Today is the birthday of Clarkson Frederick Stanfield (Sunderland, England 3 December 1793 – 18 May 1867 Hampstead, London); marine painter.

Nino Rota Rinaldi

Today is the birthday of Giovanni “Nino” Rota (Milan 3 December 1911 – 10 April 1979 Rome); composer, pianist, conductor and academic perhaps best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti.  He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli’s Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, receiving the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II (1974).

During his long career Rota was a prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema.  He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death.  An average of three scores each year over a 46-year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954.  Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works.  He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo De Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.

It was on this day in 1947 that the play A Streetcar Named Desire premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City.  Tennessee Williams began writing the play three years earlier, during rehearsals for The Glass Menagerie (1945).  While living in Mexico, he kept working on a story about a dreamy, possibly mentally ill Southern belle named Blanche who comes to live with her sister, Stella, and Stella’s violent husband, Stanley.  Early titles included The Moth, The Poker Night, and Blanche’s Chair in the Moon.

The play’s depictions of sexuality and violence onstage shocked the audience, but at the end of the evening, the applause lasted 30 minutes.  In the New York Times, theater critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “This must be one of the most perfect marriages of acting and playwriting.”

The play starred a handsome 23-year-old named Marlon Brando from Omaha, Nebraska.  About Brando, who came to see him at his home in Provincetown, Williams said, “There was no point in discovering him, it was so obvious. I never saw such raw talent in an individual. He was very natural and helpful. He repaired the plumbing that had gone on the whack, and he repaired the lights that had gone off. And then he just sat calmly down and began to read. After five minutes, Margo Jones, who was staying with us, said, ‘Oh, this is the greatest reading I’ve ever heard, even in Texas!’ And that’s how he was cast in Streetcar.”

Brando went on to portray several iconic film characters, like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now (1979) (see above) and Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972).  He says he learned how to play Stanley Kowalski by watching boxer Rocky Graziano during his gym practices.  Brando gave Graziano two tickets to A Streetcar Named Desire.  After watching the play, Graziano exclaimed, “The curtain went up and on the stage is that son of a bitch from the gym, and he’s playing me!”

 When Stanley Kowalski cries in agony for his wife in the rain, tearing his shirt in distress, Brando dragged out her name in one long plea: “Steeeeellllllaaaaaa!”  It has become such a famous interpretation that it has been referenced in film and on television shows.  There is even an annual competition in New Orleans called “The Stanley & Stella Shouting Contest,” also known as the “Stell-Off.”  It takes place in Jackson Square in the French Quarter and winners get bowling alley passes and beer.

On writing A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams said: “A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she’d been stood up by the man she planned to marry.”

The streetcar took its name from Desire Street in the 9th Ward of New Orleans

Blanche DuBois

• The first time I got laid my eyes on her told the story I thought to myself, “That man is my executioner!”

• Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing in my opinion and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty.

• I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic. I try to give that to people. I do misrepresent things. I don’t tell truths. I tell what ought to be truth.

• Tarantula was the name of it! I stayed at a hotel called the Tarantula Arms! Yes, a big spider. That’s where I brought my victims. Yes, I have had many meetings with strangers. After the death of Allan, meetings with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with. I think it was panic — just panic — that drove me from one to another, searching for some protection. Here, there and then in the most unlikely places. Then, at last, in a seventeen-year-old boy. But someone wrote to the superintendent about it: “This woman is morally unfit for her position!” True? Yes… unfit somehow anyway.

• Whoever you are: I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.

Stanley Kowalski

• Stella. Hey, STELLA!

• You know what luck is? Luck is believing you’re lucky, that’s all… To hold a front position in this rat-race, you’ve got to believe you are lucky.

• Don’t you ever talk that way to me. “Pig,” “Polack,” “disgusting,” “vulgar,” “greasy” — those kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister’s tongue just too much around here. What do you think you are, a pair of queens? Now just remember what Huey Long said — that every man’s a king — and I’m the king around here, and don’t you forget it.

• Listen, baby, when we first met — you and me — you thought I was common. Well, how right you was. I was common as dirt. You showed me a snapshot of the place with them columns, and I pulled you down off them columns, and you loved it, having them colored lights goin.’ And wasn’t we happy together? Wasn’t it all okay till she showed here? And wasn’t we happy together? Wasn’t it all okay till she showed here, hoity-toity, describin’ me like a ape?

Blanche DuBois

• [to Stanley] It won’t be the sort of thing you have in mind. This man is a gentleman – he respects me. What he wants is my companionship. Having great wealth sometimes makes people lonely. A cultivated woman – a woman of breeding and intelligence – can enrich a man’s life immeasurably. I have those things to offer, and time doesn’t take them away. Physical beauty is passing – a transitory possession. But beauty of the mind, richness of the spirit, tenderness of the heart – I have all those things – aren’t taken away but grow! Increase with the years! Oh! Strange that I should be called a destitute woman when I have all these treasures locked in my heart. I think of myself as a very, very rich woman. But I have been foolish – casting my pearls before….swine. Yes, swine! And I’m thinking not only of you, but of your friend Mr. Mitchell. He came here tonight, he did, coming in his work clothes, to repeat slander, vicious stories he’d gotten from you. I gave him his walking papers. But then he returned, he returned with a box of roses to beg my forgiveness. He implored my forgiveness. Some things are not forgivable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable. It is the one unforgivable thing, in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, never been guilty. So I said to him, ‘Thank you,’ but it was foolish to think that we could ever adapt ourselves to each other. Our ways of life are too different. Our backgrounds are incompatible. So farewell, my friend and let there be no hard feelings.

Dialogue

Blanche: You’re married to a madman.

Stella: I wish you’d stop taking it for granted that I’m in something I want to get out of.

Blanche: What you are talking about is desire, just brutal desire. The name of that rattle-trap streetcar that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another.

Stella: Haven’t you ever ridden on that streetcar?

Blanche: It brought me here, where I’m not wanted and where I’m ashamed to be.

Stella: Don’t you think your superior attitude is a little out of place?

Blanche: May I speak plainly?… If you’ll forgive me, he’s common… He’s like an animal. He has an animal’s habits. There’s even something subhuman about him. Thousands of years have passed him right by, and there he is. Stanley Kowalski, survivor of the Stone Age, bearing the raw meat home from the kill in the jungle. And you — you here waiting for him. Maybe he’ll strike you or maybe grunt and kiss you — that is, if kisses have been discovered yet. His “poker night” you call it. This party of apes. Maybe we are a long way from being made in God’s image, but Stella, my sister, there’s been some progress since then. Such things as art, as poetry, as music. In some kinds of people, some tenderer feelings have had some little beginning that we have got to make grow and to cling to, and hold as our flag in this dark march toward whatever it is we’re approaching. Don’t, don’t hang back with the brutes!

Georges Seurat
Georges Seurat, 1888

Today is the birthday of Georges-Pierre Seurat (Paris 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891 Paris); post-Impressionist painter and draftsman.  He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism.  Seurat’s artistic personality showed both extreme and delicate sensibility; and a passion for logical abstraction.  His large-scale work, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886), altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.

Seurat concealed his relationship with Madeleine Knobloch (or Madeleine Knoblock, 1868–1903), an artist’s model whom he portrayed in his painting Jeune femme se poudrant.  In 1889 she moved in with Seurat in his studio on the 7th floor of 128bis Boulevard de Clichy.

When Madeleine became pregnant, the couple moved to a studio at 39 passage de l’Élysée-des-Beaux-Arts (now rue André Antoine).

Seurat died in Paris in his parents’ home at the age of 31.  The cause of his death is uncertain, and has been variously attributed to a form of meningitis, pneumonia, infectious angina, and diphtheria.  His last ambitious work, The Circus, was left unfinished at the time of his death.

30 March 1891 a commemorative service was held in the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul.  Seurat was interred 31 March 1891 at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise.

• 

  The Suburbs, 1882–83, Musée d’art moderne de Troyes

• 

  Fishing in The Seine, 1883, Musée d’art moderne de Troyes

• 

  The Laborers 1883, National Gallery of Art Washington, DC.

• 

  Study for A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–85, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  Bathers at Asnières, 1884, National Gallery, London

• 

  View of Fort Samson 1885, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

• 

  Circus Sideshow (Parade de Cirque), 1887–88, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

• 

  The Seine and la Grande Jatte – Springtime 1888, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

• 

  Les Poseuses (The Models), 1888, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

  

  The Eiffel Tower 1889, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

• 

  The Circus, 1891, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

• 

  Child in White, 1884-85, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Seated Nude, Study for Une Baignade, 1883, Scottish National Gallery

• 

  L’Écho, study for Une Baignade, Asnières (Bathing Place, Asnières), Yale University Art Gallery

• 

  Joueur de trombone (Study for Parade de cirque), private collection

Today is the birthday of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (Karl Schmidt until 1905; Rottluff; 1 December 1884 –10 August 1976 Berlin); expressionist painter and printmaker; he was one of the four founders of the artist group Die Brücke.

Gallery

Emy mit Anemonen, 1940
Brücke-Museum, Berlin

Lectrice

Woman with a Bag by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1915)

Thoughtful Woman 1912

Double Portrait 1919

Today is the birthday of Violette Verdy (born Nelly Armande Guillerm in Pont-l’Abbé, a seacoast town in the Finistère department of Brittany, in northwestern France; 1 December 1933 – 8 February 2016 Bloomington, Indiana); ballerina, choreographer, teacher, and writer who worked as a dance company director with the Paris Opera Ballet in France and the Boston Ballet in the United States. From 1958 to 1977 she was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet where she performed in the world premieres of several works created specifically for her by choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. She was Distinguished Professor of Music (Ballet) at the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, in Bloomington, and the recipient of two medals from the French government.

by Carl Van Vechten

by Martha Swope

by Martha Swope

Mac Tag

William-Adolphe Bouguereau
Portrait of the Artist (1879)

Today is the birthday of William-Adolphe Bouguereau (La Rochelle, France; November 30, 1825 – August 19, 1905 La Rochelle); academic painter and traditionalist.  In his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.  As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde.  By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes.  In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work.  Throughout the course of his life, Bouguereau executed 822 known finished paintings, although the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

In 1856, he married Marie-Nelly Monchablon.  In 1877, she died.  Bouguereau was married for the second time in 1896, to fellow artist Elizabeth Jane Gardner, one of his pupils.

Gallery 

La Nymphée

• 

  The Bather – Baigneuse (1879)

• 

  After the Bath (1875)

• 

  Baigneuse (1825-1905)

• 

  Baigneuse (1825-1905)

• 

  Les Deux Baigneuses (1884)

• 

  Innocence

• 

  Soir, Evening or Evening Mood

• 

  L’Aurore or Dawn

• 

  Psyche

• 

  Bacchante (1894)

•  
• 

  Fraternal Love (1851)

• 

  The Day of the Dead (1859)

• 

  Charity (1859)

• 

  The Haymaker (1869)

• 

  Italian Girl Drawing Water (1871)

• 

  Les murmures de l’Amour (1889)

• 

  Charity (1878)

• 

  A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros (1880)

• 

  Song of the Angels (1881)

• 

  Biblis (1884)

• 

  Seated Nude (1884)

• 

  The First Mourning (1888)

• 

  The Invasion (1892)

• 

  Gabrielle Cot, daughter of Pierre Auguste Cot – 1890

• 

  A Little Coaxing (1890)

• 

  Inspiration (1898)

Folies Bergère

2013, after renovation of facade (originally created in 1926)

The Folies Bergère is a cabaret music hall, located in Paris, France.  Established in 1869, the house was at the height of its fame and popularity from the 1890s’ Belle Époque through the Golden Twenties.  The institution is still in business, and is still a strong symbol of French and Parisian life.

Located at 32 rue Richer in the 9th Arrondissement, the Folies Bergère was built as an opera house by the architect Plumeret.  It opened on 2 May 1869 as the Folies Trévise, with light entertainment including operettas, opéra comique (comic opera), popular songs, and gymnastics.  It became the Folies Bergère on 13 September 1872, named after a nearby street, the rue Bergère (“bergère” means “shepherdess”).  The American impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., named his light-hearted, extravagant Broadway revues the Ziegfeld Follies (1907-1931), after the venue.

In 1882, Édouard Manet painted his well-known painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère which depicts a bar-girl, one of the demimondaines, standing before a mirror.

In 1886, Édouard Marchand conceived a new genre of entertainment for the Folies Bergère: the music-hall revue.  Women would be the heart of Marchand’s concept for the Folies.

Today is the birthday of Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (Bergamo, Lombardy; 29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848 Bergamo); composer.  Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, Donizetti was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Donizetti attended the Bologna Academy, where, at the age of 19, he wrote his first one-act opera, the comedy Il Pigmalione.  Over the course of his career, Donizetti wrote almost 70 operas.  An offer in 1822 from Domenico Barbaja, the impresario of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples, which followed the composer’s ninth opera, led to his move to that city and his residency there which lasted until the production of Caterina Cornaro in January 1844.  In all, Naples presented 51 of Donizetti’s operas.

By 1827/28, three important elements in Donizetti’s professional and personal life came together:  Firstly, he met and began to work with the librettist Domenico Gilardoni who wrote eleven librettos for him, beginning with Otto mesi in due ore in 1827 and continuing until 1833.  Next, the Naples impresario Barbaja engaged him to write twelve new operas during the following three years.  In addition, he was to be appointed to the position of Director of the Royal Theatres of Naples beginning in 1829, a job that the composer accepted and held until 1838.

Finally, in May 1827 he announced his engagement to Virginia Vasselli, the daughter of the Roman family who had befriended him there and who was then 18 years old.  The couple were married in July 1828 and immediately settled in a new home in Naples.  Within two months he had written another opera semiseria, Gianni di Calais, from a libretto by Gilardoni.  It was their fourth collaboration, and became a success not only in Naples but also in Rome over the 1830/31 season.

Initially, Donizetti was buried in the cemetery of Valtesse but in the late 19th century his body was transferred to Bergamo’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore near the grave of his teacher Simon Mayr. 

Virginia Vasselli, wife of Donizetti, c. 1820

And today is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott (Germantown, Pennsylvania; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888 Boston, Massachusetts); novelist and poet perhaps best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Alcott’s family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and crossdressers.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Alcott’s childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children’s novel today, filmed several times.

Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. So, talented writer and smart. I think I am in love.

She died from a stroke, two days after her father died, in Boston on March 6, 1888.

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

• “Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?”
  “Go away and–”
  He interrupted with a triumphant laugh, “Die as heroines always do, tender slaves as they are.”
  “No, live and forget you”, was the unexpected reply.
  • Phillip and Rosamund, p. 46.

• I tell you I cannot bear it! I shall do something desperate if this life is not changed soon. It gets worse and worse, and I often feel as if I’d gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom.

• ‘In the fitful light of the dusky hall the newcomer’s face suddenly appeared fiery-eyed and menacing, and, glancing at a portrait of Mephistopheles, Rosamond exclaimed, “Why, you are the very image of Meph–“

• No, I never wish that. I don’t intend to die till I’ve enjoyed my life. Everyone has a right to happiness and sooner or later I will have it. Youth, health and freedom were meant to be enjoyed and I want to try every pleasure before I am too old to enjoy them.

• Even at the cost of what is called honor and honesty? That is comfortable philosophy, and having preached and practiced it all my days I’ve no right to condemn it. But the saints would call it sinful and dangerous and tell you that life should be one long penance full of sorrow, sacrifice and psalm-singing.

• For an hour Rosamond paced up and down the deck reveling in the breezy motion of the boat, the delicious sense of freedom which possessed her, the atmosphere of romance which surrounded her. Tempest lounged beside her, watching her beautiful face, listening to her happy voice, and enjoying her innocent companionship with the relish of a man eager for novelty and skillful in the art of playing on that delicate instrument, a woman’s heart.

• I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.

• Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?

• I mean that it is more natural for me to be wicked than virtuous, when I do a bad act, and I’ve done many, I never feel wither shame, remorse or fear, I sometimes wish it was not necessary as I don’t like the trouble, but as for any moral sense of principle, I haven’t a particle. Many people are like me as actions prove, but they are not so frank in owning it and insist on keeping up the humbug of virtue. You’ll find that is true, Rose, when you know the world better.

• Not another day or hour would she remain, no help was possible, no atonement could retrieve the past, no love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man. To go instantly and forever was her only thought, and this gave her strength to rise and look about her.

• Back to him she would never go, but in her lonely life still lived the sweet memory of that happy time when she believed in him and he was all in all to her.

• The sin is yours, but the shame and sorrow are mine, the past I cannot retrieve, the future is still unspoiled and I will not embitter it by any willful sin. Before I was innocently guilty, now I should be doubly guilty if I went back to the ‘gay free life I love.’ Atone for the wrong you have done me by ceasing to tempt and trouble me. I will not yield, though you hunt me to death.

• In vain she told herself that he was unworthy any woman’s trust and love, still the unconquerable sentiment that once made her happiness now remained to become her torment.

• Because in spite of this longing, I know that I shall purchase happiness at high price if I return; that new falsehood may betray me, new tyranny oppress me, and above all I feel that with this man I must lose more and more the love of all good things, so strong is his influence, so unprincipled his nature. My only hope is that I may save his soul and yet not lose my own. Can I, dare I do this?

• I must know where you are, but I will not molest nor betray you till the time arrives. Go where you like, assume what disguise you choose, do what you please, except die or marry. I’ll stand off and watch the play, but I must follow. I like the chase, it is exciting, novel and absorbing. I have tried and tried of other amusements, this satisfies me and I am in no haste to end it.

William Blake
portrait by Thomas Phillips (1807)

Today is the birthday of William Blake (Soho, London 28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827 Charing Cross, London); poet, painter, and printmaker.  In my opinion, one of the seminal figures in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.  His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as “Pre-Romantic”.  Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England, Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions.  The singularity of Blake’s work makes him difficult to classify.

Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782 when he was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal.  He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, “Do you pity me?”  When she responded affirmatively, he declared, “Then I love you.”  Blake married Catherine – who was five years his junior – on 18 August 1782 in St Mary’s Church, Battersea.  Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X.  Later, in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver.  Throughout his life she proved an invaluable aid, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes. 

Blake is sometimes considered (along with Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin) a forerunner of the 19th-century “free love” movement, a broad reform tradition starting in the 1820s that held that marriage is slavery, and advocated the removal of all state restrictions on sexual activity such as homosexuality, prostitution, and adultery, culminating in the birth control movement of the early 20th century.  Blake was critical of the marriage laws of his day, and generally railed against traditional Christian notions of chastity as a virtue.  At a time of tremendous strain in his marriage, in part due to Catherine’s apparent inability to bear children, he directly advocated bringing a second wife into the house.  His poetry suggests that external demands for marital fidelity reduce love to mere duty rather than authentic affection, and decries jealousy and egotism as a motive for marriage laws.  Poems such as “Why should I be bound to thee, O my lovely Myrtle-tree?” and “Earth’s Answer” seem to advocate multiple sexual partners.  In his poem “London” he speaks of “the Marriage-Hearse” plagued by “the youthful Harlot’s curse”, the result alternately of false Prudence and/or Harlotry.  Visions of the Daughters of Albion can be read as a tribute to free love since the relationship between Bromion and Oothoon is held together only by laws and not by love.  For Blake, law and love are opposed, and he castigates the “frozen marriage-bed”. In Visions, Blake writes:

Till she who burns with youth, and knows no fixed lot, is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes? and must she drag the chain
Of life in weary lust? (5.21-3, E49)

Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car

Lope de Vega
Portrait of Lope de Vega

Today is the birthday of Félix Lope de Vega y Carpio (Madrid; 25 November 1562 – 27 August 1635 Madrid); playwright, poet and novelist.  He was one of the key figures in the Spanish Golden Century of Baroque literature.  His reputation in the world of Spanish literature is second only to that of Miguel de Cervantes, while the sheer volume of his literary output is unequalled, making him one of the most prolific authors in the history of literature.

Nicknamed: Fénix de los Ingenios (The Phoenix of Wits) and Monstruo de la Naturaleza (Prodigy of Nature) by Cervantes, Lope de Vega renewed the Spanish theatre at a time when it was starting to become a mass cultural phenomenon.  He is regarded as one of the greatest dramatists in Western literature, his plays still being produced worldwide.  He was also one of the best lyric poets in the Spanish language, and author of several novels.  Some 3,000 sonnets, 3 novels, 4 novellas, 9 epic poems, and about 500 plays are attributed to him.

Verse

Huir el rostro al claro desengaño,
beber veneno por licor süave,
olvidar el provecho, amar el daño;
creer que un cielo en un infierno cabe,
dar la vida y el alma a un desengaño;
esto es amor. Quien lo probó lo sabe.

• To turn your face from clear proofs of deceit,
  To drink poison as if it were a soothing liquor,
  To disregard gain and delight in being injured.
  To believe that heaven can lie contained in hell;
  To devote your life and soul to being disillusioned;
  This is love; whoever has tasted it, knows.
• Sonnet, “Desmayarse, atreverse, estar furioso”, line 9, from Rimas (1602); cited from José Manuel Blecua (ed.) Lírica (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, [1981] 1999) p. 136. Translation from Eugenio Florit (ed.) Introduction to Spanish Poetry (New York: Dover, [1964] 1991) p. 65.

• Como las paga el vulgo, es justo
  hablarle en necio para darle gusto.
  • Since after all, it is the crowd who pays,
    Why not content them when you write your plays?
  • Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, line 47. (1609). Translation from Marvin A. Carlson Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, [1984] 1993) p. 62.

• Armonía es puro amor, porque el amor es concierto.
  • Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement.
  • Fuenteovejuna (1613), Barrildo, Act I.

• Lord, what am I, that, with unceasing care,
  Thou didst seek after me, — that Thou didst wait,
  Wet with unhealthy dews, before my gate,
  And pass the gloomy nights of winter there?
  • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 89.

La Dorotea (1632)

• A mis soledades voy,
  de mis soledades vengo,
  porque para andar conmigo
  me bastan mis pensamientos.
  • Lone I muse but feel not lonely,
    Covert solitude’s my lore;
    For my company I only
    Want my thoughts and nothing more.
  • Act I, sc. iv. Translation from John Armstrong Crow An Anthology of Spanish Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979) p. 107.

• Dijeron que antiguamente
  se fue la verdad al cielo;
  tal la pusieron los hombres,
  que desde entonces no ha vuelto.
  En dos edades vivimos
  los propios y los ajenos:
  la de plata los estraños,
  y la de cobre los nuestros.
  • In ancient days they said truth had fled to heaven: attacked on every side, it’s not been heard of since. We live in different ages, non-Spaniards and ourselves: they in the age of silver, we in the age of brass.
  • Act I, sc. iv. Translation from Alan S. Trueblood and Edwin Honig (ed. and trans.) La Dorotea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) p. 23.

• Pero la vida es corta:
  viviendo, todo falta;
  muriendo, todo sobra.
  • But life is short: while one lives, everything is lacking; when one is dead, everything is superfluous.
  • Act III, sc. vii. Translation from Arthur Terry Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) p. 118.

Today is the birthday of Maurice Denis (in Granville, Manche, a coastal town in the Normandy region of France; 25 November 1870 – 13 November 1943 Paris); painter, decorative artist and writer, who was an important figure in the transitional period between impressionism and modern art. He was associated with Les Nabis then the Symbolist movement, and then with a return to neo-classicism. His theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism, and abstract art. Following the First World War, he founded the Ateliers d’Art Sacré (Workshops of Sacred Art), decorated the interiors of churches, and worked for a revival of religious art.

A major event in the life of Denis was his meeting with Marthe Meurier in October 1890. From June 1891 they had a long romance, meticulously documented in his journal, and were married on 12 June 1893. She became an important part of his art, appearing in many pictures and also in decorative works, such painted fans, often as an idealized figure representing purity and love.

Beginning in 1891, shortly after his engagement, Denis made Marthe the most frequent subject of his paintings; she was depicted, in purified and idealized form, doing household tasks, taking naps, and at the dining room table. She appeared in his landscapes, and in his most ambitious works of the time, The series called The Muses, which he began in 1893, and showed at the Salon of Independents in 1893.

His wife played the piano, and throughout the 1890s Denis had a growing interest in the connections between music and art. He painted a portrait of her at the piano in 1890. He designed a flowing lithograph, featuring Marthe, for the cover for the sheet music of La Damoiselle élue by Claude Debussy, as well as another lithograph for the poem Pelléas et Mélisande by Maurice Maeterlinck, which Debussy transformed into an opera; and in 1894 he painted La Petit Air, based on the poem Princesse Maleine by Stéphane Mallarmé, the most prominent literary proponent of symbolism. In 1893 made a collaborative project with the writer André Gide, which combined art and literature; he provided a series of thirty lithographs to accompany a long essay by Gide, called Le Voyage d’Urien. The Lithographs did not illustrate the text, but approached the same topics from an artist’s point of view.

Another topic he addressed in this period was the relationship between sacred love and profane love. The painting had three female figures, two nude and one clothed, following the model of Le Concert Champêtre and L’Amour Sacré et L’Amour Profane of Titian and Déjeuner sur l’herbe by Manet. The setting is his own garden, with the viaduct of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the background. The nude figures represented sacred love, and he clothed figure profane love. He made another painting, this time of Marthe nude in the garden, representing both sacred and profane love in one figure.

Following Marthe’s death in 1919, Denis painted a chapel dedicated to her memory. He married again on February 22, 1922 to Elisabeth Graterolleore, whom he had used as a model for one of the figures in the cupola of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Elisabeth also features in several paintings of Denis, sometimes alongside Marthe.

Gallery

Wave

• 

  Self-portrait at the age of 18 (1889)

• 

  Climbing to Calvary (1889)

• 

  Le Mystere Catholique (1889)

• 

  Motif Romanesque (1890), Los Angeles County Museum of Art

• 

  September Evening, (1891), Musée d’Orsay

• 

  Marthe at the Piano (1891)

• 

  Triple Portrait of Marthe (1892)

• 

  Portrait of Marthe, (1893)

• 

  Nude with Bouquet of Violets (1894)

• 

  Painted screen with doves (1896), Musée d’Orsay

• 

  Stained glass window for private residence (1896)

• 

  Second panel from The Legend of St. Hubert(1895-97)

• 

  Portrait of Yvonne Lerolle in Three Aspects (1897)

• 

  Decoration for the Chapel of Sainte-Croix du Vésinet (1899)

• 

  Gioco del volano, Racket game on a lawn (1900)

• 

  Homage to Cézanne (1900)

• 

  Bacchus and Ariadne (1907), the Hermitage

• 

  Polyphemus (1907), Pushkin Museum, Moscow

• 

  Bathers at Perros Guirec (1912)

• 

  Wave (1916)

• 

  Frontispiece lithograph from the series Amour(1899)

• 

  The Story of Psyche, panel for mansion of Ivan Morozov, Moscow (1908)

• 

  Portion of the mural for the cupola of the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, Paris (1908-11)

• 

  Mural from the Church of Saint-Nicaise. Reims

Mac Tag