Word: paintings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Naipaul, the best of contemporary novelist-travel writers, he takes a melancholy view of lands that are past their primes. In the city of Kenya he discovers a universal shabbiness imposed by the use of concrete: "The Asiatics' love of bright colors, too, is betrayed by the plastic paint they slap on everywhere, which flakes and peels as the colors of their native fabrics and tiles never did." A few passages border on old-fashioned disrespectful wog-whomping, though some of the author's deepest disdain is reserved for the scraggly, underwashed Western students who can be found...
...second exotic subject is more mysterious, almost surreal. It is a zebra mare, which had been brought from the Cape of Good Hope and given to Queen Charlotte in 1762. This "painted African, ass," the first seen in England, was installed in the royal menagerie at Buckingham Gate. When he came to paint it, Stubbs set it in an English wood, its black-and-white hide in almost shocking contrast to the green tunnels of boscage and filtered shade that stretch behind it. It is as though one had taken a wrong turn in the Forest of Arden and encountered...
...vanished tone of 18th century landed society-fenced about with deadly capital statutes, but also bound intimately together by chains of patronage running vertically through the classes-that enabled Stubbs to paint his admirably varied theater of land work, from haymakers to grooms, trainers and jockeys, without the least sign of overt condescension. Across the Channel, patrons liked pictures of drunken, vomiting peasants in the Dutch manner: a class zoo. Not in England, where Stubbs painted the cult of the horse with rapt attention, as a ritual focus of many skills and several mutually dependent classes...
...heaviest side-betting ever seen at Newmarket, and amid scenes of hysterical excitement Hambletonian won the four-mile race by half a neck. He finished "shockingly goaded," lathered in blood from whip and spur. To commemorate the victory, Vane-Tempest had the 7 5-year-old Stubbs paint him life size...
Scouten and his experts found a new paint that could be washed instead of replenished. But the paint job will not be finally finished until 2004 because the process is so complicated and expensive. (The U.S. dollar has proved less sturdy than the sandstone: it has already cost the Federal Government more money-$283,000-to repaint the grand old mansion than to build the place.) One other secret. The White House is not going to be pure white. Scouten wanted a paint that would dazzle the eye in the sun and yet glow with a mellow gold...