Plane Store
Vinemont AL, 2023.
Sargent and a Magnolia
At the Met last summer, I got to see the Sargent & Paris exhibit, which included his 1884 painting of Mrs. Albert Vickers (Edith Foster). It’s 82-3/4″ × 39-13/16″ — so, huge. About the same size as Madame X.
And she’s holding a magnolia.
Edith Foster Vickers is the subject, and she’s here at that point in Sargent’s career in which he’s looking for a bounce after the Madame X scandal — although he already had the commission in-hand.
He lost clients in the Paris fallout, and having this to look forward to must have been incredibly important to his ego. And it feels like “lessons were learned”: she’s dressed modestly, holiding a classic flower, she’s elegant.
The charcoal study of it is in the Harvard’s collection. He’d given it to his sisters, Violet (Mrs. Francis) Ormond and Emily Sargent, at his death in 1925 and they gifted it to the Fogg Art Museum in 1931.
Sargent did this and other Vickers family portraits while staying at their estate in England, basically putting some distance between what had just gone on in the press.
Besides painting Edith, he painted her husband Albert (who led a steel and defense empire — later down the line the tanks and vehicles business, aviation, and shipbuilding arms of the business were purchased by BAE, then other bits by Rolls-Royce), and the painting he did of the three nieces won a grand medal at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition.
This painting of Edith Vickers is especially week because they became such good friends — the Met label mentions that Vickers’ daughter (Izme, herself an artist, who he came back to paint in 1907) said “Sargent was devoted to my mother.”
The painting of Edith today is back home at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.
This Week’s Various, May 29 2026
Weekly notes on Southern art, architecture, food, and travel
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
Robert Johnson’s Come on in my Kitchen in newly-restored audio
Here, the monument for Rezin P. Bowie, brother of Jim Bowie and inventory of the Bowie knife, from a 2007 visit I made to the Roman Catholic Cemetery in Port Gibson, MS
Born from a Duel: A history of the Bowie & other knives in Louisiana, from 64 Parishes:
Tujague’s, from a 2016 visit — the sign has since been restored and is now on display at SoFab.
Meet the Neon King of New Orleans at Garden & Gun — Nate Schaeffer’s shop here.
“By the 1950s, New Orleans had more neon than Las Vegas. Canal Street had six hundred signs within a few blocks.”
I missed this from late last year, but Dezeen reports on this development for a school in Uniontown, Alabama:
Architect Danish Kurani has developed a prototype for a “connected” classroom, designed to enable expert teachers to remotely provide lessons to students in rural communities.
Kurani completed the first iteration of the Connected Classroom at Robert C Hatch High School in Alabama’s rural Black Belt region, in partnership with nonprofit Ed Farm and the State of Alabama.
Domilise’s, from a 2012 visit
Todd Kliman’s Submitting to the Beast: A father and son in New Orleans—feasting and flaneuring at the Oxford American
Lake Pontchartrain, 2023
The Library of America’s Story of the Week is “The Magnolia of Lake Pontchartrain” by Margaret Fuller:
I think the LoA’s link to the actual story may be routing to an incorrect page — this one seems to be right. And here it is as PDF.
BIG’s design for Nashville’s upcoming Tennessee Performing Arts Centre can be viewed here.
In the latest New Yorker, I noticed an ad for The Folio Society with an image of books including To Kill a Mockingbird. Theirs is illustrated by Nate Sweitzer.
At Christie’s, A tale of two Matildas: how the Gray Stream family assembled one of America’s finest collections of Fabergé, jewels and more
Unseen for more than a century, Imperial Fabergé masterpieces, custom Cartier designs and Diego Rivera paintings are amongst the treasures lovingly collected by Louisiana businesswoman Matilda Geddings Gray and her niece Matilda Gray Stream. Links to the June auctions are at the bottom of the page.
xoxo!
Rx
Southern Accents
Cullman AL, 2023.
Trees Older than Bees
I’ve been reading How Flowers Made Our World (here on Bookshop, here on Amazon) by David George Haskill, a book that really has me thinking about magnolias.
Here’s what’s super fascinating: magnolias are so old that when they evolved, bees weren’t…
…Well, how to say this the right way? There weren’t bees yet.
Which, I realize this isn’t how the world works — not everything showed up at the same time — but imaginging a time before bees (and butterflies, and hummingbirds) is not the easiest thing.
So 95 million years ago or so, dinosaurs were strolling around magnolias.
What do magnolias do to be pollinated? Enter: beetles and flies. Those were the primary insect pollinators back then, so this helps explain things like how magnolias evolved to make things easy for them. The blooms are large and bowl-shaped (and thick so as not to be trampled by beetle legs crawling), and the blossoms smell great because beetles rely more on scent than sight.
While some trees started with wind pollination, the magnolia and its beautiful flowers stays with the beetle. And so incredibly interesting, the magnolia traps beetles (in a really nice way that they actually enjoy, because it’s so comfortable) overnight to ensure the beetle has the opportunity to do its job in the time it takes for the flower to go from its female to male stage. Depending on variety, magnolias do this different ways.
BTW, other chapters in the book discuss goatsbeard, orchids, grass, seagrass, rose, tea, and pansy.
This Week’s Various: May 22, 2026
As always, all images unless otherwise noted copyright Deep Fried Kudzu. Like to use one elsewhere? Kindly contact me here.
Affiliate links are sometimes used. That means that if you purchase something via one of the links, it costs you nothing extra, but may generate a commission, offsetting the cost of DFK… e.g. as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Also: remember that Bookshop is fab because they’re giving orders to indie booksellers. Grateful for your support. xoxo!
The Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery was just named to the National Trust’s ‘America’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places for 2026’ list
above, from a 2009 visit
They say:
The building housed a wide set of iconic institutions, including the Majestic Café, the Malden Brothers Barber Shop, and the rooftop Afro Club, which hosted performers including Billie Holiday, B.B. King, Little Richard, and Tina Turner.
..Reuse ideas include a reopened Majestic Café and barber shop, community-serving office space, restored hotel rooms, and a revived Afro Club that would serve as a cultural venue. Rehabilitation of this scope will require a combination of public-private partnerships, historic tax credits, and philanthropic investment. Revitalization of the Ben Moore Hotel would illuminate the hotel as a symbol of African American perseverance and enterprise and allow for public interpretation focused on Black travel during Jim Crow, Green Book sites, African American entrepreneurship, and Montgomery’s broader Civil Rights landscape.
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On June 6 & 7, Crystal Bridges will celebrate the opening of an additional 114,000 square feet of artspace. The new space was also designed by Moshe Safdie. I’m SO looking forward to returning later this summer!
from a 2014 visit
This may be the last year of the 1919 Casamento’s in New Orleans
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I haven’t been out to see it yet, but Dezeen does a post on Trahan Architects, which completed the 4620 sqft Chapel of St Ignatius and the Gayle and Tom Benson Jesuit Center at Loyola University last year.
xoxo!
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