Jigsaw 2, series 2

An Elite 500 jigsaw, one of two, from the Oxfam shop in Ewell Village. 99p each. Made by Philmar, yet another jigsaw outfit which is very visible on the web, for example on ebay, but which does not have its own site - presumably because they are no longer up and running. Is there a niche here for chaps like me to set up sites for defunct jigsaw manufacturers as a home for all the information you could possibly need about them? Would this count as an infringement on copyright?

This particular puzzle is described an an antique love scene by Garafalo. The National Gallery has this and maybe half a dozen other paintings by him and will sell me digital images of same. A low grade student image for private study only comes in at £50 - very close to the price charged by Vic Guy for a photographic image of Worcester Cathedral (see October 19th in the other place). Perhaps market forces really are forcing prices together. But what student is going to pay £50 for an image which he or she can browse on the Internet for free? And if they live in London, maybe even go and take a peek at the real thing? Mysteriously, the chap is missing from my usually reliable Canaday, which seems odd for a chap with a presence at the National Gallery. But alive and well on Wikipedia.

The puzzle was quite difficult, although a pleasure to solve in a leisurely way, in part because it was all very brown, while the real thing has clearly been cleaned since Philmar took their image and is now much brighter in colour. Not altogether comfortable with this business of restoring pictures; not an unreasonable thing to be doing but one can never be quite sure that one is heading back to the original and one may have become quite attached to the old, faded and unrestored picture. Maybe high grade replicas would be a better way forward, leaving the original to moulder?

Edge first. Then the red and white cloths. Then the scene in the top left, or at least most of it. An interesting example of the growing interest in landscape, with allegory no longer quite enough. It took quite a long time to adjust to the quite subtle changes of colour in the landscape, changes which were more or less invisible at the start of the proceedings. But once one has tuned into the palette as it were, one can motor along quite quickly, selecting the right piece by its colour.

Then the faces, then pushed out from the faces to do the bodies, gradually filling in the interstices. Why are cupids so often as obnoxious looking as this one? Is that all part of the allegory?

This leaving the dark, top right quadrant, for which I sorted the pieces by prong configuration. And given that there was quite a high proportion of pieces which were odd in one way or another the dark quadrant was not as bad as one might have expected.

One panic along the way when I was convinced that a piece of the boundary between the top left and top right quadrants was missing, a piece which should have been conspicuous for being half white and half black. Which I failed to find until fairly near the end because I had earlier decided that the missing piece was actually part of the white cloth and the brain's search algorithm omitted this piece from its search for the boundary piece without further reference to me.

Turning to the jigthoughts of 1st November, the jigsaw did not have properties 2, 3, 4 or 5, although the pieces were in a roughly rectangular array. An exotic touch was a small number of prongs which needed to be clasped by two half holes, rather than the simpler and more usual arrangement of a prong fitting in a hole. Achieved by stretching (say) a lower piece to include half of what should have been the upper piece, including half a hole, thus preserving the count and property 1 - while breaking property 2. Properties 3, 4 and 5 were nowhere.

Virtually no jigsaw dust.

PS: a tweet in the form of a twit-twoo. Or put another way, the first evening visit of an owl to our back garden for quite a long time. We used to hear them along the stream behind the houses opposite, but haven't heard one there for a bit either. This one was undoubtedly an owl, despite its cry being closer to a twit than a twit-twoo. Perhaps it will work up to that on its next visit. Perhaps there is a sex difference here?

PPS: I actually voted for a PCC yesterday, one of the few occasions on which I have voted in recent years. A vote on this occasion because there was choice, I thought the contest was reasonably open and I did have a view on who should have the job. That is to say the chap who has been chairman of the Police Authority for a bit. At least he should know the ropes while the new arrangements settle down. Then we can see. Meanwhile, counting proceeds as I type.