The Journal

Field Notes

On the prints, their sources, and the strange histories behind each design. Written in the voice of the naturalist's cabinet.

The Locket and the Locked Away

On Victorian mourning jewellery and the objects we wear to remember

The Victorians wore their grief on their bodies. A locket was not decoration — it was a reliquary.

The common poppy, from ancient grain fields to Flanders and beyond

The poppy is the oldest weed in agriculture. It followed the plough across Europe and became a symbol of everything we disturb.

Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita and the Rijksmuseum woodcut of 1915

De Mesquita's woodcut owls do not look at you. They look through you. That distinction matters.

A meditation on Sowerby's mushroom plates and the patience of observation

James Sowerby spent thirty years drawing fungi from life. His plates are not illustrations — they are arguments for slowing down.

On griffins, composite creatures, and the Victorian revival of heraldic design

Heraldry is a system for describing things that do not exist. The griffin — half eagle, half lion — is its most successful invention.

Munch made the same image four times. The woodcut version is the most honest.

The painting is famous. The woodcut is different — rougher, more physical, made with hands that pressed into wood.

On the oldest story of violence and the sculptors who gave it mass

The story of Cain and Abel has been told in paint, in verse, in stained glass. In bronze, it becomes something else entirely — it becomes heavy.

Georges Méliès, the birth of cinema, and the rocket that landed in an eye

In 1902, a former stage magician shot a rocket into the moon's eye and invented science fiction cinema. The moon has not forgiven him.

Hans Hoffmann, Dürer's shadow, and the patience of a 500-year-old painting

Hoffmann painted a hare sitting in a forest in 1585. Four hundred and forty years later, it still has not moved. That is the point.