Exploding the Hearth: Considering Victorian Aging

The image of the aged parent or grandparent sitting contentedly before the hearth is a canonical trope in Victorian visual culture. The freside was, at that time, a signifcant center of the home and family, and older members of the household were viewed as principal organizing forces around this central gathering place. This article examines the archetypal image of the senescent hearthside fgure in order to better evaluate the larger context in which Victorian aging was visually interpreted and generally understood. By examining depictions of this theme by the popular British painters Walter Dendy Sadler and Frederick Daniel Hardy, this study demonstrates some ways in which art history may proft from age studies in formulating expanded readings of such material

Piet Mondrian. Proto-fashion Theorist

This paper attempts to contextualize Mondrian‘s few writings on fashion within his larger interest in oppositions and the work of early fashion theorists, who similarly framed dress in terms of binaries and antonyms. Like Mondrian, early fashion theorists were invested in ideas of opposition and universality, similarities that suggest that Mondrian may find conceptual allies in the first generation of fashion theorists, particularly J. C. Flügel, Thorstein Veblen, and Georg Simmel. Mondrian‘s largely overlooked approach to fashion theory sheds light on the understanding of his complex aesthetic philosophy, and, while much has been written about Mondrian‘s influence on fashion, there remains a need to navigate Mondrian‘s own inspiration by fashion

Exploding the Hearth

The image of the aged parent or grandparent sitting contentedly before the hearth is a canonical trope in Victorian visual culture. The freside was, at that time, a signifcant center of the home and family, and older members of the household were viewed as principal organizing forces around this central gathering place. This article examines the archetypal image of the senescent hearthside fgure in order to better evaluate the larger context in which Victorian aging was visually interpreted and generally understood. By examining depictions of this theme by the popular British painters Walter Dendy Sadler and Frederick Daniel Hardy, this study demonstrates some ways in which art history may proft from age studies in formulating expanded readings of such material

Robust Smith Predictor Design for Time-Delay Systems with H∞ Performance

A new method for robust fixed-order H∞ controller design for uncertain time-delay systems is presented. It is shown that the H∞ robust performance condition can be represented by a set of convex constraints with respect to the parameters of a linearly parameterized primary controller in the Smith predictor structure. Therefore, the parameters of the primary controller can be obtained by convex optimization. The proposed method can be applied to stable SISO and MIMO models with uncertain dead-time and with multimodel and frequency-dependent uncertainty. It is also shown that how the design method can be extended to unstable SISO models. The design of robust gain-scheduled dead-time compensators is also investigated. The performance of the method is illustrated for both SISO and MIMO systems by simulation examples

Robustness of a discrete-time predictor-based controller for time-varying measurement delay

A predictor-based controller for time-varying delay systems is presented in this paper and its robustness properties for different uncertainties are analyzed. First, a time-varying delay dependent stability condition is expressed in terms of LMIs. Then, uncertainties in the knowledge of all plant-model parameters are considered and the resulting closed-loop system is shown to be robust with respect to these uncertainties. A significant improvement with respect to the same control strategy without predictor is achieved. The scheme is applicable to open-loop unstable plants and it has been tested in a real-time application to control the roll angle of a quad-rotor helicopter prototype. The experimental results show good performance and robustness of the proposed scheme even in the presence of long delay uncertainties. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.This work has been partially granted by Conselleria de Educacion under PROMETEO project number 2008-088, and CICYT no. DPI2008-06737-C02-01 from Spanish government.Gonzalez, A.; García Gil, PJ.; Albertos Pérez, P.; Castillo, P.; Lozano, R. (2012). Robustness of a discrete-time predictor-based controller for time-varying measurement delay. Control Engineering Practice. 20(2):102-110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conengprac.2011.09.001S10211020

Price and Gilpin in the cottage garden: reading the picturesque in late Victorian watercolors

In his book American Picturesque, John Conron asserts that the picturesque “leads a nineteenth-century life very much distinguishable from its eighteenth century predecessors.” How was the nineteenth century life of the picturesque different as seen through such cottage scene pictures? What was uniquely picturesque about the Victorian cottage garden and its depiction by artists, especially those working with watercolors? How do the characters populating these pictures correspond with the favored picturesque figures found in Price? By addressing the taste for cottage garden pictures, and the work of artists like Helen Allingham and Thomas James Lloyd, one may perhaps uniquely access the Victorian life of the picturesque ideal.Publisher PD

Queen Victoria’s Durbar Room: The Imperial Museum at Home

In 1890, Queen Victoria commissioned John Lockwood Kipling to create a sumptuous ‘Indian dining room’ for Osborne House, her summer palace on the Isle of Wight. This room later came to be known as the Durbar Room, a great hall in which the queen displayed many of the gifts she received from Indian princes as Empress of India. As a strange amalgam of private and public space, dining room and museum, the Durbar Room was an indulgent project. Originally constructed by Sikh artisans led by Bhaj Ram Singh, the room was only opened to the public after the queen’s death. When Osborne House became a convalescent home for retired military officers, the room was maintained as a kind of museum where a selection of decadent Jubilee presents was displayed to an eager public. The Durbar Room is also interesting as a popular subject for picture postcards, and many views of the room have been printed and sent by post since the room opened to the public in 1904. The Durbar Room is a unique case study in the display of Indian material culture and the indulgence that is the private royal museum. This paper addresses the decadence of the Durbar Room, as well as its collections, construction, and popularity in picture postcards, with regards to its status as a uniquely indulgent private collection of Indian art and design