How my mother drummed that one into me. It never took, for some reason. Might’ve been the “glow” thing. Made me think of radioactivity.
back in the duck & cover days?
Please. I’m trying to remain in denial. Work with me, here.
I’ll be under my desk…
That website (the womanhood one) looks like a weird cross between fundamentalist Christian and romance novel.
I would not be at all surprised to discover that it was a site specifically designed to subtly encourage purchase of that particular genre. It’s one of the most prolific in the publishing industry, having, as it were, a captive audience, i.e., it’s not Christianly feminine to read anything else, not that you can with your Christianly feminine lack of education.
They typically require their authors to be members of fundamentalist churches and to write at roughly an 8th-grade level, to use plot lines which encourage feminine ideals, and prohibit mention of sex, alcohol, and dancing, unless used in a way to show that the character enjoying them gets his/her just punishment in the end. Among the suggested topics were “modern career woman realizes error of ways and finds true biblical happiness as housefrau for God-fearing doctor/lawyer/trucker/cowboy/minister/etc.” Best setting? Midwest, particularly Arizona. Seriously. I checked. 
Oh, and the main characters – the ones falling in love – cannot have been divorced, although the man is encouraged to be a widower with several small children. And they have to interact as often as possible. At no time can more than 10 pages elapse without their interaction, because studies have shown that their reading population loses interest at that point.
I swear. <oops!> I affirm.
Now that is interesting to see the photo and the painting. You can see that bit of lifted eyebrow in the photo, but in the portrait it is, at least to me, quite intimidating. And the difference in the mouth. In the photo she looks pretty docile, but in the painting I think she has the look of someone to be reckoned with. I know none of us have symmetrical faces, but if you hold a piece of paper up to the screen and view each half of her face separately it is interesting. It really is quite a stunning portrait.
I think even Mr. Sargent must have had to have a certain quality of starting material, aside from the garments, to end up with a portrait like that, but I appreciate the sentiment IB!
The woman on the left appears to be a dishrag merely stating, “go ahead and do yo bidness cause I’m too coked out to think.”
The woman on the right looks like she’s saying, “I’ll give you the best time you’ve ever had boy, if you’ve got the guts.”
Sorry, but I just can’t see it. 
So I have also done some reading into the Lady Agnew painting and, apparently, the person who painted her, John Sargent, also painted another very controversial portrait of a woman in the 1800s. This one was called Madame X.
Here is the how the painting was eventually altered to look:
BUT–this is how it looked originally, see if you can spot the very important difference:
Reading things like that make me want to study art history!
Thus explaining why I thought the right bodice half was at an odd angle in the first one, all things considered.
That is interesting. I’ll have to read about that too.
I wonder if it would help if he’s bravely but brusquely masking deep pain, and the children are wise beyond their years.
Throw in a dash of magic and you’ve got [u]Nanny McPhee[/u].
Admirable as Sargent’s work is, to me there is something amiss in this version, and I’m a bit surprised. See if you can tell what it is (of course, it could be a prime example of artistic license):
I already posted about it a couple of replies back. The way the one strap is falling off her shoulder was considered too sexually suggestive at the time it was painted, and he later changed it to the form we have today.
The woman was named something other than Madame X, though. I forget her real name, but after that painting was shown, her reputation was forever ruined, it is said. In addition to being sexually suggestive, the painting is 7 feet tall and very intimidating in real life.
Nope. I’m only talking about the painting which shows the fallen-off strap, no “morality” issues. The devil is in the details.
No takers, yet? The more I think of it, I’m voting for artistic license. Hint: for as splendid and dignified as the lady is, there’s a telling lack of gravity about her.
Do you mean the fact that she’s floating or the fact that there’s a moth above her head?
Nope. And by the way, I took that to be a jeweled hair thingy, sort of like a tiniest tiara, not a moth. But that’s my eyes.
She doesn’t have a tail, does she?
I give up.