Casper David Friedrich

Back in the '80s, Beth and I bought a poster at a Nashville art museum: "Stages of Life" (Die Lebensstufen, 1835) by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The poster has ever since hung in our home. It's a nice souvenir of a weekend with Beth's maternal aunt and uncle, who've since passed away. 

Friedrich's landscapes, some of which are allegorical, reflect the contemplation of nature. As in this painting, human figures are rendered small within the scene. Here are two others: his well-known "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog" (1818), and "The Lonely Tree" (1822), with the tiny shepherd in its shade. 

Friedrich was born September 5, 1774, and died in his long-time home of Dresden in 1840. When we visited Dresden back in 2007, we noticed a memorial to him in a city park. This intense portrait was painted by his friend Gerhard von Kügelgen. 

All copied under fair use principles.  

The Treaty of Paris, yay!

It's interesting to think of the American Revolution as one of several European wars that spanned the 18th century. On September 3, 1783, representatives of Great Britain and the new United States signed the Treaty of Paris, which officially ended our War of Independence and recognized the Thirteen Colonies as a new nation. The signing involved British North America (Canada), setting boundaries, and included peace treaties among Great Britain and France, Spain, and the Dutch Republic--the latter three of which had supported the colonists. Famously, artist Benjamin West commemorated the occasion with his painting "The Treaty of Paris." He was able to portray the American delegation--John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and William Temple Franklin--but the British party refused to pose. So the paining remained as it is.

"Walden" Anniversary

"Walden; or, Life in the Woods" by Henry David Thoreau was first published on August 9, 1854 by the firm Ticknor and Fields, Boston. Of course, the book details the author's two years living in his cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book records Thoreau's many observations, his reflections as he makes a spiritual journey, and calls for lives of simplicity and self-reliance. Although Thoreau had colonial and stereotyped ideas about Native Americans, he was also fascinated by Native culture and, even as a child, liked to role-play Indigenous living and learn about Indigenous culture. This picture of "Walden's" title page is from Wikipedia and features a drawing by Thoreau's sister Sophia.

I looked online and found some famous quotations from the book: 

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

"Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes."

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life..."

"Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!"

"To be awake is to be alive."

"I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk."