Something Beautiful

Sufficient

Someone named Fernandez de Andrada has packed a lot into this quote --

For me it is sufficient to have a corner by my hearth, a book and a friend, and a nap undisturbed by creditors or grief. 

Easter morning

The Three Marys at the Tomb, ca. 1822, by Peter von Cornelius.   

Iceland

Iceland is one beautiful country.   The site Iceland is Cool contains many photographs proving this proposition.   To sample this site's offerings, try these pages --

Autumn gallery

Grindavik gallery

Landscape gallery

Farming gallery

Guggenheim-Las Vegas

The Guggenheim-Las Vegas website is certainly a strange one.   Minimal.   Bare.  Scant.   And with a number of fine online images to which there is no obvious path from the home page.  I happened across this list quite by accident.    Here's a work to which that I would particularly like to draw your attention.   Go to Fisherman by Camille Corot.   Then enlarge the picture and look for the fisherman's red cap.    Neat, eh? 

There are other lists at this site -- this one, for instance, and this one, plus others.  I really don't know what to make of it.

Hunt Museum

Today being St. Patrick's Day, it seems only right to focus on an Irish website.  Herewith, then, the Hunt Museum site.  The Hunt Museum is in Limerick, on Ireland's southwest coast. 

The site has some worthwhile pages.  First among these would be the Director's choice page (7 items).  

Next would come the Paintings and drawings page (5 items).

And then these five remaining pages --

Ceramics (6 items)

Ivory and other materials (5 items); 

Metal (6 items)

Stone (5 items)

Textiles (4 items)

Lincoln Cathedral (more)

Here's a beautiful page, full of photographs, on Lincoln Cathedral.    Note:  Other links to this same cathedral appeared here.   

Ten Poems

Quick, everybody do this -- choose ten poems.

The Isle of Inisfree

William Butler Yeats wrote of a real lake island in his famous poem The Isle of Inisfree. This small island lies in the south-east corner of Lough Gill, in County Sligo. 

(Note: I know that Yeats spelled the word "Innisfree."   I have amended that spelling because the name comes from the Irish inis, meaning "island."  It is sometimes also spelled "Inishfree" or "Innishfree.")   

Aran Islands

I mentioned John Millington Synge a couple of days ago and it only occurred to me later that I had not said why Synge is so important to me.   There is but one reason for that and it is his book The Aran Islands, based on his visits to those islands ca. 1900.  Somehow or other I came across this book while in college, and immediately fell in love.  On the Net, you can get a feel for how the Aran Islands look at the Look Aroujd Ireland site.   Check out their twelve IPIX images too, four for each of the three Aran islands.

Better still are the photos over at Photo Voyage.  There you'll find 35 pictures of the islands, some of them excellent.   I particularly recommend those under the heading "Landscape." 

 
   
 

J. M. Synge

W. B. Yeats on John Millington Synge, in his poem, In Memory of Major Robert Gregory --

IV

And that enquiring man John Synge comes next, 
That dying chose the living world for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
Passionate and simple like his heart.

Notes (from elsewhere) --
   John Synge was one of Yeats's greatest friends in Dublin until his early death at the age of thirty-eight from cancer.  Synge was an Irish poet and playwright during the Irish literary Renaissance.  Synge traveled with Yeats all over the Aran Islands, "a most desolate stony place," and based many of his poems on the bleak and tragic lifestyle of the Irish peasants.  He was a very passionate writer and isolated himself to produce his most creative, yet critical works.  As Yeats says in the second line, "That dying chose the living world for text," Synge knew he was dying, but he decided that his role in the world was to write, which is a statement of a true artist. 

You can read more about Synge, who has been one of my favorite authors for more than thirty years, at Teach Synge (Synge House).