old town
Arnoldus van Anthonissen was a Dutch Golden Age marine painter.
Arnold Fiedler was German painter and graphic artist.
Arnold Fiedler was German painter and graphic artist.
Lincoln Townley is an English self-taught painter who explores the darker side of the human personality, painting abstract portraits of celebrities.
William Shakespeare was a British poet and playwright and writer.
William's father, John Shakespeare, was a merchant and official in Stratford. There are reports that he was a sailor for a time before joining a theater company in London. Beginning in the 1590s, Shakespeare began writing plays, and in 1593 he published a poem, Venus and Adonis, which became popular. He dedicated it to the Duke of Southampton, who was a philanthropist and patron of talent, and soon his business was booming.
From 1592 to 1600 Shakespeare wrote his dramas and romantic comedies "Richard III", "The Taming of the Shrew", "Romeo and Juliet", "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Merchant of Venice", as well as the comedies "Much Ado About Nothing", "Twelfth Night" and the tragedy "Julius Caesar". The playwright's business was so successful that he even bought a large house in Stratford. In 1599, Shakespeare became one of the owners, playwright and actor of the new theater "Globe". In 1603 King James took Shakespeare's troupe under his direct patronage. In the mature period, the great playwright turned to tragedies, there were "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear", "Macbeth" and others.
Although in the 19th century researchers had some doubts about the authorship of many of these works, William Shakespeare is considered the greatest English playwright, one of the best playwrights in the world. His plays have been translated into all major languages and to this day form the basis of the world theatrical repertoire, most of them have been screened many times. According to the Guinness Book of Records, Shakespeare remains the world's best-selling playwright, and his plays and poems have sold more than 4 billion copies in the nearly 400 years since his death.
Carl Spitzweg was a German romanticist painter, especially of genre subjects. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the Biedermeier era.
Felix Mendelssohn (full name Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy) was a German composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and one of the greatest representatives of Romanticism in music.
Felix was born into a Jewish musical family that later converted to Christianity. He received a versatile education and already as a child wrote many musical compositions, including 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concertos, sonatas and fugues. Mendelssohn's first public performance took place in Berlin in 1818, when he was nine years old. In 1821 Mendelssohn was introduced to J.W. von Goethe, for whom he performed works by J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor. A friendship developed between the famous wise poet and the 12-year-old musician.
A few years later, the talented musician began conducting in various orchestras in Europe, and became acquainted with Carl Weber. In England, where Mendelssohn visited very often, by the middle of the 19th century his music had become very popular, even with Queen Victoria he was the most favorite composer. He dedicated his Symphony No. 3 in A minor major (Scottish Symphony) to the Queen.
Among Mendelssohn's most famous works are A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826), the Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano concertos (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah (1846) and several chamber pieces. The tradition of playing the "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream in wedding processions dates back to its performance at the wedding of a royal princess in 1858, already after Mendelssohn's death.
In 1843, Mendelssohn founded a conservatory in Leipzig, where he taught composition with Schumann. Mendelssohn was one of the first great Romantic composers of the nineteenth century.
James Whitcomb Riley was an American children's poet and writer.
In 1874, Riley began working as a reporter and assistant editor for various publications, writing book reviews, humorous articles, and poems for the Indianapolis Journal newspaper. Riley also lectured from universities to theaters across the country, where he read poetry alongside writer Edgar Wilson (Bill) Nye. He attracted audiences with his oratorical skills and his imitation of the dialects of rural Indiana.
Many of Riley's poems, published in the Indianapolis Journal, were later collected in his first book, The Old Swimmin'-Hole and 'Leven Other Poems, published in 1883. By the 1890s, Riley had achieved commercial success through his writing talents and touring. His book 'Poems of Childhood' became a bestseller and he became known in the community as the 'child poet'.
Riley's poems "Little Orphan Annie" and "The Raggedy Man" served as inspiration for the books and puppets of the Broadway musical "Annie and Raggedy Ann," as well as many other entertaining works. A prolific writer, Riley published more than 50 books during his lifetime, his witty poetry is especially appreciated for its sometimes quirky reflection of small-town America.
