CLASSIC #06

The Classic doesn’t have a complaints department. But maybe we should. “Calls answered 24/7”. Because I did receive a complaint recently, that our magazine focuses too much on “expensive things”. Do we? While there are indeed some expensive things in our pages, there is usually a fair amount at the other end. This time, we feature Melbourne-based artist and collector Patrick Pound, whose purchases are usually “well under $20”.

Once again, we spill over from the magazine onto our online resource, The Classic Platform, where you will find more on Patrick Pound, Blanche Wittmann and La Salpêtrière, plus letters, including a rare letter from the collection of Stephen White, from Joseph Cundall to Alfred Swaine Taylor, describing the historic night Herschel shared his discovery of the cyanotype process with the world.

There are many other new articles on the platform and our most industrious contributor Denis Pellerin starts a new series called A Second Lease of Life: Sitters and Photographers. Part 1 focuses on Mrs. Alfred de Beauchesne (sitter) and Savary (photographer). Pellerin has been busy elsewhere, and hot off the presses is his new book, Stereoscopy: the Dawn of 3-D, edited by Dr. Brian May. It’s a fascinating story, the birth and first steps of an astounding discovery, which led in just a few years to the original Golden Age of Stereoscopy, the amazingly inventive and prolific first thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, of what we now call “3-D”.