Musidora: The Bather 'At the Doubtful Breeze Alarmed', also known as The Bather, is a name given to four nearly identical oil paintings on canvas by English artist William Etty. The paintings illustrate a scene from James Thomson's 1727 poem Summer in which a young man accidentally sees a young woman bathing naked and is torn between his desire to look and his knowledge that he ought to look away. The scene was popular with English artists as it was one of the few legitimate pretexts to paint nudes at a time when the display and distribution of nude imagery was suppressed. Musidora was extremely well received when first exhibited and considered one of the finest works by an English artist. Etty died in 1849 and his work rapidly went out of fashion. At that time, the topic of Musidora itself became a cliche, and from the 1870s Thomson's writings faded into obscurity. Etty's Musidora is likely to have influenced The Knight Errant by John Everett Millais, but otherwise has had little effect. (Full article...).
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musidora:_The_Bather_%27At_the_Doubtful_Breeze_Alarmed%27> _______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries: 771: Kʼakʼ Tiliw Chan Yopaat dedicated a 65-ton stele, the largest stone known to be quarried by the Maya civilization, at his city of Quiriguá. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirigu%C3%A1> 1913: Greek military aviators Michael Moutoussis and Aristeidis Moraitinis performed the first naval air mission in history, with a Farman MF.7 hydroplane. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristeidis_Moraitinis_%28aviator%29> 1961: A Boeing B-52 Stratofortress carrying two Mark 39 nuclear weapons broke up in mid-air near Goldsboro, North Carolina; one bomb was recovered intact, the other disintegrated. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash> 1990: Japan launched the Hiten spacecraft, the first lunar probe launched by a country other than the Soviet Union or the United States. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiten_%28spacecraft%29> _____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day: querist: 1. (formal) A person who queries or asks questions; an interrogator, a questioner. 2. About Word of the Day 3. Nominate a word 4. Leave feedback <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/querist> ___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day: No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. --Edith Wharton <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton> _______________________________________________ Wikipedia Daily Article mailing list. To unsubscribe write to: [email protected] Questions or comments? Contact [email protected]
