The Hours (engraving)
The Hours is a stipple engraving by a master of the technique, Francesco Bartolozzi (1725-1815), published on April 4, 1788, from the print shop of Thomas Macklin, at No. 39 Fleet Street, London. The print is based upon a painting by Maria Cosway (1760-1838). The dancing hours, or nymphs of Greek mythology, were a pictorial representation of the poem "Ode on the Spring" by British poet Thomas Gray (1716-1771). The poem begins:
"Lo! where the rosy-bosomed Hours,
Fair Venus' train, appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The Attic warbler pours her throat,
Responsive to the cuckoo's note,
The untaught harmony of spring:
While, whisp'ring pleasure as they fly,
Cool Zephyrs thro' the clear blue sky
Their gathered fragrance fling."
Maria Cosway sent a copy of the engraving to Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), a highly influential French painter, who stated, "on ne peut pas faire une poesie plus ingenieuse et plus naturelle." ("One couldn't make poetry more ingenious and more natural.")
Read more about The Hours (engraving): The Stippling Technique, Details From "The Hours", The Title
Famous quotes containing the word hours:
“There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)