Oscar Kleineh

My friend Merja sent me this nice painting of a Finnish yawl made by Oskar Kleineh in 1890. Oskar Conrad Kleineh (18 September 1846, Helsinki, Finland – November 16, 1919) was a Finnish painter. He attended the school of the Finnish Art Association in 1863-1864 and studied drawing, then in Düsseldorf, Karlsruhe, and in St. Petersburg, Russia as well as between the years 1866 and 1878 in Paris 1881-1885. Kleineh painted, inter alia, of the marine and coastal scenery of the coast of the Gulf of Finland, and in the high season, France, Denmark, Norway and the Mediterranean countries, as well as sailing images and city views from across Europe, such as the 1870 's, in Northern France. Kleineh was unmarried. No wonder he had so much time to paint so well ;-))

The River Mersey is a river in North West England. It is around 70 miles (113 km) long, stretching from Stockport, Greater Manchester, and ending at Liverpool Bay, Merseyside. For centuries, it formed part of the ancient county divide between Lancashire and Cheshire.
The river is now internationally famous thanks to the music of the 1960s known as Mersey beat and its strong association with Liverpool, which produced songs such as "Ferry Across The Mersey".
Over 30 acres of land within the heart of the Liverpool dock area. The site is a paradise to bird watchers and is an important area for seabirds and waders. Consisting of freshwater and salt lagoons it also provides a valuable source of food for the ducks that over-winter in Liverpool. For those interested in viewing the wildlife, three viewing hides are available for use, in one of the freshwater lagoons. Ross sent me this nice card.

Shipwreck (1854) by Ivan Aivazovsky

Throughout his lifetime, Ivan Aivazovsky contributed over 6,000 paintings to the art world, ranging from his early landscapes of the Crimean countryside to the seascapes and coastal scenes for which he is most famous. Aivazovsky was especially effective at developing the play of light in his paintings, sometimes applying layers of color to create a transparent quality, a technique for which they are highly admired.

Although he produced many portraits and landscapes, over half of all of Aivazovsky’s paintings are realistic depictions of coastal scenes and seascapes. He is most remembered for his beautifully melodramatic renditions of the seascapes of which he painted the most. Many of his later works depict the painful heartbreak of soldiers at battle or lost at sea, with a soft celestial body taunting of hope from behind the clouds. His artistic technique centers on his ability to render the realistic shimmer of the water against the light of the subject in the painting, be it the full moon, the sunrise, or battleships in flames. Many of his paintings also illustrate his adeptness at filling the sky with light, be it the diffuse light of a full moon through fog, or the orange glow of the sun gleaming through the clouds.

This painting is a testament to the artist’s skill of portraying light and dark. With nothing more than a pencil and gouache on paper, this scene illustrates the strong winds and crash of the waves with violent intensity. This intensity makes you fear for the safety of the standing observers, as if the waves threaten to dash the ship against the cliff, upon which they are standing, and throw them into the sea. Three seagulls fly over the ship, creating the slight sense that all hope is not lost, and seeming as if is not impossible to hope that the ship may not yet be lost.
This lovely card was sent to me by Rita from Kaliningrad in Russia.

The Hallig

The North Frisian Hallig Islands are indeed unique in the world. The Halligen (singular Hallig) are ten small German islands without protective dikes in the North Frisian Islands on Schleswig-Holstein's Wadden Sea-North Sea coast in the district of Nordfriesland. The name comes from a Celtic word hal, meaning "salt", a reference to the low-lying land in the region which is often flooded over with saltwater by the tides. A greater number of Halligen existed in the Middle Ages than in the 21st century. The very existence of the Halligen is a result of frequent floods and poor coastal protection. The floods were much more common in the Middle Ages and coastal protection was much poorer. A look at the maps on this page will demonstrate that this part of the North Sea coast is very much at the sea's mercy.
The Halligen have areas ranging from 7 to 956 ha, and are often former parts of the mainland, separated therefrom by storm tide erosion. Some are also parts of once much bigger islands sundered by the same forces. Sometimes, owing to sediment deposition, islands have actually grown together to form larger ones. Langeneß (or Langeness) includes a former island by that same name, and two others that were called Nordmarsch and Butwehl. Dwellings and commercial buildings are built upon metre-high, man-made hills, called Warften in German, to guard against storm tides. Some Halligen also have overflow dikes. Not very many people live on the Halligen. Their livelihoods are mainly based on tourism, coastal protection, and agriculture. This last activity mainly involves raising cattle in the fertile, often flooded, salt meadows.
Sabine sent me this card which has a painting of a Hallig.

Swiss Quality Emblem

This "maximum card" of Switzerland, showing the commemorative stamp of 40 cents denomination commemorating 50 years of "Swiss Quality Emblem (showing traditional "Armbrust" (Crossbow), with  which William Tell had killed "Gestler", who according to legend put an apple on the head of the son of William Tell and ordered the father (William Tell) to shoot the

apple, you certainly know the legend! The Swiss people believe in the legend, but there is not a single person called "Tell" who lived in the past or is living in Switzerland today!). The emblem (Trademark) Armbrust was introduced for the first time in 1931.This Armbrust Signet ensures the buyers that the product which they have purchased is genuine, and is made in Switzerland. In 1981 this signet celebrated its 50^th anniversary. Thank you Maria for this interesting maxicard.

Niasvizh Catholic Corpus Christi church

Nesvizh is a city in Belarus. It is the administrative centre of the Nesvizh District (rajon) of Minsk Province and location of the Nesvizh Castle World Heritage Site. Its 2009 population was 14,300.
Niasvizh Catholic Corpus Christi church was built in 1587–1593 according to the design of the Italian architect Jovanni Maria Bernardoni at sponsorship of Mikolai Christopher Radziwill the Orphan. The Jesuit church in Niasvizh was the first construction in Baroque in the whole territory of Rzecz Pospolita. The temple interior is richly decorated with paintings. The frescoes were performed in 1750–60-s with participation of the artist K.D. Gesski (restored in 1900–1902). The frescoes embrace 40 individual compositions depicting Saints, allegorical scenes and biblical stories. The fresco compositions include cartouches with the Bible stanze and references. There is K.D. Gesski’s picture "The Lord's Supper" (1753) in the main shrine. In addition to the paintings, the church interior contains a lot of plastic images, i.e. bás-reliefs and bust gravestones of the 17th – 19th centuries, marble altars and monuments. There is a choir with an organ above the temple entrance. An entrance into the family crypt – a burial vault of the Radziwills – is located next to the bás-relief under the altar of Christ. There are over seventy burials of the mighty dynasty in the semi-basement.
My friend Eugenia sent me this nice postcard.

Branicki Palace, Białystok

Białystok is the largest city in northeastern Poland and the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship. Located in the North Podlasie Lowland on the banks of the Biała River, Białystok ranks second in terms of population density, eleventh in population, and thirteenth in area, of the cities of Poland. It has historically attracted migrants from elsewhere in Poland and beyond, particularly from Central and Eastern Europe. This is facilitated by the fact that the nearby border with Belarus is also the eastern border of the European Union, as well as the Schengen Area. The city and its adjacent municipalities constitute Metropolitan Białystok. The city has a Warm Summer Continental climate, characterized by warm summers and long frosty winters. Forests are an important part of Białystok's character, and occupy around 1,756 ha (4,340 acres) (17.2% of the administrative area of the city) which places it as the fifth most "wooded" city in Poland.

Branicki Palace is a historical edifice in Białystok, Poland. It was developed on the site of an earlier building in the first half of the 18th century by Jan Klemens Branicki, a wealthy Polish–Lithuanian, into a residence suitable for a man whose ambition was to become king of Poland. The palace complex with gardens, pavillons, sculptures, outbuildings and other structures and the city with churches, city hall and monastery, all built almost at the same time according to French models was the reason why the city was known in the 18th century as Versailles de la Pologne (Versailles of Poland) and subsequently Versailles de la Podlachie (Versailles of Podlachia)
With the first Partition of Poland it went to the Prussian Kingdom and, after 1807, to Russia. In the summer of 1920, briefly, the palace was the headquarters of the Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee. Branicki Palace suffered from bombing and fires caused by the Germans, with damage totalling approximately 70%. It was restored after World War II as a matter of national pride. The Medical University is now housed in the Palace. Justyna a resident sent me this card.