Something Beautiful

This is the way

I found this just now on the Web: 

"This is the way of heaven: do your work, then quietly step back."  - from the Tao Te Ching

Life of the People (exhibition)

Several years ago I came across the online exhibition Life of the People: Realist Prints and Drawings. I loved it then, and love it still. So, probably, will you. :-)

Les Belles Heures

You can see nine leaves of Les Belles Heures at the Metropolitan Museum site.

This private devotional book was completed by 1408 or 1409, probably in Paris.  It was the first of several magnificent manuscripts commissioned by the duke of Berry from the Limbourg brothers, Pol, Jean, and Herman.

Art movements (at the Guggenheim)

I've always loved this page on modern art movements at the Guggenheim museum site.

My hero: Antoine Goetschel

Antoine Goetschel is a Swiss lawyer who is spearheading a movement to provide greater legal rights for animals. What could be more beautiful than that?

Spider poems

You wouldn't think so, but it turns out that there are quite a few poems out there about spiders. Some are quite good.

Two are classics of American poetry.  First, there is a A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman. (Note that only the first half of this poem is actually about the spider.)

The second is Design, the marvelous sonnet by Robert Frost. (Just imagine -- a sonnet about a spider!) Its opening words are wonderful:

"I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth"

And its last line is perfection itself:
"If design govern in a thing so small."

P.S. It occurred to me that there probably really is something called a "dimpled spider." And sure enough . . . here's a photo of one. (And here's a white heal-all.)

Mozart's Horn Concerti

Speaking of things beautiful, have you listened to a Mozart horn concerto lately?  There are four of them, thanks be to God. No doubt there are many fine renditions, but my performers of choice are Barry Tuckwell andthe Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. 

Twilight

I've long loved this painting: Twilight: Interior (Reading by lamplight), ca. 1909, by George Clausen. This painting was featured, among many others, in a marvelous exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia called The Edwardians. The exhibition presented figurative paintings by British, Irish, American and Australian artists from 1900 to 1914

Portrait of a Nun

I've never heard of Pierre Subleyras before but this evening somehow came across his work. These are a little weird, but also somewhat wonderful:

Venerable Battista Vernazza, c. 1740.

St, John of Avila, c. 1745.