Alexandre Cabanel paintings

Alexandre Cabanel paintings
Anders Zorn paintings
Anne-Francois-Louis Janmot paintings
Poetry, Sinister Street, and South Wind - and my earliest friends fitted well into this background; they were Collins, a Wykehamist, an embryo don, a man of solid reading and childlike humour, and a small circle of intellectuals, who maintained a middle course of culture between the flamboyant ‘aesthetes’ and the roletarian scholars who scrambled fiercely for facts in the lodging houses of the Iffley Road and Wellington Square. It was by this circle that I found myself adopted during my first term; they provided the kind of company I had enjoyed in the sixth form at school, for which the sixth form had prepared me; but even in the earliest days, when the whole Business of living at Oxford, with rooms of my own and my own cheque book, was a source of excitement, I felt at heart that this was not all which Oxford had to offer.
At Sebastian’s approach these grey figures seemed quietly to fade into the landscape and vanish, like highland sheep in the misty heather. Collins

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida paintings

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida paintings
Joseph Mallord William Turner paintings
Julien Dupre paintings
corner, and in my own college was no echo, but an original fount of the grossest disturbance. We were giving a ball. The front quad, where I lived, was floored and tented; palms and azaleas were banked round the porter’s lodge; worst of all, the don who lived above me, a mouse of a man connected with the Natural , had lent his rooms for a Ladies’ Cloakroom, and a printed notice proclaiming this outrage hung not six inches from my oak.
No one felt more strongly about it than my scout.
‘Gentlemen who haven’t got ladies are asked as far as possible to take their meals out in the next few days,’ he announced despondently. ‘Will you be lunching in?’ ‘No, Lunt.’
‘So as to give the servants a chance, they say. What a chance! I’ve got to buy a pin-cushion for the Ladies’ Cloakroom. What do they want with dancing

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger paintings

Gustave Clarence Rodolphe Boulanger paintings
Guillaume Seignac paintings
George Owen Wynne Apperley paintings
Pobble.”
“He did not play the guitar but I recognized his genius.”
“Oh, Pobble, what are you up to?”
“Just what Sonia asked.” Basil leaned his chin on the knob of his cane. “You know, Babs, that all I want is your Happiness.”
“This doesn’t sound at all like you. You’ve got some sly scheme.”
“Far from it. You must never tell him or your mother what I am about to say. Charles’s parents are dead so they are not affected. I knew his mother very well; perhaps he doesn’t know how well. People often wondered why she married Albright. It was a blitz, you know, while he was on leave and there were air raids every night. It was when I was first out of hospital, before I married your mother.”
“Darling Pobble, it’s very cold here and I don’t quite see what all this past history has to do with me and Charles.”
“It began,” said Basil inexorably, “when—what was her name?—Betty was younger than you are now. I threw her into the lake at King’s Thursday.”
“What began?”

Gustav Klimt Expectation (gold foil) painting

Gustav Klimt Expectation (gold foil) paintingGustav Klimt Death and Life paintingGustav Klimt Danae (detail) painting
complained but they constituted the Mont Parnasse of the Allied Armies. One met more queer old friends in its messes and clubs than anywhere else in the world at this last stage of the war, and to those on leave from the Balkans its modest amenities seemed the height of luxury. But Major Gordon, during his fortnight of “reporting to headquarters” had deeper interests than on earlier leaves. He was determined to get the Jews out of Croatia and by dint of exploring the byways of semi-official , of visiting committees and units with noncommittal designations in obscure offices, he was in fact able to quicken interest, supply detailed information and in the end set the official machine to work which eventually resulted in a convoy of new Ford trucks making the journey from the coast to Begoy and back for the sole and specific purpose of rescuing the Jews.
By the time that they arrived in Italy Major Gordon was back in Yugoslavia for a brief appointment as liaison with a camp of escaped prisoners of war,

Albert Bierstadt Beach at Nassau painting

Albert Bierstadt Beach at Nassau paintingAlbert Bierstadt Fishing from a Canoe paintingAlbert Bierstadt The Buffalo Trail painting
Scottie?”
“Oh, nothing much. I met Lockwood. You remember him. Sad case, he was a sitter for the Balliol scholarship. Then he had to go into the army.”
“I thought he was still in it. How typical of old Scottie that all he has to tell us after eight weeks away is that he met a prize pupil! I shouldn’t be surprised to hear you did some work, too, you old blackleg.”
“To tell you the truth I feel a little désoeuvré. I must look for a new subject.”
“You’ve come to the end of old Bellorius at last?”
“Quite to the end.”
Later the headmaster sent for Scott-King.
“You know,” he said, “we are starting this year with fifteen fewer classical specialists than we had last term?”
“I thought that would be about the number.”
“As you know I’m an old Greats man myself. I deplore it as much as you do. But what are we to do? Parents are not interested in producing the ‘complete man’ any

Pierre Auguste Renoir The First Outing painting

Pierre Auguste Renoir The First Outing paintingPierre Auguste Renoir Les baigneuses paintingPierre Auguste Renoir La Moulin de la Galette painting
offered them cigarettes; suddenly a new side of his character was revealed; he fell into demoniac rage, he shook his fists, he bared his chryselephantine teeth, he narrowed his eyes to Mongol slits of hate; what he said was unintelligible to Scott-King but it was plainly designed to wound. The men stood firm.
Then, as suddenly as it had arisen, the squall passed. He turned to his guests. “Excuse one moment,” he said. “These stupid fellows do not understand their orders. It will be arranged by the officer.” He despatched an underling.
“We box the rude mens?” suggested Miss Sveningen, moving cat-like towards the soldiers.
“No. Forgive them I beg you. They think it their duty.”
“Such little men should be polite,” said the giantess.
The officer came; the doors flew open; the soldiers did something with their tommy-guns which passed as a salute. Scott-King raised his hat as the little party swept out into the blaze of sunshine to the waiting cars.
“This superb young creature,” said Scott-King, “would you say she was a slightly incongruous figure?”

Thomas Kinkade Victorian Christmas painting

Thomas Kinkade Victorian Christmas paintingThomas Kinkade Sunset at Riverbend Farm paintingThomas Kinkade Make a Wish Cottage 2 painting
My project of settling in the country was well received by my friends.
Each saw in it a likely convenience for himself. I understood their attitude well. Country houses meant something particular and important in their lives, a system of permanent bolt-holes. They had, most of them, gradually dropped out of the round of formal entertaining; country , for them, meant not a series of invitations, but of successful, predatory raids. Their lives were liable to sharp reverses; their quarters in London were camps which could be struck at an hour’s notice, as soon as the telephone was cut off. Country houses were permanent; even when the owner was abroad, the house was there, with a couple of servants or, at the worst, someone at a cottage who came in to light fires and open windows, someone who, at a pinch, could be persuaded also to make the bed and wash up. They were places where wives and children could be left for long periods, where one retired to write a book, where one could be ill, where, in the course of a love affair, one could take a girl and by being her guide and sponsor in strange surroundings, establish a degree