In the spring of 1890, Russian doctor and writer Anton Chekhov travelled from Moscow to Sakhalin Island (located north of Japan), where he was to study and document the living conditions of convicts at the penal colony. He ultimately spent three months on the island, interviewin…
French painters Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas probably met in the spring of 1879, when they were introduced by their mutual friend, fellow painter Camille Pissarro. Gauguin was then thirty years old and Degas forty-five. By that time, Degas was already an established artist and h…
Novelist George Eliot worked together with Frederic Leighton on her only illustrated novel, Romola (1862-1863), set in 15th-century Florence. While not a fan of illustrated fiction, Eliot had her novel published by George Smith, owner of The Cornhill Magazine and a strong sup…
In November 1815, before the publication of her fourth novel Emma (1816), Jane Austen was invited by James Stanier Clarke to Carlton House, the London residence of the Prince Regent George (later King George IV). The Prince was a great admirer of Austen's novels and had ask…
The Russian tradition of duelling, which originated in Western-Europe, reached its peak in the 19th century. By then, it was common not only for military officers but also for civilians (especially the nobility and intellectuals) to engage in pistol duels as a means of defending…
Composer and pianist Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, whose best-known works include The Wedding March (1842) and the piano pieces Songs without Words (1829-1845), was born into a wealthy and well-established German-Jewish family. He had one older sister, Fanny, and two younger sibl…
Writing under the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is best known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature", while Ern…
In an earlier post , I wrote about the controversy provoked by Harriet Beecher Stowe's article The True Story of Lady Byron’s Life , which was published in The Atlantic Monthly in September 1869. Decades after the death of the famous British poet Lord Byron, Stowe accused…
While the Italian artist Michelangelo Buonarroti painted some of the most famous frescoes in art history —the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and The Last Judgment on the Chapel's altar wall— he considered himself first and foremost a sculptor. During his lifetime, he…
American-British author Henry James and Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson were literary and personal friends. Their literary friendship began in 1884, when Stevenson responded to James' essay The Art of Fiction with an essay of his own, titled A Humble Remonstrance …
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