The Almanac
THURSDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 2026
Observance
Through-a-frame Thursday
Find nature framed by something — a leafy arch, a cave mouth, branches around a vista. Tip: let a dark out-of-focus foreground wrap the edges to add depth and draw the eye to the landscape.
Artist
J.M.W. Turner — The Fighting Temeraire
British Romanticism · 1775–1851
J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (1839), National Gallery, London — via Wikimedia Commons Turner exhibited The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken up at the Royal Academy in 1839. The ghost-pale warship — a veteran of Trafalgar — is hauled to the breaker's yard by a squat, black steam tug belching smoke. It is an elegy for the age of sail giving way to the age of steam, and Turner reportedly refused ever to sell it, calling it his 'darling.' It hangs in the National Gallery, London. The palette is Turner's genius in miniature: a cool, spectral blue-white for the doomed ship on the left, set against a molten sunset of scarlet, ochre and gold on the right, with the tug's fire the one hot point of the present. The sky is glazed thinly so light seems to radiate…
Colour of the day
Ocean Blues: Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave
Analogous harmony (blue-green sea)
Ivan Aivazovsky's The Ninth Wave (1850, Russian Museum, St Petersburg) is the most celebrated seascape by the Russian-Armenian marine painter, and its water is a masterclass in analogous blue-green. From the translucent turquoise where dawn light passes through a cresting swell, the sea deepens through teal and emerald into cold deep-blue troughs — neighbouring hues flowing into one another the way real water does. Aivazovsky painted the ocean better than almost anyone by painting light through it, not just on it. He worked largely from memory, laying transparent glazes so the sun seems to shine from behind the wave, turning the blue-green sea luminous. Here that cool analogous sea is set b…
Composer
Antonín Dvořák — Symphony No. 9 'From the New World'
Czech Romantic · 1841–1904
Dvořák was the great melodist of the Czech national revival, folding the dance rhythms of Bohemia and Moravia — the furiant, the dumka — into the grand Romantic symphony. He carried that instinct across the Atlantic when he directed New York's National Conservatory in the 1890s, urging American composers to build their own voice on Native and African-American song. The Ninth Symphony, 'From the New World' (1893), is the fruit of that transatlantic exchange: homesick Bohemian lyricism shot through with the wide, open-air spaciousness of a new continent. Its slow-movement cor anglais theme, later sung as 'Goin' Home,' is one of the most tender melodies in the repertoire — a sound of dusk, dis…
Photographer
Jacob Riis — 'Bandit's Roost' (1888)
Danish-American Documentary photographer · 1849–1914
Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant turned police reporter, carried a camera and the new magnesium flash powder into New York's darkest tenement alleys. 'Bandit's Roost,' made in 1888 off Mulberry Street, looks straight down a narrow, laundry-hung passage where loitering men stare back at the lens — one of the images that fueled his 1890 exposé 'How the Other Half Lives' and helped launch American photojournalism and slum reform. The deep one-point perspective pulls the eye into a claustrophobic funnel of brick, while the raw flash flattens faces and throws hard shadows that make the squalor feel unsanitized. Riis died in 1914, so his photographs are public domain. Where to look / how to shoot i…
Book
Maria Sibylla Merian — Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium
Naturalist's field book · 1705 · Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717
In 1699 Maria Sibylla Merian was fifty-two, divorced, and had no patron. She sold off her own paintings to buy the passage, and sailed from Amsterdam to Suriname with her daughter to watch caterpillars. Nobody commissioned the trip. She went because she wanted to see the whole thing happen. What she invented was a way of seeing. Before her, an insect was drawn on a blank page like a specimen pinned to nothing. Merian refused. She drew the entire life — egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, moth — arranged on the actual plant the creature ate. One page is not a portrait. It is a stretch of time. Go and do it. Choose one living thing within walking distance: the plant on your windowsill, the tree at t…
Painting
Raja Ravi Varma — Galaxy of Musicians
Indian oil painting · 1848–1906
Raja Ravi Varma learned European oil painting and turned it on India. Galaxy of Musicians (1889) gathers eleven women from different regions of the subcontinent, each in the dress of her own place, each holding an instrument from it — veena, violin, tanpura, sitar — as though a country could be assembled simply by seating its musicians in one room. Then he did something with longer consequences than the painting. In 1894 Ravi Varma set up a lithographic press near Bombay and began printing his images by the thousand as cheap oleographs. For the first time, households that would never set foot in a gallery could own a picture and hang it. Art historians still argue about the sentimentality o…
Writing
Yi Sun-sin — Nanjung Ilgi, the war diary
Naval commander and diarist · Joseon Korea, 1545–1598
Admiral Yi Sun-sin kept a diary through the Imjin War, from 1592 until two days before he was killed in action in 1598. It survives, it is a Korean National Treasure, and it was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2013. You might expect a war diary to be all battle. Much of it is not. A great many entries are a handful of characters long: the weather, whether he was ill, who came to see him, whether he slept. He records his mother's death and his own grief in the same plain register as the rain. He wrote on the days when nothing happened and on the days when he could barely stand, and it is the unbroken run — not any single entry — that makes the record worth anything at a…
Trivia
The rule of thirds
Placing the horizon on the upper or lower third — not the centre — almost always feels more balanced and dynamic. Try it: turn on your grid and park the horizon on a line, with sky or land taking two-thirds.
Season
First Day of Autumn
Autumn equinox — chase the turn toward warmth and decay. North of the equator, hunt backlit amber leaves, long low golden light, mist over a field, the first fallen leaf on wet pavement, leaning into rust, ochre and burnt orange against cooling blue shadow. South of the equator this is spring's opening — chase first buds and lengthening light instead. Either way, shoot the threshold where one season hands off to the next.
Today’s edition ends here
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