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Beer In Art #92: Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Hangover

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Today’s painting is by one of the most famous post-impressionist artists, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. The painting is most often called “The Hangover,” though occasionally subtitled “Portrait of Suzanne Valadon,” an artist on her own right. It’s also been called “The Drinker.” The original hangs in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. It was painted in 1888.

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And yes, I realize it may very well be wine in the glass and the bottle, but I’m holding out hope that it may also be beer because I like the painting so much. Toulouse-Lautrec was an alcoholic most of his adult life, and originally had a taste for beer and wine, though he later began drinking American-style cocktails, too. He had a hard time coping with people’s cruel tendency to mock his short stature and turned to drink as a result.

Art and alcohol were his only mistresses, and they were mistresses to which he devoted all of his time and energy. He was doing one or both almost every day of his life until he died.

For more about Toulouse-Lautrec, Wikipedia is a good place to start, and there are a number of links at the ArtCyclopedia and the Artchive. And you can also see a number of his other works at Olga’s Gallery, the Artliste, the Web Museum and CFGA.

Beer In Ads #187: Rubsam & Horrmann

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Friday’s ad is an odd one. It’s for the Staten Island, New York brewery Rubsam & Horrmann. Founded in 1870 in in the town of Stapleton. Piels bought them out in 1953 but closed the brewery ten years later. The ad’s scene is set in Cuba, so I’m guessing the ad is from around the time of the Spanish-American War, which was in 1898. The guy in the brown hat looks like Teddy Roosevelt and the on the right the white-haired man resembles either Buffalo Bill Cody or Mark Twain. But despite the navy parked in Havana harbor, they’re all toasting with Rubsam & Horrmann beer.

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Beer From Early 1800s Found In Baltic Shipwreck

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CNN is reporting that the World’s ‘Oldest Beer’ Found in Shipwreck in the Baltic Sea off the coast of the Åland Islands. The Ålands are an autonomous group of nearly 6,000 islands near Finland. The cargo ship is believed to have been sailing from Denmark, most likely Copenhagen, sometime between 1800 and 1830 possibly bound for St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s also speculation that t may have been sent “by France’s King Louis XVI to the Russian Imperial Court.”

Initially, divers found bottles of Champagne, but later found additional bottles, some of which burst from the pressure upon reaching the surface, revealing that there was beer inside them. From the CNN report:

“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”

It will certainly be interesting to see what further analysis of the beer reveals.

Beer In Ads #185: Trinkt Sternenberg Bier

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Wednesday’s ad is for another Swiss beer, Brauerei Zum Sternenberg, from Basel. With the tagline “Trinkt Sternenberg Bier” or drink Sternenberg beer, the artwork resembles an illustration from a children’s book. The “king” sits on a throne with brewer’s stars on each arm and there’s one behind him, too. Below the throne, a triple tap fountain spills beer into a pool. The kings seems to be shouting “drink, drink” urging on the kneeling man chugging his beer. Certainly one of the odder scenes in a beer ad.

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Beer In Ads #184: Barclay’s Lager, Light Or Dark

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Tuesday’s ad is for the London brand Barclay’s Lager. Getty Images claims it’s from around 1900 but the artist, Tom Purvis, was born in 1888 meaning he’d have been 12 then, so it seems more likely it was actually later. The ad reminds me a bit of the Blues Brothers movie, the scene at the bar where the bartenders tells the band they have both kinds of music, country and western. They serve both kinds of lager, “Light or Dark.”

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Beer In Ads #182: Art Nouveau Beer Lady

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Friday’s ad is one of my favorite beer posters of all time, though I’ve never seen it with any text so I don’t know if it was ever actually used as an advertisement at all and, if so, for what brewery. I’ve never seen any information about the artist or even where it’s from precisely, though I suspect it’s French. Still, it’s beautiful.

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