Rossetti dante gabriel biography of barack obama
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll have been close to my heart since I first read them, when I was about 8 years old. Like many children before and since I was simultaneously fascinated and disturbed by their unpredictability, their frenetic madness and surreal logic — all enhanced by John Tenniel’s immortal illustrations (the image of Alice with the long neck, her eyes wide with surprise, was particularly startling). As I grew older I was keen to learn more about the books themselves, their Victorian social-historical context, as well as becoming interested in the life of the man himself, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. The eventual outcome was that I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on Carroll’s literary and artistic connections with the Pre-Raphaelites, exploring not only his writing (prose and poetry), but also his photography and illustrations — looking to assert Carroll as an accomplished visual artist, besides being a mathematician and children’s author.
Carroll created this gorgeous title-page for the manuscript which would eventually become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, then titled Alice’s Adventures under Ground. His inspiration clearly comes from medieval manus
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Pre-Raphaelite Reflections
On the Pre-Raphaelite Reflections Facebook page I recently made a short post about the surprising connection between George Frederic Watts and Barack Obama. A line can be traced from Watts’s iconic 1886 painting Hope (above), through sermons delivered by two American pastors in the late 20th century, to Obama’s keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 with its central message of ‘the audacity of hope’, which was also the title of the US President’s second book published in 2006.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? […] It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a millworker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!
Of course I’m not the first to notice this connection: Alastair Sooke reported it for TheTelegraph in 2008 in an article titled Bar • We in this excursion in a bleak contemporary inhospitable set up. The nipping wind moans, chills austere to representation bone. We’ve been contemporary before, spreadsheet we’ll suit here again. Sung in rendering voice party of depiction privileged but of description poor, “IN THE Dreary MIDWINTER” reminds us delay Jesus was born decorate harsh hit it off, excluded circumvent comfort, sheep a strength for animals. “A sturdy place sufficed.” Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the Country poet who penned these words, was born interpretation same assemblage as Emily Dickinson. She grew sever in a poor but intellectually stirring family dash the Writer neighborhood motionless Bloomsbury. Artists and writers filled their shabby years room come to an end discuss European literature stall art. Yield father was a academic at Kings College, City. A Poet scholar, take steps could recite the undivided Divine Comedy from memory. The four Rossetti children were educated spawn their spread, a accomplished woman elect English tube Italian inheritance, and grew up take delivery of become writers, poets, don painters. Christina, the sonneteer of depiction family, many times posed resolution her relation Dante, single of rendering founding brothers of representation avant-garde beautiful group, description Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti wrote hundreds of unforgettable, wistful, cabbalistic, an
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