Amphibious babies, exploding teeth, and a stomach full of slugs:The weird world of unexplained ailments.

"Doctor, doctor, I feel like a carrot"
"Don't get yourself in a stew"

"Doctor, doctor, I've just swallowed a roll of film"
"Come back tomorrow and we'll see what develops"

"Doctor, doctor, what can you give me for wind?"
"Try this kite"

"Doctor, doctor, I keep thinking I'm a sheep"
"Oh dear, that's very baaaaaaaad"

Believe it or not, some medical complaints are even funnier (and possibly equally as implausible) as those terrible jokes listed above. Though, some others are pretty horrible. Before commencing his talk, Diagnosis:Unexplained, for the London Fortean Society at The Miller in Southwark last night, the speaker Thomas Morris (a former radio producer - he worked on Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time and Night Waves - and journalist for The Financial Times, The Lancet, and The Cricketer) asked if anybody present was squeamish. Nobody put their hands up!

Which meant at least one person there, yes - me, was lying. I have to hide behind my hands if they're showing an operation, one of those Your Life in Their Hands things, on television and I even have to look away when being inoculated. I'm a wimp, basically.

But there was nothing I needed to worry about during Thomas's interesting, insightful, and amusing one hour talk. Mainly because there were no photographs and definitely no films of operations being performed (this was not a Butthole Surfers gig) but also because the stories were so fantastical they bordered on the unreal. They weren't things that you can easily imagine happening to you or people you know.

About the worst, most embarrassing, medical things I've undergone are shoving a toy lifeboat up my bum in the bath when I was a kid and losing it for a couple of days (until it came out during a 'movement', the lifeboat now loaded with a putrid brown cargo) and getting my ballbag caught in my zip when I was having a pee round the back of the garage near my gran and grandad's house a few years later.

Worse things happen to ballbags! Thomas' first book was about the history of heart surgery and when he was researching that he came across a headline that, it's fair to say, stopped him in his tracks. It read "SUDDEN PROTRUSION OF THE INTESTINES INTO THE SCROTUM" and, of course, he immediately forgot all about researching heart surgery and decided to investigate this story further.

The unfortunate protagonist turned out to be a fifty year old Bristol labourer who'd been run over by a car laden with bricks in 1829 causing the rather painful sounding 'protrusion'. Amazingly, they could treat him using a team of 'strong' doctors to hold him down and push things back to where they used to be. He went on to live a normal life, the only minor inconvenience being having to wear a truss.

This was the incident that sent Thomas down a rabbit hole of research and eventually inspired his second book, The Mystery of the Exploding Teeth and Other Curiosities from the History of Medicine, as well as the bulk of his Fortean talk.

These days medical journals, before being published, have normally been peer reviewed and edited many times. In the late eighteenth century, as you might imagine, this was not the case so all sorts of weird and wonderful cases were reported with, often, only one person being witness to the events in question.

Take the twenty-year old man who was found with a serpent living inside the ventricle of his heart. Over a century later it was discovered that the most likely explanation was that it was probably a serpentine shaped blood clot but it did lead Thomas on to another astonishing headline - "CAN THE GARDEN SLUG LIVE IN THE HUMAN STOMACH"?

A headline that demands retreat to Betteridge's Law. Betteridge's Law states that any newspaper headline that ends with a question mark can be answered with a simple 'no'. Something that applies equally to the Daily Mail's claims of various things that might give you cancer (broccoli, aspirin, bubblebaths, dildos, peanut butter, potatoes, sex, sex with sparrows (!), and even water) as it does to the idea that a family of slugs could live and thrive in a person's tummy.

So how to explain the case of the young girl who, over a period of a week or so, vomited up eight living slugs? Admittedly, the doctor looking into, and reporting, the case had not witnessed any of the octet of slug vomiting incidents but his patient told him she could feel a slug slithering around inside her so he prescribed her a course of ammonia and camphor, to be taken four times a day, which would kill the slugs. Which it did. Well, they certainly never appeared again.

The theory of how the slugs got inside her was put down to her love of eating unwashed lettuce and that one of her dirty salads had a family of slugs on it that went on to grow inside her body. Similar incidents were reported involving other creepy-crawlies. Snails and insects were said to be living happy lives inside their human hosts and there was even a case of woman in Ireland who'd fallen asleep in a graveyard and ended up with live beetles crawling out of her anus.

Years later experiments proved that human stomach acid would kill a slug in about two hours. If animals couldn't survive inside our bodies perhaps we could be born part-animal. In Chicago, in 1865, the headline "FISH, FROG, OR HUMAN?" appeared and was followed by a feature that included a sentence that not only confirmed Betteridge's Law but may be one of the most baffling ever printed. "Have we all the elements of a gudgeon in our several anatomies?".

The man who'd drawn attention to the case was a certain Dr Schulz and despite his title he wasn't a real doctor (see also Dr Fox and Dr Alban). He was a Prussian butcher and ex-military man who'd emigrated to the US and his great claim was that he'd discovered how to make the human body amphibious.

Using techniques that were both scientifically erroneous and morally dubious. He'd started off by forcing puppies underwater but had graduated to doing the same to his own infant son and visiting journalists reported witnessing the eighteen month year old boy swimming underwater for up to twenty minutes solid. Schulz was so convinced he'd made a genuine medical breakthrough, this would save countless people from drowning, that forced conversion to an amphibious state should be made compulsory by law.

It's a wonderful story but with one, rather major, snag. Not only is it not true but Dr Schulz almost certainly never even existed. This was the golden age of the American newspaper hoax where stories could be printed as sensational as you could think of and nobody saw anything wrong with that. Mark Twain wrote one about the man eating plants of Madagascar and one periodical even ran a completely fictitious piece about an entire theatre burning down and killing every single person inside. An amphibious toddler was, comparatively, small beer.

A man with the utterly fantastic name of Salmon A.Arnold (who, presumably, did exist) was another to come forward with a fairly tall tale. Arnold claimed he'd identified a 'wandering disorder of urination' and gave it a fancy Latin name to make it sound like a proper, real thing that actually happens to people.

Maria Burton, a woman in her twenties, had been coughing up blood. She was diagnosed with a prolapsed uterus and had a catheter inserted but, soon, urine started coming out of her ear (something which is not actually possible). To check to see if this was urine or something that resembled urine the doctors carried out a test that is surely as thorough as any in medical history.

They lobbed a pot of it on a heated shovel and when it steamed up and let off an odour that strongly resembled urine they decided that, yes that's piss alright. Later, she began to wee from her eyes (which virtually blinded her), her stomach, and, eventually, her bellybutton. The last one, apparently, was announced by a sound that resembled a champagne cork popping before the golden showers spurted luxuriantly and proudly from her navel. Water sports anyone?

Then, as if for an encore, she started pissing out of her nose. Doctors, astounded, told her to stay in bed (!) and, over the years, the symptoms improved. The most likely explanation for all of this is, sadly, that it never actually happened and that the doctors had been deceived by someone with an extreme case of Munchausen's syndrome. Although an alternative theory is possible. Sufferers of prolapsed bladders can end up with crystallised, and pissy smelling, chemicals in the blood that, eventually, are sweated out through the head. Nice, and I thought gout was bad!

Urine through the eyes, ears, and navel sounds unpleasant but at least it's not lethal. Spontaneous combustion rarely ends well. A character in Bleak House (a rag'n'bone man probably, it's Dickens, it's bound to be a rag'n'bone man) met his end this way. Charles Dickens believed spontaneous combustion to be a genuine but unexplained phenomenon and one that particularly took elderly alcoholics who live on their own. So I'm fucked, then!

The aftermath of one of these deadly conflagrations took on a familiar pattern. Usually, furniture and even the victim's limbs were untouched whilst the torso was reduced to cinders. A visiting Italian priest investigated one such case and claimed the unfortunate lady had perished in flames of her own accidental making because she'd eaten too big a meal before going to bed!

A more likely reason for the fatal inferno is that the lady in question was a heavy drinker who'd regularly take a bath in a tub full of highly flammable camphorated spirits before passing out in bed, drunk, in a room lit only by candles. I was never much good at Cluedo but I think I've fingered the culprit in this case.

It's more difficult to explain a story that appeared in the totally wonderfully titled Dental Cosmos journal in the 1850s. A dentist from Pennsylvania had as a patient a priest with terrible toothache that was causing him excruciating pain. When, however, the priest's troublesome tooth exploded the pain immediately ceased.

Similar cases followed. In some reports the teeth exploded so loudly they caused temporary deafness to their former owners. Others claimed the explosions to be so powerful that their entire bodies were felled by them.

That's a case they've yet to solve as is the final one that Thomas presented us with (there was a disappointingly sparsely attended Q&A afterwards that touched on such niche concerns as the gastric juice of corvids and how the saliva of crows can ease muscle pain) on an evening that was as bizarre as it was brilliant.

'ABORTION EXTRAORDINARY:FOETUS VOMITED BY A BOY' was the eye catching headline that told the story of a Greek boy who puked up an actual foetus. The Athenian doctors who examined his body could find no reason for how, or why, this could have happened and it seems the most likely scenario, and this is something that is so rare it's only believed to have happened a couple of hundred times in the entire history of the human race, is that before what should be the birth of twins there were some complications (to put it mildly) and one foetus somehow gets inside the other. This only coming to light when the healthy child expels the then dead one from their body - and you thought the film Twins with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito was odd.

Thanks again to Thomas Morris and to the London Fortean Society. Really looking forward to the upcoming talk on mermaids but it'll have to go to some to out-Fortean this one!

Fig Leaves and the Dirty Ground:The Nude in Renaissance Art.

"In the nude, all that is not beautiful is obscene" - Robert Bresson.

"What is the body? The shadow of a shadow of your love that somehow contains the whole universe" - Rumi.

"The nude does not simply represent the body but relates it, by analogy, to all structures that have become part of our imaginative experience" - Sir Kenneth Clark.

"Tits, bum, fanny, THE LOT" - Andy, Gregory's Girl.

Jacometto Veneziano or close follower - Lovers in an Interior (before 1497)

If, like Andy in Bill Forsyth's 1981 film Gregory's Girl, you'd come along to the Royal Academy's The Renaissance Nude exhibition for a little perv or a touch of titillation you were more than likely to leave disappointed. There are a handful of paintings that explore the naked body in a sexual way but, equally, there's plenty of work that focus on the martyrdom of saints, the decaying of our flesh, or even its mutilation. 

Strangely enough, your best bet for smut is Jacometto Veneziano (or, perhaps, one of his close followers) and his 15c Lovers in an Interior. Strangely, because it also happens to be one of the very best paintings in the entire exhibition (and there are a lot of pretty good ones). We're rendered prurient observers of this undoubtedly tender and erotic moment by dint of the artist positioning a masterfully captured glass of water in the foreground telling us for certain that our viewpoint is that of the voyeur. "If I don't see you through the week, I'll see you through the window" to borrow another line from Gregory's Girl.

A door ajar allows light in to the opulent room but also adds a certain frisson to the clinch. Are these illicit lovers excited by the chance of being caught in flagrante delicto? That's just one of many questions that come to mind when viewing Lovers of an Interior. What's she got in her hand? Is she taking some kind of selfie? Was the Hollywood (or is it a Brazilian) wax already in vogue during the Renaissance? Have I been looking at this so long now that the invigilators are getting concerned? 

 

Martin Schongauer - Saint Sebastian (c.1480-90)

It's also a good painting to start my assessment off with because it features both a naked woman and a naked man and this show is, roughly - I didn't count - I'm not that mad, made up of as many unclothed men as it is unclothed women. 

Which, a few years ago, would have been highly unlikely. The Guerrilla Girls didn't just ask "do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?" but also took measures to change this, to move things forward at a the time when we still seemed to be stuck in a era of unreconstructed attitudes to women's bodies. An era that still seemed to hold as absolute truths William Blake's assertion that "the nakedness of woman is the work of God" and didn't wonder what Renoir was thinking when he proclaimed his 'concern' had "always been to paint nudes as if they were some splendid fruit".

In the dim distant past the main issues with curating and hosting an exhibition of nudes would have been with pious observers demanding censorship or closure of the show. Now, curators tread on eggshells fearing they'll offend any number of groups should what they offer up be seen in any way as tokenistic or condescending and worries are based more on the likelihood of accusations of cultural appropriation and speaking from a place of privilege.

That may make the work a bit harder but that's a good thing. Things don't stay as they are. They move on. New ways of thinking and new (previously silenced) voices create new ideas and hopefully provide us with a route forward. I'd have been interested to see a show that takes us beyond the Renaissance into representations of nudity up to and including the present day. Maybe that's an idea for a sequel (obviously, the RA curators never miss one of my art blogs so no doubt they'll be planning one first thing Monday morning).

The exhibition begins with the story of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, a monumental wall painting for the Sistine Chapel that had a vast array of nudes, being completed in 1541 and then, soon after, having concealing draperies painted over them on the order of Pope Pius IV. Nudes had, before then, been central to the development of art and to the development of individual artists. Training involved careful study of human anatomy and the classical worlds of Greece and Rome seemed to have no hang ups about the naked human form.

The Renaissance came at a time when art was finding new ways of rendering the nude more realistically and, in some quarters, civilisation (if religious fundamentalism can be called that) was demanding a bit more 'modesty'. Netherlandish artist Dirk Bouts makes feelings, at least those north of the Alps, of the time absolutely clear with two paintings regarding the Last Judgement and designed to be viewed side by side.

The good people, the 'saved' people, of The Way to Paradise are dressed in modesty preserving loin cloths, highly decorative shawls, and, in one instance, a pair of wings as they head out into a heavenly paradise of sunshine, worship, and, it's assumed, eternal bliss. The Fall of the Damned, however, is much more interesting. The bad people, the 'unsaved', are all naked and, not only that, they're succumbing to all manner of death, degradation, and defilement.

No doubt it's what they deserved (if only Adam and Eve had not eaten that apple). Terrifying looking bats and dragons drop people to their deaths from the sky, one poor soul is being eaten alive, there's a pit of pitiful paupers slowly burning to death, and a crazed demonic red creature with eyes as nipples prepares to bring a pitchfork down into some sinner's skull. You'll probably not be surprised to learn that Dirk Bouts was a contemporary of Hieronymus Bosch.

Dirk Bouts - The Way to Paradise (1468-69)

Dirk Bouts - The Fall of the Damned (1468-69)

This level of horror is rarely found outside the realms of religious, specifically Christian, art (even if the Chapman Brothers do their best to copy it), but there are scenes of private devotion to balance out the torture, self-flagellation, and heavy handed didacticism. There's a lovely Donatello bronze and a painting, by the Italian Cima da Conegliano, of Saint Sebastian at a thankfully early stage of his martyrdom where he still retains his dignity.

There's also Durer's iconic, and rather heartwarming, engraving of Adam and Eve. Capturing the moment, so we're informed, just before Eve succumbed to temptation and ate the forbidden fruit ("thus condemning humanity to labour, physical frailty and, ultimately death" a sign tells us - so it's all her fault). She doesn't look like somebody who's just about to do something that will commit everyone living, and everyone who ever has or ever will, to a life of suffering and a death sentence. In fact, both her and Adam look like any other pair of young lovers both excited by, and nervous about, each other's, and their own, bodies.

Cima da Conegliano - Saint Sebastian (1500-02)

Albrecht Durer - Adam and Eve (1504)

Jean Bourdichon - Bathsheba Bathing (1498-99)

Once the original sin had been committed it wasn't all bad though, at least people were free to enjoy sex. Men more than women it seems. Rich men more than poor men it still seems. Witness that 'crazy babe' Bathsheba bathing and arousing poor King David who of course, 'summoned' her. Because that's what you do if you see someone you fancy. You 'summon' them!

We shouldn't get hung up on the veracity of these tales though. Most of them are either meant as fables or to instruct in some way and others are quite open about the debt they owe to classical mythology, and where we find classical mythology we find classical beauty. In the form of Venus and, on loan from the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, Titian's Venus.

Pliny the Elder had described a painting by the most famous painter of antiquity, Apelles, of Venus being birthed by the sea and it caught on in Renaissance times with works by both Botticelli and Titian. Titian's gone for the old wet hair look that so many of us like.

Titian - Venus Rising from the Sea ('Venus Anadyomene') (c.1520)

Giulio Campagnola - Nude Reclining in a Landscape (c.1482 - after 1515)



Pisanello - Luxuria (c.1426)

Pisanello's pen and ink Luxuria predates Titian by the best part of a century but it's equally sensuous. Where Venus appears coy, averting her gaze, Luxuria confidently stares out at us rocking a fairly impressive afro that must have been even more eye catching in 15c Pisa than it is 21c London. 

Women were, even back then, being blamed for distracting men from work and academia. Hans Baldung Grien's woodcut Aristotle and Phyllis tells the story of how, after her lover Alexander the Great was castigated by his teacher Aristotle for spending too much time with Phyllis, she sought her revenge by demanding a jaunt around the philosopher's garden while perched naked atop his back. Aristotle's humiliation was guaranteed by arranging for Alexander to witness the entire, very bonkers, spectacle.

Hans Baldung Grien - Aristotle and Phyllis (1513)

It's one of several quite out there tales that pepper The Renaissance Nude exhibition. There's Piero di Cosimo's oil painting, inspired by the poetry of Ovid and Boccaccio, of a satyr mourning a nymph, Cranach the Elder weighs in with a picture of a faun and his family looking remarkably at ease after they've somehow managed to slay a lion, Marco Dente ramps up the sexual tension between a nymph and a satyr to an uncomfortable degree, and there's Andrea Mantegna's fantastical battling sea gods.

Piero di Cosimo - A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph (c.1495-1500)

Lucas Cranach the Elder - A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion (c.1526)

Marco Dente - Nymph and Satyr (Pan and Syrinx) (c.1516)

Attributed to Jan Wellens de Cock - The Temptation of Saint Anthony (c.1520)

Andrea Mantegna - Battle of the Sea Gods (before 1481)

If you think Mantegna's warring deities look like something out of Ray Harryhausen then take a look at Pollaiuolo's Battle of the Nudes. The Florentine engraver has created a vicious, yet striking, ensemble piece in which the muscalature of his warriors has become so idealised it's moved almost into parody.

There's a homoerotic charge to it but it's one that could easily have been denied by any red blooded fully signed up heterosexual Tuscan of the time. It's hard to imagine, even in the late fifteenth century, it would have been so easy to misread Durer's 'Bathhouse'. The woodcut shows drinking, music, nudity, and the two men at the forefront of the image catching each other's eyes. This is how I imagine it was at Chariots sauna in Vauxhall on a Saturday night before Grindr changed everything.

Antonio Pollaiuolo - Battle of the Nudes (1470s)

Albrecht Durer - The Bathhouse (c.1496)

Durer is just one of many very big name artists on show at The Renaissance Nude. We've seen works by Titian and Mantegna but there are also contributions from Bellini, Raphael, and even some absolutely stunning pen and inks by Leonardo da Vinci, inspired by the dissection of human bodies he carried out himself. Jan Gossaert's not such a household name but the Flemish artist is as well represented at the RA as anyone.

Artists of the Renaissance closely studied Classical sculpture like the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere. Both nowadays on show in the Vatican but, at that time, recently excavated. They combined this with the study of actual human bodies (both alive and, as we've read with Leonardo, dead) and reading the recently rediscovered De Architectura by Vitruvius (which was first published around the time of Christ) to create works of that managed to show off both their exquisite craftsmanship, their artistic chops, and their tender, passionate piety all at the same time.

Vitruvius had posited a theory that linked the proportions of temple architecture with the human body and suggested there was a symmetry between the two. It seems a bit far fetched now but you can, not least in the work of Fra Bartolomeo (or in Leonardo's Vitruvian Man - not on show, you've got to go to Venice to see it but you've seen World in Action so you get the idea), how that was put into action by the artists of the Renaissance.

Fra Bartolomeo - Study for the Central Group of a Lamentation (Pieta) (1511-13)

Parmigianino - Reclining Male Figure (c.1526-27)



Donatello - Saint Jerome (1460s)



Michelangelo Buonarroti - A Male Nude with Proportions Indicated (c.1515-20)

Parmigianino's wonderful Reclining Male Figure and Donatello's penitent Saint Jerome (this wooden sculpture shows Jerome "scourging  himself with a rock to quell carnal desire") are both freer and more expressive whilst Michelangelo (who, let's not forget Vasari described as a "perfect exemplar in life, work, and behaviour and in every endeavour") somehow manages to find an unforced balance between the architecturally inspired works of Fra Bartolomeo and the less academic style of Parmigianino.

This particular Michelangelo is owned by the Queen but it seems unlikely that The Torture of Saint Barbara by Knife and Scourge would ever end up in any royal collection (it's normally in the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki). So shocking is it nobody's even owned up to painting it. It's been 'attributed' to the German artist Konrad von Vechta who is so obscure he doesn't even has his own Wikipedia page. That's how I judge somebody's worth these days. Do they have their own Wikipedia page?

Barbara has been caught after running away from her father who disapproved of her Christianity. Her punishment appears to be a whipping and having her left breast hacked off with a knife. I don't know what the temperature of the blood was like in those old times but I'm willing to wager it was somewhere below tepid.

Attributed to Konrad von Vechta - The Torture of Saint Barbara by Knife and Scourge (c.1430-35)

Hans Baldung Grien - The Witches' Sabbath (1510)



Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio - Fury (c.1524-25)

No other image is quite so gruesome but in Baldung Grien's Witches' Sabbath (a woodcut) and Giovannia Jacopo Caraglio's Fury (an engraving) we're treated to some pretty phantasmagorical stuff. Baldung Grien's playing on 15c Germany's irrational fear of witchcraft (there are potions being mixed, a horse flies through the air, and a topless hag displays a salver of unsavoury looking comestibles) and Caraglio shows us a howling, and emaciated, figure (maybe human, maybe not) riding some kind of dragon whilst waving a snake and a skull in the air. Your average heavy metal fan could spend hours choosing the right tattoo from this artwork.

Often these grotesque, demonic images aren't viewed as 'nudes' as such so it's testament to those behind this show that they've opened our minds to a more fuller appreciation of what a nude is. It's not something to be scared of (though it can be), it's not something to laugh at (though it can be), and it's not necessarily to something to get aroused by (though it can be). In that respect much like actual naked human bodies.

With that in mind, it initially appears a little odd that the experience should end with more idealised representations of the naked body. But, given time to ponder the intentions of the curators, it seems clear that these belong here just as much as the witches, the martyred saints, the bathhouse cruisers, the satyrs, and the fauns. This is not an exhibition that seeks to show us what human bodies look like (we've all got our own so we could just look at them if that's we wanted) but to show us what artists have done with them, how they've portrayed them, and why they've chosen to portray them in such a way.

Simone Bianco's Bust of a Young Woman is an example of a belle donne (beautiful woman), a style that was popular in early 16c Venice, and Agnolo Bronzino has painted Saint Sebastian looking more like a matinee idol than a man who's soon to be beaten to death with cudgels and thrown into a sewer (after he had survived the arrows of a troop of Mauritanian archers)

Simone Bianco - Bust of a Young Woman (c.1520)

Agnolo Bronzino - Saint Sebastian (c.1533)

Why these works were made in such a conservative style at a time when the God fearing people of Europe were clearly not averse to being presented with horrific images of punishments feted out to sinners and heathens it's not sure. Perhaps these were for private devotion. Christianity needed to have all bases covered as any lie that big always needs to.

It's unlikely that Dosso Dossi was suggesting that Christianity rested on a bubble of belief as easily poppable as the one that Fortuna sits on in his Allegory of Fortune. It's unlikely but it works for me. The painting shows Chance clasping a bundle of lottery tickets as if to remind us all that even the powerful are reliant on good fortune.

We're as reliant on good fortune in financial matters as we are with our bodies. Since I've turned fifty I've noticed how many of mine and my friend's conversations have turned towards our health, looking inwards at our failing bodies, and, in some cases, I am seeing people close to (and much loved by) me suffering great illness. 

Our body is the vessel we come into this life in, the one that carries us through it, and the one, eventually, that we depart in. It seems appropriate that so much art relating to our bodies should focus on sex, death and the other big issues because our bodies are the one thing we can never shed, the one thing we are always with (even our minds go into 'flight mode' when we sleep), and, they're something we all share. Sometimes with each other. We shouldn't be ashamed of them. We should celebrate them. I'd say that, for the most part, the Royal Academy's Renaissance Nudes did just that. Don't fancy yours much, mind!

Dosso Dossi - Allegory of Fortune (c.1530)

She's a Rainbow:The Pop Art of Tom Wesselmann.

"Have you seen her all in gold? Like a queen in days of old. She shoots colors all around like a sunset going down. Have you seen a lady fairer?" - She's a Rainbow, The Rolling Stones.

'She's a Rainbow', from The Stones 1967 LP Their Satainc Majesties Request, doesn't just celebrate the beauty of a woman and how 'colourful' she is, it also wholeheartedly objectifies her. She is nothing but her beauty and her bright colours. In that respect, it's a perfect match for the paintings that Tom Wesselmann made towards the end of his life fifteen years ago.

Or so I say now. With the benefit of both hindsight and, thanks to a huge number of incredibly brave women, a keener sense of how objectification objectifies women and how patriarchal structures have become instituionalised and how they need forcibly changing. If I'd have been writing this around the time of Wesselmann's death in December 2004, it'd be a VERY different piece indeed.

Tom Wesselmann - Sunset Nude with Palm Trees (2003)

None of which is to say that She's a Rainbow is a bad song (it's not, it's a lovely song) and none of which is to say that Tom Wesselmann's Sunset Nude paintings are bad paintings. They're not. They're lovely paintings. Well, better than average anyway. I've seen better but I've definitely seen worse.

Almine Rech Gallery in Mayfair was a new space to me and Wesselmann, despite being long dead, was a new artist to me. So, eager to learn (as ever), I made sure I read the lengthy preamble about him before I entered the gallery space. I didn't get much from it. Apparently, towards the end of an artist's career "a devil-may-attitude inhabits their psyche" and their work becomes "more joyous", collage was at the heart of Wesselmann's art, and he was "a meticulous artist who followed a highly prescribed methodology in creating his art". The words were as dry and energy sapping as his art was vivacious and full of life.

Tom Wesselmann - Seven Up Beauty (2003)

Dismissive of the term 'pop art' throughout his career, Wesselmann was, nevertheless, seen as a practitioner of the form. That does him a slight disservice. Sure, there are elements of that genre but there also nods to fauvism, expressionism, and more than a tip of the hat towards the abstraction of Piet Mondria(a)n.

Seven Up Beauty looks like somebody has decorated the chassis of their car in a Mondrian style, had a prang that's bent it all out of shape, and then stuck it up on the gallery walls anyway. It's pleasant - but frustrating. It's also difficult to get a grasp on an artist who appears to have two very distinct styles. The 'sunset nudes' and the Mondrian fender benders.

Tom Wesselmann - Sunset Nudes, Floral Blanket (2003)

It's not a big show (just a couple of medium sized rooms fleshed out with a few maquettes, sketchbooks (see end of blog), plans, exhibition catalogues, photographs, and drawings) so it's not like you can really get a handle on Wesselmann with such a tiny, and date specific, selection of his work. 

A simple Google image search reveals there's much more to his art (and leaves you in no doubt as to why that art was considered 'pop') and makes you think it'd be good to see a full show of his work. That's a job for somewhere like the Royal Academy or Tate Modern or even one of the larger commercial galleries like the Victoria Miro. Almine Rech, one presumes, are primarily in the business of flogging this stuff. I'm surprised they even let me in!

Tom Wesselmann - Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque (2003)

But what of Wesselmann's nudes? With their bright red nipples, their dark brown pubic triangles, and (in several cases) their lack of a face. There's something of Gauguin about them, some kind of exoticising, but in Wesselman's case he clearly didn't need to travel to the South Seas to find mystery. Like the sinister old perv, Degas, Wesselmann just saw women as, somehow, different.

They don't look like real women (quite clearly), they're not particularly erotic, and there's little difference in the way Wesselmann paints a woman than in the way he paints a piece of fruit. In Sunset Nude with Matisse Odalisque he's lined up a selection of juicy, succulent fruit next to one of his nudes as if almost to reflect her. Perhaps that's his representation of a man? Two balls and a dick. Who knows?

Tom Wesselmann - Three Step II (2003)

Tom Wesselmann - Three Step (2013)

Swings and roundabouts though. Each concern about objectification is mostly offset by Wesselmann's wonderful use of colour and that was my come away from the show. Tom Wesselmann (born, Cincinatti in 1931, died New York City, 2004) was a country music fan who, in his approach to women, was very much a man of his age. He wasn't the most original artist (or thinker) that ever lived but he was, without any shadow of a doubt, a very colourful one.

"Coming, colours in the air".

Tom Wesselmann - Exhibition Detail (2004)

Liquid history:Thames myth and mystery.

I have seen the Mississippi. That is muddy water. I have seen the Saint Lawrence. That is clear water. But the Thames is liquid history" - John Burns.

"There are two things scarce matched in the universe. The sun in Heaven and the Thames on Earth" - Walter Raleigh.

"Has anybody tasted a swan?" - SELFS attendee, Old King's Head, off Borough High Street, London, 14th March 2019.

The Thames, it seems, really does attract both quotations and questions that range from the sublime to the ridiculous. It was a Thursday night in March and I was sat in the function room above The Old King's Head  near London Bridge station for a SELFS talk, Myths & Mysteries of the Thames, that was being given by Robert Stephenson, a self described 'City guy' who works as a tour leader in both Brompton and Kensal Green cemeteries.

SELFS has been, perhaps, my find of the year. I regularly write of my adventures at London Skeptics, Greenwich Skeptics, and the London Fortean Society and, at these events, I'd regularly hear mention of SELFS. It stands for South East London Folklore Society and the host, George Nigel Hoyle, holds his events on the second Thursday of each month upstairs in The Old King's Head. A pub I'd, just last August, drunkenly celebrated my 50th birthday in and one, in the early noughties I'd attended, with my pal Richard Sanderson, my first ever London Skeptics event.

But, until January this year, I'd not got round to turning up for one of their evenings. Then, on David Bowie's birthday they hosted Is David Bowie a God? (anything other than an answer in the affirmative was sure to create a scene) and me and my mate Simon went along and stood at the back. On Valentine's Day I attended (solo - it's alright, don't cry for me) a talk about love tokens and rituals. Both were excellent but for reasons I won't bore you with, okay - I got too pissed, I didn't blog about them.

I was determined not to make that mistake with Myths & Mysteries of the Thames so, once I'd negotiated the packed downstairs of the pub (you could choose between Chelsea spanking Dynamo Kiev on two screens or live footage of the ongoing Brexit clusterfuck (just a couple of miles upstream)) on a smaller TV, I grabbed myself a Doom Bar and headed to an equally packed upstairs. They were turning people away.

It's only right and proper that Londoners should be interested in learning about the Thames. It provides them, and many others (the tributaries cover five thousand square miles), with their energy, their (relative) prosperity, and it's their gateway to the world. Not only was London, not so long ago, the world's biggest city - it was also the world's biggest port, and as such the history of it, let alone the mythology surrounding it, has became far more vast than the river's comparatively modest length would suggest.

One or two topics cropped up that covered similar territory to Nathalie Cohen's 2016 talk at the London Fortean Society, Religion and Ritual by the River:Archaeology in the Inter-Tidal Zone but (a) that was back in November 2016 so a refresher wouldn't hurt and (b) they didn't double up as much as they could have so I wasn't concerned. Robert started with that Walter Raleigh quote, now etched into the wall abutting the river just a few hundred yards away, and told of Raleigh bringing potatoes and tobacco into Britain via the Thames so that we could have chips'n'fags. But he soon took us back a lot further still.

Back to a time when the Thames was much wider and much shallower and each bank was dotted with numerous islands. One of these islands, Thorney Island, is where the Houses of Parliament now stand, in an area described by 8c Mercian king Offa (he of the famous dyke) as a 'locus terribilis' (which shouldn't need much translating). Legend says the mythical 2c British king Lucius built a church there and that five hundred years later it received no less a visitor than Saint Peter himself (even though he'd been dead more than half a millennium by then).

Perhaps those five hundred years of stony sleep had upset Peter's internal GPS because when he arrived in London he found himself in Lambeth on the wrong side of the river and had to be rowed across the Thames by a local fisherman ("'ere', you'll never guess who I had in the back of me boat last night?"). This event is still marked with an annual presentation of fish in Westminster.

Stories abound of Arthurian legend in Westminster, of Camelot myths, of Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, and of Guinevere's 'honour' being preserved by Lancelot swimming across the Thames still on his horse but, outside the realms of myth, the first reported events on Thorney Island/Westminster are the building of a major religious house there in the tenth century and Edward the Confessor stationing himself there when he succeeded Harthacnut to the throne in 1042.

Less than fifty years later William the Conqueror (or William I to those who live within the square mile, he never conquered the City apparently) began work on what would become the Tower of London a few miles downstream and, of course, a mythology surrounds that building also.

There was (you may disagree) a legendary Pembrokeshire king, Bran the Blessed (not to be confused with Brian Blessed), who somehow managed to live for eighty years after having his head cut off. When Bran finally died his giant head (oh, he was a giant too, as well as a king) was carried to London and buried in the Bryn Gwyn where the Tower of London now stands. He was buried with his head facing France to guard against invasion but when King Arthur exhumed Bran's head and lobbed it into the Thames, England became (it is believed, but probably not by many) vulnerable again.

As a spooky little aside the name Bran is usually translated from Welsh into raven and we all know who the Tower of London's most famous residents are now.

Bran's is not the only skull found in the Thames. It's operated as a watery resting place for many people for many hundreds of years. Robert touched on theories of Celtic head cults and simple riverside burials but this talk was flowing as fast as the river on a stormy day and we didn't have time to admire the view before we were hearing about all the swords, daggers, and axes (made from bronze, iron, and even stone - showing just how long this river has been fought over) that have been pulled from the Thames. Votive offerings like the Battersea Shield too.

Skulls weren't just in the river. They 'welcomed' you to it too. The south side of London Bridge would, for over three hundred years, regularly display the heads of around thirty traitors (or others deemed to have done something equally unsavoury) skewered on to spikes, or pikes, for all to see. The first person to get this treatment was Scottish independence leader William Wallace in 1305 and the last, in 1678, was one William Staley, who it is now believed was the victim of a papish plot.

For hundreds of years London Bridge was the only bridge across the Thames in London (hence it's name). It was the nearest place to the estuary that was able, at that point, to be bridged and its location was what dictated the position of London. The first London Bridge, completed in 1209, was only twelve feet wide and had a chapel halfway across it that could accommodate both horse riders and pedestrians on the bridge and boatmen beneath it. The chapel was dedicated to Thomas Becket so it became a suitable, and soon a popular, place for pilgrims to begin their journeys to Canterbury.

By the time, the Thames reaches London Bridge it's the wide, expansive river we know and love today but the Thames doesn't manage this all of its own accord. It relies on about fifty tributaries (many of them with their own tributaries and many of them with their own tributaries and so on and so on) along its course. When the Cherwell flows into the Thames at Oxford it increases the size of the river by a third.

Rivers like the Peck (Peckham), the Wandle (Wandsworth), and the Brent (Brentford) have given parts of London their names but many of the tributaries in London are now underground. Butchers were throwing their waste in and people using them as toilets and they started to really honk so they were covered up.

At one point people used to scavenge in these underground rivers. They were really nothing more than sewers (which was a great shame as some had once been spectacular, The Fleet for example once had a Bridge of Sighs built by Christopher Wren over it) and that's perhaps how the stories of sewer pigs took hold. The belief being that a pregnant sow had somehow managed to get herself stuck in the Fleet somewhere near Hampstead and that her piglets had grown feral in the underground river. Though, how a pig living in an underground river would be anything other than feral it's hard to gauge. Civilisation can't have been an option, really.

When a map was made of all London ghost sightings some time ago it seemed to have a remarkable correspondence with the course of the underground rivers of London (the reason for this, a helpful Brockley man piped up during the Q&A, was probably due to the distant rumbling sound of the still flowing rivers and the miasmas that can often be seen early in the morning through grilles over these waterways).

The confluence of the Lea and the Thames is the site of London's only lighthouse, the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse. Strictly speaking it is, or at least was, a centre built in 1864 for testing lighthouses.

It's far from the only architectural peculiarity that flanks the Thames as it flows through the UK capital. Cleopatra's Needle was first erected in 1500BC in Heliopolis before moving to Alexandria (both in Egypt) and, finally, to London in 1819. Six sailors died getting it to London and when it finally arrived it was discovered that its planned location, Parliament Square, was too boggy for it to be installed safely.

It eventually found its permanent home on the Embankment and a time capsule was planted at its base containing a bizarre assortment of items that'll make you wonder about the workings of the Victorian mind. There was a picture of Queen Victoria, pictures of the twelve most beautiful ladies of the time (Vicky obviously didn't make the cut), cigars, coins, a map, and, er, a hydraulic jack!

Soon this new exciting London landmark took on a practical use that many others before and since have. It became a popular suicide spot. But then the Thames is, of course, full of death. That's the main point of the talk. If it's not suicide, it's murder. If it's not murder, it's some horrible accident.

In the past, bodies fished from the river were taken to Dead Man's Hole under Tower Bridge. These days they're taken to Wapping. Which seems apt as Wapping's got a long, and bloody, history when it comes to watery deaths.

Execution Dock in Wapping was used for over four centuries to execute pirates, smugglers, and mutineers. It was the Admiralty's place of execution and the Admiralty had jurisdiction over any British merchant ship in any waters anywhere in the World. Commit a crime on the high seas in the Caribbean or in the South Seas and you could be brought back to Wapping for a gibbeting.

Which consisted of being strung up and chained to a stake for three tides to die of either drowning, thirst, or starvation. You didn't get a funeral (that was part of your punishment) but you did get a decent crowd out to watch you die. At one point Wapping High Street had thirty-six pubs ensuring a loud, raucous, and drunken crowd could witness your death.

Captain Kidd, who'd been deemed guilty of piracy in the late 17c, had a particularly gruesome end in 1701. He was gutted, tarred, put in an iron frame, and left to disintegrate. Presumably as a warning to other potential lawbreakers. The area now still has a pub named after him and if you're prepared to look carefully you can even find a gibbet standing (thankfully no longer in use).

Gibbeting was made illegal in 1834 but forty-two years later, in 1878, the Thames saw one of the most deadliest incidents in its history. The Princess Alice paddle steamer was returning from Gravesend full of holiday makers. Attempting to cut a corner on the river in Woolwich, the Alice hit a coal ship and, being made of wood, pretty much fell apart. 75,000,000 gallons of sewage had just been allowed to be released down the river and this met with the people who'd not long earlier been safe aboard a paddle steamer. Over 600 died. Nobody's sure of the exact number. Nobody had checked anybody on to the boat.

One hundred years later in 1978 a Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov, came to an altogether more sinister end on Waterloo Bridge when he was stabbed with a ricin poisoned umbrella and the next bridge along, Blackfriars, was where the body of Robert Calvi, God's banker was found hanging with thousands of pounds stuffed in his pockets four years later. Coincidentally enough (or perhaps not, this is widely believed to have been a Mafia hit), Calvi had previously belonged to the 'frati neri' illegal masonic lodge in Italy. Frati neri being the Italian for Blackfriars.

I was enjoying all these tales of death and disaster a bit too much so, perhaps, it was time for some light relief. With the tale of The Lord Noel-Buxton, Robert Stephenson did not disappoint. The Member for Agriculture and Fisheries, after learning of stories that Julius Caesar had once forded the Thames, set about trying to prove that this ford had been near Westminster. By trying to walk across it.

He was a tall man - so that helped - but if his quest was already inadvisable it was made more so by attempting the feat in his ordinary, considerably less than waterproof, clothes. He got about forty yards out into the river before falling into a dredging channel. Luckily for him, he was able to swim to safety. It's probably best to assume, now, you can't walk across the Thames near Westminster even if London is believed to be ascending an average of a foot a century!

The best way of getting about (on the river) is getting a boat and paintings by Canaletto show the Lord Mayor's Show which began on the water in the fifteenth century. Over the years many of the livery companies relinquished their barges and the pomp and ceremony now takes place on the streets and lanes (but never roads, the word road is said to be so (relatively) new it's not used in the City) of the Square Mile.

One person who's not relinquished her barge is the Queen. In fact she's recently had a second one made for her proving, once again, that when it comes to austerity we're absolutely not all in it together. Contrary to popular belief, the Queen does not own ALL the swans on the Thames. Just most of them (though she does own all the sturgeon). The unmarked ones. Two livery companies (the vintners and the dyers) have possession over the others and so they know which are theirs and which belong to the House of Windsor they make nicks on their beaks, or mark them. It's apparently painless to the swans and they get a free health check as well as being weighed at the same time! Oh, and they use rings now instead of marked beaks.

The swans used to stretch from Henley-on-Thames to London Bridge but now, according to our speaker, can only be found between Windsor and Pangbourne. That's something that, like his odd use of fonts and graphic design that could come from the day the Internet was invented, could be in need of a little updating. Maybe I'll do some research. Any excuse for a walk!

I'd quite like to walk up to the Thames Barrier which is something, remarkably, I've not done yet. The barrier was opened in 1984 (and immortalised in Alexei Sayle's novelty hit 'Ullo John! Got a New Motor?') and it's believed that if it were to fail at high tide central London, or at least parts of it, would be engulfed in a tidal wave. With climate change and rising sea levels it seems inevitable that at some point in the reasonably near future there will have to be a new, and bigger, barrier built further out towards the estuary.

I'd be sad if London was to disappear underwater but I don't think it's going to happen just yet. So for now I'm going to continue enjoying walking along the river and, hopefully, continue enjoying talks about it. Towards the end of his hour, Mr Stephenson passed round a bottle of Thames water for people to either drink neat or pour into their beer.

I declined (many did not) but I certainly did raise my glass, along with everybody else in the room, when he proposed a toast to Old Father Thames himself. It had been an absolutely fascinating talk and I've not even had room to tell you about the nineteenth century obelisks of Southend, Richard the Lionheart's connection with Staines, how the palisades of Brentford gave that town an edge when it competed with Uxbridge for the status of Middlesex's county town, or how Spanish and Portuguese sailors used to carry out a ceremony called 'Flogging Judas' in the mid eighteenth century.

I had, however, learnt that Teddington's name simply means 'tide in town' (there are tidal markers along the footpath in Teddington that show where the Thames starts to become tidal), how George V had imported sand to the banks of the river near Tower Bridge to create King's Reach (an inner city beach that saw people swimming and building sandcastles), and, perhaps best of all, how the balustrades of Westminster Bridge, at the right time of the day, create a shadowy line of cocks along the pavement all the way to the Houses of Parliament. A comment on Boris Johnson I like to think.

The Q&A afterwards was equally fascinating and I've incorporated the most salient points into the above text. Parish notices informed us about upcoming events at Crossbones graveyard and David V Barrett of the London Fortean Society spoke about future events his group are running. I'll be trying to get along to as many of them as possible, I also hope to see Robert Stephenson speaking again (he's got upcoming talks on bodysnatching, crypts, and the coronation), but I shall definitely be at SELFS on the second Thursday in April for their talk on the lost Gods of London. I've been three times so far and each one has been absolutely wonderful.

Oh, and nobody there had eaten a swan. Even if one punter seemed assured that the cygnets definitely tasted better than the adult swans.