Oil Paintings By My Late Aunt Ida

My late Aunt Ida was a prolific oil painter, and unfortunately we have no idea where her paintings went, other than the four that we have in our house. This mountain painting, which is pretty small compared to the one of the country house, was just found in my Dad’s files. It is nice that we have a fairly diverse collection, even if it is only four pieces.

Work like this is one of the reasons I’m not a fan of “Modern Art”, where people just toss two or three cans of paint on a canvas and declare the result “Artwork”. Or drawing two rectangles on a white canvas, and if you don’t “get it”, than you aren’t sophisticated enough to understand how ground-breaking it is.

Declaring things that are ugly, visually chaotic, insultingly simple, childish, and lazily random to be great art is what happens when standards no longer exist. My aunt learned a craft, practiced it prolifically, and the result were paintings that are unique and beneficial to the soul.

Aunt Ida holding my Dad

The Proud Tower

I stole these two books from my Dad when I reorganized and cataloged his library a few months back, because they aren’t topics he’s interested in, while I am very much so into World War I. So, I “procured” them. And today, I finished reading “The Proud Tower”, after finishing “Mr. Wilson’s War” last month. These aren’t the smoothest books to read, and “The Proud Tower” did a deep dive into very detailed events that helped form the cataclysm which was The Great War.

The title of the book is derived from the 1845 Edgar Allan Poe poem “The City in the Sea”. Two lines of the poem are used as the epigraph for the book: “While from a proud tower in the town/ Death looks gigantically down.”

Coincidentally, I had purchased a paperback of “The Proud Tower” not long before I found the hardback in my Dad’s possession, and was already a hundred pages into it. I prefer hardbacks, and while I have three of Barbara Tuchman’s other books in that format already, I didn’t have this one. I was close to buying it off of Amazon, but didn’t. Just days later I just happened to run across it as mentioned.

Another neat thing about this adventure is that these two hardback books are from the same personal library of someone I don’t know. Maybe Dad picked these up at the annual Jefferson County Library Sale, but otherwise, who knows.

And for being sixty-five year old books, they are in PRISTINE condition. Like-new, maybe a few minor bends in the dust jackets, and a very slight fading in the paper. But they are great to hold while reading.

In any case, they will be together on my shelf from now on, due to this experience.

I’ll be reading the book Tuchman is most known for soon: “The Guns of August”, which covers the Great War specifically. “The Proud Tower” is the prequel to that one. My copy is the Easton Press, leather-bound edition, quite exquisite.