gypsy

"A Gypsy Girl", George Elgar Hicks, 1899

The gypsy eyes have something quite special about them — a thrill and flicker of fire somewhere in their depths that has the power of making all other dark eyes seem tame and insipid, mere patches of color. A Hungarian youth once said to me as he distractedly struck his forehead — and I sympathized with his emotion — "The eyes of the gypsy women! ah! they drive you mad." 1

The Spanish Gypsies are remarkable for beauty in early youth; for magnificent eyes and hair, regular features, light and well-knit figures. Their locks, like the Hindus, are lamp black, and without a sign of wave , and they preserve the characteristic eye. I have often remarked its fixity and brilliance, which flashes like phosphoric light, the gleam which in some eyes denotes madness. I have also noticed the 'far-off look ' which seems to gaze at something beyond you and the alternation from the fixed stare to a glazing or filming of the pupil. " 2

"Gypsy Girl with Mandolin", Jean-Baptiste-
Camille Corot,  1870

I turned round. A Gypsy girl, dressed in fine Gypsy costume, very dark but very handsome, was sitting on a settle drinking from a pot of ale, and nursing an instrument of the violin kind, which she was fondling as though it were a baby. She was quite young, not above eighteen years of age, slender, graceful —remarkably so, even for a Gypsy girl. Her hair, plaited in the old-fashioned Gypsy way, in little plaits that looked almost as close as plaited straw, and as it was of an unusually soft and fine texture for a Gypsy, the plaits gave it a lustre quite unlike that which unguents can give. As she sat there, one leg thrown over the other, displaying a foot which, even in the heavy nailed boots, would have put to shame the finest foot of the finest English lady I have ever seen, I could discern that she was powerful and tall; her bosom, gently rising and falling beneath the layers of scarlet and yellow and blue handkerchiefs, which filled up the space the loose-fitting gown of bright merino left open, was of a breadth fully worthy of her height. A silk handkerchief of deep blood-red colour was bound round her head, not in the modern Gypsy fashion, but more like an Oriental turban. From each ear was suspended a massive ring of red gold. Round her beautiful, towering, tanned neck was a thrice-twisted necklace of half-sovereigns and amber and red coral. She looked me full in the face. Then came a something in the girl's eyes the like of which I had seen in no other Gypsy's eyes, though I had known well the Gypsies who used to camp near Rington Manor, not far from Raxton, for my kinsman, Percy Aylwin, the poet, had lately fallen in love with Winnie's early friend, Rhona Boswell. It was not exactly an 'uncanny' expression, yet it suggested a world quite other than this. It was an expression such as one might expect to see in a 'budding spae-wife,' or in a Roman Sibyl. And whose expression was it that it now reminded me of? But the remarkable thing was that this expression was intermittent; it came and went like the shadows the fleeting clouds cast along the sunlit grass. Then it was followed by a look of steady self-reliance and daring. 3

image source: nights...days...

There is something very winning about the Gypsy smile. It is so natural and spontaneous. It never palls. Still more fascinating, more hypnotic is the glance. The kodak cannot capture it; and no painter has quite succeeded in reproducing its likeness. It is an intense, absorbing stare that holds one in a spell...



...IMAGINE yourselves in a square cave hollowed from the rock. A little Spanish Gypsy girl is dancing an abulea to the accompaniment of a wild song and the vibrant notes of a guitar. Other Gypsies sitting tensely on the rims of their chairs, in a half circle about the dancer, are beating time with vigorous handclaps, and shouting, " Alsa!  Alsa !" in tones that make the stone vault re-echo. Dancer and audience are as one, in a frenzy of excitement. The tiny feet stamp the rough floor; the gaily colored skirt flutters as she springs. Her elastic body bends and sways. There is something of the snake and something of the bird, in the writhing arms and quivering fingers. There is a glitter in her eye, whether she strikes her bosom in mock rage, or leaps with head thrown back and lips parted in a paroxysm of joy. And an answering sparkle illumines the eye of every Gypsy. 4

gypsy dance, image source: wiki

The Gypsy women and girls were the principal attractions to these visitors; wild and singular as these females are in their appearance, there can be no doubt, for the fact has been frequently proved, that they are capable of exciting passion of the most ardent description, particularly in the bosoms of those who are not of their race, which passion of course becomes the more violent when the almost utter impossibility of gratifying it is known. No females in the world can be more licentious in word and, gesture, in dance and in song, than the Gitanas; but there they stop: and so of old, if their titled visitors presumed to seek for more, an unsheathed dagger or gleaming knife speedily repulsed those who expected that the gem most dear amongst the sect of the Roma was within the reach of a Busno. 5




Turn with us then, so please you, to the south of sunny France; it is the vineyard season, and the racy grapes, bloated with over ripeness, are being gathered. A gay time this among the French peasantry, and these gipseys know it well, for see, in this little post town, it is nightfall, and the laborers of botn sexes, each with a richly loaded basket of the generous product of the vine, are coming in from the neighboring fields. Here before the small post house and tavern on the little green, the laborers pause to witness the dance of the gipsey tribe. While the rest throw themselves lazily upon the greensward, forming a wild and picturesque group, to whose countenances the twilight and reflections of the western sky lent additional interest, by clothing them in strangely vivid hues, two of the gipsey tribe, a male and female, commenced the dance together upon the greensward.

image source: nights, days...

The girl coupled her light and graceful movements with the notes of the merry castanets, while the young man accompanied her upon the gay ringing tambourine. The girl might have been sixteen years of age, and her companion perhaps a couple of years her senior, both evincing the healthful vigor that the gipsey's life, so near to nature, is sure to induce. The fostered and delicate child of wealth could only envy such charms as the gipsey girl exhibited, she could not possess them. Art may imitate, but it cannot equal nature. Minuitti, the danseuse of the gipsey tribe, was a queen in beauty, and many a queen would have envied her.


What brilliancy in those eyes of black, and how round and beautiful the outline of that form and face. How thrillingly lovely the expression of her speaking countenance, how graceful her light and airy step. The dance over, she advances to the crowd, who have stood mute and entranced with the scene, and holding the tambourine taken from her companion, solicits in eloquent silence a few francs in payment for the exhibition. And stay, even the crabbed old post keeper thrusts his hand into his pocket. It must be enchantment that can move him. The gipsey danseuse has all the ruddy complexion that her exposed life induces, but still there is a delicacy in her skin, a native refinement in her manner, that seem to announce ber as being above the rude companions who surround her. Her dress resembles the Castilian style, and her companion wears the costume of a Spanish mountaineer. Had fate ever placed two beings more appropriately together? Each seemed the counterpart of the other, and grace and beauty the share of both. 6

image source: nights, days...

The Gypsies are nearer to the animals than any race known to us in Europe. They have the lawlessness, the abandonment, the natural physical grace in form and gesture, of animals; only a stealthy and wary something in their eyes makes them human. Their speech, which is their own, known to them, known to few outside them, keeps them to themselves. They are ignorant of the ugly modern words, the words which we have brought in to sophisticate language. 'Give me half and you take half': divide, that is, in our shorthand. Their lilting voices are unacquainted with anything but the essential parts of speech, all that we need use if we lived in the open air, and put machines out of our hands and minds.

image source: "In Gipsey Tents", 

Then, they are part of the spectacle of the world, which they pass through like a great procession, to the sound of a passionate and mysterious music. They are here to-day and there to-morrow; you cannot follow them, for all the leafy tracks that they leave for each other on the ground. They are distinguishable from the people of every land which they inhabit; there is something in them finer, stranger, more primitive, something baffling to all who do not understand them through a natural sympathy. The sullen mystery of Gypsy eyes, especially in the women, their way of coiling their hair, of adorning themselves with bright colours and many rings and long earrings, are to be found wherever one travels, east or west. Yet it is eastward that one must go to find their least touched beauty, their original splendour. It was in the market-place in Belgrade that I saw the beauty of the Gypsies in its most exact form. Here, taken from the book in which I recorded it, is my instant impression of it: 'I had seen one old woman, an animal worn to subtlety, with the cunning of her race in all her wrinkles, trudging through the streets with a kind of hostile gravity. But here it was the children who fascinated me. There were three little girls, with exactly the skin of Hindus, and exactly the same delicately shaped face, and lustrous eyes, and long dark eyelashes; and they followed me through the market, begging in strange tongues—little catlike creatures, full of humour, vivacity, and bright instinctive intelligence. As we came to one end of the market, they ran up to a young girl of about fifteen, who stood leaning against a pump. She was slender, with a thin, perfectly shaped face, the nose rather arched, the eyes large, black, lustrous, under her black eyebrows; thick masses of black hair ran across her forehead, under the scarlet kerchief. She leaned there, haughty, magnetic, indifferent; a swift animal, like a strung bow, bringing all the East with her, and a shy wildness which is the Gypsy's only.' 7

image source: Harper's Magazine, 1882

Gypsy Caravan, image source: wiki

1~  Russia, Austria-Hungary, the Balkan States, and Turkey, by Eva March Tappan, publication date unknown

2~  The life of Sir Richard Burton, Volume 2 by Thomas Wright, 1906

3~  Aylwin, By Otto Jahn, 1906

4~ NIGHTS AND DAYS ON THE GYPSY TRAIL by Irving Henry Brown, 1922 

5~ THE ZINCALI, OR AN ACCOUNT OF THE GYPSIES OF SPAIN, by George Henry Borrow, 1841

6~ Ballou's Dollar Monthly Magazine, 1855

7~ Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Volume 1, 1907-1908