• artists,  bowler,  drawings,  nudes,  painters,  paintings,  photography

    Tumblr is dying

    And these images are why Tumblr is still broken, dying 6 weeks later AND the appeals process is bullshit. Some of you might know about Tumblr’s laughable attempt to expunge adult contentfrom their system using AI. That I moved the really ‘adult’ and pron-tastic ‘Retire To The Parlour’ blog to this server as a result.

    I appealed all these laughable ‘adult’ tags and they are STILL not sorted. According to Tumblr’s own new TOS, drawings, artworks and illustrations of nudity are fine. Doesn’t stop them still flagging my life drawings as ‘porn’ though.

    Even in the one photographhere, there is NO genitalia shown, apart from one that you’d need a magnifying glass to see anything!. It’s a photo of a male sauna, so any ‘obscenity’ is in the eye of the beholder, there is no sex happening there. 

    Really, Tumblr is full of shit. 

    They promised the bot would get ‘better’ on our dime as WE taught our censor masters as the test dataset of our work. Originally the system flagged a completely dressed man in a bowler hat and a close-up of a Holbein painting. Arbeit macht frei, indeed. Fuck off Tumblr, your censor bot is a mistake. It still doesn’t work, and your appeal system still leaves perfectly fine artworks and photos on the chopping block.

    And I’m going to repeat cross-post it until they fucking listen.

  • artists,  cigar,  painters,  photography,  portraits

    Max is resting

    Unusually informal photo of Max Slevogt smoking a cigar in the garden of Neukastel, around 1925. Methinks unplanned hence the angry expression.

    Like Matisse, a cat lover, there are other photos with his cat!

  • antiqueerian,  bromance,  hats,  photography,  portraits,  top hats,  victorians,  vintage

    Merrick Toppers

    Top hats in 1872. A cabinet portrait of two men linking arms, possibly brothers or close friends, photographed in 1872 or 1873 at the “Merrick” photographic studio at 33 Western Road, Brighton, which was owned by Brighton entrepreneur Joseph Langridge (1812-1895).”

    Yeah, ‘friends’, totally friends, LOL. *gaydar goes to max*. Again from the Photo History Sussex site, a treasure trove and even talks about the different types of top hats, something I’ve ranted on before about those doing costume drama using the wrong types….

  • bathers,  beards,  hats,  nautical,  photography,  top hats,  victorians

    Brighton Bathers 1863

    An amazingly informal early photo of the Brighton Swimming Club c. 1863. probably by Benjamin William Botham. Funny thing is hipsters still pull funny poses like that one guy in Brighton, 150 years later…I suspect he was trying to do an ‘Indian’ or Buddhist/yoga pose – which seems incongruous for the time but as the site explains, it otherwise seems genuine.

    More info here. (thanks to Duckie for the tip)

  • ancient greek,  artists,  drawings,  illustration,  nudes,  painters,  paintings,  photography,  portraits,  prints,  sculpture,  top hats,  Uncategorised,  victorian,  victorians,  vintage

    dusty-musty-obsolete:

    dusty-musty-obsolete:

    An old photo of a formless ghost I reblogged is being flagged!  This is madness.  

    Oh… and a painting of hands

    -a photograph of some woods 

    -a Rossetti painting 

    -a Gericault painting of a fully clothed painter

    – a picture of a living room, 

    -George IV riding a horse

     -an illustration from Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge

    -a midshipman’s uniform

    -a window

    I’ll add these have been flagged on this very blog:

    – A fully clothed picture of a Victorian man in a top hat

    – Two Holbein portraits. He only did clothed people and faces!

    – A photo of Matisse drawing a naked male abstract greek statue, a Kouros. Not sexual at all.

    – Two men wrestling in shorts – that was an illustration too

    – A drawing of Nietzsche naked but no genitalia shown

    – A life drawing of a man but again no genitalia shown

    – Nicoletto da Modena etching of a Triton (again, not even a human bottom half so no genitalia)

  • beards,  photography,  politics,  prints,  soldiers

    Georges Ernest Boulanger by Nadar.

    Shot himself a few months after his mistress died, Marguerite Bonnemain which wikipedia tells us:

    “ She became the lover of the French general and minister Boulanger and died in his arms in July 1891. At his request ‘A bientôt’ (‘See you soon’) was engraved on her tomb. Two months later he shot himself in front of her grave and ‘Ai-je bien pu vivre deux mois et demi sans toi?’ (‘Did I really live two and a half months without you?’) was added to the epitaph.“

    Also rumoured to have frequented the infamous male brothel in Cleveland Street, London. He looks the naughty type.