On This Day...

Good Monday and good Valentine's Day to you all!

While couples in love celebrate and marinate in the festivities that is Valentine's Day, let me inform you of something else that happened on this day back in 1895.

On Feb 14, 1895, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest opened at St. James's Theatre in London. He wrote the first draft in just 21 days, the fastest he'd ever written anything.

The play tells the story of a man named Jack Worthing who, as a pillar in his community, is laden with social responsibilities. In an attempt to escape tiresome social obligations, Jack pretends to have a younger brother named Earnest, who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of pleasure and is always getting into trouble of a sort that requires Jack to rush grimly off to his assistance. Jack even pretends to be Earnest when that suits his purposes. 

At the same time, Jack's friend Algernon Moncrieff also begins impersonating the imaginary Earnest. When two women fall in love with Jack and Algernon, they both think they are in love with a man named Earnest. It comes out in the end that Jack and Algernon are themselves actually long-lost brothers.

Wilde said that The Importance of Being Earnest expressed his philosophy that "we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality." To a friend he wrote that The Importance of Being Earnest was "a trivial play ... written by a butterfly for butterflies." 

But it was his greatest success.With witty dialogue and high farce, The Importance of Being Earnest is one of Wilde's most popular and endearing plays.

Wilde showed up at a rehearsal for the play a few days before the opening, wearing his trademark green carnation pinned onto a three-piece maroon suit. After watching the actors for a few minutes he said, "Yes, it is quite a good play. I remember I wrote one very like it myself, but it was even more brilliant than this."

Source

On This Day...

On this day in 1805, writer Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark. In his lifetime, Andersen authored many of the best known fairy tales like "The Ugly Duckling", "The Princess and the Pea", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and "The Little Mermaid" (which is what the Disney classic was loosely based on).

In my early college years, I took a writing course where we studied Scandinavian literature and Andersen was one of the authors we covered. I am embarrassed to admit that it was only then that I realized where many of my classic fairy tales came from. It is amazing how mainstream American/Western culture often adopts and appropriates things from other cultures and the origin (and some times worse, significance) of that said artifact gets lost in the process of cultural appropriation.

To honor this Danish author's birthday, Google's normal multi-colored logo (well unless it is April Fools day, then it becomes "Topeka") on its home page is being replaced by a series of Google doodles that reflect scenes from Andersen's well known fairy tale "Thumbelina". Go check it out!

Image from Chronicle Books

On This Day...

Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, 1887

On this day in 1853, Dutch post-impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh was born. Little appreciated during his lifetime, Van Gogh's fame grew largely in the years after his death in 1890 from a self-inflicted gun shot wound. Today, Van Gogh is regarded as a vanguard figure in the history of modern art and his legacy is preserved in the paintings and drawings he left behind.

Whether in his multiple self-portraits, landscape paintings, sunflower series or portraits of others, Van Gogh's use of color and his correspondingly expressive broad brushstrokes conveyed his emotional state of mind. It is also this vibrant use of color, forms and brushstrokes that has influenced nearly every artistic movement that came after him: Symbolism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and beyond.

Personally, I have only gotten the chance to see Van Gogh's Irises, at the Getty Museum.