Checking up

[Frederike on the right and Louise on the left. Johann Gottfried Schadow, The Princesses Monument, marble, 1795-1797, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany. Lifted from reference 3]

Quite by chance,  I recently acquired a copy of the book at reference 1. I am getting through it slowly and was intrigued earlier today on page 152 by the following:

'... one of [Schadow's] most beautiful and emotive works is his 1796 marble life-size statue of two of Frederic William [II] and Luise's daughters, the Princesses Luise and Friedericke as teenagers. Hidden away for many years as it was thought to be too suggestive...' 

Schadow being the chap who put the famous chariot on top of the Brandenburg Gate aka Tor. Aside: Berlin has lots of tors, just as Paris has lots of portes and London has lots of gates. Another relic of the past.

So I set out to find out a bit more about this, fairly rapidly turning up references 2 and 3. Reference 3 is a fairly detailed account of the statue and its context, including the information that the statue was put away because:

'... Louise’s husband did not care for the way she was pictured. So it was hidden away and forgotten about for several decades...'.  

These two stories did not seem to be quite the same, so I thought I would ask Gemini where White-Spunner got his from, with the start of his long reply being snapped above.

This fairly rapidly led to references 4, 5 and 6 - and I got lost in a welter of Fredericks and Williams, White-Spunner had warned that the Prussian royal house - the Hohenzollern family - was keen on these two names and made a lot of use of then, sometimes both together. A royal house which also bred well, with marriages often producing lots of children.

Eventually, I worked out that my problem stemmed from White-Spunner talking of daughters when it would have been more accurate to talk of daughters-in-law. So reference 4 was about the elder daughter-in-law and reference 5 was about the father-in-law, King Frederick William II. With said elder daughter-in-law being married to the heir apparent who became, in due course, King Frederick William III.

The statue was very much in the fashion of the time and has subsequently become very popular with reproductions of all sizes being widely available in souvenir shops. It owed its long exile as much to the change of tone of the Prussian court with the accession of King Frederick William III as anything else. Where anything else included the rather scandalous life of the younger Princess, Fredericka, initially married to one of the new king's brothers. The new king felt that the royal and regal status of his wife, the Princess Louise of reference 4, was tainted by association.

So my line this morning (Tuesday) is that White-Spunner's short gloss of a long story is about right, only let down by his carelessness over daughters and daughters-in-law. And reference 3 is a bit economical with the truth, does not get dug into the scandals.

Maybe later today I will get down to further checking of Gemini's long story.

PS 1: the spelling of the names of the two princesses does not seem to be very stable. Perhaps no more than a wobbling between the German and English spelling.

PS 2: a post which has been complicated by half of it getting lost in a typo on Monday evening, now reinstated.

PS 3: Daily Art seems to be a Polish operation, or app in telephone speak. And according to reference 7:

'When Polish art historian Zuzanna Stańska considered what she could do to make the art world less stuffily academic and more accessible, building an app felt right. She had the requisite knowledge and she’d already been creating apps for museums, so bootstrapping her own art-focused app wasn’t too much of a stretch. In 2012, DailyArt hit the app stores, and with it, an elegant solution to an industry-wide problem: getting more people to engage with fine art, no PhD or a VIP pass to Art Basel necessary...'.

PS 4: breakfast prompted me to think about the nuts and bolts of checking. Is it to be all online, or are there print resources to hand - either at home or in our local library? This last being quite strong on arts: but how long would it take, as an inexperienced user of bricks & mortar libraries, to run something down? Then if it is to be online, which sources can you trust? Personally, I go for known brands and academic institutions. In the absence of either of these, I might give some weight to the advertised qualifications of an author. Search engines, however, have more resources, and can use various other tests - other tests which have the convenience of being easy to automate.

Does the content match the query? In the early days of the Internet when there was nothing like as much content as there is now, this was pretty much enough. And even now, I think Bing puts more weight on this than Google.

Moving on from the content itself, does that content get lots of hits? If lots of other people are going for it, then so will I.

Does the content get lots of references from others? Have third parties bothered to notice this particular content? Print academics used to go in for this, including lots of references at the end of their papers, partly in hope of reciprocation. I think Google started doing this quite early on.

Then do content providers keep lists of trusted content creators? People like ONS of reference 8? Lists which are maintained in some old fashioned way, involving people as well as algorithms? Or perhaps black lists, content creators to be excluded for one reason or another.

Is the content creator paying me to promote his content? If he is, then I will nudge him up the search results list. This being important since the raw search results list can be very long and it is not much good to the content creator being down the bottom, as few people bother to drill down that far. Some content providers flag up content which has been promoted in this way, some don't. Gmail, for example, flags up the advertisements it includes with your mail. Newspapers sometimes flag up articles as partner content or some such.

Looking at the references below, mostly respectable. Reference 8 best, Wikipedia references good and reference 1 thought to be reasonably reliable. References 3 and 7 unknown.

Something to think about on my morning stroll into town? Although in practise, while I may get the odd stray thought when I am out, there is not much foreground thinking. Far too much other stuff going on. But I dare say that there is thinking of a sort going on in the background, just as there is when one is asleep.

References

Reference 1: Berlin - Barney White-Spunner - 2020. Simon & Schuster paperback edition.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princesses_Monument.

Reference 3: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/prinzessinnengruppe/.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_of_Mecklenburg-Strelitz.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_William_II_of_Prussia.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Hohenzollern.

Reference 7: https://observer.com/2025/02/interviews-art-historian-zuzanna-stanska-dailyart-app/. Another arty site, not, I think, anything to do with the Observer newspaper.

Reference 8: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.