#FairytaleFriday: An Interior

February 23, 2024

The amazing Tatiana Fajardo posted this painting back on Xitter (go and follow her if you don’t) and I just couldn’t let it go.

The author is Alexander Davis Cooper, a British 19th-century painter born in 1820, and the painting is part of the Atkinson Art Gallery Collection. The work is dated 1867 and features a woman wearing a green hennin, the traditional Burgundian cone hat we nowadays associate with fairies.

Cooper painted landscapes, portrait and genre scenes from Shakespeare, but he also worked as a line engraver and illustrator of fairytales and animal tales such as Androcles and the Lion. Some of his engravings are preserved at the British Museum.

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Charlotte Riddell — The Old House in Vauxhall Walk (1)

‘Houseless–homeless–hopeless!’ Many a one who had before him trodden that same street must have uttered the same words—the weary, the desolate, the hungry, the forsaken, the waifs and strays of struggling humanity that are always coming and going, cold, starving and miserable, over the pavements

October 2, 2025 12:00 am

architecture, engineering and construction

Future-proofing grace: a reflections on digital tools and their user experience (with a little help from a German Romantic)

In an age where our tools can draw, write, compose, and even “think” faster than we can, it’s worth asking: what makes design graceful? What gives a design action — whether a sketch, or a line of code — that quality of elegance that seems

October 1, 2025 10:00 am

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Welcome to Spooktober

As the leaves turn crisp and the nights grow longer, the Gothic community prepares for its favorite season: Spooktober. October isn’t just another month on the calendar — filled with chestnuts and mushrooms and pumpkin — but a countdown to Halloween. Spooktober is a tradition,

October 1, 2025 12:00 am