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The Chinese New Year is a fifteen day celebration that falls on a different date each year as it is a combination of lunar and solar movements. It usually falls in the month of January or February. This year marks the ‘Year of the Horse’.The Chinese New Year’s date varies every year and falls on second new moon after the winter solstice. The date for the occasion is decided according to the calendar which is a combination of the solar and the lunar calendar.
Rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, cat, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog and boar are the animals that are considered to be auspicious. Each person as is believed in the chinese new year calendar 2010 resembles an animal and this reflects their traits.
The chinese new year 2010 or the Spring Festival as it is also known is the most revered holiday of the year. This is the time when family and friends gather and offer prayers to their ancestors and deities followed by a lavish dinner to usher in the New Year. During this time, families clean their homes while feng shui believers decorate their homes accordingly. On new years eve, members of a family stay up late as legend goes that long ago; the gods in heaven would give gold to each family so they would keep awake, active and ready to accept the gold gift.
Families decorate their homes with pretty vases and colorful flowers symbolizing that nature has reawakened. Oranges and tangerines are placed in the house as a sign of happiness and prosperity. A tray of candies made of eight different types of candies are placed along with these. The candies are made of lotus seeds, longan, peanuts, coconut, cumquat, red melon seeds, candied melon, etc.
The traditional food that is a significant part of the Chinese New Year party includes Jai, Fish and chicken, noodles and desserts. The dinner has a symbolic meaning in which the Chinese dumplings imply wealth as they are in the shape of ancient Chinese gold or silver ingots. Jiu is the traditional hard liquor in China symbolizes longevity as also Daikon, a white radish. Red chilies symbolize good luck while rice ensures harmony.
Chinese people are usually out on the roads, especially kids who wear Chinese dragon masks and go for the Chinese New Year Dragon parade. Dragon dances are a vital part of the Chinese New Year. One man who has a ‘Pearl Of Wisdom’ on a pole entices the dragon to follow him to the drum beats as though searching for wisdom and knowledge. The lion dance is an equally important ritual in the consecration of any auspicious time in China. The Lantern Festival is an amazing visual display of multicolored paper lanterns created by craftsmen in designs of butterflies, dragons, birds, dragonflies and other insects or animals. The Dragon Boat Festival marks the day of a certain Chinese scholar who threw himself into the river over a political protest.
Chinese New Year is not just a festival of fun and part, but also a time to welcome the new season, pray for prosperity and well being and cleanse away the any thing evil.
Mukesh writes many lunar new year calendar and more services chinese new year 2010 celebrations related articles. 365celebration.com provide ideas about chinese new year eve, Chinese New Year animal,lunar new year 2010, and Chinese New Year 2010 activity.
The career of Edgar Degas was a long one – about 60 years out of his total 83. And his style, unlike that of most famous artists who worked into their old age, never ceased developing, always seeking out new means of expression and technique.The art dealer Ambroise Vollard one day asked him why he had never married, to which he replied that he would live in constant fear that, whenever he completed a new painting, he would hear my wife say ‘That’s so pretty what you’ve done there!’. In fact, despite today’s almost universal appreciation and popularity of his images, it was never a conventional sense of beauty that attracted his talents.
Hilaire Germain Edgar de Gas (it was only later that he started to sign his works ‘Degas’) was born in Paris, the eldest of three boys and two girls born to a prosperous banker from a Neapolitan family and his Creole wife from New Orleans. He was actually named after his grandfathers – Hilaire Degas, a banker from Naples, and Germain Musson, a New Orleans merchant. However his mother was to die when he was only 13 years old.
He was educated at the lycee Louis-le-Grand, a famous school for the elite, where he received a classical education and also met his long-time friends Henri Rouart, Paul Valpincon and Ludovic Halevy. Having received his baccalaureat in 1853, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law, although he preferred to spend his time in the print room of the Louvre where he had already made some copies from engravings, and also visiting the painting studios of Felix Barrias and Louis Lamothe. In 1855 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and began to study officially with Lamothe, a pupil of Ingres.
Not needing to study and compete for the Prix de Rome, in 1856 he set out for Italy, first visiting his family in Naples. In October 1857 he visited Rome where he met Gustave Moreau, already an influential figure eight years his elder. They became close friends and visited Florence together between June and August 1858.
From 1865 to1870 Degas exhibited each year at the Paris Salon. He also became friendly with Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet and, in the summer of 1869, joined Manet in Boulogne and Saint-Valery-en-Caux where he painted some landscapes. Of all the artists of the time, it is doubtlessly Manet with whom he had the greatest affinity. They were both older than most of the Impressionist circle and both came from prosperous families so they could also meet socially within their family circles.
The tragic events of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune of the years 1870-71, together with a lengthy stay in Louisiana visiting his family from October 1872 to March 1873, marked both an interruption and a turning point in his career. At the outbreak of the war he joined the national guard together with his friend Manet and many other artists, however the extreme cold during the siege of Paris affected his health badly and at the start of the Paris Commune he went to rest in the Orne with his friends the Valpincon family.
It was during the 1870′s that Degas acquired his reputation as a painter of dancers. The reasons for his interest in dance were numerous and diverse but certainly stem from his life-long enthusiasm for music and the opera. The interior of the opera house also had many visual attractions – the possibility of unusual views onto the stage from balconies or the orchestral pit, contrasts between light and darkness, illusion and reality, beauty and banality.
After the theme of dance it was the racecourse that drew most of his attention. Racecourses were a new phenomenon in France, being introduced there from England in the 19th century. The Longchamp stadium opened in 1857 and it was this course which inspired Degas, Manet and, later, Toulouse-Lautrec. The exclusive Jockey Club was inaugurated in 1833 and it naturally attracted the same upper classes who attended the Paris Opera.
His first personal exhibition, which was held at the Durand-Ruel gallery in 1892, consisted of an extraordinary series of semi-abstract monotypes with enhanced colours representing mysterious landscapes. Besides such landscapes his style wasn’t to change dramatically from then on, although his subjects tended to grow in dimension – whereas previously, for example, he would have depicted a whole dance troupe, he now concentrated on perhaps just two or three figures in the foreground. This was undoubtedly to some extend due to his failing eyesight.
Degas himself gave another explanation for the mysterious power of his later works: “It’s one thing to copy what one sees, but it’s much better to draw what can only be seen in one’s memory. It’s a transformation during which the imagination collaborates with the memory … there your recollections and fantasies are freed from the tyranny exerted by nature.”
Degas continued to struggle against his blindness and worked up to about 1912 when he was forced to leave his apartment where he had lived for the past quarter century and move to a more convenient address in the Boulevard de Clichy. But it proved to be an ordeal from which he never fully recovered and, despite the huge international success and high prices commanded by his works from 1900 onwards, he became sad and indifferent to the glory. He died on 27th September 1917 during the wartime, making his death go almost unnoticed by the world – although perhaps a fitting end for the man who had once said “I would like to be famous but unknown”! He was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre.
About the Author
Learn more about Edgar Degas and find other biographical writing by Bianca Tavares at Vintage Art.
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Edgar Degas – Biography Of The French Artist Renowned For His Figure Painting
The career of Adolphe William Bouguereau, unlike that of his contemporaries, the then avant-garde Impressionists, was one of ever-increasing success without major setback. He was born on the west coast of France into a family of wine merchants and was given a classical education by his uncle Eugene, a curate, who tutored him in bible study, Latin and Greek, with particularly classical mythology. He also arranged for him to take drawing lessons and after only 2 years of part-time study, he won first prize in the figure-painting class at the Bordeaux Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
With the help of money earned from painting portraits of his uncle’s parishioners and financial assistance from an aunt, at the age of 21 Bouguereau went to Paris to train in the studio of Francois-Edouard Picot and, after only two months, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Chosen as a contestant for the Prix de Rome in the years of 1848 and 1849, he was finally awarded the prize in 1850. As was the tradition, the winner was sent to Rome for 4 years to study at the Villa Medici, the seat of the French Academy in Italy, where the techniques of the classical and Renaissance masters were taught. While there he also had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the country locating and copying many Renaissance masterpieces and visiting towns and lakes inspirational to landscape artists. The influences from this period are readily seen in all his future work.
Returning to Paris in 1854, Bouguereau exhibited at the Salon and was awarded many commissions for portraits and decorative series. His work was very popular with both public and the critics and he soon started selling through the dealers Durand-Ruel and Goupil, finding eager markets in England and America.
Throughout his later career Bouguereau gained official and public recognition and was awarded an imperial commission in 1856, resulting in the canvas Napoleon III Visiting the Floods of Tarascon. In 1857 he was awarded a Salon medal and in 1859 was made a chevalier (knight). Awarded the Legion of Honour in 1876, he was at the same time made one of only 40 life members of the Academie des Beaux-Arts of the Institut de France, the highest official honor awarded to French artists. In 1885 he was awarded the Grand Medal of Honor at the Salon and was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor in the same year.
Bouguereau was also a respected teacher and in 1881 was elected president of the painting section of the Paris Salon. In 1883 he became president of the benevolent Society of Painters, Architects, Sculptors, Engravers and Designers, which promoted and attended to the welfare of new and struggling artists. He also taught drawing at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.
Although relatively little is known, Bouguereau’s private life was less happy. In 1856 he married Marie-Nelly Monchablon (1836-1877) with whom he had five children, three sons and two daughters. They lived together with his domineering mother in a purposely-built large house and studio in Montparnasse, an area of Paris popular with artists to this day. But domestic happiness was short-lived and his daughter, Jeanne-Leontine, died in infancy in1872; a son, Georges died in 1875 at the age of 16; and in 1877 his wife Nelly died, closely followed by the infant William-Maurice. This persomal tragedy was memorialized in two paintings: Pieta in 1876, dedicated to Georges, and Vierge Consolatrice in 1877. His other son, Adolphe-Paul, was also to die of Tuberculosis in 1900, aged 30.
In 1879 Bouguereau became engaged to the young American artist Elizabeth Jane Gardner (1837-1922) who was his neighbour in Montparnasse, but their wedding was initially opposed by his daughter Henriette and also by his mother, not until whose death at the age of 91 in 1896 were they able to marry. They lived together happily for the few remaining years of his life.
Each summer Bouguereau would return to his birthplace of La Rochelle to paint in his studio he had built there and it was there that he died in 1905 after several years of heart disease. He is buried in the famous cemetary of Montparnasse.
Bouguereau declared that he was only really happy when painting and indeed he completed almost 700 canvases during his long career. Despite being verbally attacked by Degas and the Impressionists who considered him to be too backward-looking and artificial and to be holding back the progression of French art, by the time of his death he was one of the most respected and loved of French artists. He was a favorite of collectors who found in his scenes of bathers, nymphs and other idylls, the perfect escapism from the pressures of every-day life.
About the Author
Learn more about Adolphe William Bouguereau and find other biographical writing by Dr Bianca Tavares at Vintage Posters.
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Adolphe William Bouguereau – Biography of the French Realist Painter