Thursday, October 23, 2008

Albert Bierstadt The Shore of the Turquoise Sea painting

Albert Bierstadt The Shore of the Turquoise Sea paintingDante Gabriel Rossetti Paolo and Francesca paintingDante Gabriel Rossetti A Sea Spell painting
Drusus had uttered while in prison. Never had such a painful document been read in the House before. It was clear from Drusus's remarks that he had been beaten and tortured and insulted by the captain himself, by common soldiers and even by slaves, and that he had very cruelly been given every day less and less food and drink, crumb by crumb, and drop by drop. Tiberius even ordered the captain to read Drusus's dying curse. It was a wild but well-composed imprecation, accusing Tiberius of miserliness, treachery, obscene filthiness and delight in torture, of murdering Germanicus and Postumus, and of a whole series of other crimes (most of which he had committed but none of which had ever been publicly mentioned before); he prayed the Cods that all the immeasurable suffering and distress that Tiberius had caused others should weigh upon him with increasing strength, waking or sleeping, night and day, for as long as he lived, should over-' whelm him in the hour of his death, and should commit him to everlasting torture in the day of infernal Judgment

Paul Cezanne Still Life with Kettle painting

Paul Cezanne Still Life with Kettle paintingPaul Cezanne Still Life with Fruit paintingPaul Cezanne Still Life with Flowers and Fruit painting
crammed down his throat afterwards. As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.
Tiberius asked the Senate to decree Castor Protector of the People, which was as much as pointing him out as heir to the monarchy. This request caused general relief. It was taken as a sign that Tiberius was aware of Sejanus's ambitions and intended to check them. When the decree was passed someone proposed that it should be printed on the walls of the House in letters of gold. Nobody realized that it was at Sejanus's own suggestion that Castor was so honoured; he had hinted to Tiberius that Castor, Agrippina, Livia and Gallus were in league together and proposed this as the best way to see who else belonged to their party. It was a friend of his own who had made the proposal about the gold inscription, and the names of senators who supported this extravagant motion were carefully noted. Castor was more popular

Monday, October 20, 2008

Thomas Moran Autumn Landscape painting

Thomas Moran Autumn Landscape painting
Jean Francois Millet The Gleaners painting
Etruscan language. I told my mother about it and she called me a fanciful fool; but she must have been sufficiently impressed to repeat what I said to Tiberius; for I told nobody but her.
Gallus asked why Jove should give his message in Etruscan rather than in Greek or Latin? Could nobody swear to having observed any other more conclusive omen? It was all very well to decree new gods to ignorant Asiatic provincials, but the honourable House ought to pause before ordering educated citizens to worship one of their own number, however distinguished. It is possible that Gallus would have succeeded in blocking the decree by this appeal to Roman pride and sanity had it not been for a man called Atticus, a senior magistrate. He solemnly rose to say that when Augustus's corpse had been
Jacques-Louis David Napoleon crossing the Alps painting
burned on Mars Field he had seen a cloud descending from heaven and the dead man's spirit then ascending on it, precisely in the way in which tradition relates that the spirits of Romulus and Hercules ascended. He would swear by all the Gods that he was testifying the truth.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Gustave Courbet The Origin of the World painting

Gustave Courbet The Origin of the World paintingGustave Courbet Plage de Normandie paintingThomas Kinkade HOMETOWN MORNING painting
laughed! Then he bellowed: 'And isn't it true, though Pompey says it? Deny it if you can, you damned fornicating dogs, you!' And he flung the half-radish at them. And the roar that went up! Never were there soldiers like Caesar's. Do you remember the song they sang at his French triumph?
we bring the bald whore-monger, Romans, lock your wives away.'" "The truth, boy! Have you ever caught him out in any historical inaccuracies? You seem to be a fellow who reads a good deal." "I would rather not venture…" "Out with it. There must be something." So I said: "There
Livy said. "Pollio, my dear fellow, we were not discussing Caesar's morals, but the proper way to write history."
Pollio said. "Yes, that's right. Our intelligent young friend was criticizing your method, under the respectful disguise of praising your readability. Boy, have you any further charges to bring against the noble Livy?"
I said: "Please, sir, don't make me blush. I admire Livy's work greatly."

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Henri Matisse Goldfish painting

Henri Matisse Goldfish paintingHenri Matisse Blue Nude I 1952 paintingCassius Marcellus Coolidge A Friend in Need painting
true I was thinking as I was bound to as a Christian, but I was forgetting we’re human, and you set me right and I’m thankful. You’re right. Jay wasn’t—a religious man, in that sense, and to realize could have only been—as you said for him. Probably as much so, even if he were religious.” She looked at him quietly. “So just please know I’m not hurt or angry. I needed to realize what you told me and I thank God for it.”
There was a noise on the porch; Andrew got from his knees and kissed his sister on the forehead. “Don’t be sorry,” she said. He looked at her, tightened his lips, and hurried to the door.
“Papa,” he said, and stood aside to let him past. His mother fumbled for his arm, and gripped it hard. He put his hand gently across her shoulders and said, next her ear, “They’re back in the kitchen”; she followed her husband. “Come in, Walter.”
“Oh no. Thank you,” Walter Starr said. “These are family matters. But if there’s ...”
Andrew took him by the arm. “Come in a minute, anyway,” he said. “I know

Monday, October 6, 2008

Henri Rousseau The Sleeping Gypsy painting

Henri Rousseau The Sleeping Gypsy paintingHenri Rousseau The Dream paintingPaul Cezanne Trees in Park painting
light lift out their pallors and their voices all together, mothers hushing their children, the hushing unnaturally prolonged, the men gentle and silent and each snail-like withdrawn into the quietude of what he singly is doing, the urination of huge children stood loosely military against an invisible wall, and gentle happy and peaceful, tasting the mean goodness of their living like the last of their suppers in their mouths; while the locusts carry on this noise of hoses on their much higher and sharper key. The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere

Thomas Gainsborough River Landscape painting

Thomas Gainsborough River Landscape paintingThomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews paintingSandro Botticelli Madonna and Child painting
ordinarily next-door neighbors talked quite a bit when they happened to run into each other, and never paid calls. The men were mostly small Businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-five.
But it is of these evenings, I speak.
Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell, and the carbon lamps lifted at the corners were on in the light, and the locusts were started, and the fire flies were out, and a few frogs’ were flopping in the dewy grass, by the time the fathers and the children came out. The children ran out first hell bent and yelling those names by which they were known; then the fathers sank out leisurely in crossed suspenders, their collars removed and their necks looking tall and shy. The mothers stayed back in the kitchen washing and drying, putting

Jacques-Louis David Napoleon crossing the Alps painting

Jacques-Louis David Napoleon crossing the Alps paintingJoaquin Sorolla y Bastida Children on the Beach paintingThomas Gainsborough The Morning Walk painting
We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded. middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were soft-wooded trees, poplars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn’t doing very well. There were few good friends among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might talk short times, trivially, and at the two

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky The Ninth Wave painting

Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky The Ninth Wave paintingFrank Dicksee Portrait of Elsa paintingFrank Dicksee Passion painting
IT is time to speak of Julia, who till now has played an intermittent and somewhat enigmatic part in Sebastian’s drama. It was thus she appeared to me at the time, and I to her. We pursued separate aims which brought us near to one another, but we remained strangers. She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one’s attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and, saying between brother and sister, which, caught repeatedly in different poses, under different lights, each time pierced me anew; and, as Sebastian in his sharp ‘I must read that, too, when I’ve the time,’ replace it, and continue the search. On my side the interest was keener, for there was always the physical likeness

Vincent van Gogh Le Moulin de la Galette painting

Vincent van Gogh Le Moulin de la Galette paintingVincent van Gogh Farmhouse in Provence paintingVincent van Gogh Wheat Field with Cypresses painting
than his. We were both happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog’s barking miles away on a still night.twenty minutes I should have been ready for all he had to tell. I closed my mind to him as best I could and gave myself to the food before me, but sentences came
At the beginning of May the engagement was announced. I saw the notice in the Continental Daily Mail and assumed that Rex had ‘squared the old man’. But things did not go as were expected. The next news I had of them was in the middle of June, when I read that they had been married very quietly at the Savoy Chapel. No royalty was present; nor was the Prime Minister; nor were any of Julia’s family. It sounded like a ‘hole-in-the-corner’ affair, but it was not for several years that I heard the full story.