Olde Posts Addenda (7)

    Since all of the news is "breaking" these days, here are some more stories which have broken and are related to older news items in MM. 

Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900) Cropsey has been a subject in MM because I appreciate landscape paintings and, more importantly, because a painting of his was once found on the campus of UWO (Western). Forty-five years ago, the selling of Backwoods of America caused quite a controversy, even though $665,000 was received by UWO. For a discussion of the "Cropsey Controversy" see, Jasper Cropsey and McIntosh Gallery in the Winter, where it is discussed again. In a post about The Hudson River School it is noted that Cropsey's "Autumn Landscape With Cattle" sold for $325,000 (US) in 2021. The work pictured below is now offered by Questroyal Fine Art, if you are Christmas shopping. 

Doug Sneyd (R.I.P.) - Art of a Different Kind
   Back in 2017, I discussed three Canadian Cartoonists, Barry Blitt, Bruce McCall and Doug Sneyd. Mr. Sneyd was a classmate of my mother-in-law in high school in Guelph. He died in Orillia in January, 2025. Apart from my brief bit in MM, more is learned in the obituary from Mundell Funeral Home LTD. Douglas "Doug" Mord Sneyd:
   "Doug was a renowned commercial artist, illustrator, and cartoonist. He was born in Guelph Ontario, one of seven siblings. From humble beginnings, as a teenager, Doug sketched silhouettes at the Canadian National Exhibition. After high school, Doug was employed as a commercial and portrait artist in Montreal and Toronto....

Doug became a cartoonist for Playboy magazine in 1964 and was the longest contributor with over 400 full-page colour cartoons. Also in the mid 1960s, Doug became a daily political cartoonist, first with “Doug Sneyd” in the Toronto Star and later with “Scoops” that he syndicated in over 150 North American papers. These features ran for nearly 20-years. Doug followed up with a heartwarming feature, “Wee Whimsy.”

Photos and the War in Vietnam

   You will have seen the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the child who is generally referred to as "Napalm Girl", and I provide one in that post. That girl is now a grown woman, who lives in Ontario. In another post, "Napalm Girl" (Again), I discussed the controversy which has developed around who actually took the photo. I provide photos in those posts and will not do so again.
   The addenda is this: a film about the controversy has just been released and there will be more reviews, like this one: "‘The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo’ Review: Freelancing Woes: Was a Freelance Photographer Intentionally Left out of the Famous Vietnam War Photo of “Napalm Girl”?" Beatrice Loayza, New York Times, Nov. 27, 2025.
   "As far as documentaries go, Bao Nguyen’s “The Stringer” is a relatively straightforward work of investigative reportage. Its objective? To uncover the truth behind “The Terror of War,” a.k.a. “Napalm Girl,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, a naked Vietnamese girl who is fleeing her village with other children in the aftermath of a 1972 napalm attack."
   There is another review in The Globe and Mail: "I Heard the Rumours About the 'Napalm Girl' Photograph Decades Ago: The Question of Who Took It Reflects the Ambiguity of War," Denise Chong, Dec. 5, 2025.

Menus
   In 2018 I told you about collections of menus in Food History. If you are shopping for someone who likes to cook or dine out, this new book is an option: Tastes and Traditions: A Journey Through Menu History, by Nathalie Cooke. Professor Cooke is in the Department of English at McGill, where this is found: 
Nathalie Cooke's Latest Book: Tastes and Traditions. It is published by Reaktion Books and is found on Amazon or available from Indigo, where more can be learned.
   There is also this review by James Chatto in the October issue of the Literary Review of Canada: 

"À la carte: "According to a delicious art form."An English literature professor at McGill University, Nathalie Cooke is an expert at detecting nuances of meaning and historical resonance in the written word. Having set out her thesis that an old menu can tell “the belated reader” much more than simply what was once for dinner, she organizes her material according to half a dozen themes, each one explored through a generous number of examples. Cooke is a skillful curator, and her carefully chosen, clever juxtapositions prevent her book from being a mere list or catalogue. The first chapter, for instance, considers the design and visual appeal of menus, taking us from handwritten and painted mementoes of elaborate feasts hosted by Louis XV in the 1750s to a modern Bangkok restaurant’s bill of fare composed entirely of emoji. En route, we encounter cards designed by Toulouse-Lautrec and Albert Robida, the gorgeous offerings of luxury ocean liners, and the mixed-media assemblages of the 1960s artist-chef Daniel Spoerri’s “New Realism.”
  If you add her 190 illustrations to the ones found in my post about menu collections, you will have a substantial visual resource related to food. If you need more convincing, see also: "Old Menus Serve up a Glimpse of our Past; McGill Professor Nathalie Cooke Whets Readers' Appetite with a Book on the Evolution of Dining," Susan Schwartz, Montreal Gazette, August, 23, 2025.