The most famous art shows held in Paris in the late 1800’s were undoubtedly the exhibitions of the Impressionists. However, in 1890, the École des Beaux-Arts held one of what were a series of shows in a style that was nearly as influential: Japonisme.

Japonisme was the French term used to cover a wide variety of Japanese visual art styles. Most often, these were woodcuts and prints from the Edo period. A master of the form was Kitagawa Utamoro, who made a series of prints in the late eighteenth-century. One of these prints, shown above, was called Midnight: The Hours of the Rat; Mother and Sleepy Child. The simple lines and clear composition of the piece would help Cassatt move away from her early Impressionist style toward the more precise look of her late lithograph prints. In homage to Utamaro, the most famous of these prints, made a year after the Japonisme show, also depicts a mother and child: The Bath.

For a recent take on “Japonisme,” read this new book by Lionel Lambourne.

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(René Descartes’ diagram describing the arc of the rainbow)

Along with the Meditations, the most commonly read work by René Descartes is his Discourse on the Method, which contains the famous assertion: “I think, therefore I am.” In the Discourse, Descartes laid out his rules that, he claimed, could be used to solve any problem that the mind might encounter. This was quite a large claim, but Descartes went a long way toward proving it in the essays that followed. (Originally, Discourse was only meant as an introduction to these technical works.) In one of these essays, “The Geometry,” Descartes solved the “Pappus Locus Problem,” a complicated geometrical puzzle that was first formulated thousands of years before Descartes’ birth, and never solved before he applied himself to it. (Incidentally, it was in solving this problem that the great Enlightenment philosopher invented “Cartesian coordinates.”) In another essay, “The Optics,” Descartes discovered the Law of Refraction. And in the final essay, “The Meteors” (what we would now call “meteorology”), Descartes used the new Law of Refraction to make an important discovery about the rainbow.

As today’s entry in the Devotional points out, you can never stand under a rainbow, because it is an optical illusion caused by sunlight passing through raindrops. Descartes used his discoveries in optics to make this point more precisely. As he discovered, the angle at which light passes through the edge of a rainbow at its center – or its “angular radius” – is exactly 42 degrees. As impressive as the Discourse itself was, the fact that Descartes could use its rules to make three major discoveries is far more impressive still.

Read Descartes’ Discourse on the Method here.

For more on Descartes, read the entry for Week 15, Day 6.

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Albert Einstein formulated the world’s most famous equation in 1905, a year that has rightly been called his annus mirabilis, or “Wonderful Year.” It was in that same year that he made three other important discoveries:

1) The Photoelectric Effect
The Photoelectric Effect is an odd property of light: shine a light on a sheet of paper with two small holes on it, and the pattern formed by the light passing through the holes doesn’t quite behave the way you’d expect. The expectations before 1905 were based on the theory that light is a wave, but Einstein postulated another possibility. Or, rather, he postulated three: perhaps light isn’t only a wave; and perhaps something can be matter and a wave at the same time; and perhaps matter can have a mass of zero. With those new assumptions, Einstein solved the problem of the Photoelectric Effect. Even he considered this revolutionary.

2) Brownian Motion
Go to the nearest body of water, look at the surface, and you’re likely to witness an odd phenomenon: pollen zipping around the surface of the water in seemingly random ways. This is called “Brownian Motion.” Einstein explained how it happens, and, in doing so, proved the existence of atoms.

3) The Theory of Special Relativity
Years before formulating his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein postulated a theory that works in a special case: for bodies moving close to the speed of light. The Devoted Intellectual does not pretend to understand this one, but feel free to chime in with your explanations…

And what about that famous equation? It appeared in a fourth paper. In a footnote. Almost an after-thought in a year of magical thinking.

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The label “Impressionist,” like “Tory” or “intellectual” or “suffragette,” was first used as an insult. In this case, the insult was hurled by Louis Leroy, who coined the term in “Exhibition of the Impressionists,” his famous review of the 1874 exhibit that made Renoir, Pissarro, Monet and others famous. Leroy described one painting as “palette-scrapings placed uniformly on a dirty canvas,” and many others agreed. The works of the Impressionists were dismissed as sloppy, slap-dash messes. There might be a few contemporary artists who would be happy to hear their work described like this, but the Impressionists weren’t. They insisted that their paintings represented the world far more accurately than the old masters had. According to a study published last year, they just might have been right.

Between 1899 and 1905, Claude Monet made 19 paintings of the British House of Parliament at various times of day. Like all the Impressionists, Monet was fascinated by subtle differences in light and shading and captured these in his works. He captured them with remarkable accuracy, as Jacob Baker and John E. Thornes demonstrated in last year’s study. Baker and Thornes compared the position of the sun in the paintings with astronomical records and found that they matched exactly. As Thornes told the New York Times, “We can date, almost to within 15 minutes, when he first put the sun onto certain images.” Now that they know how precise Monet’s observations were, Baker and Thornes hope to use his paintings to analyze “London fogs and air quality during this period.” Apparently, those “palette-scrapings” were placed on canvas far more carefully than M. Leroy cared to admit.

Read the abstract of Baker and Thornes’ paper here.

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The first draft of the Declaration of Independence contained a condemnation of slavery that was struck out in order to conciliate representatives from the South. The original wording of the Constitution contained a famous “compromise” that allowed for slaves to be counted as “three-fifths” of a person when determining the number of seats that states would have in Congress, giving each plantation owner the equivalent of hundreds of votes with which to oppress his human chattel. These were horrible stains on the founding documents of the United States, and one man who had no use for the conciliation and compromise that applied them was John Brown.

Brown responded to these imperfections not by dismissing the Declaration and the Constitution, but by rewriting them. He saw that the principles they embodied were noble, despite their stance on the institution of slavery. His revisions lived up to the noble principles and categorically rejected the legality of human property. Brown’s “Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population of the United States of America” makes this point explicit, when it states that acts which condone slavery “are false, to the words, Spirit, and intention of the Constitution of the United States, and the Declaration of Independence.” His Declaration is a declaration of freedom for men and women held in bondage, and his “Provisional Constitution” began by recognizing slavery as an “unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion,” and setting forth the principles for a new Union that would be, in the words of Brown’s great successor in the battle against slavery, “conceived in liberty.”

In his time, Brown was dismissed as an insane traitor. But the war came, and the new Union that Lincoln created began the process of making Brown’s “Provisional Constitution” permanent.

Read John Brown’s Declaration here. And read his Provisional Constitution here.

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The earliest electrical cars had one particularly inconvenient feature: every night, they needed to be plugged in to restore their batteries. Besides being inconvenient, this also made them somewhat pointless: how much energy was really being conserved if the batteries had to be charged on a nightly basis?

Eventually, car makers came up with an innovative solution. “Hybrid” cars use gas to accelerate, but electricity to run the car at a steady speed. Most importantly, this electricity is not pumped into the car with a large plug or generator. It is produced by the car every time that it brakes. How? Friction. When the brakes are applied to a moving car, this causes friction. Depending on how hard the brakes are pushed, this is enough to slow down or stop the car. Until recently, that’s been all there was to say. But car makers soon decided to reuse the energy generated by that friction. So, every time you brake your hybrid, the heat produced by the brakes is used to charge the battery, allowing it to go for years and decades without ever being plugged in. This is about as true to the environmentalist motto – “reduce, reuse, recycle” – as you can get.

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In 1913, T.S. Eliot was a student at Harvard University who had just been awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford. He hoped to establish himself there as a poet and a thinker, and he knew that one of the most influential people in the field was Ezra Pound. Pound, who would soon take up Eliot’s cause, was the overseas editor of a Chicago magazine named Poetry, to which he would submit Eliot’s “Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” In the January 1913 edition, Pound published an essay about the best new poets in London (a list that Eliot would soon strive to make). That issue, which Eliot is likely to have read, also contained a poem by the Kentucky writer Malcolm Cawein. The title of the poem was “Waste Land.”

Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place,
Twisted and torn they rose–
The tortured bones of a perished race
Of monsters no mortal knows,
They startled the mind’s repose.
…
I looked at the man; I saw him plain;
Like a dead weed, gray and wan,
Or a breath of dust. I looked again–
And man and dog were gone,
Like wisps of the graying dawn.

As Robert Ian Scott first pointed out in the Times Literary Supplement in 1995, Cawein’s poem (which preceded Eliot’s by eight years) has more than its title in common with Eliot’s far more famous work. The tone and sensibility are very much like Eliot’s, as are many of the images, from the “skeletons gaunt” to the “breath of dust” that Eliot would transform into a “handful.” At the end of his poem, Eliot famously listed his sources, but not all of them. He was happy to put himself in the same company as Chaucer and Shakespeare, Dante and the Bhagavad Gita, but did not condescend to mention the forgotten poet from Kentucky who influenced him more than anyone else.

Was Eliot’s act plagiarism or homage? Compare Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Cawein’s “Waste Land” and decide for yourself.

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