1890 in art
Morris & Co – Adoration of the Magi Henri Rousseau – Self-portrait Vincent Van Gogh – Wheatfield With Crows Claude Monet – Boating on the River Epte Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – At the Moulin Rouge
Hedda Gabler
1890 is very much a landmark year in the psychological development of fictional characters. So specious is the dramatist, so subtle is his skill in misrepresentations, so fatal is his power of persuasion that for a moment we believe Hedda Gabler is a noble heroine, and not a fiend, and that Lovborg is deserving of …
Oscar Wilde – The Picture of Dorian Gray
I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray aged 18 and found it to be life-changing. Not for the witticisms which Wilde is so famous for, but for the philosophy of art and morality which it expressed. When I got to university I enlarged the preface and put it up on the wall of my …
William Morris — News from Nowhere
Better known these days for his artistic contributions to the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris was also a prolific author and prominent socialist thinker. News From Nowhere is a glimpse at a utopian future – or rather it is a novel-length thesis on how things should be, presented in novel format, with the convenient …
Arthur Machen – The Great God Pan
“”The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story”… …Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?” – Harry Quilter “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror …
Knut Hamsun — Hunger (Sult)
Hunger is a novel about a man, not fully in charge of his faculties or decisions, attempting to survive on the most basic of levels in a city that has nothing but contempt for his entire existence. With a psychologically complex and highly unreliable protagonist, a proto-Kafkaesque city full of unknown unknowns and a complete …
Vincent van Gogh
This is the best documentary I can find online about the life of Vincent van Gogh. It’s still not great, but it will do.
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Sign of Four
The second Sherlock Holmes novel, and one of the most well-known stories now, The Sign of Four was still only moderately successful in its day, the more well-known short stories yet to be written, but it still holds an important place in Holmes folklore as it introduces Dr Watson’s wife and frames his later, more …
Elsewhere in 1890
At Wounded Knee, the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment massacres 153 Lakota Sioux. Elsewhere, Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull is killed by police on Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Vincent van Gogh moves to Auvers-sur-Oise on the edge of Paris in the care of Dr Paul Gachet where he will produce around seventy paintings in as many …