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| June 8, 2011 |
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| ISLAND VILLAGE Charles Ebert (American, 1873-1959) |
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| I am most at peace on a river in Montana. I like the experience to a washing machine for my brain. Being there is transforming. While under the Big Sky, I am only concerned with fishing and catching. If you allow your mind ot wander anywhere else, you will neither catch nor land your trout.
In Montana I am so focused on fishing that my mind is cleared of everything else. |  Henry Winkler is an actor, producer and director. He is probably most famous for his role as the Fonz in the 1970s U.S. television sitcom, Happy Days. |
| More than anything else, the value of I've Never Met an Idiot on the River is its look into the genuinely likable-seeming personality behind one of television's most beloved characters, a friendly guy, a family guy, easygoing, amiable and refreshingly unpretentious. | |
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| THE GOLDEN GATE |
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| WINTER OF 1864 |
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| AVERILL'S RAID |
| No language can tell the suffering of our men. They were in saddle night and day, save a few hours between midnight and day. They were beat up by their officers with their swords -- the only means of arousing them -- numb and sleepy. Some froze to death, others were taken from horses senseless. They forded swollen streams, and their clothes, stiff frozen, rattled as they rode. It rained in torrents and froze as it fell. In the mountain paths the ice was cut from the roads before they ventured to ride over. One horse slipped over the precipice -- the rider was leading him -- he never looked over after him. |
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| MICHIGAN CENTRAL RAILROAD |
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| SNOWY MORNING ON PICKET |
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| THE BEECHES |
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Initially titled "Landscape Composition," The Beeches originated in a plein-air study of beech and basswood trees that Durand made at an undetermined location--probably not far from the banks of the Hudson River.
Critics of the day distinguished the painting from the art of Durand's mentor, Thomas Cole, for its freedom from the narrative and allegorical freight that informed so many of Cole's pictures. In fact, the conception and vertical format of The Beeches distinctly reflect the suburban pastoral character and proportions of many works by the English master John Constable, whose paintings Durand had admired a few years earlier in London. Nonetheless, the warm, late-day glow of the prospect, suffusing the treetops at either side and highlighting the shepherd and his flock, resonates with the Italianate and French landscape antecedents that had marked most of Cole's production and would continue to affect Durand's work for several more years. PLEIN-AIR -- A school of French impressionist painting representing observed effects of outdoor light and atmosphere |
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| GARDANNE |
| This is one of three views of Gardanne, a hill town near Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne worked in the autumn of 1885 and most of 1886. The town is observed from a close vantage point.
Between 1885 to 1886, to be closer to Aix, Cézanne chose this village to settle with Hortense Fiquet and little Paul at 27 Forbin Court. This borough of 2645 inhabitants granted him a life of serenity; he formed friendships with some locals and the young Paul attended the elementary school for boys. This period was punctuated by two major events in the painter's life: it was from Gardanne that he broke off his friendship with his childhood friend Émile Zola, and on April 28th, 1886, he married Hortense in Aix, thus formalizing her marital status in her parents' eyes. During these few months he attempted to paint the old village perched on the hill of Cativel. Joachim Gasquet, a friend, wrote: "he paints from all sides this village of Gardanne rooted in its slope; the rugged bell tower, the russet cluster of houses, the burned roofs, great masses of foliage that always provide refreshment, a well of green light out there somewhere in the heat." Today, Paul Cézanne Boulevard leads to the "hill of the brothers" and an outdoor museum. |
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| GARDANNE -- ANOTHER VIEW |
 ONE HUNDRED FAMOUS VIEWS OF EDO (TOKYO) NUMBER SIXTY |
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| ASAKUSA RIVER, GREAT RIVERBANK, MIYATO RIVER |
| The point of view in this print is as though we had zoomed in from the previous scene, now looking north from just under Ryogoku Bridge. Hiroshige here provides a characteristically indirect depiction of one of the most interesting summer customs associated with the bridge--the ablutions of the Mount Oyama pilgrims.
He has refrained from showing us the actual ablution site, which was located under the bridge on the east shore. This view instead features two groups of pilgrims returning by boat from the ablution site, moving in the direction of the boat landing at Yanagibashi, just out of sight to the left. The huge assemblages of ritual paper strips that dominate the composition are called bonten and their use seems to have evolved within the syncretic practice of the mountain ascetics known as yamabushi. The figure in the bow of the farther boat is a yamabushi, blowing the huge trumpet shell for which they were known. |
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| BY THE WATERHOLE Frederic Remington |
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| THE GATES OF THE HUDSON |
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| F-15E Strike Eagle Fighter Jets over Sawtooth Mountain Range in Idaho |
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| F-15E Strike Eagle Fighter Jets Over the Ocean at Guam |
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| LARKSPUR |
| This plant is 6-24 inches tall, generally with unbranched stem. It blooms from April to July in valleys, foothills, and on dry ridges and flats. It is especially abaundant in sagebrush, extending from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Wyoming, Idaho, and south through most of Utah and Colorado. There are about two dozen species in the Rocky Mountain region.
Larkspur is poisonous to cattle and is responsible for the greatest cattle loss on national forest rangeland. The greatest losses occur when larkspur is grazed early in spring. After blooming, the plants apparently lose their toxicity. |
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| COMB DRABA |
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| HENBANE |
| Henbane is a poisonous plant, well known since the remote past. It was used in ancient Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome. Henbane is a widely distributed weed in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America. It is a biennial grayish-green sticky plant with an unpleasant smell. It is amazing that henbane produces a huge amount of seeds–from 10,000 to half a million per plant–and as few as 10-20 are enough to poison a child. All parts of henbane are poisonous. They contain the same alkaloids •belladonna• does, namely: hyoscine, hyoscyamine, atropine, and scopolamine. In fact, henbane is less toxic than belladonna because the amount of its alkaloids is ten times as little. The poisoning effect of the plant rarely leads to death. In most cases, it causes a clinical condition, characterized by insanity, violence, seizures, trembling limbs and other symptoms similar to those caused by belladonna.
Henbane is cultivated as a source of alkaloids for the pharmaceutical industry. Drugs based on henbane alkaloids are applied in modern medicine as painkillers and antispasmodics. |
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Authorship cannot always be credited nor the source defined. Authenticity of material is assumed to be correct, but is not guaranteed. |  |