It mentions Dumas held a eulogy for him. Dumas father came from a similar family background: He was the son of a French nobleman and a Caribbean slave, and Dumas' grandfather bought his father free and brought him to France, where he ended up a general under Napoleon.
Came here to say this... The Black Count was such an illuminating read. It's surreal to think that Dumas' own father was the inspiration for writing Count of Monte Cristo.
Along these lines - the life story of Abram Petrovich Gannibal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal, who was Alexander Pushkin's great grandfather, is jaw-dropping incredible to me. I'm really surprised a Hollywood movie hasn't been made about him.
Unless there were gaping liberties taken with facts in that book, I can't for life of me fathom how that book still hasn't been made into a movie yet. It's amazing how one person was at the right place at the right time and at the wrong place at the wrong time in two very extreme ways in one lifetime.
Is this true? I know modern French is troisième, but I'd never seen this before, so I googled. There seems to be nothing on the internet about it, and remarkably few matches for Thière beyond misspellings of théière (teapot), which makes me think the authors of this article just made this up.
That got me curious, and according to the French Wikipedia, he was originally called "Letiers" (with the same etymological explanation) before he renamed himself "Lethiers" and finally "Lethière". Seems to hold up.
It's currently closed for renovation and set to reopen in November but if you have a chance to go see the Frick Collection in New York, I strongly recommend it for two of the most photorealistic paintings I've ever seen: the portraits of Sir Thomas More [1] and Thomas Cromwell [2] by Hans Holbein the Younger (sadly the digitized versions are low resolution and don't do them justice).
The paintings are 500 years old but look like photographic portraits, down to the individual hairs in the stubble on More's chin. Realism was in vogue at the time but there weren't many other artists who were as good as Hans Holbein.
Thats an obsessive level of detail for that era. Later Rembrandt's school were focusing more on the play of shadows on given subject and its surroundings, but most of the details were not to this level, at least not those I've seen up close (but still some parts were pretty crazy, ie embroidered collar or vein structure of wrinkled skin of an old woman).
Obviously clothing and hairstyles change. More recently, average BMI is higher, or people are more likely to be tattooed. I'm sure there's other differences that aren't coming to mind.
But even setting aside any of that, it's pretty rare that I see a portrait that old and I think it could conceivably be recent.
even the amount of tattoos depends on culture and region. lots of cultures around the world practice some form of tattooing. even the BMI thing varies somewhat because different BMIs are healthy for different ethnic groups.
Its funny that you say that since photography was invented in France in that period. Was it the paintings that were photorealistic, or the photos that were painterly?
The nature of the photographic mechanism becomes a new definition of “reality,” but it is still a cultural byproduct, leaving Realness to be still uncovered in all kinds of ways
In early photography history there was a pictorialist movement where people used special sort focus lenses to introduce more of a painterly quality. These lenses, such as Rodenstock Imagon still exist and are sought after.
So what you’re saying is that the mirror is the measure, and that the projections based on photons, etc. are fundenmentally evidenced by the form of the mirror image?
> You can substitute "photorealistic" with "looks like the square (or rectangle) picture in the mirror".
Reflections in the mirror have depth and motion. Even without the viewer or the subject moving, the viewer can see depth in the mirror that isn't in a photo. In those respects, photos are more like paintings than mirrors. Of course, in other respects, they're more like mirrors.
You wouldn't be interested in him as neoclassicist, academist, even professor at Beaux Arts today, because that period is totally uninteresting at all. If not how they suppressed the independent artists, romantics those days. In England or Germany much more interesting painters were celebrated those days, who won over those salon academics.
The article does discuss this, and the main point to understand is that his mother was a slave and was then emancipated, meaning any children she had prior to emancipation were born into slavery. The article says that his father emancipated both his mother and him. It does not state that there is 100% definitive evidence of his status at birth but given his mother's status and the lack of baptismal records for his birth, it is very likely he was born a slave.
