Archive for the ‘billeder’ tag
walden
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.” (Henry David Thoreau)
DUEL EFTER MASKEBALLET
Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Duel After the Masquerade (ca. 1857–59) depicts a duel after a costume ball in Bois de Boulogne, Paris. The Walters Art Museum.
The scene is set on a gray winters morning in the Bois de Boulogne. A man dressed as a Pierrot has been mortally wounded and has collapsed into the arms of a Duke de Guise. A surgeon, dressed as a doge of Venice, tries to stop the flow of blood, while a Domino holds his head. The winner of the duel, dressed as an American Indian, walks away with his second, Harlequin. In the background, chariots wait in the distance, offering a getaway if the police were to arrive. The bizarreness of the scene in regards to the brightly colored costumes turns to pathos at the sight of blood on the Pierrot.
LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA – TEPIDARIUM (1881)
His artistic legacy almost vanished. As attitudes of the public in general and the artists in particular became more skeptical of the possibilities of human achievement, his paintings were increasingly denounced. He was declared “the worst painter of the 19th century” by John Ruskin, and one critic even remarked that his paintings were “about worthy enough to adorn bourbon boxes.” After this brief period of being actively derided, he was consigned to relative obscurity for many years. Only since the 1960s has Alma-Tadema’s work been reevaluated for its importance within the nineteenth century, and more specifically, within the evolution of English art.
LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA
This painting completed in 1881, depicts Sappho and her companions listening as the poet Alcaeus plays a “kithara”, on the island of Lesbos (Mytilene).
Sappho was a Greek lyric poet, born on the island of Lesbos. The Alexandrians included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and it is said that she died around 570 BCE, but little is known for certain about her life. The bulk of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, has been lost, but her immense reputation has endured through surviving fragments.
Alma-Tadema was among the most financially successful painters of the Victorian era, though never matching Edwin Henry Landseer. For over sixty years he gave his audience exactly what they wanted: distinctive, elaborate paintings of beautiful people in classical settings. His incredibly detailed reconstructions of ancient Rome, with languid men and women posed against white marble in dazzling sunlight provided his audience with a glimpse of a world of the kind they might one day construct for themselves at least in attitude if not in detail.
JOHN WILLIAM GODWARD
John William Godward (9 August 1861 – 13 December 1922) was an English painter from the end of the Pre-Raphaelite / Neo-Classicist era. He was a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema but his style of painting fell out of favour with the arrival of painters like Picasso. He committed suicide at the age of 61 and is said to have written in his suicide note that “the world was not big enough” for him and a Picasso. His already estranged family, who had disapproved of him becoming an artist, were ashamed of his suicide and burned his papers. No photographs of Godward are known to survive.
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