I’m afraid i don’t know a great deal about Helen Wells Seymour who moved between Washington DC and Japan/China in the 1920s and 1930s as an artist. She would oftren head to Asia for two years at a time. I also do not have any of her China art, though I believe she did paint Peking and environs in the 1930s – so if anyone has any of her paintings I’d love to see them.
Japanese wall paintingsIt appears Wells Seymour was born in in 1878 in Baltimore and lived mostly in neighbouring DC. She may have attended the Friends School in DC for art classes and possibly also Columbia University and/or the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
In the early 1900s she toured Europe (certainly visiting France, Germany, Italy and England) as well as Egypt. By the 1920s she was settled in Asia and survived the 1923 Japanese earthquake. As well as painting in both China and Japan she collected Japanese wall paintings and a wide range of textiles from East Asia, South Asia, and South East Asian batiks (much of the collection is, I think, at the Art Institute of Omaha). In Japan she was also a part-time lecturer at the Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto. She was a member of the Society of Women Geographers, of the Japan Society, the Society for Japanese Studies, and the Washington Club.
In Peking she did meet and intereact with other artists – noting Bertha Lum in 1924.
I believe she returned to America in 1935 from China and Japan to settle in Connectticut, where she died in 1937. She wrote some memoirs of Japan in the 1920s in A Japanese Diary. Below are two of her Japanese paintings…
A quick post for Italian readers – my Long Read for the South China Morning Post from a few years ago in the 1932 kidnapping of Mrs “Tinko” Pawley in northern China (here in English) has been translated into Italian (here) in Il Post. BTW: the story is also coming to RTHK3 as a story of the week later this year….
I came across this interesting watercolour at a local auction recently and decided to bid…and won for a modest fee. It has an interesting story I only partly know at the moment.
It is by Laurence Henry Irving (1897-1988) who was the grandson of the great Victorian actor and theatre impressario Henry Irving and son of the actors HB Irving and Dorothea Baird (who starred in the lead role on the original production of Trilby). Laurence Irving trained at the Royal Academy and was in the Royal Navy Air Service in WW1. He started as a set designer in the West End and, after meeting Douglas Fairbanks, went to Hollywood to design sets for his movies including The Iron Mask (1929). He also collaborated with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. He returned to the UK in the 1930s and worked on both films and in the theatre. I can’t work out when this painting was done but it suggests 1930s.
To the best of my knowledge Irving never went to China so this painting was presumably done from photographs and other images. It does seem very accurate and representative. Which play it was for is also noted noted – I will dig deeper. Still hence the paintings title ‘Chinese’ ‘Theatre’ indicating it is a suggestion for a Chinese set for a theatrical play.
Irving worked on numerous films and stage productions. He exhibited at the RA, the School of Fine Art (London) and the Glasgow Insitute of Art. He lived in Whitstable. He rejoined the RAF in 1939 and after the war did set for the J Arthur Rank film studios. He died in 1988.
Set against the backdrop of regional and international post–Second World War tensions, Grounded at Kai Tak is the most comprehensive account of the complex legal struggle for ownership of seventy-one airplanes belonging to the two main Chinese airlines, which were stranded at Kai Tak airfield in Hong Kong at the end of the Chinese Civil War. The resulting contest for possession of them took place in the courts and among politicians and diplomats on three continents. In the process, the struggle became entangled with the anti-communist policies of the United States in the emerging Cold War, British hopes for the restoration of her pre-war commercial position in China, disagreements between nations about recognition of the new government in Peking, and the delicate balance that the colonial government of Hong Kong had to keep to preserve the colony’s interests. Merry tells the tale of this legal saga by weaving together archival documents and news reports of the day, revealing the international alignments that emerged from the aftermath of the wars and the colorful cast of actors that influenced the outcome of the dispute.
Bruno Lessing was the pen name of Rudolph Edgar Block (1870-1940), an American journalist, columnist, and author. An avid traveler, Block wrote about his experiences in the daily newspaper column “Vagabondia”, which was published from 1928 through 1939. And here is his rather negative view of his visit to Shanghai in 1934 – you can judge for yourselves what might be fair and what not….
Bruno Lessing
Count Ciano being Italian Consul in Shanghai at the time…(1932-1933)
Between 2006 and 2021, historian and widely acclaimed author Robert Bickers and colleagues at The University of Bristol ran a unique project that sought out privately held historical photographs of China digitized them and published them online.
Over 22,000 photographs, ranging from the late 1850s to 1950, are now available on the project’s platform; many more were copied and are not yet published. In this Zoom talk and discussion, Robert Bickers will discuss how and why the project evolved, and where it goes from here.
Having written about the teenage L Ron Hubbard’s travels to China in the South China Morning Post weekend magazine last week I did not that one of his best pulp fiction stories set in China was The Red Dragon (1935). A full description of the story below but this line is a classic of the time and genre…
‘My dear Miss Sheldon, you must believe me when I say that Manchuria is no place for a lady.’
As a lieutenant in the US Marine Corps—as handsome and cocky as Richard Gere—Michael Stuart was once considered an officer and a gentleman. But that’s all changed. Now he’s seen as a renegade, a traitor and a thief.
Stuart is a man without a country … and perhaps without a prayer. Why? Because in a daring plot to foil the Japanese puppet regime in China, he set out to reinstate the country’s true emperor. Known now as the Red Dragon, Stuart is a soldier of fortune in war-torn Manchuria—and a man of honor in a world of treachery.
Stuart’s latest adventure takes him from Peking to the Great Wall and beyond. He’s in a race against time and against the Japanese super-spy known as the Hell-Cat, both of them in hot pursuit of an elusive black chest. For Stuart, the ultimate prize is one filled with mystery, power, and treasure—not only in the chest itself, but in the love of the beautiful woman who has sent him on this mission.…
