Prosper Mérimée was an important French writer in the school of Romanticism, and one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, and an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian and translated the work of several important Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, and was responsible for the protection of many historic sites, including the medieval citadel of Carcassonne, and the restoration of the façade of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Along with the writer George Sand, he discovered the series of tapestries The Lady and the Unicorn, and arranged for their preservation. He was instrumental in the creation of Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris, where the tapestries now are displayed. The official database of French monuments, the Base Mérimée, bears his name.
Les Fleurs du mal is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857, it was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The poems deal with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.
"Roses Are Red" can refer to a specific poem, or a class of poems inspired by that poem. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19798. It is most commonly used as a love poem.
Armand Guillaumin was a French impressionist painter and lithographer.
La Légende des siècles is a collection of poems by Victor Hugo, conceived as an immense depiction of the history and evolution of humanity.
"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged.
L'Année terrible is a series of poems written by Victor Hugo and published in 1872. They deal with the Franco-Prussian War, the trauma of losing his son Charles, and with the Paris Commune. Covering the period from August 1870 to July 1871, a group of poems encapsulates each month, blending Hugo's anguish over personal tragedies with his despair at the predicament of France.
Les Orientales is a collection of poems by Victor Hugo, inspired by the Greek War of Independence. They were first published in January 1829.
Odes et Ballades, published in 1828, is the most complete version of a collection of poems by Victor Hugo written and published between 1822 and 1828. It includes five books of odes and one book of ballads.
"Beau Soir" is a French art song written by Claude Debussy. It is a setting of a poem by Paul Bourget. Debussy was 15 or 16 when he wrote this song, and his music was marked by the aesthetics of the period.
The poems of Victor Hugo captured the spirit of the Romantic era. They were largely devoted to 19th-century causes. Many touched on religious themes. Initially they were royalist but soon became Bonapartist, Republican and liberal. Hugo's poems on nature revealed a continuing search for the great sublime.
Léopoldine Hugo was the eldest daughter of novelist, poet, and dramatist Victor Hugo and his wife, Adèle Foucher.
Claude Monet painted a series of oil paintings of the Palace of Westminster, home of the British Parliament, in the fall of 1899 and the early months of 1900 and 1901 during stays in London. All of the series' paintings share the same viewpoint from Monet's window or a terrace at St Thomas' Hospital overlooking the Thames and the approximate canvas size of 81 cm × 92 cm. They are, however, painted during different times of the day and weather conditions.
A mirage of an astronomical object is a meteorological optical phenomenon, in which light rays are bent to produce distorted or multiple images of an astronomical object. The mirages might be observed for such celestial objects as the Sun, the Moon, the planets, bright stars, and very bright comets. The most commonly observed of these are sunset and sunrise mirages.
Lines on an Autumnal Evening was composed by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1793. The poem, rewritten throughout Coleridge's life, discusses nature and love. As Coleridge developed and aged, the object of the poem changed to be various women that Coleridge had feelings toward.
Soleil et chair is a poem written by Arthur Rimbaud in May 1870. The work, while being unmistakably Rimbaud, nevertheless exhibits the influence that both Romanticism and Latin writers such as Horace, Virgil, and Lucretius had on his early style. It takes the tone of a hymn to the sun and earth—with overt sexual overtones—which periodically lapses into a lament of the abyss that now separates Man from Nature. Throughout, double entendres figure widely, often providing the sexual innuendos. The poem, which consists of four sections, is written in Alexandrines, or 12-syllable lines—typical to French verse in the same way that iambic pentameter is to English. In spite of its relatively classical form, the direct nature of its venereal themes sounds shockingly modern to even today's reader; moreover, the sheer creativity of Rimbaud's imagery would seem to presage his later refinement of this stylistic trait, which has since earned him the title of Visionary.
François Brousse was a philosophy professor who had mainly taught in the Languedoc-Roussillon region and is the author of some 80 works including poetry, essays, novels, plays and storybooks. He was a pioneer of the philosophy cafes that were popping up almost everywhere in France at the end of the 20th century. Brousse was born in Perpignan, France and died in Clamart, France.
Coucher de soleil no. 1 is an oil painting created circa 1906 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). Coucher de soleil no. 1 is a work executed in a mosaic-like Divisionist style with a Fauve palette. The reverberating image of the sun in Metzinger's painting is an homage to the decomposition of spectral light at the core of Neo-Impressionist color theory.
Les Feuilles d'Automne is a collection of poems written by Victor Hugo, and published in 1831. It contains a multitude of poems, six of which are especially known as Soleils Couchants.
