Clippings 02

Louis Vuitton cots, houses of henequen, and other stories

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You’re reading Buzzcut, a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature by writer and strategist Zander Abranowicz.

Our Clippings franchise gather a few glowing specimens of knowledge in a single format, designed for gentle reading. You can find the first installment below, and access our full library of reports, reviews, and recommendations here.

Clippings 01

Our latest book is Country Life: Homes of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson Valley.

Thank you, as ever, for your enthusiasm.

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The Louis Vuitton camp bed that (may have) helped France conquer the Congo

September 10th, 1880. The Roman-born French explorer Pierre-Paul-François-Camille Savorgnan de Brazza unfolded his stool on the banks of the Congo, and sat. A tricolor drooped in the equatorial heat, affixed to a flagpole held upright by an African porter sweating in a Breton shirt and marine bonnet. Facing the explorer, draped in a straw-colored robe, lorded King Makoko Iloo I of the Batéké, a Bantu-speaking tribe which had ruled much of the Congo basin since the time of Christ. After exchanging gifts, de Brazza began outlining his terms: French rule in exchange for protection and preferential trading status. As he listened, the king’s gaze fell on the expedition’s impressive stack of luggage, visible over his visitor’s shoulder. Noticing this, de Brazza rose and unlatched a trunk. In minutes, it had blossomed, like a nocturnal orchid, into a full-length bed. Before sailing for Central Africa, de Brazza had commissioned the piece from Louis Vuitton, the inventive Parisian trunkmaker whose monogrammed luggage still summons that age of exploration. Vuitton’s clever contraption quickly deployed an elevated canvas mattress out of one of his signature cases, without tools. Accounts (of dubious origin) have suggested that the ingenuity of this mobile furniture helped sway the king to sign France’s treaty, but this seems unlikely, even insulting, to the ancient kingdom and its ruler. Makoko was surely consumed by more consequential matters. In the service of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Welsh explorer Henry Morton Stanley was at that moment blasting a road inland around the impenetrable 32 cataracts of the Congo, deep into Batéké country. Stories of Belgian brutality had probably reached the king’s ears well before the arrival of this mild-mannered French emissary. Surrounded by family, friends, advisors, and heirs, it was the security of Makoko’s subjects (not fine luggage) which would have forced his hand as he signed away nearly 2,000 years of Batéké sovereignty in the Congo. Whatever the truth, this rare specimen from LV’s storied catalog continues to fascinate, long after de Brazza’s final rest. The explorer died en route to France in 1905, carrying an explosive report charging starvation, torture, and forced labor in the very colony he’d helped establish.

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The man who painted every bird in North America from life

When Rex Brasher was eight, he resolved to paint every bird in North America. And he did. Nearly a half-century later, in the Connecticut farmhouse-studio he’d christened Chickadee Valley, Brasher applied the final stroke to the 874th watercolor of his “Birds and Trees of North America.” The series featured all 1,200 species and subspecies listed in the American Ornithologists Union Checklist of North American Birds — including males, females, and juveniles. It was a monumental feat of creative endurance rivaled only by John James Audubon, who, in Brasher family lore, once snubbed Rex’s father, a taxidermist. While Audubon famously sketched from lifeless pelts, the self-trained Brasher studied every single specimen in its natural habitat, bursting with life and song. He conducted these patient observations on freewheeling journeys across the continent, often traveling by foot for months at a time. He funded these peregrinations working as a lithographer, or playing the horses. After one disastrous gamble left him destitute, he joined a fishing boat working the waters between Boston and Portland, Maine. Undeterred, he used the time to sketch sea birds. Like so many luminaries, Rex Brasher’s road to recognition was a crooked one. Twice, he destroyed his entire archive, believing it inadequate. In 1935, he offered his life’s work to the State of Connecticut, on the condition that it be well kept. After multiple attempts to finance museum displays failed, Brasher took it back. It must have been a heartbreaking setback. Finally, in 1938, Brasher’s “Birds and Trees” was granted a suitable exhibition in the Explorers Hall of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. Three years later, the State of Connecticut purchased the series again, promising it would be housed in a purpose-built museum near Chickadee Valley. World War II derailed that plan, too. Today, Rex Brasher’s work has found a proper home at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center in Storrs, Connecticut. The creative agency Order recently designed an exquisite brand identity for the The Rex Brasher Association, including a gorgeous custom typeface by Emily Atwood inspired by the artist’s own skilled calligraphy.

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The house that henequen built

This May, we were walking down Paseo Montejo in Mérida, capital of the Yucatán. Our eyes grazed over mansion after faded mansion, evidence of the prosperous time when henequen, a flowering plant of genus agave, made the hacendados of this region fantastically rich. As with the row of spectacular homes on East Battery Street in Charleston, built with fortunes amassed from rice, cotton, and slaves, a visit to Paseo Montejo begs a complex question: can we appreciate architectural splendor while recognizing the exploitative labor systems that facilitated such extreme concentrations of wealth (and still do)? In the case of henequen, indigenous Maya peoples were, since the time of Spanish rule, forced to toil on henequen plantations established on their confiscated communal lands. Naturally, desperate uprisings, like the 1847 Caste War, were common, and bloody. Henequen had been the heart of the region’s economic life for centuries, but it wasn’t until the Spanish-American War of 1898, which interrupted the export of cheap hemp (henequen’s chief alternative) from the Philippines, that its “green gold” made Yucatán the richest state in Mexico, and Paseo Montejo the gilded boulevard it is today. Now, the only great house to remain in its original state is Quinta Montes Molina, built in 1902 in the representative style of the Porfiriato, or the reign of President Porfirio Díaz, roughly 1876 to 1911. The presence of period furniture, finishes, and objects — from Limoges dinnerware to Tiffany stained glass windows — gives the quinta that special sense of arrested time elicited by the best house museums. Driving back toward the Gulf coast, passing the smoldering henequen fields and ruined haciendas that fed Mérida’s renaissance more than a century ago, I considered how now, as then, cosmopolitan comforts are so often built on the backs of the rural poor.

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Something You Should Know

A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver

Some believe the etymology of the term “posh” is “port out starboard home” — a reference to the most comfortable accommodations on ships between England and India