Louis Amédée Lantz

Louis Amédée Lantz (1886-1953) was a pioneer of European herpetology.

His residence of nearly twelve years in Russia enabled him to make several field trips to regions such as the Caucasus and Iran. He always carried with him a homemade telescopic net that he used to catch lizards. That net became symbolic of Lantz for most people around him. He realized significant herpetological collections mainly deposited in the Museum of the Zoology Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Soon after the Russian Revolution in 1917, he had to leave the country and stayed for a few years in France before moving to England.  Lantz died at the age of 66 years, in Switzerland, as he was about to join the team of herpetologists at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

Unfortunately, the only evidence of Lantz wearing a beret, is as a 10 year old in his native Alsace in 1896. 

Jules Supervielle

Jules Supervielle (1884 –1960) was a Franco-Uruguayan poet and writer born in Montevideo. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.

He opposed the surrealism movement in poetry and rejected automatic writing, although he did adopt other techniques of modern poetry. In so doing he anticipated the literary movements of the late 1940s.

After WWII, Supervielle moved to France as the cultural correspondent to the legation of Uruguay in Paris. He published his first mythological tales under the title Orphée in 1946. In 1990, the city of Oloron-Sainte-Marie created the Jules-Supervielle prize.

GB Stern

Gladys Bronwyn Stern or GB Stern (1890 –1973) wrote many novels, short stories, plays, memoirs, biographies and literary criticism. She wrote her first novel, Pantomime, in 1914 at the age of 24. Her first critical success came with Twos and Threes in 1916.

She married New Zealander Geoffrey Lisle Holdsworth in 1919 and divorced him "fairly soon after". Her closest male friends were the playwright John van Druten and Jack Cohen. A long-time friend was Rebecca West, who came to call her "Peter", as did most of Stern's friends. Stern went through a number of secretaries but Freda Bromhead managed to survive five years with her and came back to help her years later when Stern was in a nursing home.

Her family was never terribly religious and Stern herself disliked the word 'Jew' and preferred 'Israelite'. In 1947 she converted to Catholicism. She wrote about the conversion in 1954 in All in Good Time.

Annabella Daneila Parola

Annabella Daneila Parola was a French Actress, born in 1912.

This photo was used for a De Reszke cigarette card in the 1930s.
 

Ave Pildas

Ave Pildas (1939) is an American photographer and designer. His early photographs of jazz musicians, including Nina Simone, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Dave Brubeck were first published in DownBeat magazine in the 1960s.

In 1971, Pildas began working at Capitol Records in Hollywood as an art director and designed and photographed album covers for Capitol's recording artists, including The Road Is No Place for a Lady by Cass Elliot and the MGM Records Archetypes Series, featuring The Velvet Underground, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, and Joy to the World by Hoyt Axton.

Photos pictured from his book Star Struck. 

Julia Margaret Cameron

 Three days ago, on December 10, I published a photo by Julia Margaret Cameron of Sir Henry Taylor.

Cameron was one of the most profound Pictorialist-portraitists of the 19th century. She was recognized for her romanticized, sepia-toned, Victorian portraits. Unlike other famous classic photographers, Cameron started photographing in her late 40s when she received a camera as a gift from her daughter. 

Taking pictures became her hobby and later on, it transformed into her greatest passion and obsession until the last years of her life. Posted 2 more photos of Henry Taylor. 

Club Habana

 

Shepherds

Always a good subject: shepherds with beret!

Sir Henry Taylor (a Rembrandt)

This photograph of Sir Henry Taylor is by the India-born British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879).

It was taken in Freshwater at the Isle of Wight in1866 and sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum 120 years later in 1986. 

ZHP - Polish Girl Scouts

Scouts and Brownies typically wear berets, all over the world, but in Poland they wear an innovative variation on the beret.

Tied with a wool strap in the same colour as the beret, these Brownie berets won't fly off during the intense activities of the Scouts.

Gabrielle Caunesil

Gabrielle Caunesil is the founder of La Semaine Paris, a French fashion brand selling feminine clothing and swimsuits for women. In addition, she regularly works as a model and influencer for top international fashion brands.

Gabrielle has a very feminine style. She grew up in France, so her style is naturally French, but she has a strong Italian fashion sense, too. This is evident in her wardrobe filled with bright colors, metallic fabrics, and bold prints.

Gabrielle has been vocal that her mother was not a part of her life. She is very close with her father who raised her single-handedly in France.

Gabrielle has been married to Italian businessman Riccardo Pozzoli since 2019. She had a civil ceremony in California and is the mother of a son.

Louis Pache

Louis Pache lived with his wife and children in Le Buet, in the département of Haute-Savoie, on the Swiss border. Pache knew the mountains well and was a border runner during the occupation, leading refugees over the mountain trails into Switzerland. His work was one aspect of a combined effort of villagers who helped in the rescue operations, under the initiative of Father André Payot.

On September 28, 1942, two young Jews, Alexander Rotenberg and Ruth Hepner, found their way to Le Buet. Rotenberg, a Belgian Jew who had fled in 1940 to an uncle in Nice, worked for the underground. In September 1942, he was ordered to find a trustworthy border guide in the mountainous area on the Swiss border. Hepner joined him so that they would appear to be students. The proprietor of the small inn in Le Buet, Germaine Chamel, sent them to Louis Pache’s house. On their way there, they were stopped by French gendarmes who examined their papers and decided that further examination was necessary. They were ordered to present themselves at the gendarmerie at five p.m. to recover their documents. Naturally, they were forged. Alexander and Ruth, who had come to Buet simply to contact a border runner, realized that they had to cross the border that very night, to avoid being arrested. Louis and his wife, Franceline, supplied them with mountain boots and warm clothing, and they left with Louis to cross the border through the mountains.

After a grueling, all-night trek, they reached the snow-covered peak that marked the border. Pache gave them instructions on how to reach the closest Swiss village, Finhaut, and told them how to reach people who knew of the clandestine escape route to the nearest Jewish community in Montreux. Rotenberg and Hepner completed the trip safely and were saved. They were not the only Jewish refugees whom the Paches sheltered until Louis could escort them to the border zone. On March 25, 1979, Yad Vashem recognized Louis Pache and his wife Franceline as Righteous Among the Nations.

J. B. S. Haldane

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (1892 –1964), nicknamed "Jack" or "JBS", was an English scientist who worked in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and mathematics.

With innovative use of statistics in biology, he was one of the founders of neo-Darwinism. He served in the Great War and obtained the rank of captain. Despite his lack of an academic degree in the field, he taught biology at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Institution, and University College London.

Haldane was a professed socialist, Marxist, atheist, and secular humanist whose political dissent led him to leave England in 1956 and live in India, becoming a naturalised Indian citizen in 1961. He worked at the Indian Statistical Institute for the rest of his life.

Sarakatsani

The Sarakatsani are an ethnic Greek population subgroup who were traditionally transhumant shepherds, native to Greece, with a smaller presence in neighbouring Bulgaria, southern Albania, and North Macedonia.

Historically centred on the Pindus mountains and other mountain ranges in continental Greece, most Sarakatsani have abandoned the transhumant way of life and have been urbanised.

The traditional Sarakatsani settlements, dress and costumes make them a distinct social and cultural group within the collective Greek heritage. Their distinctive folk arts consist of song, dance, and poetry, as well as decorative sculptures in wood and embroidery on their traditional costumes, which resemble the geometric art of pre-classical Greece.

In medicine, they use a number of folk remedies including herbs, honey and lamb's blood.

The Sarakatsani traditionally have spent the summer months in the mountains and returned to the lower plains in the winter. The Sarakatsani were not always nomads, but only turned to harsh nomadic mountain life to escape Ottoman rule. The Sarakatsani were found in several mountainous regions of continental Greece, with some groups of northern Greece moving to neighbouring countries in the summer, since border crossings between Greece, Albania, Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia were relatively unobstructed until the middle of the 20th century. 

After 1947, with the beginning of the Cold War, borders between these countries were sealed; and some Sarakatsani groups were trapped in other countries and not able to return to Greece.

Jonathan Lamome

At 37, Jo (Jonathan) Lamone has a rich professional background and experience across France and its territories from Narbonne via Aude, Reunion and even the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.

Jo has travelled for many years with an important professional background since he holds a CAP charcuterie-caterer as well as a CAP pastry chef -glacier-chocolatier-confectioner.

Today, the southerner is taking over the reins of the grocery store in Tréflez (Finistere, Brittany). A man with many hats who likes to exploit them while maintaining the relationship that is close to his heart and is apparent from the first sight. 

The hat he wears though is of course a béret!

Wolfgang Rihm

Wolfgang Rihm (1952) is a German composer and academic teacher.

He is musical director of the Institute of New Music and Media at the University of Music Karlsruhe and has been composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival and the Salzburg Festival. He was honoured as Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2001.

His musical work includes more than 500 works. In 2012, The Guardian wrote: "enormous output and bewildering variety of styles and sounds".

Maison Constanti

Since 1923, Maison Constanti has been making bread in the purest French tradition. 

After years of research into a new chocolate, the Constanti Beret Collection was unveiled in 2021, along with its dedicated website.

As a century-old maison, nestled at the foot of the Pyrenees, the Constanti family imagined the beret, a chocolate sweet, a tribute to the Pyrenean territories and to the French art of living.

Gilles Mihălcean

Gilles Mihălcean (1946) is a Canadian-born sculptor living and working in Montréal.

Over the years, his works have been exhibited in Canada, the United States and Europe.

A self-taught sculptor, Mihalcean began his career in 1969. After teaching at Université Laval from 1972 to 1979, he has devoted himself entirely to sculpting.

However, he was also worked as a lecturer at the Université de Montréal and the University of Ottawa.

He rose to prominence in the 1980s, with major exhibits at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Power Plant in Toronto, as well as commercial galleries such as Galerie René Blouin, Chantal Boulanger, Roger Bellemare and Circa.

Gueuleton

In their popular video series on YouTube and TikTok, Vincent Bernard-Comparat, 36, and Arthur Edange, 34, the founders of Gueuleton, can seem like a spoof of a French tourism ad: over a soundtrack of upbeat tuba, the self-described bons vivants don black berets and dig into duck confit and pâté en croûte, laughing into the camera with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigar in the other. A tricolor flag is sewn into their aprons.

It was in Bordeaux that they met: three bon vivants who became friends on the banks of the Garonne, in a city that promotes the French art of living throughout the world. At the beginning of Gueuleton, there was a Gersois, a Vosgiens and a Lot-et-Garonnais, all three united by the same passion for gastronomy and the terroir.

They turned their common passion into a common adventure and this is how Gueuleton was born, a project of friends with one ambition: to share the love for gastronomy with as many people as possible.

So, they threw themselves headlong in and opened the first Gueuleton in 2013, in Agen. On the menu: wine, charcuterie and cheese, aperitif classics that are now part of Gueuleton's DNA.

The Gueuleton project with many more restaurants, bars, a distillery, a magazine, their own breeding program of Black gascon Pigs and even berets!

Savy with social media the project grew exponentially.  

Rambo @ Warburtons

 

Sylvester Stallone's stars in the Warburtons Bread commercial, premiered during the Britain's Got Talent show on 11th April 2015.

Bread Berets