps of the World, Part 1, the Caribbean, by S. Ringström and H.E. Tester (Trelleborg, Sweden: Skogs Trelleborg, 1976), contains an entire chapter on the Central American Steamship Company. The 1894 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Navigation to the Secretary of Commerce notes that the company offered “fortnightly passenger and freight service to Jamaica, Belize, Greytown, and ports in Honduras and Nicaragua,” while a 1903 report from the Office of the Army Chief of Engineers lists it as operating between Mobile, Alabama, and unspecified “Central American ports.”
In other words, there was once a genuine Central American Steamship Company. Kenyon clearly seems to have had access to printers or printing equipment, and might, just might, have been willing to turn his hand to producing legitimate stamps on the company’s behalf. Or did he simply take it upon himself to print and sell “completely bogus” stamps for a steamship company whose name he had happened to run across in a newspaper one morning?
I’m still not sure. Not quite …
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December 10 is the anniversary of the death of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who died on this day in 1928. You may recognize his name thanks to his distinctive work as an architect and designer, but I find him more interesting for his paintings—especially his watercolors of scenes in southernmost France.
Mackintosh (c. 1893)
In his early years in his native Scotland, Mackintosh developed a vigorous style that juxtaposed botanical Art Nouveau motifs with severely geometric elements. However, when he and his wife traveled to the French département of Pyrénées-Orientales, near the Spanish border, he hit upon a different approach. Mackintosh had painted watercolors as early as the first years of the 1890s, but here, where the couple lived from 1923 to 1927, his efforts in the medium took on a new and striking dimension.
The work you see at the top of today’s post, Héré de Mallet, Ille sur Têt (c. 1925), captures an inland scene involving a series of “fairy chimneys,” or columns of soft rock topped with caps of more erosion-resistant material. However, Mackintosh and his wife seem to have spent most of their time in a deep-water port known as Port-Vendres. His painting The Little Bay, Port Vendres (1927) recreates the attractive spot vividly.
The Little Bay, Port Vendres (1927)
The vintage postcard you see below illustrates how closely Mackintosh reproduced the scene.
For me, however, Mackintosh achieved his very best work with paintings in which the natural and the man-made are virtually indistinguishable, such as The Fort (c. 1924-26). Here all the elements of the locale and of Mackintosh’s art itself merge in perfect harmony.
The Fort (c. 1924-26)
In June 2004, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh association in Roussillon inaugurated Le chemin de Mackintosh, or the Mackintosh Trail, a series of panels juxtaposing reproductions of his watercolors with maps of the specific areas in which he painted them.
And, for the geographically minded, I’ll mention that the département of Pyrénées-Orientales is in the administrative (and historical) region of Occitanie, and corresponds roughly to the historical province of Roussillon. It is also known as Northern, or French Catalonia, and lies on the Franco-Spanish border just across from the autonomous Spanish community of Catalonia.
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Depending on what animals you’re after, it’s still hunting season for several species of Cervus—deer and elk—in some parts of Idaho, so it seems like an appropriate time to give some thought to Herne the Hunter.
Although I’m not a hunter, several members of Maggie’s family are, so I take a kind of interest in such things. And of course the myth and folklore of the hunt goes far, far back to our earliest days as a species.
We first read of Herne in William Shakespeare’s 1597 play The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Mistress Page recites: “There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter / Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest, / Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight, / Walk round about an oak, with great ragged horns; / And there he blasts the tree, and takes the cattle, / And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain / In a most hideous and dreadful manner.”
Robert Smirke
As it turns out, the lecherous Falstaff is easily fooled into donning a pair of antlers to impersonate the hunter.
Two and a half centuries later, we have W. Harrison Ainsworth’s 1843 historical romance Windsor Castle, in which the said hunter, gored by a stag, agrees to wear the stag’s antlers if the Devil will save him. Ainsworth describes Herne as “a weird figure, mounted on a steed as weird looking as himself, galloping through the trees with extraordinary swiftness. This ghostly rider wore an antlered helmet … and seemed to be habited in a garb of deer skins. Before him flew a large owl, and a couple of great black dogs ran beside him.” Herne’s hunting horn blows blue flames and he’s accompanied by a “swarm of horribly grotesque, swart objects, like imps.”
But is Herne a figure out of folklore or reality? In either case, he has cast a shadow. He was said to have hunted in the vicinity of a centuries-old tree known as Herne’s oak, but when the venerable tree blew down in 1863, Queen Victoria arranged for it to be replaced by another. William Perry, who held the august title of Wood Carver to the Queen, actually published a book on the subject, A Treatise on the Identity of Herne’s Oak Inferring the Maiden Tree to Have Been the Real One, in 1867.
Peter Nicolai Arbo
Herne can be seen as a figure from the “Wild Hunt”—a motif in which a supernatural horde follow an equally supernatural huntsman. They are, it seems, doomed to hunt forever.
If we look back much, much further in history, we find Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt (as well as being the goddess of animals, young women, and archery). Her counterpart in Roman mythology was Apollo’s twin sister Diana, a goddess renowned for her skill as a hunter.
Sheet music on the theme
Moving farther north, Wotan is the god of the hunt in Germanic mythology, while Odin, who was thought to lead his own supernatural Wild Hunt across the sky in winter, is his counterpart in Norse mythology. Is there a kind of psychological pattern at work when female deities are replaced by male deities? Or is the phenomenon merely geographical?
For much more information about Herne, take a look at Herne the Hunter of Windsor Forest (2024) by Eric L. Fitch, who explains that he himself had grown up in Windsor, where he was “aware of Herne from an early age.”
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