The Bradwell Anglo-Saxon bronze horse and rider figurine, a rare 7th Century artifact discovered by a metal detectorist near Bradwell, Norfolk, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 This figure is made of bronze and is only 5cm tall. The piece depicts a moustached warrior armed with sword and shield, mounted on a horse. The warrior is bare headed, sports a centre parting and has been dated to sometime in the 7th century. It was discovered in isolation so its exact purpose/use is not known, however experts think it was either a gaming piece from a game similar to chess or possibly a piece used for planning battles. It is not too dissimilar from the Lewis Chessmen knight on horseback which leads me to think that the gaming piece theory is probably more likely, although if the dating is correct then the piece would have been in use during a particularly violent time period and so could have been used for both purposes. The piece was sold at auction in late 2020 and fetched just over £120,000 with the money split between the finder and the land owner. Portable Antiquities Scheme and Timeline Auctions #drthehistories

Bring back the Art Deco bath.

Grandma busy in the kitchen. Rotterdam, Netherlands, Autumn 1945.

More than 2,000 years ago, an ancient Chinese craftsperson created a lamp that was not merely beautiful—it was designed to manage its own smoke. Known as the Changxin Palace Lamp, this Western Han dynasty masterpiece takes the form of a kneeling palace attendant holding a light. But her raised sleeve is not simply part of the sculpture. The hollow arm acts as a passage through which smoke and soot from the burning oil could travel into the figure’s body. Water could be placed inside to help collect the soot. The lamp’s shade could also be adjusted to control the direction and intensity of its light. Its sections could be dismantled for cleaning—a remarkably practical feature concealed inside an elegant work of art. The gilt-bronze lamp was excavated in 1968 from the tomb of Dou Wan, wife of Liu Sheng, at Mancheng in China’s Hebei province. What fascinates me is that its maker treated pollution as a design problem two millennia ago. We often imagine people in the ancient world accepting smoke, darkness and discomfort as unavoidable. This lamp suggests something very different: they observed a problem, understood how air moved and engineered a cleaner solution. And yet the mechanism never interrupts the beauty of the figure. The woman’s sleeve is simultaneously clothing, sculpture and ventilation. To me, that is brilliant design—not adding technology on top of art, but making it impossible to see where one ends and the other begins. The light has gone out, but the intelligence behind it is still shining. Visual: AI-generated historical reconstruction inspired by the surviving Changxin Palace Lamp. Authentic source: Henan Museum

A swimming pool, a disco and a gym—all aboard a fictional nuclear-powered train. In 1979, NBC introduced Supertrain, a television series set aboard a futuristic luxury train traveling between New York and Los Angeles. Its unusually wide carriages offered amenities associated with a cruise ship, including shops and an indoor swimming pool. For filming, the production combined elaborate studio sets with miniature train models used for exterior shots. The nuclear propulsion belonged to the story; the interiors were physical sets built for the show. Supertrain lasted just nine episodes, including its two-hour pilot, before NBC canceled the series.

Royal Guard falling down, maybe due to the extreme heat? 1957.

St Francis reads a sermon to birds who flock to a tree to listen. A wallpainting at Wissington, Suffolk. Today's the 800th anniversary of the death of St Francis in 1226. The Wissington paintings are dated c1280, so it's just possible the artist was alive in the saint's lifetime.

Rembrandt van Rijn Philosopher Reading

Saint Andrew is shown crucified on a saltire on this Scottish gold lion of Robert III that was minted sometime between 1393 & c.1403. Robert III was the first King of Scots to issue gold coins in large numbers. This example is from the Lord Stewartby Collection at the Hunterian.

Aunque nunca he conseguido pillarla con esa luz soñada, la iglesia de Sant Climent de Coll de Nargó (Alt Urgell - Lleida) me parece una de las más fotogenicas del románico catalán

3rd century wall plaster from the Romano-British villa at Tarrant Hinton in Dorset, possibly depicting Narcissus, a hunter from Roman mythology. Now part of the collections at East Dorset Museum in Wimborne, Dorset. 📷 My own. #FrescoFriday #RomanBritain #TarrantHinton

Fountains Abbey is a ruined Cistercian monastery near Ripon in North Yorkshire. It was founded in 1132 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Waited since I was 7 years old to see the Bayeux Tapestry. Got in an hour-long online queue to spend £50 on tickets. Got there ahead of time. Stood in a queue for 20 minutes. Then was told halfway through the queue that the gallery was closing. The @britishmuseum stinks 😭

Life in a Boarding House, Eric Ravilious, 1930. A now lost mural: one of several painted by Ravilious and Edward Bawden at Morley College in #London. It was destroyed in the Blitz during #WW2.

Hole, where it was reconstructed at Ryedale Folk Museum. Fourteen volunteers helped raise the great crucks in a single day. It has been restored to reflect its 17th century appearance. See Alts.

with a first floor added at one end to create a bedroom. Manor houses were important centres of local life, By the 20th century, however, Harome Hall had fallen into serious disrepair. In 1971, museum volunteers carefully dismantled the building and transported it to Hutton-le-

🧵Harome Hall is a late-16th-century Elizabethan manor house, originally standing in the village of Harome, near Helmsley. It was somewhat old fashioned in style when it was built using the traditional cruck-frame method. During the mid-17th century, the building was modernised,

In 1939, archaeologist Basil Brown opened a burial mound at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England—and discovered the ghostly outline of an enormous ship beneath the soil. Inside was an early seventh-century burial chamber filled with weapons, silverware, gold ornaments and objects brought from distant regions. Among them lay a royal helmet—but it was not found standing majestically as we see it today. It had collapsed into hundreds of corroded fragments. For years, specialists studied and assembled those pieces like an impossibly complicated puzzle. The reconstruction eventually revealed one of the most extraordinary objects to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. Its iron skull was covered with decorated panels showing warriors and mythic scenes. The eyebrows ended in tiny boar heads, an animal associated with protection and courage. When viewed together, the eyebrows, nose and moustache also form the shape of a flying creature across the wearer’s face. The man buried inside the ship has never been identified with certainty. Many historians have suggested Rædwald, a powerful king of East Anglia, but no inscription confirms his name. That uncertainty makes the helmet even more haunting. What stays with me is that the helmet survived while the face inside it disappeared completely. We know the status of the man, the craftsmanship he commanded and the symbols meant to protect him—but we cannot say with certainty who he was. Perhaps that is one of history’s strangest ironies: a person can possess enough wealth to be buried inside a ship, yet centuries later, the world remembers the helmet more clearly than the king. The Sutton Hoo discovery changed the old image of early medieval England as culturally empty or primitive. Its craftsmanship revealed a world of skilled artists, powerful rulers and connections extending far beyond Britain. Sometimes one broken object is enough to repair an entire civilisation’s reputation. Visual: AI-generated historical reconstruction inspired by the surviving Sutton Hoo helmet. Authentic source: The British Museum britishmuseum.org/blog/eight…

scenes from the life of a puppet.. scènes de la vie d'une marionnette... #art #dessin #illustrations #puppets #marionette #bookillustrations #drawing