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Today is the birthday of Ilya Repin (Ilya Yefimovich RepinChuguyev, Russian Empire (now Ukraine); 5 August [O.S. 24 July] 1844 – 29 September 1930 Kuokkala, Viipuri Province, Finland); realist painter.  Perhaps the most renowned Russian artist of the 19th century.  He played a major role in bringing Russian art into the mainstream of European culture.  His works include Barge Haulers on the Volga (1873), Religious Procession in Kursk Province (1883) and Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–91).

 

1870s–1880s 

 

 

 

 

 

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Today is the birthday of Thomas John “Tom” Thomson (Claremont, Ontario; August 5, 1877 – July 8, 1917 Canoe Lake, Algonquin Park, Ontario); artist.  He directly influenced a group of Canadian painters that would come to be known as the Group of Seven, and though he died before they formally formed, he is sometimes incorrectly credited as being a member of the group itself.  Thomson died under mysterious circumstances on Canoe Lake in Algonquin Park.

 

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  Forest Undergrowth

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  The Jack Pine 1916–17

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  Pine Island, Georgian Bay

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  April in Algonquin Park 1917

   

Conrad Aiken

Today is the birthday of Conrad Aiken (Conrad Potter Aiken; Savannah, Georgia; August 5, 1889 – August 17, 1973 Savannah); writer, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, a play, and an autobiography.

He was married three times: first to Jessie McDonald (1912–1929); second to Clarissa Lorenz (1930) (author of a biography, Lorelei Two); and third to Mary Hoover (1937).  Aiken’s tomb, located in Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, on the banks of the Wilmington River, was made famous by its mention in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, the bestselling book by John Berendt.  According to local legend, Aiken wished to have his tombstone fashioned in the shape of a bench as an invitation to visitors to stop and enjoy a martini at his grave.  Its inscriptions read “Give my love to the world,” and “Cosmos Mariner—Destination Unknown.”

Verse

• Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk,
  speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble
  of all these syllables a single word
  before the purpose of speech is gone.
  • “This image or another”

• Separate we come, and separate we go, And this be it known, is all that we know.
  • Self written obituary in verse.

Discordants (1916)

Published in Turns and Movies and Other Tales in Verse (1916)

• Music I heard with you was more than music,
  And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
  Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
  All that was once so beautiful is dead.
  • I, This section is also known as “Bread and Music”

• My heart has become as hard as a city street,
  The horses trample upon it, it sings like iron,
  All day long and all night long they beat,
  They ring like the hooves of time.
  • II

• My heart is torn with the sound of raucous voices,
  They shout from the slums, from the streets, from the crowded places,
  And tunes from the hurdy-gurdy that coldly rejoices
  Shoot arrows into my heart.
  • II

• O sweet clean earth, from whom the green blade cometh!
  When we are dead, my best belovèd and I,
  Close well above us, that we may rest forever,
  Sending up grass and blossoms to the sky.
  • IV

All Lovely Things (1916)

• All lovely things will have an ending,
  All lovely things will fade and die,
  And youth, that’s now so bravely spending,
  Will beg a penny by and by.

• Come back, true love! Sweet youth, return!—
  But time goes on, and will, unheeding,
  Though hands will reach, and eyes will yearn,
  And the wild days set true hearts bleeding.

The House of Dust (1916 – 1917)

• The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
  The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
  And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.

• ‘I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
  I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
  I will hear them whisper, invisible in their veins . . .’
  The eternal asker of answers becomes as the darkness,
  Or as a wind blown over a myriad forest,
  Or as the numberless voices of long-drawn rains.

• We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
  Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .

• Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
  We have built a tower of stone high into the sky,
  We have built a city of towers.

• What did we build it for? Was it all a dream? . . .
  Ghostly above us in lamplight the towers gleam . . .
  And after a while they will fall to dust and rain;
  Or else we will tear them down with impatient hands;
  And hew rock out of the earth, and build them again.

• There, in the high bright window he dreams, and sees
  What we are blind to,—we who mass and crowd
  From wall to wall in the darkening of a cloud.

• Before him, numberless lovers smiled and talked.
  And death was observed with sudden cries,
  And birth with laughter and pain.
  And the trees grew taller and blacker against the skies
  And night came down again.

• From high black walls, gleaming vaguely with rain,
  Each yellow light looked down like a golden eye.
  They trembled from coign to coign, and tower to tower,
  Along high terraces quicker than dream they flew.
  And some of them steadily glowed, and some soon vanished,
  And some strange shadows threw.

• From some, the light was scarcely more than a gloom:
  From some, a dazzling desire.

• And there was one, beneath black eaves, who thought,
  Combing with lifted arms her golden hair,
  Of the lover who hurried towards her through the night;
  And there was one who dreamed of a sudden death
  As she blew out her light.

• We were all born of flesh, in a flare of pain,
  We do not remember the red roots whence we rose,
  But we know that we rose and walked, that after a while
  We shall lie down again.

• One of us sings in the street, and we listen to him;
  The words ring over us like vague bells of sorrow.
  He sings of a house he lived in long ago.
  It is strange; this house of dust was the house I lived in;
  The house you lived in, the house that all of us know.

• And we recall, with a gleaming stab of sadness,
  Vaguely and incoherently, some dream
  Of a world we came from, a world of sun-blue hills . . .
  A black wood whispers around us, green eyes gleam;
  Someone cries in the forest, and someone kills.

• And, growing tired, we turn aside at last,
  Remember our secret selves, seek out our towers,
  Lay weary hands on the banisters, and climb;
  Climbing, each, to his little four-square dream
  Of love or lust or beauty or death or crime.

• Over the darkened city, the city of towers,
  The city of a thousand gates,
  Over the gleaming terraced roofs, the huddled towers,
  Over a somnolent whisper of loves and hates,
  The slow wind flows, drearily streams and falls,
  With a mournful sound down rain-dark walls.

• A chorus of elfin voices blowing about me
  Weaves to a babel of sound. Each cries a secret.
  I run among them, reach out vain hands, and drown.

• ‘I am the one who stood beside you and smiled,
  Thinking your face so strangely young . . . ‘
  ‘I am the one who loved you but did not dare.’

• ‘I am the one you saw to-day, who fell
  Senseless before you, hearing a certain bell:
  A bell that broke great memories in my brain.’
  ‘I am the one who passed unnoticed before you,
  Invisible, in a cloud of secret pain.’

• Weave, weave, weave, you streaks of rain!
  I am dissolved and woven again…
  Thousands of faces rise and vanish before me.
  Thousands of voices weave in the rain.

• My veins are afire with music,
  Her eyes have kissed me, my body is turned to light;
  I shall dream to her secret heart tonight…

• ‘I bound her to me in all soft ways,
  I bound her to me in a net of days,
  Yet now she has gone in silence and said no word.
  How can we face these dazzling things, I ask you?
  There is no use: we cry: and are not heard.

• The wind shrieks, the wind grieves;
  It dashes the leaves on walls, it whirls then again;
  And the enormous sleeper vaguely and stupidly dreams
  And desires to stir, to resist a ghost of pain.

• We reach vague-gesturing hands, we lift our heads,
  Hear sounds far off,—and dream, with quivering breath,
  Our curious separate ways through life and death.

• We rub the darkness from our eyes,
  And face our thousand devious secret mornings . . .
  And do not see how the pale mist, slowly ascending,
  Shaped by the sun, shines like a white-robed dreamer
  Compassionate over our towers bending.

• Each gleaming point of light is like a seed
  Dilating swiftly to coiling fires.
  Each cloud becomes a rapidly dimming face,
  Each hurrying face records its strange desires.

• More towers must yet be built—more towers destroyed—
  Great rocks hoisted in air;
  And he must seek his bread in high pale sunlight
  With gulls about him, and clouds just over his eyes . . .
  And so he did not mention his dream of falling
  But drank his coffee in silence, and heard in his ears
  That horrible whistle of wind, and felt his breath
  Sucked out of him, and saw the tower flash by
  And the small tree swell beneath him . . .
  He patted his boy on the head, and kissed his wife,
  Looked quickly around the room, to remember it,—
  And so went out . . . For once, he forgot his pail.

• Something had changed—but it was not the street—
  The street was just the same—it was himself.

• He would not yield, he thought, and walk more slowly,
  As if he knew for certain he walked to death:
  But with his usual pace,—deliberate, firm,
  Looking about him calmly, watching the world,
  Taking his ease . . .

• Was forty, then, too old for work like this?
  Why should it be? He’d never been afraid—
  His eye was sure, his hand was steady . . .
  But dreams had meanings.

• His thoughts were blown and scattered like leaves;
  He thought of the pail . . . Why, then, was it forgotten?
  Because he would not need it?

• I walk in a cloud of wonder; I am glad.
  I mingle among the crowds; my heart is pounding;
  You do not guess the adventure I have had! . . .
  Yet you, too, all have had your dark adventures,
  Your sudden adventures, or strange, or sweet . . .
  My peril goes out from me, is blown among you.
  We loiter, dreaming together, along the street.

• Lovers walk in the noontime by that fountain.
  Pigeons dip their beaks to drink from the water.
  And soon the pond must freeze.

• Time is a dream, he thinks, a destroying dream;
  It lays great cities in dust, it fills the seas;
  It covers the face of beauty, and tumbles walls.
  Where was the woman he loved? Where was his youth?
  Where was the dream that burned his brain like fire?
  Even a dream grows grey at last and falls.

• Death is a meeting place of sea and sea.

• Two lovers, here at the corner, by the steeple,
  Two lovers blow together like music blowing:
  And the crowd dissolves about them like a sea.
  Recurring waves of sound break vaguely about them,
  They drift from wall to wall, from tree to tree.

• ‘One white rose . . . or is it pink, to-day?’
  They pause and smile, not caring what they say,
  If only they may talk.
  The crowd flows past them like dividing waters.
  Dreaming they stand, dreaming they walk.

• Two lovers move in the crowd like a link of music,
  We press upon them, we hold them, and let them pass;
  A chord of music strikes us and straight we tremble;
  We tremble like wind-blown grass.

• What was this dream we had, a dream of music,
  Music that rose from the opening earth like magic
  And shook its beauty upon us and died away?
  The long cold streets extend once more before us.
  The red sun drops, the walls grow grey.

• The days, the nights, flow one by one above us,
  The hours go silently over our lifted faces,
  We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea.
  Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together.
  We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.

• The young boy whistles, hurrying down the street,
  The young girl hums beneath her breath.
  One goes out to beauty, and does not know it.
  And one goes out to death.

• In one room, silently, lover looks upon lover,
  And thinks the air is fire.

• As darkness falls
  The walls grow luminous and warm, the walls
  Tremble and glow with the lives within them moving,
  Moving like music, secret and rich and warm.
  How shall we live tonight? Where shall we turn?
  To what new light or darkness yearn?
  A thousand winding stairs lead down before us;
  And one by one in myriads we descend
  By lamplit flowered walls, long balustrades,
  Through half-lit halls which reach no end.

• The poet walked alone in a cold late rain,
  And thought his grief was like the crying of sea-birds;
  For his lover was dead, he never would love again.

• ‘When you are dead your spirit will find my spirit,
  And then we shall die no more.’

• Through soundless labyrinths of dream you pass,
  Through many doors to the one door of all.
  Soon as it’s opened we shall hear a music:
  Or see a skeleton fall . . .

• Let us retrace our steps: I have deceived you:
  Nothing is here I could not frankly tell you:
  No hint of guilt, or faithlessness, or threat.
  Dreams—they are madness. Staring eyes—illusion.
  Let us return, hear music, and forget . . .

• Of what she said to me that night—no matter.
  The strange thing came next day.
  My brain was full of music—something she played me—;
  I couldn’t remember it all, but phrases of it
  Wreathed and wreathed among faint memories,
  Seeking for something, trying to tell me something,
  Urging to restlessness: verging on grief.
  I tried to play the tune, from memory,—
  But memory failed: the chords and discords climbed
  And found no resolution—only hung there,
  And left me morbid . . . Where, then, had I heard it? . . .

• You know, without my telling you, how sometimes
  A word or name eludes you, and you seek it
  Through running ghosts of shadow,—leaping at it,
  Lying in wait for it to spring upon it,
  Spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound:
  Until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest,
  You hear it, see it flash among the branches,
  And scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it—
  Well, it was so I followed down this music,
  Glimpsing a face in darkness, hearing a cry,
  Remembering days forgotten, moods exhausted,
  Corners in sunlight, puddles reflecting stars—

• The music ends. The screen grows dark. We hurry
  To go our devious secret ways, forgetting
  Those many lives . . . We loved, we laughed, we killed,
  We danced in fire, we drowned in a whirl of sea-waves.
  The flutes are stilled, and a thousand dreams are stilled.

• Once I loved, and she I loved was darkened.
  Again I loved, and love itself was darkened.
  Vainly we follow the circle of shadowy days.
  The screen at last grows dark, the flutes are silent.
  The doors of night are closed. We go our ways.

Chance Meetings (1917)

Originally published as section VII of “Variations” in Contemporary Verse, Vol. 3, No. 5 (May 1917), p. 86

• In the mazes of loitering people, the watchful and furtive,
  The shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves,
  In the drowse of the sunlight, among the low voices,
  I suddenly face you

• I love you, what star do you live on?

• And the shadows of tree-trunks and shadows of leaves
  Interlace with low voices and footsteps and sunlight
  To divide us forever.

Preludes for Memnon (1935)

Preludes for Memnon; or, Preludes to Attitude

• Let us describe the evening as it is:—
  The stars disposed in heaven as they are:
  Verlaine and Shakspere rotting, where they rot,
  Rimbaud remembered, and too soon forgot;
  Order in all things, logic in the dark;
  Arrangement in the atom and the spark;
  Time in the heart and sequence in the brain—
  Such as destroyed Rimbaud and fooled Verlaine.
  And let us then take godhead by the neck—
  And strangle it, and with it, rhetoric.

Mac Tag

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Portrait of Shelley, by Alfred Clint (1819)

Today is the birthday of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Field Place, Horsham, Sussex; 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822 Gulf of La Spezia, Kingdom of Sardinia); Romantic poet.  In my opinion, among the finest lyric, as well as epic, poets in the English language.  A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death.  Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.  Perhaps best known for such classic poems as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, Music, When Soft Voices Die, The Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy.  His other major works include a groundbreaking verse drama The Cenci (1819) and long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World), Alastor, The Revolt of Islam, Adonaïs, Prometheus Unbound (1820), Hellas: A Lyrical Drama (1821), and his final, unfinished work, The Triumph of Life (1822).

Four months after being expelled from Oxford, on 28 August 1811, the 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, a pupil at the same boarding school as Shelley’s sisters, whom his father had forbidden him to see.  Harriet had been writing Shelley passionate letters threatening to kill herself because of her unhappiness at the school and at home.  Shelley, heartbroken after the failure of his romance with his cousin, Harriet Grove, cut off from his mother and sisters, and convinced he had not long to live, impulsively decided to rescue Harriet Westbrook.

Shelley was also at this time increasingly involved in an intense platonic relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, a 28-year-old unmarried schoolteacher of advanced views, with whom he had been corresponding.  Hitchener, whom Shelley called the “sister of my soul” and “my second self”, became his muse and confidante in the writing of his philosophical poem Queen Mab, a Utopian allegory.

Shelley became increasingly unhappy in his marriage to Harriet and particularly resented the influence of her older sister Eliza.  Shelley accused Harriet of having married him for his money.  Craving more intellectual female companionship, he began spending more time away from home, among other things, studying Italian with Cornelia Turner and visiting the home and bookshop of William Godwin.  Eliza and Harriet moved back with their parents.

On 28 July 1814, Shelley abandoned Harriet, now pregnant with their son Charles (November 1814 – 1826) and (in imitation of the hero of one of Godwin’s novels) he ran away to Switzerland with Mary, then 16, inviting her stepsister Claire Clairmont (also 16) along because she could speak French.  The older sister Fanny was left behind, to her great dismay, for she, too, had fallen in love with Shelley.  The three sailed to Europe, and made their way across France to Switzerland on foot, reading aloud from the works of Rousseau, Shakespeare, and Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (an account of their travels was subsequently published by the Shelleys).  Sigh…

After Shelley and Mary’s return to England, Fanny, despondent over her exclusion from the Shelley household and perhaps unhappy at being omitted from Shelley’s will, travelled from Godwin’s household in London to kill herself in Wales in early October.  On 10 December 1816, the body of Shelley’s estranged wife Harriet was found in an advanced state of pregnancy, drowned in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, London.  Shelley had made generous provision for Harriet and their children in his will and had paid her a monthly allowance.  It is thought that Harriet, who had left her children with her sister Eliza and had been living alone under the name of Harriet Smith, mistakenly believed herself to have been abandoned by her new lover, 36-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Maxwell, who had been deployed abroad, after a landlady refused to forward his letters to her.  On 30 December 1816, barely three weeks after Harriet’s body was recovered, Shelley and Mary Godwin were married.  The marriage was intended partly to help secure Shelley’s custody of his children by Harriet and partly to placate Godwin, who had coldly refused to speak to his daughter for two years, and who now received the couple.  The courts, however, awarded custody of Shelley and Harriet’s children to foster parents, on the grounds that Shelley was an atheist.

Song: Rarely, Rarely, Comest Thou (1821)

• Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
  Spirit of Delight!
  Wherefore hast thou left me now
  Many a day and night?
  Many a weary night and day
  ‘Tis since thou are fled away.
  • St. 1.
• Let me set my mournful ditty
  To a merry measure;
  Thou wilt never come for pity,
  Thou wilt come for pleasure;
  Pity then will cut away
  Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.
  • St. 4.
  • I love tranquil solitude,
    And such society
    As is quiet, wise, and good;
    Between thee and me
    What difference? but thou dost possess
    The things I seek, not love them less.
    • St. 7.
  • I love Love — though he has wings,
    And like light can flee,
    But above all other things,
    Spirit, I love thee —
    Thou art love and life! Oh come,
    Make once more my heart thy home.
    • St. 8.

Today is the birthday of John Henry Twachtman (Cincinnati, Ohio; August 4, 1853 – August 8, 1902 Gloucester, Massachusetts); painter best known for his impressionist landscapes, though his painting style varied widely through his career.  He was a member of “The Ten”, a loosely allied group of American artists dissatisfied with professional art organizations, who banded together in 1898 to exhibit their works as a stylistically unified group.

 

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  Landscape, Branchville, c. 1888, 152.4 × 203.2 cm.

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  Wild Cherry Tree, oil on canvas, c. 1901. Albright-Knox Art Gallery

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  Fishing Boats at Gloucester, 1901. Smithsonian Museum of American Art

 

Rupert Brooke
Photograph of Brooke by Sherrill Schell

Today is the birthday of Rupert Chawner Brooke (middle name sometimes given as “Chaucer”; Rugby, Warwickshire; 3 August 1887 – 23 April 1915 Aegean Sea, off the Island of Skyros); poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially “The Soldier”. He was also known for his boyish good looks, which were said to have prompted the Irish poet W. B. Yeats to describe him as “the handsomest young man in England”.  Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday.  He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite.  He died at 4:46 pm on 23 April 1915, on the French hospital ship, the Duguay-Trouin (named after the famous 17th century privateer, René Duguay-Trouin), moored in a bay off the Greek island of Skyros in the Aegean Sea, while on his way to the landing at Gallipoli.  As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, Brooke was buried at 11 pm in an olive grove on Skyros.

Ernest Christopher Dowson
Ernest Dowson

Today is the birthday of Ernest Christopher Dowson (Lee, London; 2 August 1867 – 23 February 1900 Catford); poet, novelist, and short-story writer, often associated with the Decadent movement.

Today is the birthday of Arthur Garfield Dove (Canandaigua, New York; August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946); artist.  An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.  Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes.

Dove spent a seven-year period on a houseboat called Mona with Helen Torr, known as “Reds” for the fiery color of her hair.  Torr was also a painter. Although the psychological consequences benefited Dove’s art, his life with Torr was difficult.  Dove’s wife, Florence never cared about Dove’s passion for art, and was more socially inclined.  After 25 years of marriage, Dove left Florence.  Florence would not grant him a divorce.  When he departed, he left behind everything except his copies of Camera Work and Stieglitz’s letters.  When Dove’s wife Florence died unexpectedly, he paid $250.00 for the funeral expenses and sent flowers, but did not go to the funeral in Geneva.  Dove and Torr were not able to wed immediately as Torr had not divorced her first husband.  Dove and Torr did eventually marry on April 1932 in the New York City Hall with a brief service and using a ten-cent store ring.

 

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  Sails, 1911–12

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  Dark Abstraction, 1917

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  Thunderstorm, 1918

Today is the birthday of Albert Bloch (St. Louis, Missouri; August 2, 1882 – March 23, 1961 Lawrence, Kansas); Modernist artist and the only American artist associated with Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group of early 20th-century European modernists.

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  1902, “Prof. Wayupski’s Aerial Stunts”, St. Louis Star

  

  1913, Summer Night, oil on canvas, 119 x 114 cm

Today is the birthday of Jacques Villon (Emile Méry Frédéric Gaston Duchamp; Damville, Eure, Haute-Normandie; July 31, 1875 – June 9, 1963 Puteaux); Cubist painter and printmaker.  Villon was the elder brother of: sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, painter, sculptor, author Marcel Duchamp, and painter Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti.  To distinguish himself from his siblings, Gaston Duchamp adopted the pseudonym of Jacques Villon as a tribute to the French medieval poet François Villon.

 

Today is the birthday of Samuel Rogers (Newington Green, then a village north of Islington, London 30 July 1763 – 18 December 1855 Newington Green); poet.  During his lifetime one of the most celebrated poets, although his fame has been eclipsed by his Romantic colleagues and friends Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron.  His recollections of these friends are key sources for information about London artistic and literary life.  He made his money as a banker and was also a discriminating art collector. 

Emily Jane Brontë
A portrait of Brontë made by her brother, Branwell

Today is the birthday of Emily Brontë (Emily Jane BrontëThornton, West Riding of Yorkshire; 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848 Haworth, West Riding of Yorkshire); novelist and poet perhaps best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature.  Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother Branwell.  She wrote under the pen name Ellis Bell.

Ivan Aivazovsky
Self-portrait, 1874, oil on canvas, 74 × 58 cm, Uffizi, Florence

Today is the birthday of Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky (Feodosia, Taurida; 29 July 1817 – 2 May 1900 Feodosia); Romantic painter.  In my opinion, he is one of the greatest marine artists.  Baptized as Hovhannes Aivazian, Aivazovsky was born into an Armenian family in the Black Sea port of Feodosia and was mostly based in his native Crimea.  Following his education at the Imperial Academy of Arts, Aivazovsky traveled to Europe and lived briefly in Italy in the early 1840s.  He then returned to Russia and was appointed the main painter of the Russian Navy.  The saying “worthy of Aivazovsky’s brush”, popularized by Anton Chekhov, was used in Russia for “describing something ineffably lovely.”  During his almost 60-year career, he created around 6,000 paintings, making him one of the most prolific artists of his time.  The vast majority of his works are seascapes, but he often depicted battle scenes, Armenian themes, and portraiture.

In 1848, Aivazovsky married Julia Graves, an English governess.  They separated in 1860 and divorced in 1877 with permission from the Armenian Church, since Graves was a Lutheran.

Aivazovsky’s second wife, Anna Burnazian, was a young Armenian widow 40 years his junior.  Aivazovsky said that by marrying her in 1882, he “became closer to [his] nation”, referring to the Armenian people.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Landscapes
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  Azure Grotto, Naples (1841)
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  View of Constantinople (1856)

• 

  View of Tiflis (1869)

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  Moscow in Winter from the Sparrow Hills (1872)

• Seascapes
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  Night at Gurzof

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  Battle of Navarino (1848)

• 

  The brig Mercury encounter after defeating two Turkish ships of the Russian squadron (1848)

• 

  Bracing The Waves

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  Battle of Çesme at Night (1856)

• 

  Bay of Naples (1842)

• 

  American Shipping off the Rock of Gibraltar (1873)

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  Rainbow (1873)

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  Ship “Twelve Apostles” (1878)

• 

  Sea coast at night. Near the beacon

• 

  Seascape with a steamer (1886)

• 

  Tempest by Sounion, 1856

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  Brig “Mercury” Attacked by Two Turkish Ships (1892)

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  Lake Maggiore in the Evening (1892)

• Religious paintings
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  Chaos (1841)

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  Jesus walking on water (1888)

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  Jesus walking on water (1890)

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  Passage of the Jews through the Red Sea (1891)

Armenian themes

 

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  Valley of Mount Ararat (1882)

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  Descent of Noah from Ararat (1889), National Gallery of Armenia

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  Lord Byron’s visit to San Lazzaro degli Armeni (1899)

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  Mkrtich Khrimian near Echmiadzin

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  Bosphorus

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  A Moonlit Night on the Bosphorus

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  Top-Kahne Mosque

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  View of Constantinopole by Evening Light

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  Scenes from Cairo’s Life

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  Boat Ride by Kumkapi in Constantinople

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  Sunset over the Golden Horn

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  Dusk on the Golden Horn

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  Trebizond

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  Coffee-house by the Ortaköy Mosque in Constantinople

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  The Great Pyramid of Giza

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  Tower

 

Marcel Duchamp
Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1920–21, by Man Ray, Yale University Art Gallery

Today is the birthday of Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (Blainville-Crevon; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968 Neuilly-sur-Seine); painter, sculptor, chess player and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, conceptual art and Dada.  Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the twentieth century.  Duchamp has had an impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art.  By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists as “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye.  Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind.

Throughout his adult life, Duchamp was a passionate smoker of Habana cigars.

In June 1927, Duchamp married Lydie Sarazin-Lavassor; however, they divorced six months later.  It was rumored that Duchamp had chosen a marriage of convenience, because Sarazin-Lavassor was the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer.  Early in January 1928, Duchamp said that he could no longer bear the responsibility and confinement of marriage, and soon thereafter they were divorced.  Between 1946 and 1951 Maria Martins was his mistress.  In 1954, he and Alexina “Teeny” Sattler married, and they remained together until his death.

Duchamp died suddenly and peacefully in the early morning of 2 October 1968 at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.  After an evening dining at home with his friends Man Ray and Robert Lebel, Duchamp retired at 1:05 A.M., collapsed in his studio, and died of heart failure.  He is buried in the Rouen Cemetery, in Rouen, France, with the epitaph, “D’ailleurs, c’est toujours les autres qui meurent” (“Besides, it’s always the others who die”).  Even in his death, Duchamp retained a sense of humor.

 

Mac Tag