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Johannes Vermeer of Delft: Woman at a Window

Sep 17, 2026 / terry / No comments

The painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived his whole life in Delft, a city of canals in southeast Netherlands midway between The Hague and Rotterdam. He was baptized in the Dutch Reformed Church in 1632. When he married Catherina Boles in 1653, he converted to Catholicism. However, his main patrons – Pieter van Ruijven and his wife Maria de Knuijt – were members of the Remonstrant Church. No one is sure of Vermeer’s personal beliefs. Weber (2022) suggests that he might have been Catholic. Graham-Dixon (2025) argues that Vermeer was more likely drawn to the Remonstrants. One recurring subject in Vermeer’s paintings is a woman standing at a window. These solemn images convey great depths of feeling. The illustration shows a detail from Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662).

Category: Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Photography, Politics, Religion / Tags: Calvinism, Caspar David Friedrich, Dutch Republic, Edward Hopper, Hapsburg Empire, Jacob Arminius, Mary and Martha, Pieter van Ruijven, Religious Tolerance, Remonstrant Church, Tom Hunter, Wilhelm Hammershoi

Paul Celan: Todtnauberg

Sep 7, 2026 / terry / No comments

Paul Celan (1920-1970) was a Romanian-Jewish poet whose mother-tongue was German. Both his parents died in Nazi labor camps. After the war, Celan settled in Paris but continued to write poetry in German. On July 24, 1967, he gave a recitation of his poems at the University of Freiburg. The next day he visited Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) at his cabin in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. Many believe that Celan asked Heidegger to make some statement renouncing the Nazi movement that he had joined in 1933. However, although a 1966 interview about his ties to the Nazi party was published posthumously in Der Speigel, Heidegger never made any statement about the evils of Nazism and never mentioned the Holocaust. The 1963 photograph of Paul Celan is by Lütfi Özkök.

Category: Architecture, Ethics, History, Language, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychiatry / Tags: Anselm Kiefer, Being and Time, Emmanuel Levinas, Fadensonnen, Gisele Celan-Lestrange, Holocaust, National Socialsim, Theodor Adorno, Todesfuge

Ezra Pound: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Aug 18, 2026 / terry / No comments

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) came to London in the summer of 1908. He cobbled together a living as a reviewer and editor for magazines such as The New Age and Poetry. He served as the midwife for modernism by arranging the publication of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Sometimes charming, sometimes arrogant, Pound antagonized many of his colleagues in both England the America. His Homage to Sextus Propertius, a set of poems based on the work of the Latin poet, published in Poetry 1918, was panned. Pound left for Europe in the spring of 1921. His publication of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) served as his farewell to London. The illustration shows a photographic portrait by E. O. Hoppé taken in 1918 and published in 1920.

Category: History, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, Poetry, Psychiatry, Sculpture, Uncategorized / Tags: Anadyomene, Antisemitism, Aphrodite, Bernardino Luini, Edmund Waller, Fascism, Henri Gaudier Brzeska, Homage to Sextus Propertius, Odyssey, Ovid Press, T. S. Eliot, The Cantos, The New Age, World War I

Pontius Pilate: The Trial of Jesus

Aug 16, 2026 / terry / No comments

During the reign (14-37 CE) of the Roman Emperor Tibberius, Pontius Pilates served as Prefect of Judaea from 26 to 37 CE. During this time, the High Priest of the Temple was Joseph ben Caiaphas, who had succeeded his father-in-law Annas in 18 CE and served until 36 CE. Pontius Pilate was primarily responsible for the Judaea and Samaria, but the regions of Galilee and Perea were ruled as Roman vassal states by the tetrarch Herod Antipas who reigned from the death of his father Herod the Great in 4 BCE until 39 CE. Pontius Pilate presided over the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely during the celebration of Passover in 33 CE. The illustration shows Jesus before Pilate, a panel of the Maestà (1311 CE) by Duccio di Buoninsegna.

Category: Art, Ethics, History, Painting, Philosophy, Religion / Tags: Antisemitism, Augustine of Hippo, Caiaphas, Crucifixion, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Gesthsemane, Gospel of John, Maesta, Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, Passover, Ryland Papyrus 52, Sanhedrin, Tiberius

Robert Desnos: Contrée

Jul 19, 2026 / terry / No comments

Robert Desnos (both ‘s’ pronounced, 1900-1945) was a Surrealist French poet. During World War II, after initially serving in the French army, Desnos became an active member of La Résistance. The illustration shows a photograph taken in 1943. On 22 February 1944, Desnos was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. From there he was transferred to the Flōha labor campe, and finally, in April 1945, to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. Though Theresienstadt was liberated on 8 May, Desnos died there of typhus on 8 June. Contrée (“Against the Grain”), a book of 25 poems celebrating the land of France and its resistance to oppression, was published in 1944.

Category: History, Language, Literature, Poetry / Tags: Andre Breton, Concentration Camps, Deportation, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Resistance, Rrose Selavy, Sonnet, Surrealism, Theresienstadt, Vichy France, Youki

Vincent Van Gogh: The Double-Square Paintings

Jul 11, 2026 / terry / No comments

After a period of severe depression at the hospital at Saint-Rémy in the spring of 1890, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) asked to be discharged. He left Saint-Rémy on May 16, 1890, and visited his brother Theo in Paris for a few days, before travelling to Auvers-sur-Oise, a small town about 30 km northwest of Paris, where Charles-François Daubigny had lived, and where several Impressionists, among them Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne, had painted. Auvers was also the home of Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a kindly physician whom Theo had asked to accept his brother as a patient. Van Gogh arrived in Auvers on May 20, 1890. Over the next ten weeks he created 74 paintings. Among these, twelve used a “double-square” format: 100 by 50 cm. In these paintings, Van Gogh attempted to express his new vision of the world. Unfortunately, his depression persisted and on the evening of July 27, 1890, he shot himself with a revolver, dying from the injury two days later. The illustration shows his last self-portrait painted in Saint-Rémy in September, 1889.

Category: Art, History, Medicine, Painting, Psychiatry / Tags: Auvers-sur-Oise, Depression, Doctor Gachet, Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger, suicide, Theo van Gogh, Tree Roots, Wheatfields

Su Shi: The Poetry of Exile

Jun 26, 2026 / terry / No comments

Su Shi (蘇軾; simplified 苏轼; Sū Shì, literary name 東坡 dōngpō “east slope,” 1037-1101) was a poet, calligrapher, painter and statesman during the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). After criticizing some of the new government policies in his poetry, he was indicted in 1079 for treason. After the Crow Terrace Poetry Trial (烏臺詩案), he was found guilty and condemned to death. The emperor commuted his sentence, and Su was exiled to Huangzhou in Hubei Province. There he converted an old army camp on the eastern slope of a mountain near the city into a farm. During his exile from 1080 to 1084, he adopted the name of his farm as his professional pseudonym, practised Buddhism and wrote poetry.

Category: Art, History, Language, Painting, Poetry, Politics, Religion / Tags: Battle of the Red Cliffs, Calligraphy, Cao Cao, East Slope, Huangzhou, Mount Lu, Su Shi Dongpo, Sung Dynasty, Wang Anshi

Modern Chinese Calligraphy: Wang Dongling

Jun 10, 2026 / terry / No comments

Chinese calligraphy began over 3000 years ago. Over the years several distinct styles of writing evolved: oracle, bronze, seal, clerical, regular, semi-cursive (running) and cursive (grass). The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) overturned the respect shown to these traditional modes. However, calligraphy flourished in the format of the big-character posters (大字报, dàzì bào). In the years following the revolution, Chinese calligraphy became more abstract. One of the most important modern calligraphers is Wang Dongling (王冬龄). Among his many achievements is a new writing style that he calls “chaos script” 亂書 luànshū.

Category: Art, Language, Literature, Painting, Photography, Poetry / Tags: chaos script, Cultural Revolution, Daodejing, Heart Sutra, Lin Sanzhi, Lu Weizhao, Sha Menghai

Bright is the Ring of Words: English Art Song

May 17, 2026 / terry / No comments

During the 19^th Century, composers began to set poems to music. In these “art songs” or Lieder, the piano accompaniment accentuated the emotions and complemented the meaning of the poem. Although Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) was the first cycle of art songs, Schubert was the composer who definitively established the genre. He was followed by Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and Mahler. In the British Isles, a golden age of art song occurred in the first 20 years of the 20^th Century. Young composers, many trained in the German tradition, set to music both the lines they had learned in school and the poems of their contemporaries. The illustration is a wood cut from 1903 by Wassily Kandinsky.

Category: Art, Language, Literature, Music, Painting, Poetry / Tags: Battle of the Somme, Butterworth, de la Mare, Denis Browne, Gallipoli, Gurney, Kelly, Lieder, Masefield, Schubert, Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, Stevenson, Tennyson, Vaughan Williams, W.B. Yeats

Caravaggio: The Contarelli Chapel

May 8, 2026 / terry / No comments

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was born in small community called Caravaggio just east of Milan. He first became recognized as a painter of genius in 1602 when he completed a set of three paintings on the life of Saint Matthew for the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. Caravaggio had a ferocious temper and in 1606 he killed a man in a brawl and was banished from Rome. After a period of exile in Malta, Sicily and Naples, he negotiated a pardon. However, in Naples in 1609 he was violently assaulted by his enemies. He died in Porte Ercole as he tried to return to Rome. The portrait by Ottavio Leoni derives from the time when Caravaggio was in Rome at the height of his powers, though it was likely completed later.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Calling, Creation of Adam, Giuseppi Cesari, Inspiration, Jacques Cobaert, Karen Fish, Martyrdom, Matthieu Cointreau, Michelangelo, Saint Matthew, San Luigi Dei Francesi, Tenebrism

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