Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Pictures contrived later than 1880 but earlier than 1900

Albert Joseph Moore
Dreamers
ca. 1882
oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England

Berthe Morisot
The Basket Chair
1882
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

from COLONUS' PRAISE

Who comes into this country, and has come
Where golden crocus and narcissus bloom,
Where the Great Mother, mourning for her daughter
And beauty-drunken by the water
Glittering among the grey-leaved olive-trees,
Has plucked a flower and sung her loss;
Who finds abounding Cephisus
Has found the loveliest spectacle there is.

Because this country has a pious mind
And so remembers that when all mankind
But trod the road, or splashed about the shore,
Poseidon gave it bit and oar,
Every Colonus lad or lass discourses
Of that oar and of that bit;
Summer and winter, day and night,
Of horses and horses of the sea, white horses.

– from Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles, translated by William Butler Yeats (1928)

William Merritt Chase
Study of Young Woman
ca. 1883-87
oil on canvas
Indianapolis Museum of Art

Auguste Renoir
View of a Park
1885
watercolor
Morgan Library, New York

Oswald Achenbach
In the Park of the Villa Borghese, Rome
1886
oil on canvas
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Willard Metcalf
Sunlight and Shadow
1888
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

John Everett Millais
Dew-drenched Furze
1889
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

THE FORTUNES OF MEN

Cassandra:  Ah the fortunes of men! When they go well
A shadow sketch would match them, and in ill-fortune
The dab of a wet sponge destroys the drawing.
It is not myself but the life of man I pity.

– from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, translated by Louis MacNeice (1936)

John Singer Sargent
An Out-of-doors Study
1889
oil on canvas
Brooklyn Museum

Thomas Wilmer Dewing
The Hermit Thrush
1890
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum

Rupert Bunny
Tritons
1890
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Rupert Bunny
Sea Idyll
ca. 1891
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Édouard Vuillard
Woman in a  striped dress
1895
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Camille Pissarro
La Place du Théâtre Français
1898
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Eugène Jansson
Riddarfjärden, Stockholm
1898
oil on canvas
Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

THE WAR AT TROY

Herald:  These things have taken time.
Some of them we could say have fallen well,
While some we blame.  Yet who except the gods
Is free from pain the whole duration of life?
If I were to tell of our labours, our hard lodging,
The sleeping on crowded decks, the scanty blankets,
Tossing and groaning, rations that never reached us --
And the land too gave matter for more disgust,
for our beds lay under the enemy's walls.
Continuous drizzle from the sky, dews from the marshes,
Rotting our clothes, filling our hair with lice.
And if one were to tell of the bird-destroying winter
Intolerable from the snows of Ida
Or of the heat when the sea slackens at noon
Waveless and dozing in a depressed calm –
But why make these complaints?  The weariness is over;
Over indeed for some who never again
Need even trouble to rise.
Why make a computation of the lost?
Why need the living sorrow for the spites of fortune?
I wish to say a long goodbye to disasters.

– from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, translated by Louis MacNeice (1936)