The Village of Becquigny 1857-1867 Naturalism Oil on mahogany panel The Frick Collection, New York, USA
A man semi-hidden by the shadows of a tree is walking between rows of thatched cottages beneath an azure blue sky. “The Village of Becquigny” resonates with the man’s apparent loneliness. Inspired by Rousseau’s travels through Picardy in 1857, his approach to the work is almost anthropological exotica. However, Rousseau avoids over-emphasizing the human dwellings so the cottages appear as hilly extensions of the soil foreground.
Théodore Rousseau
Théodore Rousseau The Barbizon School, Naturalism, Romanticism Born: 15 April 1812, Paris, France Nationality: French Died: 22 December 1867, Barbizon, France
Rousseau was renowned for his unconventional nature-based painting. He was regarded as a pioneer of the Barbizon School of landscape art. Rousseau was one of the earliest artists to venture outdoors to observe and analyze natural forms directly. Painting landscapes for their own sake Rousseau elevated its status from mere background to that of an independent entity.
You, the love of my life, my heart, my soul So close to me and yet so very far You are the solid core that makes me whole
And in a memory I find paradise A brief respite from the feelings of grief The sense of loss from that rolled from Fate’s dice In this unkind world our love was too brief
Between life and death the door is ajar And love travels through like a floating leaf For destiny spoke and love never ends A promise of all time, without thinking twice I gave you my heart so to take my soul
Wherever I go wherever life wends I feel you with me in love’s dividends
The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry.
Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.
My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage.
Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse,
shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens’ shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.
Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.
Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city’s throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle.
He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound’s gently tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy.
He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die– when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back.
On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year– wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . .
Shaw’s father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son’s body was thrown and lost with his “niggers.”
The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling
over a Mosler Safe, the “Rock of Ages” that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.
Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the bless’d break.
The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell Born: 1 March 1917, Massachusetts, USA Nationality: American Died: 12 September 1977, New York, USA
Lowell was a poet, born into a Boston Brahmin family, he could trace his ancestry back to the Mayflower. Past and present, his family were important subjects and influences for his poetry as was his New England upbringing
Alessandro Scarlatti Opera Born: 6 May 1660, Sicily Nationality: Sicilian Died: 22 October 1725, Naples, Italy
Alessandro Scarlatti
Scarlatti was a composer, best known for his operas and chamber cantatas. He is considered to be one of the most important composers of the Neapolitan School of Opera. Scarlatti was also the father of the composers Domenico and Pietro Filippo Scarlatti
And this reft house, the which he built, Lamented Jack! and here his malt he piled, Cautious in vain! these rats, that squeak so wild, Squeak not unconscious of their father’s guilt. Did he not see her gleaming through the glade! Belike ‘twas she, the maiden all forlorn. What though she milk, no cow with crumpled horn, Yet aye she haunts the dale where erst she strayed: And aye beside her stalks her amorous knight! Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn, And through those brogues, still tattered and betorn, His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white. Ah! thus through broken clouds at night’s high Noon Peeps in fair fragments forth the full-orbed harvest moon.
Jezzie G 