Jonathan Cohen's photos with the keyword: salmon

From the Guardian newspaper, July 28, 2000: The Dacre Beasts, four towering wooden heraldic animals which guarded Dacre Castle in Cumbria for almost 500 years until they found themselves in a London auction room, have been bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for £420,000, the museum announced yesterday. The extraordinary figures, each more than six feet tall, all carved from a single early 16th century oak tree, are said to have inspired Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. Despite their remote location, the beasts became famous in the 19th century through prints, appealing strongly to Victorian fantasies of medieval romance. The figures – a Red Bull, a Black Gryphon, a White Ram and a Crowned Salmon, concealing a coded history of the Dacre family including an elopement – are regarded as unique survivors of a lost world of English medieval and Tudor heraldic carving. All their peers have gone through rot, fire or deliberate destruction in the Reformation and the Civil War. The Dacre beasts themselves survived a 19th century fire which destroyed most of the castle. Traces of the original paint surface were recently discovered under the Victorian century repainting. The beasts were made for Thomas Dacre, a formidable soldier who fought with Henry Tudor against Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and against the Scots at Flodden.

From the Guardian newspaper, July 28, 2000: The Dacre Beasts, four towering wooden heraldic animals which guarded Dacre Castle in Cumbria for almost 500 years until they found themselves in a London auction room, have been bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for £420,000, the museum announced yesterday. The extraordinary figures, each more than six feet tall, all carved from a single early 16th century oak tree, are said to have inspired Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. Despite their remote location, the beasts became famous in the 19th century through prints, appealing strongly to Victorian fantasies of medieval romance. The figures – a Red Bull, a Black Gryphon, a White Ram and a Crowned Salmon, concealing a coded history of the Dacre family including an elopement – are regarded as unique survivors of a lost world of English medieval and Tudor heraldic carving. All their peers have gone through rot, fire or deliberate destruction in the Reformation and the Civil War. The Dacre beasts themselves survived a 19th century fire which destroyed most of the castle. Traces of the original paint surface were recently discovered under the Victorian century repainting. The beasts were made for Thomas Dacre, a formidable soldier who fought with Henry Tudor against Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and against the Scots at Flodden.

SONY DSC

SONY DSC

Once the tallest building in the British Empire, the Marine Building is a skyscraper located at 355 Burrard Street in Downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. This building is still, for old-timers, the building most clearly identified with Vancouver. Its unique wedding cake "icing", topped by that vaguely Mayan tower, makes a dramatic and exciting backdrop as you look west down Hastings. It is one of the great art deco buildings in the world. According to the architects, McCarter & Nairne, the building was intended to evoke "some great crag rising from the sea, clinging with sea flora and fauna, tinted in sea-green, touched with gold." Construction started in the spring of 1929 with a ceremony in keeping with the style of the building. "Yesterday morning," said a March 14 newspaper report, "His Worship Mayor W.H. Malkin blew a blast on a golden whistle and with it set in motion the steam shovel that will excavate the site for the new Burrard Street Marine skyscraper." From that first breaking of the ground to the formal opening October 7, 1930 was 16 months. And, when the Marine Building opened – with 21 floors at a height of 97.8 metres (321 feet) – Vancouver had seen nothing like it. Liveried doormen stood beneath a huge arched entrance framed in glittering polished brass to usher guests into the lobby, where they would be met by five young women in sailor suits. These would then escort visitors the short distance to the lifts, which could climb 210m a minute, a staggering performance at a time when the average was 45m. The doormen have gone now but everything else is as it was. An Art Deco flock of Canada geese, the rays of the setting sun blazing over them, still fly past a mass of intricately carved marine life – lobsters, crabs, prawns and starfish crawling over each other through a waving forest of seaweed.