Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

endure as best as can
at once precious yet
unendurable
this self-imposed trial
overwhelms and controls

laugh, cry,
pleasure, grief
wane, endure
such are the inconstancies
of holdin’ what cannot be held

when felt most intense
all but certain
and the hour arrives
begin again

long-felt vain dreams
accustomed to run
endless beyond…

can it ever root again
if it arched the curve of its back
if it thrust as deep as before

allow falterin’ voice
to breathe
while hands touch

tender, to wake
no thought affords
but one remembered
vision together

there is no hidin’
were there yet tears
ask not, whate’er state,
voice lost, hand unsteady
when feelin’s nor can express
that which was known

come, cast thy shadow o’er

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

choose an idea,
often somehow
related to you,
and i create with it
what i can
it is the only
fulfillment
i know

surround myself,
with the feelin’,
wallow in the fire
that lights up inside
and bursts hopelessly

and i will pay
what has to be paid
for what i must have

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

endure as best as can
at once so precious yet
so plainly unendurable
these self-imposed troubles
overwhelm and control

in every laugh a cry
in each pleasure, grief
happiness wanes, pain endures
such are the inconstancies
of holdin’ what cannot be held

when the loss feels most intense
when joy feels all but certain
and the hour of delight arrives
anguish begins again

long-felt desires, vain hopes
sad sighs, dreams accustomed to run
sad into as many rivers,
pourin’ like fountains, endless rain
a pain, beyond…

so hard, no compassion, gone mad
with pity: the last passions had
can passion ever root again
if it arched the curve of its back
if it licked with ardent fire
if it thrust as deep as before

the wounds cut everywhere
so there would be no place free
were yet there tears to flow
for hours, forever, past away

while yet, swellin’ sighs allow
falterin’ voice to breathe
while yet hands touch
tender, to wake
while yet, no thought affords
but one remembered dream alone

ask not, whate’er state
but when eyes weep no more
voice lost, hand untrue
when spirit’s fire is o’er
nor can express that which was known

come, cast thy shadow o’er

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Today is the baptismal day of Willem Drost (Amsterdam 19 April 1633 – buried 25 February 1659); Dutch Golden Age painter and printmaker.

He is a mysterious figure with not much known of his life. Around 1650, according to the early art historian Houbraken, he became a student of Rembrandt, eventually developing a close working relationship, painting history scenes, biblical compositions, symbolic studies of a solitary figure, as well as portraits. He was in Amsterdam until 1655 and then travelled to Rome and Venice, where he died.

 Gallery

Cimon et Pero

Young woman with a carnation

The Vision of Daniel, 1650, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Bathsheba, 1654, oil on canvas, Louvre.

 

Portrait of a Young Man

 

Young Woman in a Brocade Gown,Wallace Collection

Timothy and Lois, 1650s, Hermitage Museum

Today is the birthday of José Echegaray y Eizaguirre (Madrid 19 April 1832 – 14 September 1916 Madrid); civil engineer, mathematician, statesman, and one of the leading Spanish dramatists of the last quarter of the 19th century.  He was awarded the 1904 Nobel Prize for Literature “in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama.”

Mac Tag

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jose echegaray y eizaguirre, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, willem drost

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

here i draw forth my journal, turn to this page and with pen, after thinkin’ a moment, write these words

it is my privilege to have you lookin’ over my shoulder, to have you here to listen

i was late comin’ to realize my purpose, what i want

with gratitude held high

i thank you

© 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

inspiration
to not hold
feelin’s too close

then everything
else fades
and all
that went before
is as if
it had never been

only ever been
worth a damn
when in thrall

as with you

Lucrezia Borgia
The only confirmed Lucrezia portrait painted from life (attributed to Dosso Dossi, c. 1519, National Gallery of Victoria)

Today is the birthday of Lucrezia Borgia (Subiaco 18 April 1480 – 24 June 1519 Ferrara); daughter of Pope Alexander VI and Vannozza dei Cattanei. Her brothers included Cesare Borgia, Giovanni Borgia, and Gioffre Borgia.

Her family arranged several marriages for her that advanced their own political position including Giovanni Sforza (Lord of Pesaro), Alfonso of Aragon (Duke of Bisceglie), and Alfonso I d’Este (Duke of Ferrara). Tradition has it that Alfonso of Aragon was an illegitimate son of the King of Naples and that her brother Cesare may have had him murdered after his political value waned.

Rumors about her and her family cast Lucrezia as a femme fatale, a role in which she has been portrayed in many artworks, novels and films.

First marriage: Giovanni Sforza

Possible portrait of Lucrezia as St. Catherine of Alexandria in a fresco by Pinturicchio, in the Sala dei Santi the Borgia apartments in the Vatican c. 1494.

On 26 February 1491, a matrimonial arrangement was drawn up between Lucrezia and the Lord of Val D’Ayora in the kingdom of Valencia, Don Cherubino Joan de Centelles, which was annulled less than two months later in favour of a new contract engaging Lucrezia to Don Gaspare Aversa, count of Procida. When Rodrigo became Pope Alexander VI, he sought to be allied with powerful princely families and founding dynasties of Italy. As such, he called off Lucrezia’s previous engagements and arranged for her to marry Giovanni Sforza, a member of the House of Sforza who was Lord of Pesaro and titled Count of Catignola. Giovanni was an illegitimate son of Costanzo I Sforza and a Sforza of the second rank. He married Lucrezia on 12 June 1493 in Rome.

Before long, the Borgia family no longer needed the Sforzas, and the presence of Giovanni Sforza in the papal court was superfluous. The Pope needed new, more advantageous political alliances, so he may have covertly ordered the execution of Giovanni: the generally accepted version is that Lucrezia was informed of this by her brother Cesare, and she warned her husband, who fled Rome.

Alexander asked Giovanni’s uncle, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, to persuade Giovanni to agree to an annulment of the marriage. Giovanni refused and accused Lucrezia of paternal incest. The pope asserted that his daughter’s marriage had not been consummated and was thus invalid. Giovanni was offered her dowry in return for his cooperation. The Sforza family threatened to withdraw their protection should he refuse. Giovanni finally signed confessions of impotence and documents of annulment before witnesses.

There has been speculation that during the prolonged process of the annulment, Lucrezia consummated a relationship with someone, perhaps Alexander’s chamberlain Pedro Calderon, also named Perotto. Families hostile to the Borgias would later accuse her of being pregnant at the time her marriage was annulled for non-consummation. She is known to have retired to the convent of San Sisto in June 1497 to await the outcome of the annulment proceedings, which were finalized in December of the same year. The bodies of Pedro Calderon, and a maid, Pantasilea, were found in the Tiber in February 1498. In March 1498, the Ferrarese ambassador claimed that Lucrezia had given birth, but this was denied by other sources. A child was born, however, in the Borgia household the year before Lucrezia’s marriage to Alfonso of Aragon. He was named Giovanni but is known to historians as the “Infans Romanus“.

In 1501, two papal bulls were issued concerning the child, Giovanni Borgia. In the first, he was recognized as Cesare’s child from an affair before his marriage. The second, contradictory, bull recognized him as the son of Pope Alexander VI. Lucrezia’s name is not mentioned in either, and rumors that she was his mother have never been proven. The second bull was kept secret for many years, and Giovanni was assumed to be Cesare’s son. This is supported by the fact that in 1502 he became Duke of Camerino, one of Cesare’s recent conquests, hence the natural inheritance of the Duke of Romagna’s oldest son. Giovanni went to stay with Lucrezia in Ferrara after Alexander’s death, where he was accepted as her half-brother.

Second marriage: Alfonso d’Aragon (Duke of Bisceglie)

Duke Alfonso of Aragon

Following her annulment from Sforza, Lucrezia was married to the Neapolitan Alfonso of Aragon, the half-brother of Sancha of Aragon who was the wife of Lucrezia’s brother Gioffre Borgia. The marriage was a short one.

They were married in 1498; Lucrezia—not her husband—was appointed governor of Spoleto in 1499; Alfonso fled Rome shortly afterwards but returned at Lucrezia’s request, only to be murdered in 1500.

It was rumored that Lucrezia’s brother Cesare was responsible for Alfonso’s death, as he had recently allied himself (through marriage) with France against Naples. Lucrezia and Alfonso had one child, Rodrigo of Aragon, who was born in 1499 and predeceased his mother in August 1512 at the age of 12.

Third marriage: Alfonso d’Este (Duke of Ferrara)

Alfonso d’Este

 

After the death of Lucrezia’s second husband, her father, Pope Alexander VI, arranged a third marriage. She married Alfonso I d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, in early 1502 in Ferrara. She had eight children during this marriage and was considered a respectable and accomplished Renaissance duchess, effectively rising above her previous reputation and surviving the fall of the Borgias following her father’s death.

Neither partner was faithful: beginning in 1503, Lucrezia enjoyed a long relationship with her brother-in-law, Francesco II Gonzaga, Marquess of Mantua. Francesco’s wife was the cultured intellectual Isabella d’Este, the sister of Alfonso, to whom Lucrezia had made overtures of friendship to no avail. The affair between Francesco and Lucrezia was passionate, more sexual than sentimental as can be attested in the fevered love letters the pair wrote one another.

Lucrezia also had a love affair with the poet Pietro Bembo during her third marriage. Their love letters were deemed “The prettiest love letters in the world” by the Romantic poet Lord Byron when he saw them in the Ambrosian Library of Milan on 15 October 1816. On the same occasion Byron claimed to have stolen a lock of Lucrezia’s hair – “the prettiest and fairest imaginable”.

Lucrezia met the famed French soldier, the Chevalier Bayard while the latter was co-commanding the French allied garrison of Ferrara in 1510. According to his biographer, the Chevalier became a great admirer of Lucrezia’s, considering her a “pearl on this Earth”.

After a long history of complicated pregnancies and miscarriages, on 14 June 1519 Lucrezia gave birth to her tenth child, named Isabella Maria in honour of Alfonso’s sister Isabella d’Este. The child was sickly and – fearing she would die unbaptised – Alfonso ordered her to be baptised straightaway with Eleonora della Mirandola and Count Alexandro Serafino as godparents.

Lucrezia had become very weak during the pregnancy and fell seriously ill after the birth. After seeming to recover for two days, she worsened again and died on 24 June the same year. She was buried in the convent of Corpus Domini.

Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto, traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia

Tomb of Alfonso I d’Este and Lucrezia, Ferrara

She is described as having heavy blonde hair that fell past her knees, a beautiful complexion, hazel eyes that changed color, a full, high bosom, and a natural grace that made her appear to “walk on air”. These physical attributes were highly appreciated in Italy during that period. Another description said, “her mouth is rather large, the teeth brilliantly white, her neck is slender and fair, and the bust is admirably proportioned.”

One painting, Portrait of a Youth by Dosso Dossi at the National Gallery of Victoria, was identified as a portrait of Lucrezia in November 2008. This painting may be the only surviving formal portrait of Lucrezia Borgia; however, doubts have been cast on that attribution. Several other paintings, such as Veneto’s fanciful portrait, have also been said to depict her, but none have been accepted by scholars at present.

Several rumours have persisted throughout the years, primarily speculating as to the nature of the extravagant parties thrown by the Borgia family. Many of these concern allegations of incest, poisoning, and murder on her part; however, no historical basis for these rumours has ever been brought forward beyond allegations made by rival parties. It is rumoured that Lucrezia was in possession of a hollow ring that she used frequently to poison drinks.

Thomas Middleton, depicted in the frontispiece of Two New Plays, a 1657 edition of Women Beware Women and More Dissemblers Besides Women 

Today is the baptismal day of Thomas Middleton (London 1580 – July 1627 Southwark); English Jacobean playwright and poet.  Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson among the most successful and prolific playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period.  He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy.

Let the air strike our tune,
Whilst we show reverence to yond peeping moon.

Today is the birthday of poet, philosopher and writer Antero de Quental (Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores18 April 1842 – 11 September 1891 Ponta Delgada). His works became a milestone in the Portuguese language alongside those of Camões, Bocage, and Fernando Pessoa.

Throughout his life, de Quental oscillated between pessimism and depression; afflicted with what might have been bipolar disorder, at the time of his last trip to Lisbon, he was in a state of steady depression, compounded by spinal disease. After a month in Lisbon, he returned once again to Ponta Delgada around June 1891. On September 11 that year, at about 8:00 PM, he shot himself in the stomach twice, while seated on a bench in a local garden park. He died approximately an hour later. De todas as coisas, o pior é ter nascido (“Of all things, the worst is having been born,”) he wrote in a poem.

Raios de extinta luz

“Mas quem de amor nos lábios traz doçura

Esse é que leva a flor de uma alma pura!”

– O sol do Bello, 3º verso, 4ª estrofe

Today is the birthday of George Clausen (London 18 April 1852 – 22 November 1944 Cold Ash, West Berkshire, England); artist working in oil and watercolour, etching, mezzotint, drypoint and occasionally lithographs.

Clausen became one of the foremost modern painters of landscape and of peasant life, influenced to a certain extent by the Impressionists, with whom he shared the view that light is the real subject of landscape art.  His pictures excel in rendering the appearance of things under flecking outdoor sunlight, or in the shady shelter of a barn or stable. His Girl at the Gate was acquired by the Chantrey Trustees and is now at the Tate Gallery.  The Yale Center for British Art holds Clausen’s Schoolgirls (1880), an urban scene, which it featured in its exhibit called “Britain in the World: 1860-Now.”

Clausen was an official war artist during World War I. During the war his daughter’s fiancé was killed; this event may have inspired his painting, Youth Mourning which shows a distressed young woman mourning in a desolate landscape.

Gallery

Youth mourning

The watcher

And today is the birthday of Max Weber (Białystok, Poland; April 18, 1881 – October 4, 1961); painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant (1915), in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, “the finest canvas of his Cubist phase,” in the words of art historian Avis Berman.

Weber emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn with his Orthodox Jewish parents at the age of ten. He studied art at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn under Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow was a fortunate early influence on Weber as he was an “enlightened and vital teacher” in a time of conservative art instruction, a man who was interested in new approaches to creating art. Dow had met Paul Gauguin in Pont-Aven, was a devoted student of Japanese art, and defended the advanced modernist painting and sculpture he saw at the Armory Show in New York in 1913.

In 1905, after teaching in Virginia and Minnesota, Weber had saved enough money to travel to Europe, where he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and acquainted himself with the work of such modernists as Henri Rousseau (who became a good friend), Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and other members of the School of Paris. His friends among fellow Americans included some equally adventurous young painters, such as Abraham Walkowitz, H. Lyman Sayen, and Patrick Henry Bruce.  Avant-garde France in the years immediately before World War I was fertile and welcoming territory for Weber, then in his early twenties. He arrived in Paris in time to see a major Cézanne exhibition, meet the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, frequent Gertrude Stein’s salon, and enroll in classes in Matisse’s private “Academie.” Rousseau gave him some of his works; others, Weber purchased. He was responsible for Rousseau’s first exhibition in the United States.

Gallery

The three graces

Nude

Summer

 

Mac Tag

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antero de quental, lucrezia borgia, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, thomas middleton

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

tonight we dream of that place where worry of the world holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of bein’, where we know what is real and free of will, and the pleasure lies in this, here with the long splendid views, and the wind, and feelin’s which we have never seen or heard of

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

let me take you
to the Seven Cross
on the Texas High Plains

a world of isolation
far from the nearest town
where i will show you,
in abundance;
wind and wildlife,
old friendships,
wide open vistas,
night skies with more stars
than you can imagine

and the end of our search

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

might be hard to find
but once you do
you might just
find yourself

go west, on the two lane black top
turn south on an old county road,
then east on the caliche road
and you will find, The Seven Cross

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of John Ford (Ilsington, Devon, England 1586 – ca. 1639); English playwright and poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras. Perhaps best known for the tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633), a family drama with a plot line of incest. The play’s title has often been changed in new productions, sometimes being referred to as simply Giovanni and Annabella — the play’s leading, incestuous brother-and-sister characters.  In a nineteenth-century work it is coyly called The Brother and Sister. Shocking as the play is, it is regarded as a classic piece of English drama. It has been adapted to film at least twice: My Sister, My Love (Sweden, 1966) and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Belgium, 1978).

The Lover’s Melancholy (1628)

• Flattery
  Is monstrous in a true friend.
  • Act I, sc. i.

• Tell us, pray, what devil
  This melancholy is, which can transform
  Men into monsters.
  • Act III, sc. i.

• Melancholy
  Is not, as you conceive, indisposition
  Of body, but the mind’s disease.
  • Act III, sc. i.

• Philosophers dwell in the moon.
  • Act III, sc. iii.

• Love is the tyrant of the heart; it darkens
  Reason, confounds discretion; deaf to Counsel
  It runs a headlong course to desperate madness.
  • Act III, sc. iii.

• Fly hence, shadows, that do keep,
  Watchful sorrows, charmed in sleep.
  • Act V, sc. i.

Love is dead; let lovers’ eyes
Locked in endless dreams
Th’ extreme of all extremes
Ope no more, for now Love dies.

Today is the birthday of Henry Vaughan (Newton St. Bridget, Wales 17 April 1621 – 23 April 1695 Scethrog House, Wales); author, physician and metaphysical poet.  Perhaps best known for his religious poetry contained in Silex Scintillans, which was published in 1650, with a second part published in 1655.

Dear Night! this world’s defeat;
The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb;
The day of spirits; my soul’s calm retreat
Which none disturb!

They are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.

Portrait by Sir Arthur Stockdale Cope KCVO RA
Aberdeen Art Gallery & Museums Collections

Today is the birthday of George Vicat Cole RA (Portsmouth,  Hampshire,  England; April 1833 – 6 April 1893); painter.

Cole was the son of the landscape painter, George Cole (1810–1883), and in his practice followed his father’s lead with marked success. He exhibited at the British Institution at the age of nineteen, and was first represented at the Royal Academy in 1853. His election as an associate of this institution took place in 1870, and he became an Academician ten years later. He died in London on 6 April 1893. The wide popularity of his work was due partly to the simple directness of his technical method, and partly to his habitual choice of attractive material.

Most of his subjects were found in the counties of Surrey and Sussex, and along the banks of the Thames. One of his largest pictures, The Pool of London, was bought by the Chantrey Fund Trustees in 1888, and was shown in the Tate Gallery.

He was the father of the painter Rex Vicat Cole. 

His daughter Mary Blanche Cole (1858–1945), also an artist, married the artist Louis Paul (Alexander Louis Paul 1855–1927).

Gallery

Winter scene with cattle and figures 1865

Richmond Hill, London by 1876
Oil on Canvas

Today is the birthday of Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Rungsted, Denmark 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962 Rungsted), née Karen Christenze Dinesen; author, also known by the pen name Isak Dinesen, who wrote works in Danish, French and English.  She also at times used the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola, and Pierre Andrézel.  Perhaps best known for Out of Africa, an account of her life while living in Kenya, and for one of her stories, Babette’s Feast, both of which have been adapted into Academy Award-winning motion pictures. 

Karen Blixen
Blixen in 1957

Blixen photographed in 1913

with her brother Thomas on the family farm in Kenya in the 1920s

Dinesen first fell in love with the equestrian Hans von Blixen-Finecke but he did not reciprocate. She therefore decided to accept the favours of his twin brother, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, announcing their engagement on 23 December 1912. Given the difficulties both were experiencing in settling in Denmark, the family suggested they should move abroad. Their common uncle, Aage Westenholz (1859–1935) who had made a fortune in Siam, suggested they should go to Kenya to start a coffee farm. Early in 1913, Bror Blixen-Finecke left for Kenya, followed by Dinesen in December.

Blixen’s African home, now the Karen Blixen Museum

Soon after Dinesen arrived in Kenya, which at the time was part of British East Africa, she and Blixen married in Mombassa on January 14, 1914. After her marriage, she was known as Baroness Blixen, and used the title until 1929, when her ex-spouse remarried. Initially, they planned to raise cattle on their farm, but were convinced that coffee would be more profitable. The couple soon established their first farm, M’Bagathi, in the Great Lakes area, but quickly ran into difficulties caused by the outbreak of the First World War. Fighting between the Germans and British in East Africa led to a shortage of workers and supplies. Nevertheless, in 1916, the Karen Coffee Company purchased a larger farm, M’Bogani, near the Ngong Hills to the north of Nairobi. It covered 6,000 acres of land, of which 600 were used for a coffee plantation. The remainder were used by the natives for grazing while 2,000 acres of virgin forest were left untouched.

However, the land was not suited for coffee cultivation, being too high in elevation. The couple hired local workers, predominantly the Kikuyu people who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival but there were also Wakamba, Kavirondo, Swahili and Masai. Initially Bror Blixen-Finecke worked the farm, but it soon became evident that he had little interest in it and preferred to leave running the farm to Blixen while he went on safari. For the first time, English became the language she used daily. About the couple’s early life in the African Great Lakes region, Karen Blixen later wrote,

Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams!

Blixen and her husband were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. She was diagnosed with syphilis toward the end of their first year of marriage in 1915. She returned to Denmark in June 1915 for treatment which proved successful. Although Blixen’s illness was eventually cured (some uncertainty exists), it created medical anguish for years to come. By 1919, the marriage had run into serious difficulties, causing her husband to request a divorce in 1920. Against her wishes, the couple separated in 1921, and were officially divorced in 1925. Bror Blixen was dismissed as the farm manager by Aage Westenholz, chair of the Karen Coffee Company, and Karen Blixen took over its management officially in 1921.

Denys Finch Hatton, around 1910–1920

In 1918, Blixen met the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton (1887–1931), an English army officer and aristocrat. He often travelled back and forth between Africa and England and would visit her occasionally. After her separation from her husband she and Finch Hatton developed a close friendship which eventually became a long-term love affair. In a letter to her brother Thomas in 1924, she wrote: “I believe that for all time and eternity I am bound to Denys, to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves…” But other letters in her collections show that the relationship was unstable, and that Blixen’s increasingly dependent behavior upon Finch Hatton, who was intensely independent, was an issue.

Finch Hatton used Blixen’s farmhouse as a home base between 1926 and 1931, when on safari with his clients. He died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in March 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, as a result of mismanagement, a drought and the falling price of coffee caused by the worldwide economic depression, forced Blixen to abandon her beloved estate. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned Denmark in August 1931 to live with her mother. She remained in Rungstedlund for the rest of her life.

Jurij Moskvitin (middle) accompanying Blixen and meeting composer Igor Stravinsky (left) at the Copenhagen City Hall, 1959

Blixen boarding an SAS flight from at Kastrup Airport, Copenhagen, in 1957

Blixen’s grave in Rungstedlund, Denmark

The Karen Blixen Museum in Rungstedlund, Denmark

Out of Africa (1937)

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of…

Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

• “Do you know a cure for me?”
  “Why yes,” he said, “I know a cure for everything. Salt water.”
  “Salt water?” I asked him.
  “Yes,” he said, “in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”
  • “The Deluge at Norderney”

And today is the birthday of  Thornton Wilder (born Thornton Niven Wilder; Madison, Wisconsin; April 17, 1897 – December 7, 1975 Hamden, Connecticut); playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

Wilder never married and kept his personal life private.

Quotes

• Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
  • TIME magazine (3 February 1958)

• Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
  • As quoted in “The Notation of the Heart” by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

• Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.
  • As quoted in “The Notation of the Heart” by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

• Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

• Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

• Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

• Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

Our Town (1938)

• People are meant to go through life two by two. ‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
  • “Mrs. Gibbs”

• A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot’s tied in a mighty public way.
  • “Mr. Webb”

• Wherever you come near the human race there’s layers and layers of nonsense.
  • “Stage Manager”

• That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those… of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.
  • “Simon Stimson”

• I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. …Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute? …I’m ready to go back…I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.
  • “Emily Webb”

The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)[edit]

• I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.
  • Antrobus, in Act 3

• My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate — that’s my philosophy.
  • Sabina, Act One

• I hate this play and every word in it.
  • Sabina

The Matchmaker (1954)

Later adapted into the musical Hello, Dolly

• Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she’s a householder.
  • Vandergelder, in Act 1

• Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It’s your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
  • Malachi, in Act 3

• Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you’ll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of the whole city.
  • Malachi, in Act 3

• The test of an adventure is that when you’re in the middle of it, you say to yourself, “Oh, now I’ve got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home.” And the sign that something’s wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
  • Barnaby, in Act 4

• Money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.
  • Dolly Levi, in Act 4

• The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous…and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.

• Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

Writers at Work interview (1958)

• The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.

• I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.

• The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.

• On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.”

• Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

• A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

• The theatre is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.”

• I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.

• One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.

The Eighth Day (1967)

• It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

• Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

• Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.

• A sense of humor judges one’s actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.

• We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

• Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

• The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

• When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery … He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift…. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

Theophilus North (1973)

• Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants’ Ball or even write a book, if that’s what they want to do.

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henry vaughan, isak dinesen, john ford, karen blixen, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

certainly mostly with
“Of course”
there are moments
when more happens
“The way we end our days”
yes, our favorite time
“After you read poetry to me”
words precede, flow through
punctuatin’ our time together
“From the conjuring”
to the ones i write for you
but now, is the time
for more than words

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

they have never
let me down
turn on the spigot
and they flow
sometimes effortlessly
other times, the valve
must be opened full tilt

fixin’ to be six years
that they have been
comin’, findin’ their way
every day to enlighten,
to make carryin’ the burden
just a little easier

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

they are all i have
i will write myself
outta this one

the birth of the end
a few months ago
exact date, not sure

stripped of feelin’s
my own damn fault
then this pandemic

Schopenhauer was right
all will be well because
whatever happens

day and time fade away

© copyright 2020.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

nothin’ compares
dull would be without this

the night now doth wear
the fallin’ last light; silent, bare,

hills and river lie
open unto the big sky

ne’er did two need more
in this splendour
ne’er felt we, so deep

abideth here at our will
the very source of want

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

for you
all of this
of you
about you
(so now y’all know
who to blame)

of course,
there are never
enough words,
nor melodies,
nor sketches

not to mention
that there will never
be enough time

for you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

not the sort to keep
anyone happy
“But you should try!”

sinkin’ by his chair,
hidin’ her face on his knees

speechless, he leaned forward
and wrapped his arms round her
the Navajo blanket fell over them
presently a whisper…

you have beat me
how can i fight this

she answered nothin’

not with words, not even
with meetin’ eyes,
did they plight their troth
in this first new hour

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (Marie Élisabeth Louise; Paris 16 April 1755 – 30 March 1842 Paris) also known as Madame Lebrun; painter.  Her artistic style is generally considered part of the aftermath of Rococo, while she often adopted a neoclassical style.  While serving as the portrait painter to Marie Antoinette, Vigée Le Brun works purely in Rococo in both her color and style choices.  Vigée Le Brun left a legacy of 660 portraits and 200 landscapes.

Gallery

Self-portrait in a Straw Hat, 1782.

Countess Siemontkowsky Bystry 1793

Self-portrait with her daughter Jeanne-Lucie, 1786

Portrait of Marie Antoinette, 1783

Marie Antoinette and her Children, 1787

• 

  Portrait de la comtesse Maria Theresia Bucquoi, 1793

• 

  Lady Folding a Letter

• 

  Varvara Golovina

• 

  Emma, Lady Hamilton

• 

  Portrait of Miss Pitt as Hebe

• 

  Charles-Alexandre de Calonne (1734–1802), 1784

• 

  Portrait of Marie Gabrielle de Gramont, Duchesse de Caderousse , 1784

• 

  The Bather, 1792

• 

  Portrait of princess Alexandra Golitsyna and her son Piotr, 1794

• 

  Anna Ivanovna Baryatinskaya Tolstoy

• 

  Comtesse de La Châtre

• 

  Princess Ana Gruzinsky Galitzine

• 

  Self portrait with Her Daughter, 1789

Today is the birthday of Ford Madox Brown (Calais, France 16 April 1821 – 6 October 1893 London); painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style.  Perhaps his most notable painting was Work (1852–1865).  Brown spent the latter years of his life painting the Manchester Murals, depicting Mancunian history, for Manchester Town Hall.

Gallery

Self-portrait 1850

Thinking, his wife emma

The Convalescent (A Portrait of the Artist’s Wife)

Brown’s Jacob and Joseph’s Coat at Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ponce, Puerto Rico

 The Bromley Family. Brown’s first wife Elizabeth, lower right, 1844

 Pretty Baa-Lambs. Browns mistress Emma and second daughter Cathy in 1851

• 

  Catherine Madox Brown

• 
• Emma in 1852 (study for The Last of England)

• 

  in 1867, drawn by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

• 

  James Leathart

• 

  Traveller

• 

  The Irish Girl, 1860

• 

  Cromwell, Protector of the Vaudois, 1877

• 

  Finding of Don Juan by Haidee

• 

  Cordelia’s Portion

• 

  Byron’s Dream

• 

  The French saint King Louis IX in the stained glass of the East window of All Saints Church, Cambridge.

• 

  Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, oil on canvas painting, 1847–1851, Art Gallery of New South Wales

• 

  Romeo and Juliet parting on the balcony in Act III. Delaware Art Museum, 1870

• 

  King Rene’s Honeymoon, 1864, an imaginary scene in the life of the art-loving medieval king René of Anjou.

• 

  Jesus washing Peter’s feet

Today is the birthday of Anatole France (born François-Anatole Thibault, Paris 16 April 1844 – 12 October 1924 Tours); poet, journalist, and novelist.  Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters.  He was a member of the Académie française, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature “in recognition of his brilliant literary achievements, characterized as they are by a nobility of style, a profound human sympathy, grace, and a true Gallic temperament”.  France is also widely believed to be the model for narrator Marcel’s literary idol Bergotte in Marcel Proust‘s In Search of Lost Time.

Les plus beaux mots du monde ne sont que de vains sons, si on ne les comprend pas.

• The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you cannot comprehend them.
  • Series I : Propos de rentrée: la terre et la langue

En art comme en amour, l’instinct suffit.

• In art as in love, instinct is enough.
  • Le Jardin d’Épicure [The Garden of Epicurus] (1894)

Un conte sans amour est comme du boudin sans moutarde; c’est chose insipide.

• A tale without love is like beef without mustard: insipid.
  • La Révolte des Anges [The Revolt of the Angels], (1914), ch. VIII

On devient bon écrivain comme on devient bon menuisier: en rabotant ses phrases.

• You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.
  • As quoted in Anatole France en pantoufles by Jean-Jacques Brousson (1924); published in English as Anatole France Himself: A Boswellian Record by His Secretary, Jean-Jacques Brousson (1925), trans. John Pollock, p. 85

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anatole france, ford madox brown, louise elisabeth vigee le brun, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

these random thoughts

-a knock on the door-
i did place an order
but i did not think
anyone was listenin’

need some help
no, though i will
accept it from you

i like to do things
when inspired so

darlin’,
-pausin’-
if i were to…
with pleasure

i like this game
shall we play another

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© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

*Think on your sins*

-a knock on the door-
“Room service.”
i did not
order anything
-openin’ the door-
not even you

“Need some help
with that?”
your help,
always

i like to do things
the old fashioned way
“Sometimes,
the old ways
are the best.”

“I’m impressed!
Old dog, new tricks?”
when inspired so
there is nothin’
i cannot do

darlin’, -pausin’-, if i were to…
-and she smiles- “With pleasure!”

was that your best shot
“Hardly.”
well, a movin’ target
is harder to hit
“Then you better
keep moving.”

“I like this game.”
shall we play another

“You have a lot
of faith in me.”
yes, a faith
that will only cease
with breath

-later-

you look amazin’
in that dress
“It’s a wonder
what one can do
with an extra
pair of hands!”
you are tellin’ me

i do not want
to over complicate things
“Who doesn’t enjoy
the occasional twist?”

may i ask why

“Be careful what you wish for.
You know nothing about it.”
i know all there is

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Vinci 15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519 Amboise, Kingdom of France); polymath whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography.  He has been called the father of paleontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time.  His genius epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Leonardo’s most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo’s brothers of his death, described Leonardo’s feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in John the Baptist and Bacchus and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Leonardo’s earliest known drawing, the Arno Valley (1473), Uffizi

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1510), Louvre Museum

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist (c. 1499–1500), National Gallery, London

On this day in 1738 – Serse, an Italian opera by George Frideric Handel receives its premiere performance in London, England.  It is an opera seria in three acts.  The Italian libretto was adapted by an unknown hand from that by Silvio Stampiglia for an earlier opera of the same name by Giovanni Bononcini in 1694.  Stampiglia’s libretto was itself based on one by Nicolò Minato that was set by Francesco Cavalli in 1654.  The opera is set in Persia (modern-day Iran) in 480 BC and is very loosely based upon Xerxes I of Persia, though there is little in either the libretto or music that is relevant to that setting.  Serse, originally sung by a castrato, is now usually performed by a mezzo-soprano, contralto or countertenor.  The opening aria, “Ombra mai fu”, sung by Xerxes to a plane tree (Platanus orientalis).   Ombra is the Italian word for shade, as in shade tree.  In the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes is depicted as an all-powerful despot, whose every whim became law.  As evidence of the irrational effect of absolute power, Herodotus tells of Xerxes’ fondness for a certain plane tree that he ordered decorated with gold ornaments and put under perpetual military guard as a sign of royal favor.  In Handel’s opera, the famous “Largo” is actually Xerxes’s dreamy song to this famous tree-and the “shade” referred to is the sort to be found under its gold-bedecked branches.  It is set to one of Handel’s best-known melodies, and is often known as Handel’s “Largo” (despite being marked “larghetto” in the score).

Henry James
James in 1910

Today is the birthday of Henry James, OM (New York City, 15 April 1843 – 28 February 1916 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, London); author regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and in my opinion, is one of the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of renowned philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.

Perhaps best known for a number of novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between emigre Americans, English people, and continental Europeans – examples of such novels include The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. His later works were increasingly experimental. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to impressionist painting.

In addition to voluminous works of fiction, James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man and eventually settled in England, becoming a British subject in 1915, one year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

James in 1890

Grave marker in Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts

As he requested, his ashes were buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts.

James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in London proclaimed himself “a bachelor”. Biographers have speculated that James had been in love with his cousin Mary (“Minnie”) Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections. As more material became available to scholars, including the diaries of contemporaries and hundreds of affectionate and sometimes erotic letters written by James to younger men, the picture of neurotic celibacy gave way to a portrait of a closeted homosexual. Another portrayal of James includes the suggestion that he was celibate.

Portrait of Henry James, charcoal drawing by John Singer Sargent (1912)

“Portrait of Henry James”, oil painting by John Singer Sargent (1913)

Photograph (1897)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

• Mrs Touchett was certainly a person of many oddities, of which her behaviour on returning to her husband’s house after many months was a noticeable specimen. She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity.
  • Ch. III.

• Mr Touchett used to think that she reminded him of his wife when his wife was in her teens. It was because she was fresh and natural and quick to understand, to speak – so many characteristics of her niece – that he had fallen in love with Mrs Touchett.
  • Ch. VI.

• She had promised him she would consider his question [of marrying him] […]. But this was not the case; she was wondering if she were not a cold, hard, priggish person, and, on her at last getting up and going rather quickly back to the house, felt, as she had said to her friend, really frightened at herself.
  • Ch. XII.

• There’s no more usual basis of union than a mutual misunderstanding.
  • Ch. XV.

• “If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. […] You know that what you ask is impossible […] I’m capable of nothing with regard to you,” he went on, “but just of being infernally in love with you. If one’s strong one loves only the more strongly.”
  • Ch. XVI.

• Besides, I try to judge things for myself; to judge wrong, I think, is more honourable than not to judge at all.
  • Ch. XVI.

• She often wondered indeed if she ever had been, or ever could be, intimate with anyone. She had an ideal of friendship as well as of several other sentiments, which it failed to seem to her in this case – it had not seemed to her in other cases – that the actual completely expressed.
  • Ch. XIX.

• “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for,” said Madame Merle. “I only know what I can do with them.”
  • Ch. XXII.

• To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past. This vague eternal rumour kept her imagination awake.
  • Ch. XXIII.

• Don’t mind anything anyone tells you about anyone else. Judge everyone and everything for yourself.
  • Ch. XXIII.

• The working of this young lady’s spirit was strange, and I can only give it to you as I see it, not hoping to make it seem altogether natural.
  • Ch. XXIX

• She gave an envious thought to the happier lot of men, who are always free to plunge into the healing waters of action.
  • Ch. XXXVIII

• She could never rid herself of the sense that unhappiness was a state of disease – of suffering as opposed to doing. To “do” – it hardly mattered what – would therefore be an escape, perhaps in some degree a remedy.
  • Ch. XLI

• The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his — attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park.
  • Ch. XLII.

• You wanted to look at life for yourself — but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!
  • Ch. LIV.

• Here she drew forth a small pocket-book, took from it a card and a pencil and, after meditating a moment, wrote a few words. It is our privilege to look over her shoulder, and if we exercise it we may read the brief query: […].
  • XLIV

• What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.
  • Ch. LI

Today is the birthday of Thomas Hart Benton (Neosho, Missouri April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975 Kansas City, Missouri); painter and muralist.  Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement.  His fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States.  Though his work is strongly associated with the Midwestern United States, he studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there, summered for 50 years on Martha’s Vineyard off the New England coast, and also painted scenes of the American South and West.

Benton in 1935

Gallery

A Streetcar Named Desire

Hollywood

Jessie with guitar

 People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920, in the Hirshhorn Museum collection in Washington, D.C.

In 1924, Benton depicted three landmarks in New York City’s Madison Square within his painting New York, Early Twenties.

Achelous and Hercules, a 1947 mural made for a Kansas City department store, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

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george frideric handel, henry james, leonardo da vinci, serse, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, thomas hart benton

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

*tell me who’s that writin’*

though not religious
“One of the reasons for us”
yes, i have always felt
a pull to this call
“It is powerful”
when i write it seems
as if someone has come
to tell me somethin’
“That’s what the song is about”
exactly, and the answer is me
with more revelations for this

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

*tell me who’s that writin’*

come down to tell me
what i know, or should
but have i not
been listenin’
or payin’ attention
not sure it matters

answer back from where
would you have me go
to what purpose or place

best keep on
turn to see one
who continues
arms opened wide

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

*Tell me who’s that writin’*

since it must be told,
there has been this dichotomy…
the inability to be without,
the inability to be with

and now solitude

this to make the best of

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

*Tell me who’s that writin’*

knows wherein
salvation lies
in the arms
of another
and i succumb
on occasion
but i am not
convinced

too many mistakes
and wrong choices
the faults run too deep

She knows…

*Tell me
who’s that writin’*

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

*Tell me
who’s that writin’*

the Revelator
comes round to explain
what will have to be done

i want to tell Her, it is alright
i have heard worse

live long enough
you come to understand

sorry for the wait, She says

it is alright
i will be home soon

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Victor Borisov-Musatov (Victor Elpidiforovich Borisov-Musatov, Saratov April 14 [O.S. April 2] 1870 – November 8 [O.S. October 26] 1905); painter, prominent for his unique Post-Impressionistic style that mixed Symbolism, pure decorative style and realism.  Together with Mikhail Vrubel he is often referred as the creator of Russian Symbolism style.

Gallery

 Self-portrait

Loneliness (on the balcony) 1903

 Self-Portrait with sister, 1898

The Pool. 1902

 The Emerald Necklace

The Pool. Sketch

• 

  May Flowers, 1894

• 

  Agave, 1897

• 

  Dame in a Rocking Chair, 1897

• 

  Two Dames, 1899

• 

  Spring, 1898-1901

• 

  Daphnis and Chloe. 1901

• 

  Phantoms, 1903

• 

  Portrait of Nadezhda Stanyukovich, 1903

• 

  Autumn Song. 1905

• 

  Requiem. 1905

On this day in 1883 the premiere of Lakmé, an opera in three acts by Léo Delibes to a French libretto by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille.

The score, written from 1881–1882, was first performed by the Opéra-Comique at the (second) Salle Favart in Paris, with stage decorations designed by Auguste Alfred Rubé and Philippe Chaperon (Act I), Eugène Louis Carpezat and (Joseph-)Antoine Lavastre (Act II), and Jean-Baptiste Lavastre(Act III). Set in British India in the mid-19th century, Lakmé is based on Théodore Pavie’s story “Les babouches du Brahamane” and novel Le Mariage de Loti by Pierre Loti.

The opera includes the popular Flower Duet (Sous le dôme épais) for sopranos performed in Act 1 by Lakmé, the daughter of a Brahmin priest, and her servant Mallika. The name Lakmé is the French rendition of Sanskrit Lakshmi, the name of the Hindu Goddess of Wealth. Perhaps the most famous aria is the Bell Song (L’Air des clochettes) in Act 2.

Like other French operas of the period, Lakmé captures the ambience of the Orient seen through Western eyes, which was periodically in vogue during the latter part of the 19th century and in line with other operatic works such as Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers and Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore. The subject of the opera was suggested by Gondinet as a vehicle for the American soprano Marie van Zandt.

The Indian fashion brand Lakmé, established in 1952 by the Tata Group and now owned by Hindustan Unilever, is named after the opera.

Synopsis

Place: India

Time: Late nineteenth century during the British Raj. Many Hindus have been forced by the British to practise their religion in secret.

Act 1

The Hindus go to perform their rites in a sacred Brahmin temple under the high priest, Nilakantha. Nilakantha’s daughter Lakmé (which derives from the Sanskrit Lakshmi) and her servant Mallika are left behind and go down to the river to gather flowers where they sing the “Flower Duet”. As they approach the water at the river bank, Lakmé removes her jewelry and places it on a bench. A party of British officers, Frederic and Gérald, arrive nearby while on a picnic with two British girls and their governess. The British girls see the jewelry and request sketches; Gérald volunteers to stay and make sketches of the jewelry. He sees Lakmé and Mallika returning and hides. Mallika leaves Lakmé for a while; while alone Lakmé sees Gérald and, frightened by the foreigner’s incursion, cries out for help. However, simultaneously, she is intrigued and so she sends away those who had responded to her call for help when they come to her rescue. Lakmé and Gérald begin to fall in love with each other. Nilakantha returns and learns of the British officer’s trespassing and vows revenge on him for his affront to Lakmé’s honor.

Act 2

At a bazaar, Nilakantha forces Lakmé to sing (the Bell Song) in order to lure the trespasser into identifying himself. When Gérald steps forward, Lakmé faints, thus giving him away. Nilakantha stabs Gérald, wounding him. Lakmé takes Gérald to a secret hideout in the forest, where she nurses him back to health.

Act 3

While Lakmé fetches sacred water that will confirm the vows of the lovers, Fréderic, a fellow British officer, appears before Gérald and reminds him of his duty to his regiment. After Lakmé returns, she senses the change in Gérald and realises that she has lost him. She dies with honour, rather than live with dishonor, killing herself by eating the poisonous datura leaf.

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Lakmé, leo delibes, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, victor borisov-musatov

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

a theme so compellin’
it had to come back
“In misty watercolors”
ha, well played my dear
“Thank you”
we talked about
the ones we have created
“Now we can turn towards
the ones to come”
absolutely
wherever they take us
one constant
runs through it
the way we will be

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who may tell the tale
of all gone wrong,
weigh the loss,
and mete want

assess woe
in verse enclose

bid sigh on sigh,
and wish and wish
till nothin’ness has flown,
and we have come

silent
at the doorway
facin’ need
only our eyes

is it time

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

five hundred mile
road trip tomorrow
goin’ back in time
about forty years
back to a place
full of memories
some, best left
undisturbed

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Thomas Percy (Bridgnorth, Shropshire, England, 13 April 1729 – 30 September 1811 Staffordshire, England); poet, Bishop of Dromore, County Down, Ireland.  Before being made bishop, he was chaplain to George III.  Perhaps best remembered for his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), the first of the great ballad collections; possibly the one work most responsible for the ballad revival in English poetry that was a significant part of the Romantic movement.

Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) excerpt

• Over the mountains,
  And over the waves,
  Over the fountains,
  And under the graves;
  Over the floods that are deepest,
  Which do Neptune obey;
  Over the rocks that are steepest,
  Love will find out the way.
  • “Love Will Find Out the Way”; in its published form this is suspected to have been extensively written by Percy himself; it was later used by Pierre de Beaumarchais in Act III of The Marriage of Figaro (1778).

Today is the birthday of James Ensor (James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor; Ostend, Belgium; 13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949 Ostend); painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.

During the late 19th century, much of Ensor’s work was rejected as scandalous, particularly his painting Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (1888–89). The Belgian art critic Octave Maus famously summed up the response from contemporaneous art critics to Ensor’s innovative (and often scathingly political) work: “Ensor is the leader of a clan. Ensor is the limelight. Ensor sums up and concentrates certain principles which are considered to be anarchistic. In short, Ensor is a dangerous person who has great changes. … He is consequently marked for blows. It is at him that all the harquebuses are aimed. It is on his head that are dumped the most aromatic containers of the so-called serious critics.”[citation needed] Some of Ensor’s contemporaneous work reveals his defiant response to this criticism. For example, the 1887 etching “Le Pisseur” depicts the artist urinating on a graffitied wall declaring (in the voice of an art critic) “Ensor est un fou” or “Ensor is a Madman.”

Ensor’s paintings continued to be exhibited and he gradually won acceptance and acclaim. In 1895 his painting The Lamp Boy (1880) was acquired by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and he had his first solo exhibition in Brussels.  By 1920 he was the subject of major exhibitions; in 1929 he was named a Baron by King Albert, and was the subject of the Belgian composer Flor Alpaerts’s James Ensor Suite; and in 1933 he was awarded the band of the Légion d’honneur. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after considering Ensor’s 1887 painting Tribulations of Saint Anthony (now in MoMA’s collection), declared Ensor the boldest painter working at that time.

As Ensor’s production of new works was diminishing, he increasingly concentrated on music—although he had no musical training, he was a gifted improviser on the harmonium, and spent much time performing for visitors.  Against the advice of friends, he remained in Ostend during World War II despite the risk of bombardment. In his old age, he was an honored figure among Belgians, and his daily walk made him a familiar sight in Ostend.  He died there following a short illness, on 19 November 1949 at the age of 89.

Gallery

Naissance de Vénus

Skeletons Warming Themselves (1889) oil on canvas, 74.8 x 60 cm., Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth

The Wait

Death and the Masks

Today is the birthday of Samuel Beckett (Samuel Barclay Beckett, Dublin, 3 April 1906 – 22 December 1989 Paris); avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French.  In my opinion, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.  Beckett’s work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour, and became increasingly minimalist in his later career.  He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what has been called the “Theatre of the Absurd”.  Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature “for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation.”

The 1960s were a time of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil in a secret civil ceremony in England (its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law). The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1957, he had his first commission from the BBC Third Programme for a radio play, All That Fall. He continued writing sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema and television. He began to write in English again, although he also wrote in French until the end of his life. He bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet about 60 kilometres (40 mi) northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals.

From the late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray, a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC. Knowlson wrote of them: “She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of a relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life.”  Barbara Bray died in Edinburgh on 25 February 2010.

In 1969 the avant-garde filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim shot an experimental short film portrait about Beckett, which he named after the writer.

In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett heard that he had won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature. Anticipating that her intensely private husband would be saddled with fame from that moment on, Suzanne called the award a “catastrophe”.  While Beckett did not devote much time to interviews, he sometimes met the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques in Paris – where he gave his appointments and took frequently his lunches – near his Montparnasse home.  Although Beckett was an intensely private man, a review of the second volume of his letters by Roy Foster on 15 December 2011 issue of The New Republic reveals Beckett to be not only unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his work and the process behind it.

Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson’s disease, Beckett died on 22 December. The two were interred together in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett’s directive that it should be “any colour, so long as it’s grey”.

Beckett wrote:

“Where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

“My mistakes are my life.”

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”

“Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order.”

who may tell the tale
of the old man?
weigh absence in a scale?
mete want with a span?
the sum assess
of the world’s woes?
nothingness
in words enclose?

From Watt (1953)

Bid us sigh on from day to day,
And wish and wish the soul away,
Till youth and genial years are flown,
And all the life of life is gone.

• Watt, Addenda, p. 248

From Rockaby (1980)

• Yes, in my life, since we must call it so, there were three things, the inability to speak, the inability to be silent, and solitude, that’s what I’ve had to make the best of. 
  • The Unnameable (1954)

.

Today is the birthday of Eudora Welty (Eudora Alice Welty, Jackson, Mississippi April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001 Jackson, Mississippi); short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South.  Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973.  Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among numerous awards including the Order of the South.  She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America.  Her house in Jackson has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum.

She continued to live in her family house in Jackson until her death from natural causes on July 23, 2001.  She is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Jackson. Her headstone has a quote from The Optimist’s Daughter: “For her life, any life, she had to believe, was nothing but the continuity of its love.”

“I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth: The thing to wait on, to reach for, is the moment in which people reveal themselves…”

“Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”

“I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.”

Today is the birthday of Seamus Heaney (Seamus Justin Heaney; Tamniaran, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, 13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013 Blackrock, Dublin); poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume.

He became a lecturer at St. Joseph’s College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen’s University and began to publish poetry.

Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996, was made a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 1998 was bestowed the title Saoi of the Aosdána. Other awards that he received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry(2001), the T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2011, he was awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize and in 2012, a Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust. His literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.

Heaney met Marie Devlin, a native of Ardboe, County Tyrone, while at St Joseph’s in 1962; they married in August 1965.  A school teacher and writer, Devlin published Over Nine Waves (1994), a collection of traditional Irish myths and legends. Heaney’s first book, Eleven Poems, was published in November 1965 for the Queen’s University Festival.

His body is buried at the Cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, Bellaghy, Northern Ireland. The headstone bears the epitaph “Walk on air against your better judgement”, from one of his poems, “The Gravel Walks”.

—from “Joy Or Night: Last Things in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats and Philip Larkin“

The Cure at Troy

• Human beings suffer,
  they torture one another,
  they get hurt and get hard.
  No poem or play or song
  can fully right a wrong
  inflicted or endured.
  • “Doubletake” from The Cure at Troy (1990) – The Cure at Troy excerpts

• History says don’t hope
  On this side of the grave.
  But then, once in a lifetime
  The longed for tidal wave
  Of justice can rise up
  And hope and history rhyme.
  So hope for a great sea-change
  on the far side of revenge.
  Believe that a further shore
  is reachable from here.
  Believe in miracles
  and cures and healing wells.
  • “Doubletake”, from The Cure at Troy (1990)

• Call the miracle self-healing:
  The utter self-revealing
  double-take of feeling.
  If there’s fire on the mountain
  Or lightning and storm
  And a god speaks from the sky
• That means someone is hearing
  the outcry and the birth-cry
  of new life at its term.
  • “Doubletake”, from The Cure at Troy (1990)

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eudora welty, james ensor, samuel beckett, seamus heaney, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, thomas percy

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

today’s theme had to be
about desire as tribute
to Madame Bovary
“Knowing you,
I would’ve been
disappointed otherwise”
could have been about
the recurrin’ theme,
c’est la faute de la fatalité
“Interesting, and how
that applies to us”
somethin’ brought us here
lets give thanks for the “fault”

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by the best part
the ante

the words rollin’
lengthenin’ feelin’s

comin’ on, a song,
each note carryin’
us closer

by the best part,
afterwards,
so intense
it is difficult
to understand
the nothin’ness
that came before
and we cannot help
but resign ourselves
to believe it

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

by unbound
imagination
and curiosity

by smiles,
eyes full of light,
and graceful hands

by desire for livin’
beyond ordinary

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

she turned me on
to absinthe, opera,
and French poetry
i turned her on
to wide open spaces,
campfires, and first light
we turned each other on
to unbound desire
and crushin’ heartache

© copyright 2016 Mac tag all rights reserved

Illustration by Charles Léandre Madame Bovary, engraved by Eugène Decisy (fr). (Illustration without text on page 322: Emma as a transvestite at the ball) It was on this day in 1857 that Gustave Flaubert’s first novel Madame Bovary was published.  The book was almost an instant sensation, in part because of Flaubert’s new painstaking style of Realism, but also due to the sensational trial the book had already starred in.  When the novel was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between 1 October 1856 and 15 December 1856, public prosecutors attacked the novel for obscenity.  The resulting trial in January 1857 made the story notorious.  After Flaubert’s acquittal on 7 February 1857, Madame Bovary became a bestseller when it was published as a single volume.  The novel is now considered Flaubert’s masterpiece, as well as a seminal work of literary realism.  The story focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.  Selected Quotes: C’est la faute de la fatalité ! Phrase récurrente Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Editions Garnier Frères, coll. Classiques Garnier, 1955, partie 3, chap. XI, p. 323 […], la parole est un laminoir qui allonge toujours les sentiments. Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Editions Garnier Frères, coll. Classiques Garnier, 1955, partie 3, chap. I, p. 218 Le plus médiocre libertin a rêvé des sultanes, chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète. Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Eugène Fasquelle, 1905, p. 264 Cette lâche docilité qui est pour bien des femmes comme le châtiment tout à la fois la rançon de l’adultère Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Eugène Fasquelle, 1905, p. 314 Il y a toujours après la mort de quelqu’un comme une stupéfaction qui se dégage, tant il est difficile de comprendre cette survenue du néant et de se résigner à y croire. Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Eugène Fasquelle, 1905, p. 379 Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles, la dorure en reste aux mains. Madame Bovary (1857), Gustave Flaubert, éd. Editions Garnier Frères, coll. Classiques Garnier, 1955, partie 3, chap. VI, p. 263

Today is the birthday of Imogen Cunningham (Portland April 12, 1883 – June 23, 1976 San Francisco); photographer known for her botanical photography, nudes, and industrial landscapes.  Cunningham was a member of the California-based Group f/64, known for its dedication to the sharp-focus rendition of simple subjects.

On February 11, 1915, Cunningham married etching artist, printmaker and teacher Roi Partridge. The couple divorced in 1934.

Cunningham continued to take photographs until shortly before her death. She was named Imogen after the heroine of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

Gallery

Martha graham

• 

  Dream 1910
• 

  Eve Repentant 1910
• 

  Cunnigham in cap and gown
• 

  Boy with Incense, 1912
• 

  Cunningham by Clare Shepard
• 

  In Moonlight, 1911
• 

  Morning Mist and Sunshine

And today is the birthday of Robert Delaunay (Paris 12 April 1885 – 25 October 1941 Montpellier); artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes.  His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee.  His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.

In 1908, after a term in the military working as a regimental librarian, he met Sonia Terk; at the time she was married to a German art dealer whom she would soon divorce. In 1909, Delaunay began to paint a series of studies of the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower, the Eiffel Tower series.  The following year, he married Terk, and the couple settled in a studio apartment.

When World War II erupted, the Delaunays moved to the Auvergne, in an effort to avoid the invading German forces.  Suffering from cancer, Delaunay was unable to endure being moved around, and his health deteriorated. He died from cancer on 25 October 1941 in Montpellier at the age of 56. His body was reburied in 1952 in Gambais.

Gallery

“Portrait of Madame Heim”

Femme portugaise (1915), Columbus Museum of Art

Nu à la toilette (Nu à la coiffeuse)

Simultaneous Windows on the City, 1912,

Portrait de Jean Metzinger, 1906, oil on canvas, 55 x 43 cm

Paysage au disque, 1906–07, oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm, Musée national d’art moderne (MNAM), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Champs de Mars, La Tour rouge, 1911, Art Institute of Chicago.

Simultaneous Contrasts: Sun and Moon, 1912–13, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art

Le Premier Disque, 1912-1913, oil on canvas, 134 x 52.7 inches, Private collection

• 

  c.1907, Nature morte au vase de fleurs, oil on canvas, 46.4 x 55 cm

• 

  1906, Jean Metzinger, oil on paper, 43.2 x 54.9 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

• 

  1905–06, Autoportrait, oil on canvas, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris

• 

  1906, Carousel of Pigs, oil on canvas, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  1906, L’homme à la tulipe (Portrait de M. Jean Metzinger), oil on canvas, 72.4 x 48.5 cm (28 1/2 by 19 1/8 in).

• 

  1907, Portrait of Wilhelm Uhde. Delaunay and Sonia Terk met through the German collector/dealer Wilhelm Uhde, with whom Sonia had been married as she said for “convenience”

• 

  1909-10, Saint-Séverin No. 3, oil on canvas, 114.1 × 88.6 cm, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  1911-12, Window on the City No. 3, oil on canvas, 113.7 × 130.8 cm (44.8 × 51.5 in), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  1912, Windows Open Simultaneously 1st Part, 3rd Motif, oil on canvas, 57 × 123 cm (22.4 × 48.4 in), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  1913, L’Équipe de Cardiff, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

• 

  1913, L’Équipe de Cardiff, oil on canvas, 326 × 208 cm, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

• 

  1915, Nu à la toilette (Nu à la coiffeuse), oil on canvas, 140 × 142 cm, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

• 

  1916, Portuguese Woman, oil on canvas, 135.9 × 161 cm, Columbus Museum of Art

• 

  1926-28, Eiffel Tower, Conté crayon on paper, 62.3 × 47.5 cm (24.5 × 18.7 in), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Hilla Rebay Collection

• 

  1926, Tour Eiffel, oil on canvas, 169 × 86 cm, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

• 

  1930, Circular Forms, oil on canvas, 67.3 × 109.8 cm (26.5 × 43.2 in), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift by Andrew Powie Fuller and Geraldine Spreckels Fuller Collection, 1999

• 

  1938, Rythme n°1, Decoration for the Salon des Tuileries, oil on canvas, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

   

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gustave flaubert, imogen cunningham, madame bovary, robert delaunay, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.

Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

“I’m guessing not the age of”
ha, no but we could write a song
of a new era that began
when we saw each other
on Ponce for the first time
“Little did we know what
we were walking towards”
the accouchement, the sun risin’
as we had never seen or known
the dawnin’ of the age of us

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© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a song of want
and what could be

this sentiment holds
through the nights

such a task to find

blessed here
and there
to have seen,
to have been
to the edge
and back

someday perhaps
rememberin’ this
as the beginnin’

have we
endured and kept
ourselves for days
long delayed

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2018.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

before sleep,
watchin’ the light
from the moon
move across the floor
though there is no
love’s even breathin’
lullaby for me,
there is much
to be grateful for

the muses and the verse they bring
the wind outside bringin’ music
for the night, the dawnin’ promise
of solitude, and the possibility
that hope did not go to hell

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

On this day in 1689, perhaps; the premiere performance of Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas” in Chelsea at Josias Priest’s School for Young Ladies.  The exact date and circumstance of this work, in my opinion the first great British opera and Purcell’s masterwork, remains uncertain. April 30th is also cited as a possibility for its premiere, being the date of Queen Mary’s birthday.  The premiere occurred sometime that year, as the libretto by Nahum Tate was published in London that December.

Three years earlier Tate had written a poem that compared the deposed Catholic King James II to Aeneas, and constructed an allegory implying that James had been led astray by witches, the result being that he abandoned the British people, just as the legendary Trojan Prince Aeneas had abandoned Queen Dido of Carthage in order to found a new empire in Rome.  Since the Catholic King James II had also fled to Rome, some have speculated that Purcell’s opera was a political allegory, commissioned by Mr. Priest’s School for Young Ladies to celebrate either the coronation or birthday of the new Protestant Queen.

The story is based on Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid.  It recounts the love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, for the Trojan hero Aeneas, and her despair when he abandons her.

And today is the birthday of Jean-Baptiste Isabey (Nancy, France 11 April 1767 – 18 April 1855); painter.  He was a successful artist, both under the First Empire and to the diplomats of the Congress of Vienna.

At the age of nineteen, after some lessons from Dumont, miniature painter to Marie Antoinette, he became a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. Employed at Versailles on portraits of the dukes of Angoulême and Berry, he was given a commission by the queen, which opens the long list of those he received from successive French rulers until his death.

Patronized by Josephine and Napoleon Bonaparte, he arranged the ceremonies of their coronation and prepared drawings for the publication intended as its official commemoration, a work for which he was paid by Louis XVIII, whose portrait (engraved by Debucourt) he executed in 1814. Although Isabey did homage to Napoleon on his return from Elba, he continued to enjoy the favour of the Restoration, and took part in arrangements for the coronation of Charles X.

The July Monarchy conferred on him an important post in connection with the royal collections, and Napoleon III granted him a pension, and the cross of commander of the Legion of Honor.

A biography of Isabey was published by Edmond Taigny in 1859, and Charles Lenormant’s article, written for Michaud’s Biog. Univ., is founded on facts furnished by Isabey’s family.

Gallery

Portrait of a woman

Eugénie Moreau

Mac Tag

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dido and aeneas, henry purcell, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle