Chess in Art Postscript : The Significance of Seeing Ernst.

Chess in Art XIII featured the only sculpture in the series: Max Ernst's "The King playing with his Queen" of 1944.

Allusions abound: a hieratic Lord and Protector; a mythic Totem, awesome; a zodiacal Taurus, jealous and possessive; the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull and, as satyrised by Picasso, a bit of old goat........

Minotaur Caressant une Dormeuse (From La Suite Vollard) 1933

Pablo Picasso 1881-1973

........... and, as Ernst intended, he portrays himself as the King overprotecting his Queen. As many have commented this one act play celebrates his relationship with fellow surrealist Dorothea Tanning who he married (his fourth time, lucky) in 1946. Ernst is the dramaturge, and he puts himself centre-scene, significantly; his play-actors are pieces in the set of his own creation.

He had ideas about board design as well, and created a "Strategic Value Board" with squares colour-coded accordingly. Unfortunately, decent photographs of the board are almost non-existent, and "hard copies" even more so. Maybe only a couple of them were ever made and have now disappeared from public view (to lose one maybe regarded as a misfortune, to lose two... etc). This photo shows Version 2 of the board, together with the Ernst-designed chess pieces.

Possibly Strategic Value Board 2 1944

In spite of the poor quality you can see something of the colour modulation of the squares. Along with an artistic sensibility, there is more than a suspicion of a chess mind at work as the strongest blacks and whites are in the centre, and those on the rim dim. The point of 1. h3!? is revealed on h2: a portrait photo of the artist, Max. Headroom obviously only could be found for something passport size. And, yes, they STBUR (see note at end), on a chess table, barely visible, designed by Xenia Cage (wife of John) for "The Imagery of Chess" show of 1944.

Now, as an aside, a morsel of Duchampatrivia: in that famous 1964 photo of himself grinning archly from beyond an Ernst chess set Duchamp also and infamously STBUR - co-incidence number one. But he like-wise, and seemingly intentionally, left the same h2 square empty (albeit with colours reversed): which is coincidence number two. As coincidences go, one may be regarded as good fortune, but two look like carefulness. These deliberate features of the Duchamp photo suggest that it is a nod to 1944, and a homage to his friend Ernst, and this could be the explanation for his knowing look (and that was another minor contribution to Duchamp scholarship (note 2)).

Back to Max: in the January 1945 issue of Chess Review (note 3) there is a black and white photo of the S.V. Board Version 1, framed and displayed as a wall hanging (note 4). Max deconstructed the ensemble and borrowed the frame to pose with Dorothea for this photographic double portrait.

They are using the Ernst set, and the liberated S.V. Board Version 1 which Mrs. Ernst Version 4 has exploited to the max., as you can just see from her intimidating pawn wedge on the strategically invaluable blackest squares.

Dorothea tanning Max in 1948

Some have remarked about this photo (note 5) that the couple seem, unwittingly maybe, but wittily for sure, to mimic a medieval scene of flirtatious fore/chess play, of which this is a famous example, moist with innuendo, that makes Max and Dorothea, six centuries later, look chastely old-fashioned...

The Game of Chess (14th Century mirror case). Anon

...inviting further comparison with the famous/scandalous Duchamp/Eve Babitz 1963 game/photo where Marcel affects to be distracted by the chess only.

Ernst's thrifty recycling of artwork into photographic study gives us a serendipitous opportunity to test out whether the frame-within-the-frame hypothesis holds water. As we saw with Delacroix and friends in Chess in Art XV this could be provided by a decrepit arch, unkempt foliage, or anything else pictorially plausible, but here we have a proper one, and this is what happens if you frame with the real thing:

Suppressing the peripheral vision makes a more meaningful image of the chess players at play and it helps us see the significance of Ernst, and Dorothea also of course. So, QEDdeedee, but no surprise to us so handy with digital cropping; we should admire then The Old Masters, who did it by eye, with a brush.

And here is another try at improving the original by Polish artist Renata Wypych:

Szachy
Renata Wypych b1982

Like a shameless paparazzo she has tweaked the image: plain ground; no frame; and a proper board. Dorothea sits like a ramrod but Max has now slumped, with age perhaps, or more likely in despair at the advancing pawn-roller. But at least he kept his shirt on and stayed calm, focussed and determined; he knows the importance of being earnest.

Dorothea Tanning has outlived Max Ernst by over thirty years, and is now ninety-nine. She is must be one of the last living members of that be-knighted set of artist-cum-chess players in the "The Imagery of Chess" show. I hope she makes it to a hundred and beyond. It is poignant now that her contribution to "The Imagery" was "Endgame".

Endgame, 1944
Dorothea Tanning, b. 1910

Notes and References

STBUR = Set The Board Up Wrong coined by Mike Fox and Richard James; usually by having a black square bottom right.

Note 1. This is fig. 58 in The Imagery of Chess Revisited by Larry List (ed). (George Braziller, New York, 2005). The “possibly” is his designation. While some of the observations in this post are foreshadowed by comments in List their development and embellishment are not his responsibility.

Note 2. The other two (Duchamp's favourite smoke and a sealed move) were proposed in "We are not amused III". I’m not aware that anyone else has spotted the STUBR and h2 coincidences before – if they have, credit to them where it is due.

Note 3. Reproduced in List, op, cit., p. 157-165.

Note 4. List, op. cit., fig. 57.

Note 5. In the legend to fig. 61 in List, op. cit.

Note 6. Commentators who have also squeezed its juices are Bradley Bailey in "Marcel Duchamp - the Art of Chess" (2009), and according to his footnote, Michael Camille "The Medieval Art of Love" (1998).


Picture acknowledgements:

Max Ernst - Masterpiece
Art Facts
Sympathy for the Art Gallery
Catalogue des Moulages
Touch of Art
Chess-Theory

Chess in Art Index

Richard James On Junior Chess: 5. That'll Teach Them Again

This the fifth guest post in which Richard James develops his in-depth analysis of the junior chess, and its pedagogy. You can access his earlier installments via the side bar. The series began on Friday 20th April.

Richard James on Junior Chess

10. We should teach the moves in a couple of weeks so that they can play complete games

This is what usually happens here: we encourage as many children as possible to take part in the UK Chess Challenge and other events even though some of them hardly know the moves. Elsewhere, though, the recommendations are very different.

Look, for example, at the Steps Method. The first step, which, you will remember, should take at least a year, longer for younger children, only introduces checkmate half way through. From the introduction: “Learning how to mate is postponed as long as possible. This sounds astonishing and even incredible but up till now, practice has shown that this effect works perfectly.” And, paraphrased from their website, in answer to the question about how long teachers should spend over Step 1:

“As long as possible. The ability to solve the exercises and obtain the certificate does not always correspond to the student’s playing skills. Only then when the student can use the material in his games regularly, should the following step be introduced. It is no use to teach Step 2 to children who fail to capture their opponent’s unprotected pieces in their own games. In the Step 1 Manual you can read the following: The basic material seems to be simple and some trainers manage to complete step 1 within 3 months. That is not the best approach. Essential chess skills such as giving mate require a long learning period. It is better to devote at least a year to the first step to master the basic skills very well (there are always exceptions). The lost time can be easily recovered later.”

GM Jaan Ehlvest’s recently published Chess Gymnasium takes this even further, only introducing checkmate in lesson 21 of a 28 lesson book. From the introduction:

"This manual differs from other beginning chess books available in the United States. This is the ‘Russian way’ of teaching Chess to young children. It is not an arbitrary method but the result of decades of research. ‘Chess Gymnasium’ introduces each concept slowly, but with depth. We do not attempt to have students play legal games against each other as soon as possible, but rather to use the very process of learning the rules as a teaching tool. This is important, and what makes this manual different from others. For this reason, two lessons are devoted to each piece. Besides simply learning how each piece moves, the students solve various problems with each piece before they have learned all the rules of chess. Along the way, particularly close attention is given to the geometry of the chess board itself.

The ultimate goal of chess – checkmate - is not introduced until Lesson 21! After learning the material in this book, students will know all of the rules. However, we can say that they will gain much more, and have a much more solid foundation in chess, than if they had been taught the rules as quickly as possible without discretion.

This book is designed to be used by any adult who wishes to teach chess to a child. You do not need to know anything about chess! Thus it can be used by a master who is teaching chess in a classroom, or by a classroom teacher who knows no more about chess than the children. It can also be used by parents who wish to teach their children chess at home.”

Compare this with what happens here: a school sets up a chess club so Dad, perhaps having read somewhere that Chess Is Good For You, teaches little Johnny how the pieces move and plays a couple of games with him so that he can join the club next week, just in time to take part in the first round of the UK Chess Challenge. He’ll be delighted to get his badge in 3 weeks time but it’s really not going to help him become a good player or develop a lasting interest in chess.

One reason why this happens is that we have top down coaching within a bottom up administration rather than bottom up coaching in a top down administration. So strong players start teaching chess or running tournaments without really knowing anything about child development or how to teach young children. They encourage as many children as possible to take part because they make more money that way. And, by and large, they’re only really interested at the players right at the top.

Proposition 10: We should spend 6 to 12 months, depending on the age of the child, teaching the other pieces along with board vision and control, and attack, defence and safety, before we introduce the king, along with concepts of check, checkmate and stalemate, and then another 6 to 12 months working on these ideas before children start playing competitive chess.

11. After teaching the moves we teach tactics, endings and openings

Take your typical chess book for children. It teaches you the moves pretty quickly, followed by check, checkmate and stalemate. Then you learn, in some order, some opening principles, some simple tactics and some endings. The first version of chessKIDS did very much the same thing, but it became clear from working with some of my school pupils that there was a gap of a couple of years between being able to learn the rules and being able to do even the simplest two move tactic.

Again, if you read the Steps and Gymnasium courses all this makes sense. At first it seems crazy to spend a year or more teaching what children can pick up in half an hour or so. But then you understand that they’re not just learning the moves: they’re developing chessboard vision and learning about different methods of attack and defence. As they say, there’s no point in teaching anything else to students who fail to take their opponent’s unprotected pieces. If this method can really teach children not to leave pieces en prise within a year or so it’s pretty remarkable. But until you’re at that level there’s not a lot of point in trying to show someone a combination that wins a pawn. The main thing kids need to learn after learning the moves is quite simply how to avoid one move oversights – and, before that, to understand that you can – and should – avoid one move oversights. But most chess writers and publishers don’t understand this and think that they can write a book for less experienced adult players, put some cartoons in it, and claim it’s suitable for children.

Proposition 11: After teaching the moves we teach children how to avoid one-move oversights through exercises teaching board vision and control, attack, defence and safety.

[Come back tomorrow for Richard's thoughts on how to sustain children's interest in the game]

Richard James On Junior Chess: 6. Keeping Kids At It

This is the last but one in this series (which began on Friday of last week) of guest posts by Richard James. Today he examines the challenge of maintaining a developing interest in the game.
Richard James on Junior Chess

12. We should put children into tournaments as quickly as possible

I really don’t see the point of putting children into even low-level tournaments when they hardly know how the pieces move. We’re fooling the children, along with their parents and teachers, into thinking they’re real chess players when in fact they’re no such thing. Giving children all the accoutrements of real chess such as clocks, scoresheets and grades when they are more or less playing random moves really does them no favours. Children find the baubles and trinkets they win in the UK Chess Challenge attractive but the superficiality of bogus rewards of this nature is well documented. They go to the chess club because they want to win the prizes, not because they want to play chess, and as they get older and the attraction wears off they drop out of chess. If we want to give prizes of this nature (and that’s open to debate) we should do so for demonstrating improved skills rather than just for winning games. There’s another thing as well: in many countries there is concern about putting children into competitions too soon, not so much because they’re not good enough players, but more because they lack the emotional maturity to cope with the pressures of playing competitive chess. Some young children can deal with this, but others cannot.

Proposition 12: we should only put children into tournaments when they have reached an appropriate level, and when they have sufficient emotional maturity to deal with victory and defeat.

13. Children give up chess when they leave Primary School because there’s no chess at their Secondary School

A few do, yes, but most give up long before them. Typically, a Primary School chess club might have 16 children in Y3, 8 in Y4, 4 in Y5 and 2 in Y6. Inevitably there will be a high drop-out rate: chidren will try a lot of activities when they’re young, and only choose to continue those they like best, but we need to ensure that the drop-out rate is as low as possible.

Here’s Cor van Wijgerden, in an email to me: “Lacking a proper board vision and not applying things they have learnt are, in my view, the main reasons why children drop out”. From my experience and observation I’m sure he’s right. If children are just playing chess and getting no instruction they will not develop board vision and continue to leave pieces en prise, and not to take the pieces their opponents leave en prise. If they’re getting instruction from strong players they will be taught things that are too advanced for them, and there will be no reinforcement or checks to see that they’ve really understood what they’ve learnt. (I spent years doing exactly this myself before giving up because it clearly didn’t work.) Remember that the Steps Method recommends that children spend a year or two teaching children not to leave pieces en prise and ensuring that they don’t do this in their games before moving on to anything else, teaching in small groups so this is possible. Here, we either teach nothing or too much too soon.

In most secondary schools there’s little or no chess. The exceptions are almost all large selective schools, usually boys’ schools, and always have an enthusiastic member of staff who is actively promoting the game. In some areas there’s little opportunity for younger players to play and learn, but even where the opportunity exists, most children give up after a year or two because they fail to make significant progress.

Proposition 13: Most children give up chess long before they leave primary school because they are not taught the basics correctly so fail to make progress.

14. Promoting Primary School chess clubs will produce a lot of strong players

No it won’t – at least not the way we’re doing it at the moment. If anything, it will have the opposite effect. Thirty years or so ago there were a few primary schools where the Headteacher or a senior member of staff was genuinely interested in chess, taught all the children to play and provided opportunities to play every day. There were two such schools in my area: one produced a GM and the other produced two IMs. This still occasionally happens, but almost always in the private sector.

In most Primary Schools where chess is ‘done’ there’s a club which meets for half an hour one lunchtime or an hour one afternoon, and children get no other opportunity to play. There’s no way children in this sort of environment will ever get anywhere unless they’re doing significant work on chess at home as well. Parental support is absolutely essential for young children to become good players, and the younger they start the more support they need.

If you want to produce strong young players you need to set up junior chess clubs rather than encourage chess in primary schools. Parents need much more commitment to take their children to a club than to pick them up an hour late from school. Clubs will have higher standards of play, attracting children from a wider area, and will be able to meet longer hours and perhaps more often.

There’s also some evidence from Cor van Wijgerden that running a proper course within a school or a club encourages more parental interest: “The most common order: Manual and Extra and Plus books (supplementary material – RJ) from a mother! Her child has got Step 1 and she is interested as well.”

Proposition 14: Promoting Junior Chess Clubs will produce more strong players. Promoting chess in Primary Schools, unless is it taught correctly, will produce weak players with only a short-term interest in the game.

[Come back tomorrow for Richard's recommendations on the way forward]

Improve Your Chess VI: Join a Club!

There are lots of reasons to join a chess club, mostly not directly linked to chess improvement. Drinking buddies with a similar interest to you. Something different to do on a Tuesday night. A way to be more involved with the local community. Or less, if you choose one away from your local area. Pure love of the game. The extra competition. Pragmatics: you can easily pick up chess news, gossip, information about tournaments, and so on. Maybe even, via your club you get to indulge a pet-project, like a newsletter, or a website or . . . a blog! Lots of reasons.

However, being a part of a club offers unique opportunities for chess improvement unavailable elsewhere. Today's piece is about what these opportunities are, and the overarching advice is simple: join a club suited to your chess improvement. Or if you're already in a club, orientate your club-based activities toward chess improvement. And finally, if it's impossible for you to join a club because the nearest one is too far away, then why not start yourself up a chess club closer to home?

Practical opportunities to play more
There might be some players who play too much chess, but not many. Regularly playing over-the-board (otb) chess in serious competitive games - rated games under reasonable time-controls - is one key way to improve. It is the only way we really test ourselves, the only way we really come to feel how real our limitations are - and more importantly what they are, the only way we start to look the reality of chess in the face - the difficulty, the confusion, the practicality of the thing. Tal put it succinctly: “Minutes of play and years of analysis are not the same thing.”

And joining a club will always provide more opportunities to play than not. Many clubs have internal competitions (I played 12 rapid-play games in ours this year.) Many clubs are members of several leagues. For our part, for instance, we have a twelve-board team in the London League Division 1, a ten-board team in the London League Division 3, and an eight board team in the London League Division 3; four-board teams in each of the three Croydon Leagues; a four-board team in the Stoneleigh Trophy (although admittedly this is a rapid-play league); a team in the Lauder Trophy; and, an eight-board team in the Surrey League. We also frequently enter teams in Cup Competitions, that is, knock-outs - and we also have links to the Surrey County sides and the 4NCL team the Celtic Tigers. I myself played around 30 games this last season for my club. Not only that, via your club you might hear news of upcoming individual tournaments, get offers of lifts to venues, and so forth.

In short: joining a club should enable you to play more chess; playing chess regularly is important for improvement.

Chess events
Sometimes clubs will arrange events directed toward chess improvement. For instance, a few years ago we held a day of talks about openings. Several strong players each researched a different variation, and each gave talks on their findings. After each talk we played practice games in the variations given. I vividly recall being intrigued that day by the Hedgehog, whilst also being appalled at my lack of comprehension of the mainline of the Scotch. The contrast was confirmed by my results in the practice games and subsequently the former has joined my repertoire, the latter left it.

Of course one shouldn't be merely a passive recipient in these kinds of activities. This is just not for reasons of fairness, although I myself gave a talk about the games of Greco a while back. It's that in getting ready to talk about chess to others, we have to really be sure we know what we're talking about. Often our chess studies aren't like this: we think we've prepared some super-sharp line, we sit down at an actual game and half-way along our opponent varies, disorientated we blunder and bang we're mated five moves later. Back we go to our private preparation, telling ourselves we'll be really sure we've learnt it for next time . . . but not so when you're talking in front of people. You really have to know you know what you're talking about - else the humiliation isn't just a loss under twenty moves, but a flustered silence and red cheeks in front of twenty bemused friends from your club. This is different to putting a chess video on-line, when you can answer any critical questions via Fritz. (There is some overlap here with my advice to coach others.)

In conclusion, at chess clubs you can both organize chess events that force you to work on your chess, and learn from those that others put together.

Chess buddies
There are some people who learn best entirely on their own, but even amongst chess players not many. Most top Grandmasters have seconds, and during top one-on-one matches both competitors will often have teams of players assisting and advising them. And even in this computerized age, some top players even play training matches against human opposition. For instance, Grandmaster Morozevich recently played GM Navarra in an unrated match, the moves of which have been kept secret. (And not over the internet either, but face to face.)

It is unlikely that you and members of your chess club will be quite able to emulate all that. However, even tiny things can help - like extended postmortems with your club-mates after in the pub. However, there is more than that that club mates can do together. I regularly have lunch with team-mate and fellow-blogger Jonathan B, for instance, and we've recently decided to work through the exercises in Jacob Aagard's Excelling at Chess. We take it in turn to set out the pieces, and after some thought talk about how we think about the position. Then we come to a decision: a move and the idea behind it. Sometimes we're bang on, sometimes close but no cigar, sometimes only vaguely thinking about the positions in the right way. Having someone else there helps in several ways: the focus, the impossibility of cheating, and the sheer competitiveness! Although there is a loss in realism due to talking, there is a corresponding gain in tension which brings the experience closer to the ideal of simulating otb chess. (As an aside, I should add that I think the positions in Aagard's book are appropriate for the kind of simulation exercises I talked about previously.) I certainly feel a flutter of nerves much closer to otb chess as we reach for the solutions than I do when, say, playing a few games on www.chesscube.com at lunch.

Personal advice
Shared activity is one thing. However, for all-but-one member of every chess club, there will always be at least one stronger player, and usually stronger players prove good sources of advice. In fact I would say the ideal person to give a player chess advice is a person who (1) is a stronger player and (2) knows the player and their play personally. I don't think that (1) is a particularly controversial claim, but I think that (2) is. I am saying that it is better to follow chess advice from someone who knows you and your play personally than from any other expert - even Grandmasters who write books, even World Champions who produce DVDs, even from the works of undoubted world-class trainers. Indeed, I have benefited this way myself, following advice from club-mate and fellow-blogger ejh about my opening repertoire, that I detailed here. ejh knew me and my play, and knew my openings needed fixing, and went about it in a way that worked for me. No book has had anything like as powerful effect on my repertoire or indeed my overall attitude to the opening in chess.

Having said that, I do still stand my advice to read Rowson. There is not really a contradiction here. As I explained in my previous article, I find Jonathan Rowson's two books about chess improvement confusing and badly-written - but because of this, they are hugely provocative, shake up our assumptions, and are a stimulus to change. And they contain only one or two pieces of truly direct advice anyhow - practice concentration, simulate otb chess - so they hardly can be considered a surrogate for the personal touch.

On which note, in my article on Rowson I compared his work favourably with Nunn's Secrets of Practical Chess. Again Nunn's book provides a contrasting example to the kind of thing I'm talking about here. One piece of advice Nunn gives is "DAUT" which stands for "Don't Analyze Unnecessary Tactics". Undoubtedly true, good advice, and when we have a clear-cut positional option we should not plunge headlong into muddy tactical waters for the sake of it.

One question Nunn doesn't ask, though, is: what's a necessary tactic to analyze? Instead he assumes the reader errs on the side of tactical analysis. I think it's fair to say this preference for tactics is a part of Nunn-the-chess-player, but there is a tacit assumption it is part of his readership too. This makes him a bad source of advice for players not like him.

Let me make this concrete for anyone not convinced. Even if you've read the book, try this test. The test is: come to a conclusion about the tactics in the diagram position after 16...Nxe4, analyzing for several minutes at most.

This is from page 91 of the book, the chapter on Middlegames. Nunn is discussing how to play bad positions - whether to try to hang-on with grim defence, or try to create confusion in complications. What are the necessary tactics you need to analyze here to make that decision? The answer is implied in Nunn's annotations. After 16...Nxe4 Nunn writes how he was "dumbfounded" and that "for several minutes I just couldn't see the point of it . . . Then I suddenly saw the idea." The game continued, 17.Qxe4 Bb7 18.Rd5 Rc8 19.c3! Qc4 20.Qxc4 Rxc4 21.Bg2 Bxd5! 22.Bxd5 and then black played 22...Rxh4! to which Nunn comments: "This moves is the key point which it took me several minutes to see at move 16."

Several minutes to see 22...Rxh4 at move 16?

Frankly, I can barely visualize the variation and resultant position now, despite having played over the line several times. DAUT is all very good advice - provided you're at the level where you can see sequences like the above after several minutes; that is, provided you're a Grandmaster with excellent tactical vision, or at least a player with a far superior command of tactics compared than your positional sense. Incidentally, I think it's rather a shame Secrets of Practical Chess wasn't written twice: once in its current form by Nunn - a Grandmaster with strong tactical leanings - and once with the same chapters but by a positionally-orientated GM with relatively weak tactical abilities. It would be interesting to see the overlaps, more interesting to see the potential inversions.

Anyway. My points is that Nunn's advice is going to be a poor-fit for some players, because he doesn't know them personally and so his advice is not tailored to them. A team-mate who knows you well will certainly not advice you to analyze less tactics if they watch you blundering into two-movers every other week!

Which club is right for you?
Obviously, you can't just roll up to a chess club and demand free lessons. That's not how the world works. My point is more than many chess clubs are conducive environments for learning, especially through the friendships you make there, which often prove mutually-beneficial from a chess point of view.

Sometimes whether a chess club is likely to be right for you is pretty obvious from just the name of the club. The membership of London Deaf is self-explanatory, whilst teetotalers might feel somewhat out of place at Drunken Knights. Other times it's not so obvious, so the best thing to do is find out. Nowadays, first contact is frequently through the web:


View Larger Map

For our part for instance, we're on google maps as you can see. However geography nowadays isn't as crucial as it might seem: our teams in the London League play in central, not south London; our team in the Surrey League plays as far away as Guildford. We also have a website with the essential facts about our club here. Forty members is a healthy number, and it should be clear from the ECF grades that we have players of widely varying strengths. After that, second contact might be in person on a club night, or phoning or emailing a club official. For instance, the contact details of our captains are available on our website who can be contacted as appropriate. Incidentally, if you're not improving, want to improve, and are a member of a club - I don't mean to imply this is the club's "fault"! More, that being in a club is an opportunity to set-up situations suitable for improving, even if this kind of thing is directly structured into the goings on of the club itself.

Conclusion
There are lots of reasons to join a chess club not related to chess improvement. However, there are several ways to improve your chess from within a chess club that are not readily available elsewhere. One is that they increase the opportunities for you to play competitive chess. Also, you can be involved in chess events orientated around improving. Less formally, you can make chess friends who can help you train and vice versa. A special example of that is the situation where stronger players give weaker players advice. I argue this advice is more likely to be apt than that found in books. Finally, it's not necessarily obvious what the right club will be for a player, so it's worth exploring the options. (And do drop us a note if you think Streatham & Brixton Chess Club might be the place for you!)

[Index]

Smallville

Fans of the successful Superman spin-off TV series Smallville will wonder why their favourite show is being blogged about on a chess site. Chess fans, meanwhile, think of Smallville as the on-line user-name, nickname and playing handle of Hikaru Nakamura: a 19 year old American chess prodigy, Grand Master, and already one of the world's top 100 players.

Whilst it's not uncommon for chess players to like science fiction - there is typically a Star Trek t-shirt or ten seen at any old chess tournament - liking science fiction with good looking heroes (as opposed to emotionally stunted nerds) is somewhat rarer. But perhaps Smallville's attraction to Smallville is not to hard to explain - in terms of the way he plays chess. Uh?!? I hear chess players and TV fans alike respond. Well, Smallville's style is famous for three reasons - and each seems to correspond to a certain character from Smallville . . .

Firstly, Smallville thrives on complexity, difficulty, a refusal to make life simple. He rarely resigns until it's completely over, and is always on the look out for resources to trap his opponent with. In other words, the obsessive, secretive, hording strategist who never gives up: his play throws a dark, Lex Luthor-shaped shadow over the board at all times.

Secondly, and in complete contrast to his Lex-esque murky, messy chess, Smallville definitely has a Lois Lane side. He displays that in the opening stages of the game - where typically he rushes headlong up the board with the most stupid and obvious attempts to win, that even beginner-level players could repel. Naive, bolshy, fun, confident, blind and oblivious to danger - like Lois sticking her foot in it. Of course, Lois then needs to be rescued . . .

. . . and this is where Smallville's third distinctive ability comes in. Because, at times, make no mistake about it. Smallville is Clark Kent. He penetrates the problems on the board with x-ray vision, then executes apparently-impossible winning manouvers at lightening speed, that seem to come right out of nowhere. This is what clarifies the dark complexities of the Lex-like strategy; the sun after the storm. This, too, is what resuces him from the difficulties caused by his Lois-like idiot adventures.
Well, hopefully now fans of Smallville know a bit more Smallville, and vice versa.

But why I am telling you this?

Well, earlier this year I got to play Smallville in an Internet Chess Club Simultaneous Game. I hear that Uh?!? againt from TV-viewers. Well, the Internet Chess Club (ICC) club is a way to play games on-line through a computer programme. Many of the world's top players do this, as well as hundreds of thousands of amateurs like myself. Now, one way for the pro's to make money on the ICC is to play Simultaneous Games. A Simultaneous Game is where one strong player takes on a number of weaker players at the same time. Each weaker player only has their board to worry about - whilst the stronger player must make a move in turn on each of them, during a set time-limit. And I got to play Smallville in one of these Simultaneous Games - where he had 59 other opponents beside me.

Would I manage to Kryptonite his Clark side? Or would his Lois side make an idiot out of me on move 1? And what traps would his Lex-side cunningly lay for me? Well, here's what happened . . .





1. Nf3 d5 2. g3 Nf6 3. Bg2 c6 4. O-O g6 5. d3 Bg7 6. Nbd2 O-O

I have the black pieces. Nothing scary so far, or so I thought. Lois-mode is evidently switched to off, I told myself; this is all rather dull and worthy of him, in fact - just like Clark's parents.

7. e4 Bg4 8. Qe1 dxe4 9. dxe4

But, uh oh. What's this. Out of nowhere he suddenly has a nasty threat; e4-e5-e6, like journalist Lois asking a question you can't think how to answer.

9. ... Qa5 10. e5 Nfd7 11. h3 Bxf3 12. Nxf3 Qxe1 13. Rxe1 Nc5

But answer I did. e5-e6 is now impossible, and white's space advantage less important because the queens have come off. If I knew more about the show, I'd make a metaphorical references to it here.

14. b3 Ne6 15. Bb2 Rd8 16. Ba3 Kf8 17. Rad1 Nd7 18. Rd3 Nb6 19. Rxd8+ Rxd8 20. Bf1 a5 21. Bc1 a4 22. Be3 Nd5 23. Bd2 axb3 24. axb3 Ra8 25. Bd3 h6 26. Bc4 Ra2 27. Rc1 b5 28. Bxd5 cxd5 29. Kf1 Ke8 30. Ke2 Kd7 31. Bc3 h5 32. b4 Bh6 33. Bd2 Bxd2 34. Kxd2 Ra3 35. c3 Ra2+ 36. Rc2 Ra1 37. Rc1 Ra2+ 38. Rc2 Ra1 39. Ne1

39. Ne1 is a definite Lex move - a draw by repetition and thus peace was available by 39. Rc1 instead, but he pushes his position to breaking point for the win.

39. ... Kc6 40. h4 d4 41. cxd4+ Kd5 42. Nf3.

Now at this point, it's clear the Lex-like uncompromising aggression has lead him into difficulties, since 42. ... Ra4 would probably win for black. But with a Lois-like innocent sweetness, Smallville proposed a draw. And since it was 3am and I was blind-drunk (probably the best way to watch the TV series too) I agreed. Game Drawn. Superman just didn't show up, and so the point was split between Smallville and me, his opponent, Jurchessic Park.

Mr. Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 6: Close Up

In this episode of the series we are going to pick over the detail in Rosenbaum's picture, and have a look at it as a piece of art.

                ©National Portrait Gallery 
       Click to enlarge

But before we do, a quick mention of another spot of the picture in the chess press...

From R.D.Keene. Chess: An Illustrated History (1990)
pub Phaidon

...which is a reproduction of a photo, now on display at Simpson's (or it was the last time I looked), of the original painting, which itself had been on show there over 130 years before.

In earlier posts we noticed some of the references that the artist had wittily insinuated into the composition, particularly on the back wall. It was the only one that Rosenbaum had at his disposal, and he took full advantage of it.

To recap a bit, there are the barely discernable roundels honouring chess heroes whose deaths antedate the picture. They were listed, slightly inaccurately, by The Chess-Monthly, but notice that the most recently demised, Evans (in 1872) and Staunton (in 1874), are added at the extremes left and right respectively, as if to convey that they had, subsequent to the others, just been installed. Then there are the two images - "paintings" note, as if to accord them special celebrity - of Paul Morphy (not yet dead), with a chess set, and Adolf Anderssen (died 1879), with a trophy: nice details within the details.

Lower down there are the “placards with the conventional club notices and comical inscriptions” as The Chess Monthly put it. They are more or less legible when you are up close to the painting. Going from left to right there is a notice referring to the City of London Chess Club; then something very faint and barely noticeable followed by a group of three on green baize (all unclear); next to Gumpel we find Mephisto as discussed in episode 3; then a notice for St. George's CC; finally, just behind Rosenbaum, there is an In Memoriam requiem for the ill-fated West End Chess Club with a faint illustration, possibly of two characters seated at a chess board.   

The clock, top dead centre in front of the mirror, tells us the time of day: it is a most civilised five o’clock in the afternoon - that’s real time, in the real world, where and when the factory whistle signals the end of the shift or, as is more likely in polite company, the bell tinkles and tea, or something stronger, is served. Compare this with the other clock, the one at the front on the table by the ongoing chess game...

...which says, not five o’clock, but three; an anomaly that resolves when we remember that these gents, intent on their game, are in a chess world, not the real world and, as all chessers know, chess time flies at its own tempo. This clock marks the hour of the telegraphic transmission of the move, the one that the footman is now presenting to the Master of Ceremonies. Here in the Universal Chess Club it is not tea-time, it is move-time and the chess clock will tick-tock at its own pace till the last move is made, and the game is done.

Now transported to the front table you can inspect the other paraphernalia that Rosenbaum has put there. Speaking art-wise you could call this arrangement a pretty competent still life, though purists may prefer to see the entire front page of The Field (in which Hoffer was running a chess column). The other paper could be showing a chess problem (or a crossword, if non-chessers would prefer). We know about position on the board from episode 3, but what about that trophy? Looks familiar?   

Yes, it was recently seen stealing the show from Streatham and Brixton Chess Club member Andrew Stone after Middlesex’s victory in the Inter-Counties Championship (that's right: Streatham isn't in Middlesex). It is the same Löwenthal Cup (purchased from a surplus in his Testimonial Fund, and after various changes of hands bought by the BCF in, or shortly after, 1922) as sits on the table at the front of Mr Rosenbaum’s chess painting.  Here is the trophy in all its gilded magnificence.

Pic thanks to Steve Mann
 at Yorkshire Chess History 

Löwenthal himself is in Rosenbaum's painting (between Bird and MacDonnell), even though he died in 1876 (Anomaly Alert! How then could he appear along with a cup purchased after his death?).  The empty chairs are odd, when so many of the gents are made to stand, but maybe Rosenbaum was leaving room for a few more so as to get his tally nearer to a round 50 or, running with the Gunsberg gag, Mr R has reserved him a seat for when he returns from Mephisto duties.

Over to the right is the nicely-painted and well-stocked drinks tray (mentioned by The Chess-Monthly, see episode 2) which has also caught Wordsworth Donisthorpe’s attention (he's in the light suit, and we will come back to him in another post, promise). 

You'll recall, from episode 1, that The Chess Monthly spoke about Rosenbaum's difficulties of getting his subject matter...i.e. "of getting the necessary sittings, the photographs, or even sight of the originals he wished to paint " [my emphasis-MS]...implying that he relied on the copying of photographs, or illustrations in the press, to get the job done. To catch him at it - copying borrowed portraits - just look at this: from a picture-weekly of the time...

From the Daily Graphic December 29 1875
(via Chess Archeology )

  ...and here you will recognise some familiar Rosenbaum faces. He has used the seated figures of MacDonnell, Löwenthal and Bird (left) around his Board 1; and Horwitz and Murton (sitting right) at Board 2. Standing are Messrs. Gastineau and Rabbeth - unnamed (as are Lowenthal and Murton) by the Daily Graphic -  but recognisable from Rosenbaum. 

Now for a bit of retrograde analysis. With a bit of cutting and pasting from the Rosenbaum portraits here is my reconstruction of  The Graphic image above:

Pretty close, apart from some small spacing issues and the orientation of Gastineau to make him peer at us rather than the board. Clearly Rosenbaum copied The Graphic or, perhaps more likely, had access to the same material as did the magazine. There may well be more of Rosenbaum's sources in the popular graphic or illustrated press (chess or otherwise), but I haven't stumbled on them yet. That would have to include the source for Henry Bird above, because if you put the Rosenbaum and Daily Graphic images side by side (as below) you can see that Mr R must have used some other original; in fact he has flattered Mr B a touch, given him a haircut, and maybe knocked a few years off him. He has also tried to scale the head more harmoniously to the body - not completely successfully -  because The Graphic image looks unnaturally contrived (perhaps with a head "pasted" on to the wrong shoulders).    

Let’s now go back to the five o’clock clock, or more precisely the mantelpiece upon which it sits. This detail opens the door to the wider view. It has an important role in the organisation of the painting as it is the horizon line for its governing perspective scheme, as you can see from the diagram below. All the receding parallels on view, from the three chess boards for example, meet there. In the conventions of perspective they are supposed to meet at "infinity".    

This high horizon line conveys the impression of a high view point for the spectator (you and me). But because the mantelpiece is so close, and not at the "infinity" point somewhere north of Watford, we get the impression of a sloping floor; or of tiers (as around an intimate tea-dance salon, or a modern-day football stadium). It looks like one of those school photos with rank of uniformed pupils piled one on top of another. But, in the one clear stretch of floor that we can see (running up to Bird and friends on board one) it is flat and continuous.

If Rosenbaum's intention was to help us see all the portraits clearly, even in the back row, we'd have to say that he pretty much pulled it off, even if he has, willy nilly, distorted the perspective. Compare it to the painting below where, with pukka perspective, the floor is obviously level and every one stands on it...

George Elgar Hicks
Dividend Day at the Bank of England (1859)
Bank of England Collection

... but you can't make out the faces at the back, even though, very cleverly, Hicks has enabled us to glimpse all 30-odd of his characters. Incidentally, it's likely that Dividend Day would have been known to, and admired by, the investment-savvy gents of the Universal Chess Club as it was in the RA Summer Exhibition of 1859. Some of them might even have witnessed such a scene first-hand when down at the Bank collecting their own wind-falls.

So, we are at a high vantage point vis a vis Rosenbaum's gents; and we are looking down on that game at the front. But we see the figures, in all the rows including the first, as if we are at the same eye level - and that creates problems for the look of his composition. This inconsistency arises because, Rosenbaum was either painting in portraits posed from real life, or (as we have seen above, and this is crucial to his method, and his achievement) "pasting in" copies of images from photographs and the press; and of course these would all have been originated at eye level before they were added to the full tableau. Given the technical difficulties of the task Rosenbaum set himself we can forgive that the relative sizes of the sitting and the standing figures also sometimes get out of kilter (e.g the group around Donisthorpe).

For the record let's mention one other intriguing aspect. How big was the picture, and could it have been trimmed at some time in its life? At its unveiling The Chess Monthly said it was "6ft. by 4ft. including frame". Today the NPG says it is "32 in. x 60 in." - which is 5ft. by 2ft. 8 in. excluding frame. Which means that, when unveiled in 1880, the frame could have been a generous 6 inches all around: not impossible, but rather ostentatious. R.N.Coles, when he saw it in 1980, expressed surprise that the picture, by then more modestly framed (if at all), wasn't bigger. Perhaps, though, he mistakenly had in mind The Field's dimensions as being the canvas size.

But could it have been reduced by a foot or so? At the bottom Donisthorpe is cut off at the ankle; and along the top we lose the edges of the Morphy and Anderssen picture frames. Could there have been some scissoring along the way?

A couple of feet less than expected?

Well, the NPG's own condition report (in its Archive) doesn't mention it. Maybe if they ever unscrew it from the wall at Bodelwyddan Castle they will have a look again. Possibly Hoffer et al exaggerated the dimensions for effect. Given the size of his ambition, Rosenbaum may simply have miscalculated what he could get in and then ran out of space, denying us the opportunity to admire Donisthorpe's taste in shoes.  

It is, though, a monumental feat of organisation and planning, fraught with compositional challenges, at the mercy of the subject matter that came to hand, and vulnerable to unforeseen eventualities - such as the premature demise of a personnage already placed in position: Löwenthal for instance. Once you know he had already passed on it is difficult to expunge the thought that his cadaver remains upright only because of the discreet connivance of Mr Gastineau behind.

Overall, you have to admire Rosenbaum's vision, and perseverance to see it through, and you could say that Rosenbaum's 50-up was in the grand manner of action-packed Victorian crowd-scene painting such as  Frith's Railway Station of 1862 which has 60-ish and a dog, and another Hicks: The General Post Office - 1 minute to 6 with 40-ish (and another dog) of 1860. Like Frith and Hicks, AR attempted to imbue his tableau with incident and interplay, however downbeat and low-key a chess séance would be. Hicks incidentally earned £1700 per annum at the height of his career, which puts into context Rosenbaum's £200 for the several years' on-off labour over his chess painting.

Perhaps (wild hypothesis warning) Rosenbaum was hoping also to get his magnum opus selected for the RA Summer Exhibition, to catch the eye of the art-viewing (and purchasing) public and thus to make his artistic reputation. Perhaps he was persuaded by his chess chums to let them buy it instead, so as to keep it in the family. Perhaps, also, they could see what he couldn't: that it would be savaged by the art critics of the day.

The NGA Archive contains an expert's comment a hundred years or so later: that Rosenbaum's chess picture  is of worth as an historical document rather than as a work of art. Perhaps we should settle for that, and value it for giving us a unique record of the chess characters of the time, even if Rosenbaum's own self-portrait (leaving aside all the others) should not to be taken at face value - as we will see when look at the man himself in the last episode.

What a painting!

Next week another character takes the limelight; someone who would have basked in it.

Two episodes more to go. See all episodes in the series via our History Index

An Educational Migraine?

I'm not sure if this is interesting, clever, educational - or giving me a headache:


As for what it is - look carefully. Yellow is for knight, blue is for bishop, red for rook. I've never seen a graphic quite like it with which to demonstrate the importance of the centre, or paracetamol.

I found this image, along with related others, posted over at the About Chess Forum by its creator Tom Brown. The idea behind his work is linked to Nikolai Krogius's book "Psychology in Chess" (which fortunately I've not read) says Tom:

If this doesn't do something for your board vision, then I don't know what will! ... The "chess image" is introduced in the beginning of Krogius' book on chess psychology, which I am working my way through. I figured that once a guy can work with the chess images, then he'll be in good shape.

Interested? Tom adds "Let me know if you get any ideas on things to make images for. I am always looking for new ideas." How about the same thing, but in pastels?

(Seriously though, congratulations to Tom on some novel & intriguing representations of relationships in chess. The whole of thread at About Chess & Tom's Blog are certainly each worth a read.)

Mr Rosenbaum's Chess Picture. Part 7: Adonis

We have been rooting around in the nooks and crannies of Anthony Rosenbaum’s chess picture and, as we've gone along, we've noted its public appearances. Here is another one:

From Matthews British Chess (1948) 
Find out who everybody is here.

Now we turn to look at a man whose time has come, in this series anyway: Wordsworth Donisthorpe (1847-1914) - about whom, with the generous help of others, there is much to tell, which for the chessers of the period outside the first rank is perhaps unusual, but he was no shrinking violet and so left a heavy footprint in the historical record, of unusual breadth and depth to boot. He is sitting, and reading, in the bottom right-hand corner. 

A thoroughly researched account of his adventures by Stephen Herbert and Mo Hearn Industry, Liberty, and a Vision (1998) has brought much to light, and in particular does full justice to him as an inventor. It also mentions his chess. For other important chess data see Batgirl's helpful blog here, and there's a mention in Tim Harding's Victorian Chessers book.

With this episode, as with all of them, the usual caveats apply: all misrepresentation, misinterpretation and narrative overexcitability are the responsibility of the author.  

To begin with let's remind ourselves of how Rosenbaum painted him. Here's a man who ploughed his own furrow, and dressed for the part. Not, though, in cloth cap and clogs. He is Wordsworth Donisthorpe à la mode, a dedicated follower of fashion.  

Because I'm Wordsworth it.

He was nicknamed "Adonis" (according to Sergeant) and in Rosenbaum's painting we can see why. It plays to WD's borderline bumptiousness by putting him down-stage left (see the full-colour tableau in earlier episodes via this link), where prima donna-ish he affects disinterest in the proceedings. We can take it as read that, of all Rosenbaum’s mini-portraits, this one was done from life – Donisthorpe would, methinks, have settled for nothing less. Rosenbaum, by the way, is back row, second from right.

Chess-wise he was strong, if not quite in the top flight. Initially he had been a "pawn and two" player, according to an appreciation in The Chess-Monthly of December 1890, but latterly "an amateur of the 1st class", and with Bird's (balding, seated behind the board top-left) commendation. In wider chess matters he was a full-blooded mover and shaker, taking a role in club governance (British Chess Club Vice-President, for example, in 1885), voicing opinions on proper national arrangements (e.g. a revitalised British Chess Association, of which he was a founding Council member the same year), and tournament administration (he was on the Management Committee of the 1883 London International). In the Saturday Review of 1893 he proposed a rule amendment to permit the king to be captured, thereby eliminating stalemate and as a by-product reducing the number of draws (see Batgirl). It has yet to catch on.    

By the time of the unveiling of Rosenbaum’s picture in 1880 Wordsworth (his mother claimed to be the great-niece of the poet) he had already made his mark. Back in 1876 he'd applied for a patent for an “apparatus for taking and exhibiting photographs”- moving ones - and in that year he'd published his first political tract  The Principle of Plutocracy which “ investigates the law of value…and the source of wealth”. This was after his studies at Cambridge where he got a First in spite of indulging his passion for billiards, at which he was “first for the cue” in 1868 - in that respect, the Adonis was a kind of Victorian Steve Davis.  

A kind of 20th Century Wordsworth Donisthorpe. 

WD was called to the Bar in 1875, and “never did anything since” as he put it. He belonged to the “leisured class”, was “a gentlemen of independent means”, and “…devoted his leisure to the solution of various social problems” as The Chess Monthly put it - though it might have said, more accurately, "attempted solution" as his brand of extreme Individualism also hasn't yet carried the day.     

His many talents include his wit and banter - even at the board apparently - which survives in his copious writing. A chess-related example would be his “poetical alphabet” which, said The Chess-Monthly of January 1895, "rightly or wrongly, is attributed to the gifted pen of the genial philosopher Wordsworth Donisthorpe" and for legal reasons was not formally acknowledged as by him, indeed one stanza was retracted for fear of litigation. The "poem" lampoons several of his fellow British Chess Club members, and the three who are in Rosenbaum’s picture are given below. Although you are a contemporary reader, and are not easy to shock, be warned: these extracts are really rather tame. 

On the green-baize skills of the editor of The Chess Monthly, at board two, left of Steinitz: 

"H stands for Hoffer. At chess he gives odds; / But to see him play billiards’ a sight for the gods ;"

On the classically educated, white-haired gent who stands behind the front board:

"W for Woodgate, a walking Thesaurus. / His English is grand – but his Greek tends to bore us ;"

And, as if to put up a smokescreen as to authorship, he writes this about himself:

"D stands for Donisthorpe ; some folks complain / That he oftener wins with his tongue than his brain ;" 

Well, he said it; although he did have genuine chess success, for example when he tied with the Rev MacDonnell (bearded, two left of Bird) in the 1897 London Tournament secondary competition for participants with qualifications in “Art, Science, or Literature”. Professor John Ruskin, vice-president of the BCA, was a patron of the tournament and a selection of his works made up the prize. The cerebral side of Donisthorpe might have been pleased to add the great man’s voluminous tomes to his library as he was a fan of sorts: in "The Claims of Labour" (1880) he concurs with Ruskin's denunciation, delivered "with force and ability", of the destruction of individual craft and skill by industrial machinery. Before we move on here is another example of WD's wit, manifest this time at the board. In this little bit of nonsense the coup de grâce cannot fail to make you smile.

Something else to raise a smile is this wonderful cartoon by Harry Furniss published in Punch in 1885:

   Click on to enlarge

All the usual suspects are there (see Appendix), including Donisthorpe cadging a light, perhaps even the cigar, from W. D. Duffy, over on the left-hand side.  The fellow seated in front of them, reading his own Chess column in The Field, is Leopold Hoffer. Sorry about the blurriness of this crop:  

Donisthorpe is described by G. A. MacDonnell in his commentary on the cartoon as "a pillar of fire...for he is a guide as well as support...of the Grand Chess Divan", and as for Hoffer, MacDonnell injudiciously applied the word "racy" to his writing. Hoffer may not have been amused as it was edited out later (see Appendix for detail).

As for his politics, you get the flavour of Donisthope’s "small state" (as we'd say today), "let-be" (as he said then) persuasion from this statement of aims of his Liberty and Property Defence League, of which he was the President:  

"[The League] opposes all attempts to introduce the State as a competitor or regulator into the various departments of social activity and industry which would otherwise be spontaneously and adequately conducted by private enterprise.” 

That came from a League pamphlet (1888) "against teetotal tyranny" written by Isidor "Mephisto" Gunsberg, no less, opposing the Temperance movement’s “Local Option” proposal for community rights to ban the local sale of alcohol. It is a pretty dry read, and one suspects the hand of Donisthorpe in this attempt to froth it up: why stop at booze - he asks rhetorically - why not also ban “meat [as it is] very generally abused by Englishmen, causing a great national evil [of] indigestion, a far more serious evil, in our opinion, than intemperance”.

Chesser James Mason (in profile, middle row, first left of page break) also brought home the bacon thanks to WD's good offices (per Tim Harding) and, what with his “The Claims of Labour” finding a publisher in Samuel Tinsley & Co. a few years earlier, chess connections were evidently proving mutually advantageous, as we suspected in episode 3.

Gunsberg's 1888 pamphlet, & Donisthorpe's published by 
Tinsley (front row, right of waiter) in 1880.
(apologies for the BL watermark) 

Wordsworth wrote copiously, and lectured and debated far and wide. George Bernard Shaw heard him and commended his courage for venturing into the lions' den down at the Fabians, although GBS took issue with most everything Donsithorpe said, even aiming this low blow: that many League supporters had deserted WD (finding him rather strong meat, perhaps?) so as to set up their own "Individualist Clubs, which, by a curious freak of evolution, turned into chess clubs..."   

His thinking and interests evolved from political economy to encompass social philosophy and we find him as the President of the Legitimation League in the 1890s. It/he argued, in respect of  family life, that the status of illegitimacy visited on children born out of wedlock was a misconceived notion - as you might say - and was unacceptable. Not that he was advocating anything other than monogamy, married or otherwise: it was "the highest and best state of sexual relationship". Yet he was reluctant to condemn multiple partnering ("let-be!"). "Perhaps the epicure is right in approving oysters and chablis..."  - WD's lubricious trope for monogamy - but "...it may be that the coster really prefers whelks and porter, and it would be quixotic to reprove him for indulging his 'low' and 'beastly' appetite...". Chew on that.

"What's for luncheon?"
The Adonis around 1910. 

It was the challenge of capturing, and then projecting, a moving image that had occupied him (till the money ran out), and together with his cousin William Carr Crofts he built the Kinesigraph.  William's brother was Royal Academician Ernest Crofts who specialised in military subjects – Civil War scenes, battles versus the French, and the like. He gave us another painting of the Adonis strutting his stuff, this time modelling a gay Hussar. 

The Advance Guard.
Ernest Crofts RA (1847-1911)
Image from the Witts Library.
"Crofts grafi bel Kanbide men prelam" as Donisthorpe might have said. 

But it was with cousin William that (sometime in, or close to, 1890) Donisthorpe set up their Kinesigraph...

A recent reconstruction
 of Donisthorpe and Crofts' Kinesigraph of 1889/90. 

...in a vacant office at 1, Northumberland Avenue overlooking Trafalgar Square and recorded the passing traffic - then the benchmark test of a successful moving image. Remarkably the film survives – or at least ten frames of it does: and you can see it here (in the first three seconds of this clip, before the open-top bus arrives).   

Stephen Herbert conjectures that there may have been, in part, a hidden agenda in photographing this particular scene – traditionally the site, in the heart of London less than a mile from Parliament, where freedom of speech and expression is exercised en masse in demonstrations and assemblies. Donisthorpe might have intended to use it in his lectures to show the very place where ordinary decent citizens found that their right freely to walk the pavement, and go about their daily business, monstrously trampled by whelk-chomping trade unionists led by John Burns and other bolshie Scots. WD's collaborator, W. C. Crofts, had written a broadside against the "Socialism of the Street in England" in 1888. The reality was however (according to Mr Herbert) that projection proved even more problematic than the initial recording. Raising funds for further development, even with Sir George Newnes' assistance, proved too much of a challenge.

That's Sir George Newnes who made an appearance in episode 5. He was, for 20 years in total, the Liberal M.P., for Newmarket and, later, Swansea; chair of both the British and City of London Chess Clubs; "reportedly the best chess player in the House of Commons" (according to G. A. MacDonnell); and publisher, from 1881, of the popular weekly, jauntily titled "Tit-Bits", from which he made his fortune.

Tit-Bits in 1906, offering a cure for the abuse of meat.  

Just a couple of further examples of Donisthorpe's active mind always at work, demonstrating an unstinting zeal to smooth the inner rumblings of the body politic.  He devised a new language (Esperanto-style) based on Latin: "Uropa", for which he wrote an instructional exposition, the introduction to which betrays a little, rather atypical, self-doubt. 

"All are requested to read through the following chapters [that's all 28 of them - MS], without mental protest [his emphasis - MS] till the end is reached. Then, but not before, let them pour forth their pent-up fury over its apparent shortcomings and defects." 

Look again at that example of "Uropa" in the caption to the gay Hussar above, though it is not a phrase which, in translation, has the quotidian utility of  "What's for luncheon?". "Crofts grafi bel Kanbidem men Waterloo prelam" in Uropa-speak translates, so Donisthorpe assures us, as "Crofts paints a fine canvas representing the Battle of Waterloo". Uropa didn't catch on, either.

Nor, as a lubricant to free trade, did his proposed new system of weights and measures. Though actually that's only half right, as we (here in the UK) are moving, if only half-heartedly, towards a universal decimal base such as he advocated. Perhaps, for those times, Donisthorpe made a tactical mistake in proposing a system that was associated with things French, something his novel nomenclature based on cod Olde English didn't quite disguise. After "Jot" (that's a millimetre), he has "Quil" and "Hand", but then "Mete", which was a bit of a giveaway. In money matters our man did, however, catch the eye of H.G.Wells, who was minded to adopt WD's "Lion" as the principal denomination in the decimal currency of his Wellsian Utopia.  

Donisthorpe's final adventure was a kind of Eight Men in a Boat cruise around the Mediterranean with Newnes and sundry other chaps. It was written up as "Down The Stream of Civilization", and even has a literary reference chess game in the dialogue on the first page: "...looking up from the chess-board, on which he was struggling with a rather nasty attack..." ("Then give him some Beecham's", they cried?). Here he is (on our left), aka "Jus - a Literary Failure", waiting to splice the mainbrace with some fellow hearties. Newnes, "The Commodore", is on the far right, and it was he who published the yarn in 1898.

Wordsworth Donisthorpe. Larger than life. You couldn't make him up, and he is a natural for dramatisation on stage or screen. Stephen Herbert has done just that with a performance, music and film production at the Museum of Moving Image, and at the British Silents Festival in Nottingham. My own fantasy - recently alluded to in the blogosphere by a certain lady - is for a theatre piece in which Wordsworth, wit, chesser, politico, and undoubted charmer, meets the admirable Louise Matilda Fagan, and regards it as his masculine obligation to flirt (their age difference being just three years). We encountered her in episode 4, you will recall. She was a Fabian, and a more than decent player. Her father is in the bottom left-hand corner.

Admittedly Louise was abroad (Irish husband serving in India) for some of the time, but when in London visiting papa and her brother, and taking time off from campaigning for women's rights etc, don’t you think Wordsworth would have manoeuvred so as to engage her in a game? This would have been his pretext to impress her with his badinage and witty repartee, providing the dialogue for my projected comedy of manners. He would gambit a libertarian tease. She would rebuff him with suffragette ease. All in Donisthorpian rhyming couplets. 

So, Wordsworth Donisthorpe: what a character, who, in spite of his shortcomings (i.e. his politics IMHO), adds colour to the assembly of Rosenbaum's worthy gents. Possessed of "intellect and energy" - as Stephen Herbert puts it - who developed "a most powerful concept, that of reproducing filmed movement...which, when finally realised by others would revolutionise communications throughout the twentieth century." If we add to this his contibutions in those other fields of enquiry touched on above we see an exceptionally fertile brain at work, even if his efforts are now largely forgotten today.      

Next week, for the conclusion of this series, we meet Anthony Rosenbaum; the artist himself.                        

Acknowledgments etc

Published by the The Projection Box, but now out of print.

Read the full "poetical alphabet" in Winter's Chess Note 5662 and in A. M. Fox's reminiscences of the British Chess Club in BCM February 1941. 

Thanks again to Stephen Herbert and Mo Hearns. Their most recent research shows that WD had applied for a patent as early as 1868  when he was still  at Cambridge. See here.
And thanks, yet again, to Paul Timson and Richard James for their help; and also to Tim Harding's Eminent Victorian Chess Players (2012) for Donisthorpe related info.
G.B.Shaw (1889)  Mr Donisthorpe's Individualism 
H. G. Wells (1905)  A Modern Utopia  
Donisthorpe's many writings are easily Googled, and Batgirl lists them, too. He has an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

See all episodes, previous and subsequent, in this Rosenbaum series via our History Index. 

Appendix follows after the jump