Painting #9: The Man With The Violin
BORDER PHRASE: “Riddle de dee, a rose in May. Fiddle de dum, a daisy day.”
BARBED LETTER WORD: SAD
RED LETTER WORD: MELODY
WORD FROM THE MASTER RIDDLE: MIDDAY
HIDDEN HARE: All over the tree.
CLUES & COMMENTS: I do believe it’s the guy from Painting #2.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
When I first read saw this book when it first came out and my whole family used to go through it. My dad had lines drawn through it and we ended up with several copies. I was about 10 yrs old and on the first page I instantly got the ‘One of six to eight’ as being Catherine of Aragon and I also got the equinox dates. THIS picture gave me what I considered to be my biggest clue..The pig has grass on his back..I looked in all the map indexes for a place called HAM HILL. I know it vaguely sounds like Ampthill looking back.
If I had read my Conan Doyle then I would have read ‘The Musgrave ritual’ where Sherlock holmes uses a shadow to find treasure and I think the equinox dates would have become more obvious.
Ironically I only lived 22 miles from Ampthill at the time 🙂 Great site by the way
There is an interesting thing going on with the leaves and the rose that extends over the frame of this picture: you can order them in a gradient from green to red, starting with the green leaves of the rose, going through all the leaves of the maple tree, and ending with the flower of the rose. Each of these points at a letter that is easy to identify, and a space. The sequence of these letters makes the sentence I ADD OF (space) IN DILEMMA.
I don’t know what it means. But there are a few more things to notice:
– The space is the seventh of 16 characters, like the empty cell in the grids of image 12 and image 15 that are so important to the master riddle.
– The maple leaves have 5 lobes, like the 5 fingers of a hand. Even the rose has 5 small leaves. I tried to use the longest lobe to point at letters but it’s not really working.
– The gradient is from green to red, which in the master riddle corresponds to the right hand and left hand. So maybe it’s also a clue for the hand colors in the master riddle?
– The words LEFT (direction) and LEAVES (plural of leaf) can both be seen as conjugations of the verb TO LEAVE. In the master riddle, the four spaces are given by three left feet and one upper end of a fish tail. If red is the left hand and there is a fish, maybe it’s a red herring and we should LEAVE this cypher out of our solution?