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‘The lady without legs or arms’: how an artist shattered Victorian ideas about disability | Painting
She was born with out arms and legs to a farming family members in 1784 and, measuring just 37 inches in top as an adult, was put on present in touring fairground attractions. Billed as The Limbless Wonder, Sarah Biffin painted, wrote and sewed with her mouth and shoulder, along with prize fighters, wild animals and other sideshow “curiosities” that drew paying out spectators. But she overcame life’s adversities, discovering recognition for her superb talent as a painter in an age when the artistry of gals and disabled individuals was typically disregarded. Now a important exhibition will rejoice her as an inspiring woman who not only challenged attitudes to incapacity…
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In a Reimagined Victorian Schoolhouse, an Artist Finds His Third Act
DAN McCARTHY Experienced just develop into the resident of a stately Victorian schoolhouse at the foot of the Catskill Mountains when he realized that a setting up, like a individual, life multiple life. In 2014, when he was 52 and in what he refers to as “the conclude of act two,” the artist packed up his condominium of virtually 30 several years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and set out for a new lifestyle a couple of hrs north of Manhattan in a a few-story, Romanesque stone framework with an amazing Dutch gable and panoramic sights of the Hudson Valley. The transfer, however overpowering, brought fast reduction. Ceramics had supplied McCarthy’s career…