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:
“The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)