Blog: Unidentified Couple

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Yesterday we DROPPED (it means "released for public consumption" - get with it, Grandad) the cover for the Jane and John single "Our Year" which, as I previously mentioned, will be out on Monday 14 December. It looks like THIS:



I flipping LOVE this image, which was found on Smithsonian Open Access, a rather wonderful repository of royalty free art which the museum recently DROPPED (see above). It is FULL of images from their collection that they've made available for any purpose, which is rather nice of them. I do like The Smithsonian, especially their magazine, as pretty much every day they tweet a story about something FASCINATING. It's sort of like National Geographic, but not boring.

We had a couple of goes at the artwork for the single before we settled on this image. The Canvas In My Frame had lots of ideas about how it could look, and we tried various ways to CAPTURE these THORTS without getting it quite right - it's always difficult putting ARTWORK together when a) you're not just using a photograph of yourselves and b) you can't really draw something from scratch, so I was DELIGHTED to discover that Smithsonian were running this service, and when I found the original painting that our image was taken from I was ENAMOURED straight away.

I copied the painting, cropped it, stuck it underneath the text which The Paint In My Pot had already suggested, and showed it to aforesaid who was similarly ENAMOURED. There's something about the pair of them that makes you think they look like fun. They appear to actually like each other, and I can imagine sitting opposite them at a boring WORK DO or something, and ending up nipping out to another pub with them for the rest of the night.

According to The Smithsonian's information nobody knows who painted the picture, or who the couple are. They know they're American and it's from between 1865 and 1885, but that's about it. In some ways this is a relief - without any other info to go on, I'm free to just imagine them being a lovely couple to go out for a curry with.

In fact, the only problem is that I've no way of finding out if there were ever any other pictures of them - if there were they'd be prime candidates for the next single!

posted 23/11/2020 by MJ Hibbett

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