Don’t Tell Mama

Maybe it's naive of me, but whenever I see portraits like this, with just a father and daughter, it restores my faith in humanity a little. Because people seem to love this idea that fathers never loved their daughters in the past and only saw them as bargaining chips for marriage or whatever, but look at the guy in the first portrait on the left, he loves that little girl! And the dad trying to do his work while his daughter bothers him with an Old Timey Barbie. The man teaching his daughter geography, his expression is so soft! The way the man in the last portrait holds the little girl's hand! And none of these are incidental, these aren't photographs, someone (probably the father) paid good money and sat down for hours so that they could have a painting of themselves and their daughter. Probably because they loved their daughter.

oh I love those! People being people is one of my favourite kinds of paintings and an important reminder that people in past times were not all that different. There were dads who loved their daughters fiercely. There were fathers who happily looked after their babies too. The German reformer Philip Melanchton for example had a cradle in his office. His wife was busy organising a household for 20 people- she was out and about, he mostly worked in his office, it made sense for him to look after their babies too babies while she dropped by at snack time.

I raise you:

Pierre Fouché. 1994.77 or Lebenslänglichen Explosionsglück, 2020.

Genuinely one of my very favorite pieces of art ever. It's a masterpiece of design, materials, and execution.

Women writers of the Victorian era regarded the fairy tale as a dormant literature of their own. When Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre hears hoofbeats approaching her in the dark, ice-covered Hay Lane, "memories of nursery stories" immediately flood her mind, especially the recollection of "a North-of-England" monster capable of assuming several bestial forms. But the beastly apparition Jane expects turns out to be Rochester, the "master" whom she promptly causes to fall off his horse and who will eventually become her thrall. Rochester himself soon shows his own conversance with, and respect for, powers he associates with the magical women of traditional fairy tales. "When you came on me in Hay Lane last night," he tells Jane, "I thought unaccountably of fairy tales, and had half a mind to demand whether you had bewitched my horse. I am not sure yet. Who are your parents?" When Jane replies that she is parentless, Rochester endows her with a supernatural ancestry. Surely, he insists, she must have been "waiting for [her] people," the fairies who hold their revels in the moonlight: "Did I break one of your rings, that you spread the damned ice on the causeway?"

Wait I’m sorry parent/child incest fic?????? Why does that exist? Why do you KNOW that exists?????? What the fuck 🤢