Toilets of Arts and Letters:
Artists, Authors, Musicians, and Educators
This page has an overview of the plumbing of famous artists, authors and musicians, and of prominent educational institutions.
Click on any of the pictures or links to be taken to detailed explanations with more pictures.
Rudyard Kipling thought that sewers were more compelling than literature. He wrote in 1886 that drains are "a great and glorious thing, and I study 'em and write about 'em when I can." He wrote that a decent primer on sanitation "is worth more than all the tomes of sacred smut ever produced."
Anton Chekov wrote about the awful lack of sanitation on the island of Sakhalin off Russia's far eastern coast.
The architect Le Corbusier said that the toilet is "one of the mots beautiful objects industry has ever invented."
Shakespearean Chamber Pot
This Shakespearean chamber pot is not The Bard's Own Thunder Mug, but it is a typical English chamber pot from around 1600. This one was brought from England to the English colony at Jamestown, Virginia.
See the dedicated page for further details on this chamber pot.
Edgar Allan Poe's Washbasin
Edgar Allan Poe moved to Amity Street in West Baltimore in 1832. The home was outside the city then. Now it's in the middle of a pretty awful urban setting. He won an 1833 literary contest for his story MS. Found In A Bottle. In 1835, he married his young cousin Virginia.
Edgar and Virginia Poe, with mother-in-law in tow, later moved to New York. In October, 1849, Poe was passing through Baltimore. On the night of the 3rd, he was found on the streets delirious and "in great distress, and in need of immediate assistance." He was taken to a hospital, where he died on the morning of the 7th without becoming coherent enough to explain how he had gotten into his dire state or why he was wearing someone else's clothes. Delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningitis, cholera, and rabies have all been blamed.
American homes did not have indoor plumbing in the 1830s. The Poes would have had chamber pots in the bedrooms and possibly a privy out back. But given the dire financial situation of the Poes, their privy may not have been much.
Here you see a specially made wash stand holding a ceramic bowl and pitcher in the small bedroom on the top floor. This was the state of the art of indoor "plumbing" in America in the 1840s.
The detailed Edgar Allan Poe page has more details on Poe's life and their home in Baltimore.
Vincent Van Gogh's Sink and Hydrotherapy Tub
Vincent Van Gogh voluntarily committed himself to a mental institution in Saint-Rémy de Provence, not far to the north-east of Arles, in southern France. He produced 150 paintings during his one-year stay in this hospital.
Mental health care was very primitive in those days, and featured "hydrotherapy". The patient was physically restrained in a tub and doused with streams of cold water.
See the dedicated page for more details and a picture of his sink.
William Randolph Hearst's Toilets, Sinks, Showers, Fountains, and Pools
Hearst Castle, the mountaintop estate of publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst, features indoor and outdoor pools, ornate fountains, and, of course, toilets, sinks, showers, and tubs.
Among other accomplishments (like being the co-instigator of the Spanish-American War), Hearst was a publishing mogul, with the largest newspaper and magazine empire of his time. Hence his inclusion here, filed under Arts and Letters.
Jim Morrison's Bidet
I once stayed at the Hôtel de Medicis in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
Some time later I learned that I had stayed in a nearly identical room just upstairs from where Jim Morrison stayed in 1971!
As you can see here, the bidet provides a fine view out the nearly floor to ceiling window of the room.
See the dedicated page for more pictures and details of the room and its plumbing, and Jim Morrison's time in Paris.
Tom Wolfe Cops a Urination
Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968, a "non-fiction novel" describing Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and other works, and his Merry Pranksters, a group of friends who lived communally and experimented with and promoted the use of psychedelic drugs.
They purchased a 1939 International Harvester bus in 1964, stripped it down, remodeled it inside, gave it a psychedelic paint job outside, and named it "Furthur". They then went on an expedition from California to New York and back.
Wolfe describes how the Merry Pranksters would swarm into a gas station and overwhelm its plumbing facilities. These days they would use truck stop toilets like this one.
Hunter S. Thompson's Urinal
Hunter S. Thompson hung out at McSorley's Irish Bar in the East Village of New York when he lived there in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
See the dedicated page for more pictures of McSorley's and more details of Thompson's time in New York.
Sebastian Junger's Toilet
Prominent non-fiction writer Sebastian Junger is part owner of the Half-King Pub in New York. It's at 505 West 23rd Street, at 10th Avenue.
As this is the men's toilet at the Half King, Sebastian Junger is part owner of this toilet.
The dedicated page has more about the pub and Junger.
Trompe l'Oeil Toilets
Trompe l'Oeil means "Trick of the Eye", and is a style of art based on convincingly realistic rendering.
Trompe l'oeil toilets would then be a toilet using some form of visual illusion. For example, this toilet at the Castle Rock hostel in Edinburgh, Scotland that appears to have a fireplace.
Or, this painting of Stephen Colbert, which was exhibited for a while next to one set of restrooms on the ground floor of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
The portrait shows him standing in front of a fireplace, over which is a portrait showing him standing in front of a fireplace, over which is a portrait of him. Double trompe-l'oeil!
The Trompe l'Oeil Toilet page has more pictures and details about the Colbert portrait and other illusions somehow related to toilets.
Toilets of Higher Education
Universities provide many examples of both mundane and unusual toilets. What are those strange fixtures at Purdue University, are they urinals or are they toilets? And what about the complicated modern toilet found on the campus of Cambridge University? Although Stephen Hawking is on the faculty, that contraption is not wheelchair accessible!
The Toilets of Higher Education page contains further examples from Purdue, including its Secret Staff Bathroom, plus further examples from Oxford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University.
Toilets as Modern Art
Marcel Duchamp's Fontaine is on display at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, one of the world's major museums of modern art.
In 1917 Duchamp laid a urinal flat, signed it "R. Mutt", and called it an art piece. It was submitted to an exhibition but not accepted, and the original was lost. Then, in the 1960s, he was commissioned to make a number of replicas.
A number of performance artists have staged "interventions" physically attacking the pieces. One used a hammer, the others used a more obvious and relevant form of assault.
The art toilet page contains more information on the piece Fontaine as well as an example of modern architectural design for a modular bathroom, also on exhibit at Centre Pompidou.
The American toilet page features some interesting anthropomorphic plumbing at the Mehanata Bulgarian bar on the Lower East Side in New York.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box. [....] Poor sanitation, bad hygiene, and unsafe water — usually unsafe because it has fecal particles in it — cause one in ten of the world's illnesses. [....] Diarrhea — nearly 90 percent of which is caused by fecally contaminated food or water — kills a child every fifteen seconds. The number of children who have died from diarrhea in the last decade [1998-2008] exceeds the total number of people killed by armed conflict since the Second World War.
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, by Julie Horan, contends that civilization began with the toilet.
Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Laura Noren and Harvey Molotch, has essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and architects on the importance of the toilet, especially for urban dwellers.
Latrinae Et Foricae: Toilets in the Roman World describes the toilets of the Roman Empire from Iberia to Syria, and from North Africa to Hadrian's Wall in Britannia.
Toilets, Bathtubs, Sinks, and Sewers: A History of the Bathroom, explains the history of personal cleanliness and hygiene to children in grades 5-8.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
In December, 2010 I registered the toilet-guru.com domain and moved the pages to a dedicated server.
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