Sunday 13 July 2014

Oliver Goldsmiths Words in Miniature & Welcome To The Microwriter Blog...


Short History

The short history is that Microwriting has a long history. Early forms of it were found in Mesopotamia thousands of years ago on what are known as Cuneiform tablets. Since that time there has been a fascination with small writing and how it can be used, from amazing Hebrew and early Christian Art works, to Japanese examples on pottery, rice writing, shady world of gangs and even espionage. We'll be talking about James W Zaharee, the American who in the 1930's famously wrote Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on a 3 inch strand of human hair, blond, I believe it was a donated hair and I don't think it was still attached to its owner. The way it was done is to all accounts simply breathtaking.

Our Focus

This blog will focus on examples and will provide background information on each type with many images yet to display, to that end there will be a gallery and we will be adding to that each week.


First Post

This first post deals with an amazing set of miniature artworks found by New Zealander Don Shelton, of www.portmin.blogspot.com. The set comprises of 4 individual miniature artworks done in classic micrography style but on an unusual surface thought to be Papier Mache. Each piece is no more approximately 65 mm in height which puts the micro wrting that make up the images in the .6mm in height range

Plato on the left and unkown on thr right

Scenes from rural Ireland

.
Close up view of microwriting from the image to the right and above.

The writing shown in each image is from the works of 18th Century Irish Social writer/novelist, Oliver Goldsmith. It is thought that the artist was in fact one of the engravers responsible for illustrations in Goldsmiths books and was possibly one of the following:
John Absolon, Birket Foster, James Godwin and Harrison Weir.

You can download a book from the US Library of Congress, The Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith, here..


The Post for next week is on James W Zaharee, an interesting man with an equally interesting career and some amazing achievements to his credit.

We will be adding more to the Goldsmith story so please check back soon. Comments are welcome.

No comments:

Post a Comment

We moderate comments which are very welcome. We will endeavour to publish as quickly as possible..