Nice Things: July Edition

A monthly dose of visual creative inspiration. This time: bathing.

Edvard Munch, Summer Night. Mermaid, 1893

Nice Things is a monthly feature of visual creative inspiration that goes out to paid subscribers, usually on the last Thursday of the month. You can also catch up on the last two editions: seaweed and the sun.

Hello friends,

Tis the season of swimming holes, floating on the river, and running through sprinklers. So what better theme for this month’s Nice Things than an exploration of bathing?

This past month,

Roshni Robert

and I have both been filling our notebooks with swimming ladies (some are, of course, better than others). I also ended up making an assortment of weird mermaid papercuts too.

In other words: we have swimming on the brain.

So let’s take a little dive into the world of the water (yes, pun intended). We’ll start with the first English treatise on the practice of swimming, published in 1587. As Public Domain Review explains, this book reveals “how seemingly innate human practices can be cultural techniques, which ebb and flow over time, like the beautiful freshwater bodies within which its woodcut figures wade.”

Everard Digby's 1587 De Arte Natandi (The Art of Swimming), considered the first English treatise on the practice. Also: a very solid sun up in the right corner.