Word: rousseau
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FACT Attributed to an unnamed "princess," the remark appears in Rousseau's Confessions at least two years before Marie Antoinette arrived in France...
...been asked, amid the intellectual and political convulsions that tore Spain asunder between 1790 and 1815, "Whose side are you on?", he would have answered, "Reason's." For Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, the gilder's son from Aragon, did not have the education of a Diderot or a Rousseau, but he was completely a figure of the Enlightenment; his paintings and prints, with their obsessive imagery of the conflict of light and darkness, are perhaps its supreme metaphorical expression in European art outside of the classically formalized work of Jacques-Louis David...
...past. The figures in Matisse's fauve landscapes at St.-Tropez -- amply represented in this show -- are Arcadians with spots. The pale recumbent nude among the columnar tree trunks in his Nymph in the Forest, 1935-42 or '43, harks directly back to Titian. The flute player in Henri Rousseau's The Happy Quartet, 1902, whose music is joined by the howling of a giant white poodle, is a reprise of innumerable earlier pastorals. Gauguin was partly a reprise of Watteau, each in his own way imagining fugitive pleasure on a distant island, Cythera equaling Tahiti...
Todd's life is a walk through the 20th century, and Boyd makes a lavish, if somewhat raveled, tour leader. Todd's mother, like Rousseau's, dies giving birth to him, and he grows up with his dour physician father and his pompous elder brother, not knowing much of love except for the erratic attentions of Oonagh, the daily. An indifferent student, he is eventually shipped off to a boarding school that he actually enjoys, in part because he never takes rugby seriously and in part because he is able to develop his talent for photography...
...Todd is neither a cynic nor a coward, and he never dodges the consequences of his own wild inspiration. Rousseau, he recognizes, is the "first modern man . . . ((who)) spoke for all of us suffering mortals, our vanities, our hopes, our moments of greatness and our base corrupted natures...