It Is True That John Hawkins Masterminded The First English Transatlantic Slaving Voyages In The 1560s,

It is true that John Hawkins masterminded the first English transatlantic slaving voyages in the 1560s, but he was, in an awful sense, ahead of his time. After his final voyage returned in  disarray in 1569, the English did not take up the trade again in earnest until the 1640s. Elizabeth I did not ‘expel’ Africans from England in 1596; rather her Privy  Council issued a limited licence to an unscrupulous merchant named Caspar Van Senden, who was only allowed to transport individuals out of England with their masters’ consent: a consent that he utterly failed to obtain.

Black Tudors: The Untold Story

Rosalba Carriera, 1675-1757

Caterina Sagredo Barbarigo as Berenice, ca.1741, pastel on gray-blue laid paper, mounted onto thin canvas, 45.7x34.5 cm 

Detroit Institute of Arts,  Inv. 56.264

Allegorical Portrait of a Woman (also known as Simonetta Vespucci) by Sandro Botticelli

Frank Cadogan Cowper (1877-1958), The Blue Bird, 1918, oil on canvas, 88.4 x 71.1 cm. In a private collection. - The Blue Bird appeared at the Royal Academy in 1918, the last year of the Great War. Military images dominated the exhibition and the picture must have struck an incongruous note amid the portraits of generals, tributes to indomitable Tommies, romanticised accounts of ‘bringing up the guns’, and poignant war memorials. There seems to be no iconographical connection with Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird, although Cowper must have been aware of the phenomenally successful staging of this 'transcendental pantomime’ at the Haymarket Theatre, London, in 1909-11. The costumes and sets were by Frederick Cayley Robinson, who also illustrated the text when it was published by Methuen in 1911.

The picture does, however, undoubtedly relate to Madame d'Aulnoy’s fairy tale of the same name, first published in 1697. This tells of a beautiful young princess, Fiordelisa, who falls in love with a handsome prince. He returns her love, but her wicked step-mother, wanting him to marry her own ill-favoured daughter, Turritella, shuts her up in a tower and attempts to blacken her name with her suitor. When the prince, refusing to marry Turritella, is transformed into a Blue Bird by her fairy godmother, he flies to the tower and holds amorous tête-à-têtes with Fiordelisa, bringing her presents of jewels as tokens of his affection. Cowper shows the lovers enjoying one of these trysts, the princess holding a rope of pearls that the Blue Bird has evidently just given her. 

EDIT REQUEST MEME | anon asked: jane seymour + favourite costume