Henri matisse simple biography of william shakespeare
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February 4 through May 1, 2011
In 2009 when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon unveiled a previously unknown portrait painting with strong claims to be the only surviving life-time portrait of William Shakespeare, it created an international sensation. The Jacobean painting had hung unrecognized for centuries in an Irish country house belonging to the Cobbe family. Both this portrait and a recently identified portrait of Shakespeare's patron and dedicatee, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, were inherited by Archbishop Charles Cobbe (1686-1765). Recent technical analysis—as well as the portrait's superior quality—has established it as the original of a long series of portraits traditionally identified as Shakespeare. The Cobbe portrait has significant resemblances in costume and design to Martin Droeshout's engraving of Shakespeare published in the First Folio (1623) and bears a Latin inscription taken from a poem by Horace addressed to a play
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It’s been on at the Walker since last October, but last week I finally got round to seeing the exhibition of art books by Henri Matisse that comprises 63 original illustrations with text from four of Matisse’s most significant art books, including Jazz (1947), perhaps the most celebrated artist’s books in the history of modern art. In Nice four years ago we were fortunate enough to see a temporary exhibition of Jazz, a complete collection of the one hundred prints that make up the book.
The exhibition at the Walker features just a small selection from five Matisse art books: Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé (1932), Baudelaire’s Le fleurs du mal, Henri de Montherlant‘s Pasiphaé-Chant de Minos (les Crétois) (1944), Jazz (1947), and Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950). All of the images on display are outstanding. There are delicate line drawings, the flowing white-on-black curves of linocuts, and the vivid, colourful cut-out stencils of Jaz • Late in the afternoon of the first day of my trip to WW1 sites in Flanders and the Somme, inom was in the little village of Ors where Wilfred Owen fryst vatten buried and where his platoon spent their final hours before being mown down by German machine gun fire. The nearest town is Le Cateau-Cambresis and, since it fryst vatten the place where Matisse was born, and since it has a museum devoted to Matisse, inom had to go. I hadn’t expected much of a museum in a small provincial town. But inom was wrong. Housed in a former archbishop’s palace that in Matisse’s day had been transformed into a cotton mill, the museum is excellent. In ten beautifully-presented rooms, key episodes from the the life and work of the town’s most famous son are illustrated through an astonishing collection of Matisse’s work. I quickly learn the reason for this: the museum was established bygd Matisse han själv in November 1952, and he also defined the way h
Henri Matisse: celebrated in his home town