Thought and Memory

Category: Culture

The visual, literary and performing arts, with some architecture thrown in.

  • Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks – Ilya Repin

    The Zaparozhye Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan *oil on canvas *358 × 203 cm *signed b.c.: И.Репин 1880-91

  • Theodor Severin Kittelsen

    Theodor Severin Kittelsen was a Norwegian artist. He is one of the most popular artists in Norway. Kittelsen became famous for his nature paintings, as well as for his illustrations of fairy tales and legends, especially of trolls. (Wikimedia)


  • Christ in the Desert

    Christ in the Desert, or Christ in the Wilderness by Russian artist Ivan Kramskoi, reflecting the Fasting of Christ. 1872


  • Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

    Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.

  • ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’

    Dylan Thomas reciting his villanelle ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’

    Do not go gentle into that good night,
    Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
    Because their words had forked no lightning they
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
    Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
    And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
    Do not go gentle into that good night.

    Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
    Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

    And you, my father, there on the sad height,
    Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
    Do not go gentle into that good night.
    Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


  • The Faithful Hound

    The Faithful Hound – Sir Edwin Landseer. 1830.


  • Napoleon Crossing the Alps

    Napoleon Crossing the Alps by Jacques-Louis David.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_Crossing_the_Alps

  • St Michael Archangel

    “St Michael Archangel”. – Guido Reni. The Archangel Michael trampling Satan,wears a late Roman military cloak and cuirass. 1636, held in Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Rome. (Wikipedia)

  • St. Michael – Luca Giordano

    Luca Giordano (18 October 1634 – 3 January 1705) was an Italian late Baroque painter and printmaker in etching. Fluent and decorative, he worked successfully in Naples and Rome, Florence and Venice, before spending a decade in Spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Giordano

  • Storm in the Mountains, c. 1870 – Albert Bierstadt

    > Albert Bierstadt (January 7, 1830 – February 18, 1902) was a German-born American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. To paint the scenes, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion. Though not the first artist to record these sites, Bierstadt was the foremost painter of these scenes for the remainder of the 19th century.


    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/HRSOA_AlbertBierstadt-Storm_in_the_Mountains.jpg

    > Born in Germany, Bierstadt was brought to the United States at the age of one by his parents. He later returned to study painting for several years in Düsseldorf. He became part of the Hudson River School in New York, an informal group of like-minded painters who started painting along this scenic river. Their style was based on carefully detailed paintings with romantic, almost glowing lighting, sometimes called luminism. An important interpreter of the western landscape, Bierstadt, along with Thomas Moran, is also grouped with the Rocky Mountain School.