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TIL The film Dr. No features a replica of the painting ‘Portrait of the Duke of Wellington’ by Goya in the villian’s lair because the original had been stolen the year earlier. The replica was used for film promotion and like the original it was later stolen.

by whatilearned July 2, 2022, 12:16 pm

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TIL in 1918 photographer Arthur Mole and John Thomas arranged 21,000 soldiers at Camp Sherman in Ohio into a “living portrait” of President Woodrow Wilson. Mole & Thomas created many other living portraits of other famous figures in the years which followed at different military bases around the US.

by whatilearned July 1, 2022, 1:50 pm

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TIL: In 1977 Evel Knievel attacked the president of Fox Sports, Shelley Saltman, with a baseball bat. He was upset over a book that painted an unflattering portrait. Although convicted he served a minimal sentence; multi-million dollar judgment against estate never paid.

by whatilearned May 14, 2022, 7:54 pm

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TIL that after the tragic suicide of socialite Dorothy Hale, Frida Kahlo was commissioned by Hale’s friend, Clare Booth Luce, to paint a likeness of Hale in remembrance. Instead of a beautiful portrait, however, Kahlo painted a sequence of Hale leaping to her death from her 16th story apartment.

by whatilearned May 7, 2022, 8:02 am

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TIL that the portrait of George Washington on the one-dollar bill comes from an unfinished portrait containing only his face, called the Athenaeum Portrait.

by whatilearned April 18, 2022, 10:41 pm

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TIL Dostoievsky’s greatest joy was writing the character of ‘Karazinov’, in ‘The Devils’ (1872), a scurrilous portrait of his rival, the poet Turgenev when a fire broke out on board a ship. Turgenev apparently rushed from one crewman to the next, screaming, “Save me! I am my mother’s only son!”.

by whatilearned January 29, 2022, 8:44 pm

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TIL: Sculptor Selma Burke, a black woman, never received credit for her portrait of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was later adapted and featured on the US dime. It is widely accepted that the white John R. Sinnock’s obverse design on the Roosevelt dime was adapted from Burke’s work.

by whatilearned January 23, 2022, 12:27 pm

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TIL we don’t know what Robert Hooke looked like because a pissed off Sir Isaac Newton “lost” Hooke’s portrait after he died.

by whatilearned November 29, 2021, 11:22 pm

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TIL that leftist mural artist Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint a mural in the lobby of Rockefeller Center. His mural included a portrait of Lenin, leading the Rockefellers to cancel the commission and destroy the unfinished mural. Rivera later recreated the piece in Mexico.

by whatilearned November 22, 2021, 4:53 pm

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TIL that in 2016, Tong Aonan, a 27-year-old Chinese man, declared his affection for his next-door neighbour by solving 840 Rubik’s cubes and using them to create a portrait of her. She said no.

by whatilearned November 9, 2021, 11:58 am

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TIL Mozart wrote a Piano Sonata for Rose Cannabich, his 15 year old pupil. Mozart described it as a sort of a portrait of “a very beautiful well-behaved girl, very sensible and demure for her age, serious, speaking little but, when she does, with grace and friendliness”

by whatilearned November 4, 2021, 2:42 am

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TIL that US President George Washington’s official portrait has a spelling error: one of the books in the painting is titled “Laws and Constitution of the United S-a-t-e-s”

by whatilearned October 5, 2021, 5:36 pm

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