Vases thought to be by Alexander 'Greek' Thomson heading to auction
Thomson was one of the most gifted architects of the Victorian era, whose unconventional style attracted admirers worldwide.
His creations - such as Caledonia Road Free Church, the Egyptian Halls and Holmwood House - are quintessential landmarks in his adopted city of Glasgow.
The rare Victorian Scottish fireclay garden vases were thought to have been designed by Thomson and modelled by George Mossman for the Garnkirk pottery stand at the Great Exhibition of 1851, held in London's Hyde Park.
READ MORE:
Local history group to host 'ambitious' Alexander 'Greek' Thomson festival
Artefacts linked to David Livingstone heading to auction
The vases, with scrolled lugs and classical coronation scenes, were gifted to a chauffeur to Mr Dixon of Govan Ironworks in the 1920s.
Although estimated at £600 or £800, the vases are expected to achieve "considerably more" when they appear in Great Western Auctions' Spring Two Day Fine Art & Antiques Auction on Friday, March 21 and Saturday, March 22.
Also heading to auction is a first Beano Annual dating from 1940 and a large Royal Doulton prestige figure of Princess Badoura riding an elephant.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Gizmodo
an hour ago
- Gizmodo
LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel Hits All-Time Low, Marked as Amazon's #1 Best-Seller and Already Selling Fast
'Boutique' and 'luxury' might not be words you normally associate with LEGO, but in this case they're very well deployed. The LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel is a stunningly detailed and beautiful 3,000+ piece kit for adult builders 18 and up, and Amazon's 24% off deal makes it a great $174 addition to any display area in your home. Think of an old-fashioned Victorian dollhouse, crafted with tons of fine details and hidden little conversation pieces, and you'll get a good idea of what this LEGO kit is all about, except it's far easier to build than those dollhouses. (Not that it's easy by any means — it's 3,066 pieces that most definitely require an adult builder.) The LEGO Boutique Hotel is a tribute to late-19th and early-20th century European architecture, released as part of the 15th anniversary celebration of the LEGO Modular Buildings line. See at Amazon This gorgeous set is filled with nods and tributes to LEGO Modular Building kits from the past 15 years. If you're a longtime LEGO fanatic you'll be able to spot many of them, but even unfamiliar builders can enjoy looking up these older kits and finding out where the LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel cleverly hides their references. (Spoiler: The typewriter in the LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel is from the Police Station kit.) More than just a self-reverential exercise, the LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel is a stunning piece of architecture in block form. There are five sections overall, with exquisitely detailed construction, including the unique geometric shapes and architectural quirks of the era. The roof's decorative dome and skylight are a beautiful topper, and the art gallery and terrace are fun touches. Seven minifigures are include, including a porter, receptionist, and coffee vendor. The LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel recreates the opulent hotels of Europe's Gilded Age, and it will provide a challenging yet fun hours-long activity, and once completed, a beautiful conversation piece you can proudly display in your home. When completed it's 13 inches tall, 10 inches wide, and 10 inches deep — small enough to comfortably occupy a prominent place in your home yet large enough for curious visitors to see all of the cool details. The LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel is #1 Amazon bestseller, with over 10,000 sold in just the past month. Nearly 500 Amazon reviewers give it a hefty 4.8-star average review. This 24% off sale brings the price of the LEGO Icons Boutique Hotel down from $230 to just $174, making it a perfect birthday or holiday gift for a crafter or fan of fine art and architecture. See at Amazon


San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Rare photos of Grateful Dead in S.F. by Jim Marshall showcased in new book
When an up-and-coming Peninsula band recently renamed the Grateful Dead moved to San Francisco in 1966, Jim Marshall was already an established national rock 'n' roll photographer whose fame exceeded theirs. That gave him immediate access to the band in their big Victorian at 710 Ashbury St. They welcomed him to drop by any time, with the two Leica cameras he wore around his neck, one loaded with Kodachrome color slides and the other black-and-white. He wound up making some 10,000 pictures of the band, at home and in concert in their home city — which often meant a stage quickly put up in Golden Gate Park or the connecting Panhandle. Marshall's images of the musicians at the park, in sunglasses or squinting in the daylight, are featured more than any other single venue in ' The Grateful Dead by Jim Marshall: Photos and Stories from the Formative Years, 1966–1977.' The coffee table issue, which weighs five pounds and costs $50, will be released nationally Aug. 5 by Chronicle Books, an independent publishing house. But bookstores Bay Area-wide are offering it early by special arrangement to coincide with the 60th anniversary weekend of shows by Dead & Company at the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park. The band's lead guitarist, Grammy-winning musician and songwriter John Mayer, wrote the afterword, having given Marshall full access to cover his solo career. The cover lettering is by Fez Moreno, who also designs concert posters for Dead & Company. 'This book is a tribute to the GratefuI Dead, Jim Marshall and San Francisco, in that order,' said Amelia Davis, who spent 13 years as Marshall's assistant, up until his death in 2010. 'It tells you a visual story about the relationship of Jim with his subjects in their environment, and documents an era of access that we are never going to see again.' Marshall was married and divorced twice but never had any children. He left his entire archive to Davis to reward her for loyalty and patience with a personality that was as complex and difficult as the rock stars he depicted. The book features some 265 pictures plus proof sheets that bring it to 900 images total, including candids and performance shots that were never printed and have never been seen. The totality, 288 pages with a psychedelic design, is an indicator that Marshall spent more time with the Dead than with any of the other subjects who gave him preferential treatment, including the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and the Jefferson Airplane, which was the biggest San Francisco band of that era. 'Jim used to say he never ate or drank anything when he was with the Grateful Dead, because they notoriously dosed everything with acid, and that wasn't his thing' said Davis. 'He considered the band to be family, and we want the readers to feel like family when they go through the book.' The book idea came from Oakland singer-songwriter and Grateful Dead authority David Gans, who pitched it to Davis as a 60th anniversary tribute long before the series of concerts in Golden Gate Park was announced. Marshall left behind a catalog of 3-by-5 notecards referencing every musical act and event he photographed. These corresponded to proof sheets and negatives, but they were not cross-referenced, so Davis had to search through the cards of every other act the band was known to play with and every venue it played at. There was no notecard for Golden Gate Park, but there were notecards for the Artists Liberation Front Free Fair in the Panhandle on Oct. 16, 1966, and the Human Be-In of Jan. 14, 1967, at the Polo Field, the same venue as the Dead & Company shows. There was also a notecard for an impromptu concert after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 1968. Marshall got lots of shots of band members arguing with San Francisco police — and that's all he got, because that concert never happened due to a lack of permits. Marshall, who was known to be persuasive, somehow managed to get the members of the five major San Francisco bands — the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Charlatans — to pose for a group photo in the Panhandle, as if they were a sports team. That image from the book is the ultimate proof of access. 'Jim was everywhere that mattered and he documented it with a photograph,' Davis said.


Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
Thomas Sayers Ellis, poet of ‘percussive prosody,' dies at 61
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Ellis's high school nickname was Sticks, not just because he deployed them on the drums but also because he was skinny. In a poem with that title, he used the language of percussion to connect the violence he saw in his father, whose strength he revered as a child, with his own development as a writer: Advertisement I discovered writing, How words are parts of speech With beats and breaths of their own. Interjections like flams. Wham! Bam! He went on: My first attempts were filled with noise, Wild solos, violent uncontrollable blows. The page tightened like a drum Resisting the clockwise twisting Advertisement Of a handheld chrome key Poet and composer Janice Lowe, another Dark Room founder, said in an interview that Mr. Ellis's work was 'very much rooted in musicality, in all kinds of Black musical and linguistic traditions and in the way people play with language.' She added, 'It can fly you into the surreal, into jazz or film, or root you in something familial -- whatever he was dialoguing with -- but it never rests, never stays in the familiar. It always travels and transforms and transgresses.' Mr. Ellis was prone to linguistic pyrotechnics, both on and off the page. He was an omnivorous reader of the literary canon and an avid book collector, particularly of those writers not yet in the canon, notably people of color. He was also a film, poetry, and music buff whose interests ranged from Gertrude Stein and French New Wave films to Bootsy Collins and George Clinton. In 1986, he was living in a Victorian house in Cambridge, with poet Sharan Strange and others when he and Strange began putting together a library of works by Black authors of the diaspora. They housed it in a former darkroom on the third floor, and they called the collection 'The Dark Room,' a name they liked as a pun for a room full of 'Black books,' as Strange wrote in an essay for the literary magazine Mosaic in 2006. When James Baldwin died the next year, Mr. Ellis, Strange and their housemates made a pilgrimage to his funeral in New York City. It was a heady literary event -- Toni Morrison, William Styron, Maya Angelou, and Amiri Baraka all delivered eulogies -- and it galvanized them to create a collective that would honor and support writers of color. They already had a name, the Dark Room, and, with Lowe, they began to host readings in their living room. Advertisement They were electric events, with music and art installations, and everyone wanted in. Alice Walker called and asked to read. Derek Walcott, the Caribbean-born Nobel Prize winner, read, and so did Michael S. Harper, the poet laureate of Rhode Island. The collective grew to include, among many others, Kevin Young, now the poetry editor of The New Yorker, and Pulitzer Prize winners Tracy K. Smith and Natasha Trethewey, the country's poet laureate from 2012 to 2014. Jeff Gordinier, writing in The New York Times in 2014, called the Dark Room 'a flash of literary lightning' akin to the Beat poets and the Black Arts Movement. The collective lasted, in various forms, until 1998, and the members held reunions in subsequent years. 'You need other people who think like you, maybe, who read like you, maybe, who walk and breathe like you, maybe,' Mr. Ellis told an audience in Santa Fe in 2013 during one reunion tour. 'You think you're adding something that's needed, that you don't see. There's something about that, that never ends, no matter who you are and where you are.' In a poem that Mr. Ellis titled 'T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully-Operational Memory),' he wrote: Memory, Walcott says, moves backwards. If this is true, your memory is a mothership minus the disco-sadistic silver all stars need to shine. Tell the world. A positive nuisance. Da bomb. When that poem was included in 'The Best American Poetry 2001,' he had this to say about it, in an author's note: Advertisement 'In the poem, I am working on my own brand of literary activism, which I call Genuine Negro Heroism. Genuine Negro Heroism (GNH) is the opposite of HNIC (Head Negro In Charge), and incorporates pee-pure modes of black freak, black folk, and black soul behavior.' Thomas Sayers Ellis was born Oct. 5, 1963, in Washington. His mother, Jeannette (Forbes) Ellis, managed a restaurant; his father, Thomas Ellis, was a pipe mechanic. Thomas Ellis attended Dunbar High School but spent much of his time at the city's block parties and go-go clubs. His girlfriend at the time, Sandra Andrews, gave birth to his son, Finn, when he was 17 and she was 19. Mr. Ellis attended Alabama State University on a scholarship and then moved to Cambridge, where he took classes at Harvard with poet Seamus Heaney. 'In a city where everybody acts like they've read everything,' poet and publisher Askold Melnyczuk said of Cambridge, 'he actually had.' Melnyczuk was an early booster of Mr. Ellis's; he included his work in 'Take Three: Agni New Poets Series' (1996), which he edited. In addition to 'The Maverick Room,' Mr. Ellis was the author of the chapbook 'The Genuine Negro Hero' (2001), 'Skin Inc.: Identity Repair Poems' (2010), and 'Crank Shaped Notes' (2021), a collection of poems, essays and photos about the go-go music he loved. Mr. Ellis, who had taken photos since his go-go days, was a sharp street and portrait photographer. He earned a master of fine arts from Brown University in 1995. He taught at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., among other institutions, and earned numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim. Advertisement In 2014, he and jazz saxophonist James Brandon Lewis formed a band they called Heroes Are Gang Leaders, after a chapter in Amiri Baraka's 1967 collection of short fiction, 'Tales.' Playing an enticing mashup of poetry, jazz, funk and more, the group swelled to 12 members and performed with such guests as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, singer and poet Lydia Lunch, and jazz bassist William Parker. Mr. Ellis and Lewis often squabbled during rehearsals. Mr. Ellis had a habit of recording jam sessions and then memorizing the music, and he was annoyed when they weren't later reproduced, down to the note. 'His memory was phenomenal, and he'd get so irritated,' Lewis said in an interview. 'I'd say: 'Thomas, we're improvising. We're not supposed to be memorizing.'' In addition to his son, Andrews, Mr. Ellis leaves a brother, James; four grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. In early 2016, a year before the #MeToo movement took off, Mr. Ellis was a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop when a women's literary group known as Vida published, online, a collection of anonymous accounts of what it said was sexual misconduct by Mr. Ellis. His classes were canceled, and Jia Tolentino, writing in Jezebel, reported on the Vida post and its ethics in an article headlined 'Is This the End of the Era of the Important, Inappropriate Literary Man?' The New Republic picked up the story, as fodder for a piece about the workshop's reputation for the bad behavior of its male professors. For his part, Mr. Ellis made no public comment about the incident. Soon after, he moved to St. Petersburg, and he was named the city's first photo laureate in 2023. Advertisement 'Language is always changing,' Mr. Ellis told The Missoula Independent, a weekly independent newspaper in Montana, in 2009. 'Language is not finished. Language is the thing that if you stay connected to it like I do, eat it enough, carry it with you enough, it will rejuvenate you. 'I don't mean 'save you' in a religious sense, but it will save you from a certain kind of dogma or mundane, boring existence.' This article originally appeared in