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| A Year in the Short Life of Henry M. Thomson Friday, January 1st |
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A very
dull day, of course, as all New Year’s Days are. Have at length
determined to keep a diary, or it would be better to call it a journal.
I do not intend to put anything in it which I would not like an outsider
to see; and I shall endeavour to say nothing in it which might at
all injure any one’s character. This journal shall only be descriptive
not critical, except of course as regards giving my opinion on such
and such a thing. To begin with I have done nothing in particular
to-day except read and draw. This evening I bought the English Illustrated
Magazine which contains several interesting articles and illustrations.
The frontispiece is a portrait of Sir Henry Thompson, the physician,
after a picture by Millais. It is very fine indeed, the expression
and character of the man’s face being very beautifully rendered.
There is an exhibition of Millais’s pictures going on now at
the Grosvenor Gallery, arranged by himself, to which Mama,
Lydia and myself purpose going on Tuesday.
Notes: English Illustrated News -- A journal of commentary, stories and illustrations, begun in 1882.
Sir Henry Thompson -- known for introducing the modern Western technique of cremation. While serving as Queen Victoria's surgeon, he published Cremation: The Treatment Of The Body After Death (1874). Inspired by the work of two Italians, Professors Gorini and Brunetti, who had demonstrated their cremating apparatus at the Vienna Exposition of 1873, Thompson constructed a reverberating furnace which managed to reduce a 144lb corpse to 4lbs of dust in 50 minutes. He went on to establish the Cremation Society of England, which had among its original members the novelist Anthony Trollope, the pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais and the cartoonist and illustrator John Tenniel, the man behind the original drawings for Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. (Sunday Herald, January 17, 2002); “Ashes to Ashes” http://www.sundayherald.com/print22317. John Everett Millais -- One of the leading lights of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, most famous for his painting of Ophelia (1852). In 1885 Millais he was made a Baronet and in 1886 one-hundred and fifty-nine of his works went on display at an exhibition at the Grosvenor Galley. This exhibition led to the revival of interest in his work. http://www.artrenewal.com/articles/2002/Millais/obituary.asp. The Grosvenor Gallery -- Founded in London in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay for the exhibition of paintings and sculpture by artists, both from the Royal Academy and those considered modern. “The paintings and works of art shown there challenged artistic convention and were the cause of virulent debate about the means and purpose of modern art, while the very existence of a gallery which attracted so much fashionable attention and which lent such great prestige to the artists who exhibited there served to overthrow the stultifying influence of the contemporary Royal Academy;” The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. (Columbia University Press, 2004); see Christopher Newall, The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions: Change and Continuity in the Victorian Art World Published (Cambridge, 1995) . |
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