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Thomas Hardy
Hardy between about 1910 and 1915

Today is the birthday of Thomas Hardy (Stinsford, Dorset 2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928 Dorchester, Dorset); novelist and poet.  A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth.  Charles Dickens was another important influence.  Like Dickens, he was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.  While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898.  Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895).  Hardy’s poetry, though prolific, was not as well received during his lifetime.  It was rediscovered in the 1950s, when Hardy’s poetry had a significant influence on the Movement poets of the 1950s and 1960s.

In 1874, he fell in love with and married Emma Lavinia Gifford, but he later became estranged from her.  After her death, he married his much younger secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale.  But he felt intensely remorseful about the estrangement from Emma, and his Poems 1912-1913 were elegies for her and explorations of his grief.  A biographer of Hardy called the collection “one of the finest and strangest celebrations of the dead in English poetry”.

Verse

Florence Hardy at the seaside

When I set out for Lyonnesse,
A hundred miles away,
The rime was on the spray,
And starlight lit my lonesomeness.

Whence comes solace? Not from seeing,
What is doing, suffering, being;
Not from noting Life’s conditions,
Not from heeding Time’s monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream
And in gazing at the Gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.

• “On a Fine Morning” (1899), lines 1-7, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)

• We two kept house, the Past and I,
  The Past and I;
  I tended while it hovered nigh,
  Leaving me never alone.
  • “The Ghost of the Past”, lines 1-4, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

• In a solitude of the sea
  Deep from human vanity,
  And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
  • “The Convergence of the Twain” (Lines on the loss of the Titanic) (1912), lines 1-3, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

• “The Voice” (1912), lines 1-4, from Satires of Circumstance (1914)

Today is the birthday of Paul-Albert Besnard (Paris 2 June 1849 – 4 December 1934) was a French painter and printmaker.

A great virtuoso, he achieved brilliant successes alike in watercolour, pastel, oil and etching, both in portraiture, in landscape and in decoration. His close analysis of light can be studied in his picture La femme qui se chauffe at the Luxembourg in Paris, one of a large group of nude studies of which a later example is Une Nymphe au bord de la mer; and in the work produced during and after a visit to India in 1911. A large panel, Peace by Arbitration, was completed seven days before the outbreak of war in 1914.

Gallery

La vérité qui guide les sciences tout en diffusant la lumière

“La Nuque”