1931 Sven
Herman Axel Delblanc, Swedish scholar, novelist, and playwright,
who died of cancer on 15 December 1992. He mixed realism with the fantastic.
A recurrent theme in Delblanc's work is the conflict between human freedom
and overpowering social system. Delblanc's breakthrough book was Prästkappan
(1963), a picaresque tale, based on the Hercules myth but set in the 18th-century
Germany.
1910 Laurence S. Rockefeller CEO (Chase Manhattan
Bank)
1907 John Wayne "The Duke", [Marion Michael
Morrison], Academy Award-winning actor: True Grit [1969], Hondo, Rio Bravo
- over 200 films.
1903 Estes Kefauver (Sen-D-Tn)
campaigned against John F. Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination
1899 Otto
Neugebauer, Austrian historian of ancient mathematics. He died
on 19 February 1990.
1898 Max Gubler, Swiss painter
who died on 29 July 1973. — links
to a biography and images.
1896 Yuri
Dmitrievich Sokolov, Ukrainian mathematician who died on 02
February 1971.
1896 Dow Jones Industrial Average's
first day, created by journalist Charles Henry Dow, founder of the Wall
Street Journal. The original 12 stocks in the industrial average are: American
Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American Tobacco, Chicago Gas, Distilling &
Cattle Feeding, General Electric, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American,
Tennesee Coal & Iron, US Leather preferred, US Rubber. General Electric
is the only one among the 30 stocks in the average in 2000. See http://averages.dowjones.com/ddorigin.html
1893 Vilhelm Henry Lundstrom, Danish artist who died in
1950.
1878 Spencer Frederick Gore, British painter
who died on 27 March 1914. — MORE
ON GORE AT ART “4” MAY with
links to images.
1874 Ernest Leonard Blumenschein,
US painter who died in 1960, specialized in the US
West. — links
to images.
1868 (25 May?) Jules Alexandre Grün,
French painter, illustrator, and poster artist who died on 15 February 1934.
— MORE
ON GRÜN AT ART “4” MAY with
links to images.
^
1859
Alfred Edward Housman
, English scholar and poet who died on 30 April 1936. His lyrics express
a Romantic pessimism in a spare, simple style.
Housman,
whose father was a solicitor, was one of seven children. He much preferred
his mother; and her death on his 12th birthday was a cruel blow, which
is surely one source of the pessimism his poetry expresses. While
a student at Oxford, he was further oppressed by his dawning realization
of homosexual desires. These came to focus in an intense love for
one of his fellow students, an athletic young man who became his friend
but who could not reciprocate his love. In turmoil emotionally, Housman
failed to pass his final examination at Oxford, although he had been
a brilliant scholar.
From 1882
to 1892 he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in London. In the
evenings he studied Latin texts in the British Museum reading room
and developed a consummate gift for correcting errors in them, owing
to his mastery of the language and his feeling for the way poets choose
their words. Articles he wrote for journals caught the attention of
scholars and led to his appointment in 1892 as professor of Latin
at University College, London.
Apparently convinced that he must live without love, Housman became
increasingly reclusive and for solace turned to his notebooks, in
which he had begun to write the poems that eventually made up A
Shropshire Lad (1896). For models he claimed the poems of Heinrich
Heine [13 Dec 1797 – 17 Feb 1856], the songs of William Shakespeare
[26 Apr 1564 – 23 Apr 1616], and the Scottish border ballads.
Each provided him with a way of expressing emotion clearly and yet
keeping it at a certain distance. For the same purpose, he assumed
in his lyrics the unlikely role of farm laborer and set them in Shropshire,
a county he had not yet visited when he began to write the first poems.
The popularity of A Shropshire Lad grew slowly but so surely
that Last Poems (1922) had astonishing success for a book
of verse.
Housman regarded himself
principally as a Latinist and avoided the literary world. In 1911
he became professor of Latin at Cambridge, teaching there almost up
to his death. His major scholarly effort, to which he devoted more
than 30 years, was an annotated edition of Astronomica
by the 1st century AD Roman didactic poet Marcus Manilius (1903–1930),
whose poetry he did not like {who does?} but who gave him ample scope
for emendation. Some of the asperity and directness that appears in
Housman's lyrics also is found in his scholarship, in which he defended
common sense with a sarcastic wit that helped to make him widely feared.
A lecture, The Name and Nature of Poetry (1933), gives Housman's
considered views of the art. His brother Laurence Housman [18 Jul
1865 – 20 Feb 1959] selected the verses for the posthumous volume
More Poems (1936). Housman's Letters appeared in
1971.
HOUSMAN ONLINE: A
Shropshire Lad — A
Shropshire Lad — A
Shropshire Lad — The
Blue Moon |
| Could man be drunk forever
Could man be drunk for ever
With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
And lief lie down at nights.
But men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts. |
On
Wenlock Edge
On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble;
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
'Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
|
Then, 'twas before my time, the Roman
At
yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The
thoughts that hurt him, they were there. There,
like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then 'twas the Roman, now 'tis I.
The gale it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, 'twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon. |
1850 Amelie Helga Lundahl, Swedish French artist who died
on 20 August 1914.
1846 Eduard von Grützner,
German artist who died in 1925.
1840 Alfred Wordsworth Thompson,
US artist who died on 18 August 1896. — link
to an image.
 ^
1822 Edmond-Louis-Antoine
Huot de Goncourt French writer who died on
16 July 1896.
Click
here for enlarged 1870 photo by “Nadar”
[05 Apr 1820 – 21 Mar 1910]
{Click on image for etching portrait by Bracquemond [28 May 1833 –
27 Oct 1914] >}.
Edmond and his brother Jules-Alfred Huot de Goncourt [17 Dec 1830
– 20 Jun 1870] were constant collaborators who, despite and
partly because of neurotic sensibility, contributed solidly to the
Naturalistic novel, social history, and art criticism. Above all,
they are remembered for their perceptive, revealing Journal
and for Edmond's legacy, the Académie Goncourt, which annually awards
a prize to the author of an outstanding work of French literature.
The Goncourts' widowed mother
left them an income that enabled the brothers to live in modest comfort
without working and rescued Edmond from a treasury clerkship that
had driven him to suicidal despair. The brothers immediately began
to lead a life doubly dominated by aesthetics and self-indulgence.
Amateur artists, they first made a sketching tour of France, Algeria,
and Switzerland. Back home in their Paris flat, they made a fetish
of orderly housekeeping, but their lives were continually disordered
by noises, upset stomachs, insomnia, and neurasthenia. Neither of
them married. All the mistresses appearing in the Journal
no doubt belonged to Jules, whose fatal stroke presumably was preceded
by syphilis.
From attempts at
art the brothers turned to plays and in 1851 published a novel, En
18, all without success. As journalists, they were arrested in
1852, though later acquitted, for an “outrage against public morality,”
which consisted of quoting mildly erotic Renaissance verses in one
of their articles. The brothers achieved more success with a series
of social histories, which they began publishing in 1854. These drew
on private correspondence, newspaper accounts, brochures, even dinner
menus and dress patterns to recreate the life of specific periods
in French history. As art critics, the Goncourts' most notable achievement
was L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1859–1875), which helped
redeem the reputations of such masters of that time as Antoine Watteau.
The same meticulous documentation
and attention to detail went into the Goncourts' novels. The brothers
covered a vast range of social environments in their novels: the world
of journalism and literature in Charles
Demailly (1860); that of medicine and the hospital in Soeur
Philomène (1861); upper middle-class society in Renée
Mauperin (1864); and the artistic world in Manette Salomon
(1867). The Goncourts' frank presentation of upper and lower social
classes and their clinical dissection of social relations helped establish
Naturalism and paved the way for such novelists as Émile Zola and
George Moore. The most lasting of their novels, Germinie Lacerteux
(1864), was based on the double life of their ugly, seemingly impeccable
servant, Rose, who stole their money to pay for nocturnal orgies and
men's attentions. It is one of the first realistic French novels of
working-class life. Most of the other novels, however, including Madame
Gervaisais, suffer from overly long exposition and description,
excessive detail, and mannered, artificial language.
The Goncourts began keeping their monumental Journal in 1851,
and Edmond continued it for 26 more years from Jules's death in 1870
until his own. The diary weaves through every social stratum, from
the hovels where the brothers sought atmosphere for Germinie Lacerteux
to dinners with great men of the day. Full of critical judgments,
scabrous anecdotes,descriptive sketches, literary gossip, and thumbnail
portraits, the complete Journal is at once a revealing autobiography
and a monumental history of social and literary life in 19th-century
Paris. The Académie Goncourt, first conceived by the brothers in 1867,
was officially constituted in 1903. |
1814 Albertus Steenbergen, Dutch artist who died in 1900.
1810 Christen Købke, Danish Realist
painter who died on 07 February 1848. — MORE
ON KØBKE AT ART “4” MAY
with links to images.
1788 Baby without a brain born
to Mary Clark of England.
1667 Abraham
de Moivre, French Hugenot mathematician, who would be a refugee
in England from 1685 (18 Oct 1685: révocation
de l'Édit de Nantes), and would die there on 27 November 1754.
He pioneered the development of analytic geometry and the theory of probability.
(De Moivre's theorem). Author of The Doctrine of Chance (1718).
1787 Franz Steinfeld, Austrian artist who died on 05 November
1868.
1759 John-Nost Sartorius, British artist who
died in 1828. — links
to images.
|
1937
Ford goons photographed beating up union leaders
^top^ 
2000
1951
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