A seal on horseback that got linked to an infamous scandal, a carefree beauty who hated skirts, and racy goings-on in Vienna: my first Amazons of Paris newsletter carries on where the Paris Review Daily series left off.
Category Archives: 1800s
Céleste Mogador: Lioness of the Hippodrome
Paris Review Daily have just published the fifth in my Écuyères series about the circus and hippodrome horsewomen of nineteenth-century Paris. It’s about Céleste Mogador, who was so many things it was hard to cram it all into the essay, not least because she left so much of her own life writing behind. Please go …
Continue reading “Céleste Mogador: Lioness of the Hippodrome”
The Baudelairean Horsewoman: Jenny de Rahden
The new Écuyères essay is up at the Paris Review Daily’s blog: it’s about Baroness Jenny de Rahden. This is part of a series on circus horsewomen of nineteenth-century Paris. The earlier essays are on Selika Lazevski (research blog here), Sarah l’Africaine (research blog here) and my obsession with these circus horsewomen (research blog here). …
Continue reading “The Baudelairean Horsewoman: Jenny de Rahden”
The Story of the “Black Gazelle” of the Paris Hippodrome: Sarah L’Africaine
A new essay on an equestrian stuntwoman who set Second Empire Paris alight: Sarah l’Africaine, following on from an earlier piece about the mystery horsewoman Selika Lazevski. Here’s some information about my sources: Most of the firsthand material is combed from Gallica, the incredible, searchable digital collection of the French national library. The quotations in …
Continue reading “The Story of the “Black Gazelle” of the Paris Hippodrome: Sarah L’Africaine”
A Street Filled with 102 Horses
From Tom Crewe’s review of A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain in the London Review of Books: “At 11am on 22 November 1827 Francis Place, the reformer and radical, stuck his head out of his bedroom window in Charing Cross and put down on paper the activity …
A Crown of Feathers and a Fine, Blue-Nosed Horse
American Woman Riding Side-Saddle on the Road at Hommoku, Motomura, Yokohama, by Utagawa Hiroshige II (Japanese, 1829–1869). This woodblock print dates from 1861. It belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, who have generously made many of their public domain images free for anyone to use.
May 2017 Bring You Obedient White Horses
Therese Renz of the famous Renz circus dynasty, c. 1895. I’ve seen wonderful pictures of her in action (have you see the one where she and her horse are jumping rope?) but didn’t realise that she was a Berliner, and is buried just up the road from me in St Hedwig’s cemetery in Weissensee. She …
Expert Lady Jockeys Wish You a Happy Christmas!
Happy Christmas!
Haunted by Horses in St Petersburg
Last weekend I travelled to St Petersburg to start research on a new book and I thought I’d share my equestrian shots. I was only in this fascinating, complicated city for two and a half days and did not venture out of the very heart of it but I still found some horse history of …
Horses in the Wings
The theatrical and circus historian A H Saxon is the don of hippodrama history. I bought an old library copy of his Enter Foot and Horse when I was working on The Age of the Horse because I knew it would be the key to nineteenth-century equestrian theatre. I wasn’t disappointed. Hippodramas were, to quote …