Word: aesop
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Winston Churchill retouching Peter Paul Rubens? During the war, British Prime Minister Harold Wilson told a TV interviewer, it happened to a painting by Rubens and Artist Frans Snyders that hangs at the P.M.'s country house, Chequers. Although the canvas was supposed to depict Aesop's fable of the lion and the mouse, Churchill could barely discern the mouse. One day he took brush in hand to highlight it. "But it's still difficult to see," Wilson admitted. Would he try to improve it further? "I wouldn't touch up a Rubens " said Wilson, "still...
Times and critical tenets are changing, though. Aesop's ant is no longer quite so honored, his grasshopper no longer quite so despised. Play has ceased to be such a dirty word. The wise and serious artist is more and more free of the burden of having to sound like a high priest. Today's readers should be more inclined to accept Auden's virtuosity without imputing shallowness. He is serious, if not deadly-and who, save Lowell perhaps, can match him for compassion and complexity...