The image in the header is a painting of Boston and Bunker Hill looking from the east. It’s a painting you’d find only by knowing how to handle the book it was created for.
To look at the book, it will look like those beautifully bound older books with the lovely gold edge pages. Maybe something like this one:
You can inspect the binding and you wont see the image.
You can open the pages and still not see any hint.
Did you know when you open a book to leaf through it, the edge you turn the pages from is called the fore-edge?
If you take the pages in hand and gentle fan the pages into about a 45 degree angle, the painting above would appear.
Pretty cool eh? It’s a craft known as fore-edge painting.
This 4 minute video will show you 10 fore-edge paintings. Stick around to the end if you’re a Harry Potter fan.
About Fore-Edge Painting
The earliest of these paintings date to the 14th century and were largely heraldic designs and weren’t hidden. The hidden images emerged around 1649 or so.
Legend is that King Charles II commissioned his court painter and bookbinder to create a secret way for him to identify his books. Charles had a friend who would borrow books and fail to return them. Together they worked out the hidden images and used the royal coat-of-arms.
When Charles visited and spotted a book that he thought was his he claimed the book. His friend protested. He then fanned the pages revealing the image.
I Get Where Charles Was Coming From
OH, how I can relate to this. I have a brother who has the same habit with borrowing books and ‘forgetting’ they are borrowed. I often found I had to just consider the books gifted to him instead of engaging in an argument. The thought of being able to reveal my own ‘secret’ image to claim ownership.
Back to the Fore-Edge Paintings
Around 1750 the designs shifted away from decorative and heraldic to images depicting a wide range of genres. While it was most common in England, the skill did make it’s way to the new world.
Critically Endangered Craft
Today the skill of fore-edge painting is considered to be a critically endangered craft. There are no formal trainings for the craft and currently only 4 professional artists practicing fore-edge painting.
Of the 4 there is only 1 who is a full-time fore-edge artist, Martin Frost of Worthing, United Kingdom. In this 8 minute video Frost shows you how the paintings are done:
About Martin Frost
Frost had a background in painting backdrops for plays in theatres. A friend introduced him to fore-edge painting and taught him how to do them in the 1970s. Since then he has done some 3500 commissions. In 2019 he was presented with the MBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
There are about 60 amateurs and hobbyists doing fore-edge painting.
Want to Try Fore-Edge Painting?
If you’d like to try your hand at creating a fore-edge painting, you could try this tutorial out from My Modern Met
Collections of Fore-Edge Paintings Are Available
The image header on this post and the image above of** Anne Hathaway’s cottage** are from the collection of 214 paintings available at the Boston Public Library. If you’re in the area, you can go visit or view the collection online
To view some of the other collections available, check out the Wikipedia article in the Notes.
This is an amazing art form. Would be a shame to see the practice of it completely disappear.
NOTES:
- The bound book image was from Pixabay.com
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore-edge_painting
Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.
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How fascinating and what stunning results! I had no idea that people did this. Thank you for sharing this wonderful art form that truly complements beautiful old gilded books. That is quite a pain-staking process of layering up the watercolours and keeping that fine balance so as not to destroy the gold edge or the paper itself. I found this post in Dreemport this evening 😍
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I'd never heard of it either until I came across it. Then I spent most of the day exploring it when I should have been writing LOL ... it is rather fascinating though
!LOLZ yeah, I get distracted rather too easily when I find something that interests me and I go down every rabbit hole imaginable... 😂😂😂 Well I am really pleased you wrote about this one Shadows. It was wonderful! !PIZZA !ALIVE
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Of course, I'm going to be a little bit biased with my love of old music... but I do love the old books. There is just something quite personal about each of them... even the old prints and manuscripts of music that I use for my work are just beautiful to read from... the modern copies just seem so sterile in comparison. Although, I have more than enough modern classical colleagues who complain that the old parts are unreadable.
the old books definite have their appeal, there was a workmanship to them that isn't present in the mass produced volumes. Add fore-edge painting to an older volume and you've got even more craftsmanship.
Absolutely amazing, I've never see this type of art! Painstaking and highly skilled, the artist must have loads of patience. Thank you so much for sharing this rare artwork with us!
I spent the day exploring the subject before I wrote the post, Was so fascinated with the images almost forgot I was researching a post LOL.
An amazing art form indeed Shadows! 😍 I have seen this somewhere before but I can't remember when... It really would be a shame to loose such skill in the world... I guess capitalism and the economy as we know it doesn't leave much space for this beautiful artists to thrive 😔. Hopefully with web 3.0 we can start to change that!
I'm defenitely a Harry Potter super mega fan ❣️❣️❣️ Still hopefully waiting for my letter to Hogwarts at age 28 🤣🤣🤣 !LUV your post and thank you so much for bringging this to my attention 😁
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It would be neat to some more artists take it up and keep it going.
Definitely! Way to go! You're already doing an amazing job to expand and acknowledge their work 😊
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