missfolly:

Sitting Room, by Johann Erdmann Hummel, ca. 1820

audienceaudience:

Paris’s Hell’s Café from 19th-century

Le Café de L’Enfer was a Hell-themed café in Paris’ red light district (aka Pigalle, the neighborhood of the Moulin Rouge), created in the late 19th century and operating up ’til sometime around the middle of the 20th.

“A hot spot called Hell’s Café lured 19th-century Parisians to the city’s Montmartre neighborhood—like the Marais—on the Right Bank of the Seine. With plaster lost souls writhing on its walls and a bug-eyed devil’s head for a front door, le Café de l’Enfer may have been one of the world’s first theme restaurants. According to one 1899 visitor, the café’s doorman—in a Satan suit—welcomed diners with the greeting, “Enter and be damned!” Hell’s waiters also dressed as devils. An order for three black coffees spiked with cognac was shrieked back to the kitchen as: “Three seething bumpers of molten sins, with a dash of brimstone intensifier!”

(via lord-kitschener)

navigus:

Once upon a time, there was a wizard who knew what Heaven and Hell looked like. In fact, he designed them. He also drew the greatest royal palaces that Britain has ever dreamed of, and a massive new Parliament building. He assembled complete, monumental cities and prototype skyscrapers. The name of this magician was Joseph Michael Gandy, and he did all this in the first few decades of the 19th century. Gandy was doomed to disappointment - he built very little in the real world, and was destined to be comprehensively eclipsed by another architect. He died a mad, penniless, abandoned old man. But he was no failure, because his extraordinary visions survive.

missfolly:

Scene from the Apocalypse, ca. 1829, by Francis Danby

missfolly:

Coalbrookdale at Night, 1801, by Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg

missfolly:

In the park of Villa d’Este, by Carl Blechen, 1830

(via d-isfordangerous-deactivated201)

missfolly:

Southeast View of ‘Sedgeley Park,’ the Country Seat of James Cowles Fisher, Esq. by Thomas Birch, ca. 1819 

tuesday-johnson:

ca. 1854, [portrait of young man yawning]

via George Eastman House photostream, Donald Weber Collection

(via fuckyeahvictorians)

historyfan:

The Crystal Palace as seen in 1934.

Once home to the Great Exhibition in 1851 it was later moved to this site in 1854 an area of London later to become know as Crystal Palace.

Just two years after this photograh was taken the palace was to burn to the ground thought to have been watched by as many as 100,000 Londoners.

(via my-ear-trumpet)