Fortunino Mantania was an Italian artist, living in London, who worked as an “allied war artist” during World War I, with most of his work being published in The Sphere. Above, British officers having afternoon tea in a ruined farm house in Ypres, and below, a soldier writes a Christmas letter to his family, using an ammunition box as a desk.
From Goodbye, Old Man: Mantania’s Vision of the First World War (2014) by Lucinda Gosling.
Elsa Lanchester sips tea during the filming of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Nothing else boils water for tea like a Charter Oak Stove.
No counter space, no table, no problem.
Tea fairy, by Ekaterina Babok
Illustration by N.C. Wyeth for “The Unwrit Dogma” by William Ashley Anderson in Everybody’s Magazine, December, 1917. The story begins, “The fat-faced lamas of the Poota Miao, nodding their shaved heads over cups of steaming jasmine tea, exchanged sober jokes – laughing down in their stomachs – concerning the foreign missionaries who occupied compounds in the east and west of the city. The jokes were pertinent. Why do foreign lamas, professing the same religion – a religion of universal love – shun each other with scorn smoldering deep in their averted eyes? The answer was a laugh.”
Two postcards by Harrison Fisher
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