The smooth, curved lines of bentwood chairs epitomize the timeless elegance linked to the European café style. While we may take this furniture style for granted today, its emergence in the late 19th century represented a revolutionary design advancement and signified an exhilarating shift from the rigid straight lines of earlier eras.
Could this be a bubble off?
In the Museum’s collection is a dry razor that resembles a modern bubble off or fluff shaver.
The Thorens Riviera is a gents’ dry razor manufactured in Switzerland in the 1950s. What makes this razor unique is its clockwork mechanism. The mechanism is wound up by turning the large chrome handle on the back similar to winding up a clock. This means no batteries or electricity is needed to power the shaver. In 1971, a similar razor was on board the Apollo 14 Moon mission.
Giovanni Battista Venturi was born in 1746 in Bibbiano, a small village in the Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. At the age of 23, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and, in the same year, was appointed as a teacher of logic at the University of Reggio Emilia. In 1774, he moved to the University of Modena as a professor of geometry and philosophy. Over the next years, Venturi would also have success as a university-level mathematics instructor, a civil engineer, a politician, a statesman, a confidant of Napoleon I Bonaparte, and, in later years, as a renowned historian.
What do Emily Hobhouse and Charlotte Newman have in common?
In July 2019 the National Museum in collaboration with the Leeds Becket University (England) hosted a satellite exhibition on Emily Hobhouse and the home industries as part of the War Without Glamour: the Life and Legacy of Emily Hobhouse exhibition presented at the Free State Arts Festival in Bloemfontein.
The discovery of diamonds in 1869 and of gold in 1886, and the influx of several thousand fortune seekers which followed these events created new markets for grain products in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. This, in turn, encouraged the cultivation of wheat and mealies in the Free State and Basutoland (Lesotho).