Who?
"First I sits myself down. Then I work myself up. Then I throw in my darks. Then I pulls out my lights."
"If the picturesqueness of objects be increased in proportion to their roughness of surface and intricacy of motion, two spiders, such as the avicularia, not to descend to too diminutive a scale, caressing or attacking each other, must, in point of picturesqueness, have greatly the advantage over every athletic or amorous symplegma left by the ancients."
"With regard to ourselves, the barbarous though then perhaps useful rage of image-breakers in the seventeenth century seems much too gratuitously propagated as a principle in an age much more likely to suffer from irreligion than superstition. A public body inflamed by superstition suffers, but it suffers from the ebullitions of radical heat, and may return to a state of health and life; whilst a public body plunged into irreligion is in a state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous symptom of approaching dissolution."
(No googling!)
"If the picturesqueness of objects be increased in proportion to their roughness of surface and intricacy of motion, two spiders, such as the avicularia, not to descend to too diminutive a scale, caressing or attacking each other, must, in point of picturesqueness, have greatly the advantage over every athletic or amorous symplegma left by the ancients."
"With regard to ourselves, the barbarous though then perhaps useful rage of image-breakers in the seventeenth century seems much too gratuitously propagated as a principle in an age much more likely to suffer from irreligion than superstition. A public body inflamed by superstition suffers, but it suffers from the ebullitions of radical heat, and may return to a state of health and life; whilst a public body plunged into irreligion is in a state of palsied apathy, the cadaverous symptom of approaching dissolution."
(No googling!)
8 comments:
Mary Shelley?
No. (A point of clarification: the person to be identified is the artist (who is also the author of the quotations), not the sitter.)
No idea whatsoever. But let me try: William Hogarth?
Gulley Jimson?
Thanks for the clarification--the sitter in that first portrait looks a little like John Waters.
My guess: Oscar Wilde??
A clue: This is an artist living sometime between Hogarth and Wilde, writing in English, despite not having a native command of the language.
Although I haven't read his prose, I'll be trying with Dante Gabriel Rossetti then. (Could that be Jane Morris?)
OK, looks like nobody's going to get it. Thanks for guessing.
It was Henry Fuseli. Fine drawings, eh?
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