February 27, 1863

Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (February 27, 1863 to August 10, 1923) was a painter, born in Valencia. According to Britannica:

Sorolla was from a poor family and was orphaned at age two. He displayed an early talent and was admitted to the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia at age 15. After further studies in Rome and Paris, he returned to Valencia. Initially, he painted historical and social realist works, one of which, Otra Margarita (1892), was his earliest success. He received the greatest recognition, however, for his genre paintings and landscapes. Using heavily impastoed pigments, he combined an Impressionist manner with narrative and anecdotal themes. In 1909 he made a successful debut in the United States in a solo exhibition at the Hispanic Society in New York City. The resulting critical acclaim won him a commission to paint President William Howard Taft in 1909. Upon his return to Spain, he purchased a beach house in Valencia....

For the rest of his life the sun and water there would inspire him.




Sorolla reminds some of Sargent, though you can't tell it so much from this portrait of his wife, Clotilde.

"Clotilde was his confidant, traveling companion, bookkeeper (or in his words, "my Treasury Minister"), and muse."  They were married in 1888.

February 26, 1879

Mabel Dodge, later Mabel Dodge Luhan, (February 26, 1879 to August 13, 1962) inherited banking money, and married more. She became a patron of the arts.

Encyclopedia.com tells some of the story. We excerpt a sketch of her life with her second husband, at their villa in Florence, while Mabel has become bored. She was

.... greatly influenced by the Gertrude and Leo Stein's philosophy that the individual could overcome the ill effects of both heredity and environment and create herself anew, Mabel returned to New York. Separated from her husband, Mabel moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village, the heartland of America's avant-garde. There, at 23 Fifth Avenue, she launched the most successful salon in American history. For the next three years Mabel entertained the "movers and shakers" of pre-war America, men and women who were sweeping in their condemnation of bourgeois values and industrial capitalism. Gathered together at one of Mabel's "Wednesday evenings" one might find artists, philosophers, writers, reformers, and radicals of all stripes: Margaret Sanger, Walter Lippmann, Lincoln Steffens, Emma Goldman, "Big Bill" Haywood, and Hutchins Hapgood. Mabel was determined to make herself the mistress of the spirit of her age by embracing its most idealistic and committed men and women.

Mabel Dodge gave generously of her time and money to support the various causes she believed would liberate Americans from the shackles of their Victorian past. She helped to sponsor the watershed Armory show which introduced post-impressionist art to a largely unfamiliar American audience; contributed to The Masses, the leading left-wing literary and political journal of her day; wrote a syndicated newspaper column popularizing Freudian psychology; and supported a host of organizations, among them the Women's Peace Party, the Heterodoxy Club, the Women's Birth Control League, and the Twilight Sleep Association.

Heralded by her friends and the public as the "New Woman," Mabel experimented with free love, having several unsatisfactory affairs, the most famous of which was with radical journalist John Reed. Mabel, who was never able to rid herself of the belief that women could only achieve through men, realized the tremendous gap that existed between the radical, emancipated image she projected and the reality that she was intellectually and emotionally dependent on men.

In 1916 Mabel and her third husband, artist and sculptor Maurice Sterne, moved to Taos, New Mexico. There she finally found the "cosmos" she had been searching for all her life. In the 600-year-old Pueblo culture she saw a model of permanence and stability; a total integration of personality achieved through the organic connection of work, play, community, and environment. Soon she fell in love with Tony Luhan, a fullblooded Pueblo Indian. Divorcing Sterne and marrying Luhan, her fourth and final husband, Mabel viewed their alliance as a bridge between Anglo and Native American cultures.

For the rest of her life Mabel took a leading role in calling "great souls" to Taos to help her create "a city upon a hill." The American Southwest was destined, she believed, to serve as a source of social and psychic renewal for the dying, decadent, and disillusioned postwar white civilization.

Lois Palken Rudnick is one of  Mabel Dodge Luhan's biographers. In her eponymously titled biography (1987) we learn, not about Luhan's cats, but a fictional portrayal of Luhan as a cat lover. The author Rudnick references here is Carl Van Vechten. For Van Vechten's novel, Peter Whiffle (1922) contains a character modeled on Mabel Dodge Luhan.  Rudnick quotes Van Vechten as giving Edith Dale (Luhan) this speech:

The cat understands pure being which is all we need to know and which it takes a life time to learn...all the rest of us are divided into bits of self...the cat has a complete subjective unity....

Mabel Dodge Luhan and Carl Van Vechten were, in real life, good friends.

February 25, 1820

You may not recognize the artist of this cat, but you have seen plenty of his work.







The legend for the this reproduction reads:

Kitty and the ball of yarn — Illustration to the first chapter of Through the Looking Glass [1872] by John Tenniel. Wood-engraving by the Dalziels. Student assistants from the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, scanned this image and added text under the supervision of George P. Landow. You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the site and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.

John Tenniel (February 28, 1820 to February 25, 1914) is perhaps overshadowed by Lewis Carroll. Here are excerpts from a useful biographical source.

John Tenniel, the third son of John Baptist Tenniel (1793–1879), a dancing-master, was born in London on 28th February, 1820. His biographer, Lewis Perry Curtis, has pointed out: "Living in genteel poverty in Kensington, his parents could not afford much formal education for their six children. Tenniel, the third son, attended a local primary school and then became the pupil of his athletic father, who taught him fencing, dancing, riding, and other gentlemanly arts. At the age of twenty, while fencing with his father, the button of his opponent's foil fell off and he suffered a cut that blinded his right eye - an injury that he concealed from his father for the rest of his life in order to spare him any pangs of guilt."

Tenniel attended the Royal Academy but left in disgust at the quantity of teaching he received. When Tenniel was sixteen he began having his paintings exhibited at the Suffolk Street Galleries. He was soon recognised as a talented artist and he received several commissions, including the production of a fresco for the House of Lords.

Tenniel had some cartoons accepted by Punch Magazine and one showing Lord John Russell as David with his sword of truth attacking Cardinal Wiseman, as the Roman Catholic Goliath, upset Richard Doyle so much that he left the magazine. Mark Lemon, the editor, decided to replace Doyle with Tenniel and in December, 1850, he became a staff cartoonist with Punch. At first Tenniel was reluctant to take the post arguing that he was more concerned with "High Art". He also doubted his ability to produce humourous cartoons. He asked one friend: "Do they suppose that there is anything funny about me?"

....Tenniel was a Tory and some of his cartoons upset radicals on the staff such as Douglas Jerrold. Tenniel denied being political prejudice and claimed that "if I have my own little politics, I keep them to myself, and profess only those of the paper".

Tenniel, who was blind in one eye, had a photographic memory and never used models or photographs when drawing. He wrote: "I have a wonderful memory of observation - not for dates, but anything I see I remember. Well, I get my subject on Wednesday night; I think it out carefully on Thursday, and make my rough sketch; on Friday morning I begin, and stick to it all day, with my nose well down on the block. By means of tracing-paper I transfer my design to the wood and draw on that. Well, the block being finished, it is handed over to Swain's boy (Joseph Swain was the engraver) at about 6.30 to 7 o'clock, who has been waiting for it for an hour or so, and at 7.30 it is put in hand for engraving. That is completed on the following night, and on Monday night I receive by post the copy of next Wednesday's paper. Although I have never the courage to open the packet. I always leave it to my sister, who opens it and hands it across to me, when I just take a glance at it, and receive my weekly pang."

Where possible, he arranged meetings with the leading politicians so that he could obtain a close look at the subjects of his drawings. On one occasion he was invited to 10 Downing Street to study the face of William Gladstone. Tenniel later claimed that Gladstone disapproved of the way he was portrayed and he was "not honoured again". Tenniel, was was a strong opponent of parliamentary reform, gave Gladstone a hard time during the debate over the 1867 Reform Act.



The Conservative Party was grateful for the support John Tenniel had given them and the Marquis of Salisbury, the Prime Minister, decided to grant him a knighthood. However, before it could be announced, the Conservatives lost power. William Gladstone, the leader of the Liberal Party, became new Prime Minister, had obviously forgiven Tenniel and agreed to let him have his knighthood.

Lewis Perry Curtis has pointed out: "Despite their dignified quality some of Tenniel's cartoons partook of the dominant prejudices of the day. His depiction of Jews included such standard antisemitic features as the hooked nose and the dark, oily locks of the Shylock–Fagin variety... Tenniel also endowed some African chieftains or warriors with such racialized traits as thick lips and big bellies. But when it came to the Irish - especially Fenians or republican separatists wedded to physical force - he delighted in simianizing rebel Paddy. Indeed, his Fenian apemen rank among the fiercest images of political violence ever to appear in the serio-comic format. ....


As well as working on Punch, Tenniel worked as a book illustrator. He is best known for the illustrations that he did for Lewis Carroll..... Tenniel was replaced by Bernard Partridge as chief cartoonist on the journal in 1901.


More Tenniel cats:

February 24, 1848

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (February 24, 1848 to October 25, 1899) was a writer who grew up near a Canadian wilderness, but after receiving a scholarship to Oxford University he never returned to Canada. He was inspired by the idea of evolution and his fiction and essays reflect this very Victorian excitement.

His books were read. William James referred to Allen's The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897). Chesterton said of the same book that "it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book on the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen." Not only was Grant Allen read, but his income from the sale of his books allowed his family to winter in the south of France.

There are some biographical details here. Including:

In 1895, Allen's scandalous book titled The Woman Who Did (1895) contained startling views on marriage and kindred, which promptly became a bestseller.The British Barbarians (1889) is a bold social commentary. An African Millionaire(1897) is a set of 12 humorous light fiction stories portraying the con man as hero and is a strong contender for pioneering the crime writing genre.

Grant has a graceful way of analyzing class distinctions in his work. Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899) is a work of fiction and we quote a brief section on royal assumptions, in the context of Indian tiger hunting.

He drew himself up and opened his palms with a twinkling of pendant emeralds 'I am royal' he answered with naive dignity and the tiger is a royal beast. Kings know the ways of kings If a king kills what is kingly, it owes him no grudge for it. But if a common man or a low caste man were to kill a tiger-- who can say what might happen.

With Allen's death, he left an unfinished manuscript. His good friend, Conan Doyle finished the writing of it and it was published posthumously.

February 22, 1928

Martha Swope, (February 22, 1928 to January 12, 2017) got a New York Times obituary:

From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of “West Side Story,” to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of “La Cage Aux Folles” in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever....As official photographer first for New York City Ballet and then for an honor roll of other dance troupes, Ms. Swope chronicled the working lives of George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Mr. Robbins and other key figures in 20th-century dance. At the same time, she was what Variety called “the go-to photog” for New York’s theater industry...
We are given a glimpse of the private woman too, by this obituary writer:

Ms. Swope never revealed her age, even to intimates, who laugh about how often they tried unsuccessfully to find out, looking for her passport in a purse left briefly unattended on a trip, or searching her apartment for clues while feeding her cats.

And of the early years:

One of her pictures appeared in Life magazine, and her photography career took off.
“I didn’t even know what an interchangeable lens was, or a Leica,” she once recalled. But she was still hoping to become a dancer when Lincoln Kirstein, who ran the school and was general director of City Ballet, pulled her out of class one day to offer her a job recording the company’s work in pictures. She shelved her toe shoes.
Another obit notes:

In 2010 she donated her life's work, including contact sheets, negatives, prints, slides and digital files, to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.

February 21, 2000

Noel Gilroy Annan (December 25 1916 to February 21 2000) was the author of a variety of notable histories, such as:

Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1951) and
The Curious Strength of Positivism in English Political Thought (1959).

Annan has been described as "As the foremost spokesman of his generation... [H]e cared passionately about education, culture, and the intellect: 'everything else is secondary', he once wrote."

His quote is from his book, The Dons: Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses, (1999) which has been reviewed:

For two hundred years Oxford and Cambridge Universities were home to some of Britain's greatest teachers and intellects, each forming the minds of the passing generations of students and influencing the thinking and practice of university learning throughout the country and the world.
In this entertaining, informative book, Noel Annan is at his incisive best. Displaying his customary mastery of his subject, he describes the great dons in all their glory and eccentricities: who they were, what they were like, why they mattered, and what their legacy is. Written with love and wisdom, the great minds of the past—figures such as John Henry Newman, John Sparrrow, and Isaiah Berlin—are brought alive. In addition, Annan's often quoted article "The Intellectual Aristocracy" is included in this book. No other work has ever explained so precisely and so intimately the significance of the dons and their important role in shaping higher education—at a time when the nature of learning is ever more the subject of dissension and uncertainty.

Thus Stephen Toulmin. Another reviewer (Robert Fulford,) described the book as "an affectionate elegy for a class that has largely expired."

We stress the eccentric in The Dons, by mentioning an incident Annan includes,when "the headmaster's exquisite cat" was dissected by a student.

February 20, 1919

Anne Isabella Ritchie [née Thackeray], Lady Ritchie, (June 9, 1837 to February 20,1919) was the daughter of William Thackeray so her eminence in late Victorian society is not surprising. She wrote novels. Miss Angel (1875), Miss Williamson's Divagations (1881), Mrs. Dymond (1885) are just a few titles; she was prolific, writing biography and criticism also. 

According to her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry:

Among her obituaries, one of the most evocative is that contributed to the Times Literary Supplement by her stepniece Virginia Woolf (who also drew her as Mrs Hilbery in Night and Day) Although her novels are largely forgotten, posterity will remember her both as the diligent custodian of her father's memory (her biographical prefaces to the 1911 Centenary Edition of his works, collected as The Two Thackerays, 1988, are of lasting value) and as a vivid memorialist-roles which frequently, as in the autobiographical Chapters from some Memoirs (1894), overlap. A mass of surviving correspondence, much of it unpublished, confirms her centrality to the late-Victorian literary scene.

In Lady Ritchie's volume, Some Memoirs (1894) we have a charming picture of her childhood pets. She  starts by referencing her sister Harriet Marian (1840–1875).

My little sister had a menagerie of snails and flies in the sunny window-sill; these latter, chiefly invalids rescued out of milk-jugs, lay upon rose - leaves in various little pots and receptacles. She was very fond of animals, and so was my father—at least he always liked our animals. Now, looking back, I am full of wonder at the number of cats we were allowed to keep, though De la Pluche, the butler, and Gray, the housekeeper, waged war against them. The cats used to come to us from the garden, for then, as now, the open spaces of Kensington abounded in fauna. My sister used to adopt and christen them all in turn by the names of her favourite heroes; she had Nicholas Nickleby, a huge gray tabby, and Martin Chuzzlewit, and a poor little half-starved Barnaby Rudge, and many others. Their saucers used to be placed in a row on the little terrace at the back of my father's study, under the vine where the sour green grapes grew— not at all out of reach; and at the farther end of which was an empty greenhouse....

Anne Thackeray Ritchey's little sister grew up to marry Leslie Stephen; Harriet was his first wife.

February 19, 1877

Gabriele Munter (February 19, 1877 to May 19, 1962), the German painter, is discussed in this article.

A well known contributor to German Expressionism, Gabriele Munter came to Munich in 1901 to study art, and in 1902 became a pupil of the great Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). In 1903 they became lovers and for the next thirteen years were inseparable. During the summer of 1908, which she spent in Murnau with Kandinsky, along with Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941) and his Russian lover Marianne Werefkin (1870-1938), she finally found her individual style - a form of expressionism combining Bavarian folk art, stained glass work, and luminous blocks of colour. .... In 1909 she was co-founder of the New Artists' Association in Munich, a member of the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter, and a participant in all major shows of avant-garde art (including the two Blaue Reiter exhibitions) in Germany until 1914. In that year Kandinsky had to leave Germany. Munter met him once more in Stockholm before they finally parted in 1916. After the war she settled in Murnau where she lived a secluded life.....[Murnau is south of Munich, and near the Alps.]

Although Munter deferred inevitably to her older and more creative partner, right from the beginning she had her own style of painting, which may have influenced Kandinsky's own vision - and may even have become an issue between them. For instance, while she was interested in Kandinsky's passion for abstract art, her own 20th-century paintings remained firmly figurative.

..... In 1927 she met the German art historian Johannes Eichner, who became her lifelong companion. The two settled in Murnau, where Munter lived and worked until her death. Despite the Nazi ban on modern art and the closure of her 1937 exhibition at the Munich Art Association (Kunstverein Munchner) because of her "Degenerate Art" (entartete kunst), she continued to produce a variety of work, including portraiture, genre paintings and still lifes.

In 1956 she was awarded the Culture Prize in Painting by the city of Munich. In 1957, on the occasion of her 80th birthday, she donated an outstanding collection of almost 200 paintings (120 by Kandinsky, 60 by herself) to the city of Munich. In the same year, the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich held a major retrospective of her painting. In 1960 she had her first solo art show in the United States, and in 1961 she had an important show at the Mannheim Kunsthalle. She died in her house at Murnau on 19 May 1962.

This is her 1930 "Still Life with Black Cat."

February 18, 1979

Claude Rogers (January 24, 1907 to February 18, 1979) was a English painter, of some note.  He studied at the Slade and London University and later taught art, at these schools, and others. I like his picture below, so much.





I do not know if that is Elsie, his wife, or not.

February 17, 1929

Alejandro Jodorowsky (February 17, 1929) is a Chilean film maker with roots in the Russian shetls.

His artistic talents bloomed during his life in Paris. He is best known for the film El Topo (1970) where his ideas on shamanism and Buddhism are displayed. He has experimented with many media.

Jodorowsky has said:

“Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles.“

and

"What I am trying to do when I use symbols is to awaken in your unconscious some reaction. I am very conscious of what I am using because symbols can be very dangerous...."


Here is our artist:





He is hard to make sense of, often, but I get this quote:

"Five cats and a woman. That is all I need in life."

February 16, 2016

Jackie Morris, illustrator, was born in 1961. Her reputation was enhanced when she was longlisted for the Kate Greenaway Medal, an announcement made February 16, 2016. The local headlines soon read:

She Got a D in English and an E in A’ level Art, now Jackie Morris writer and illustrator has been shortlisted for a Kate Greenaway Medal.

Jackie Morris discusses her life on her blog:

I was born in Birmingham and lived there until at the age of four my parents moved away to Evesham.

Here I grew up and remember little of those times. ....I remember walking in the park by the river, bank voles and weeping willows and bright flashes of kingfishers. I loved the ferry at Hampton where the ferryman pulled you across the river to a land of fields and blackberries, where my dad would walk with me and show me how to find birds' nests and tales of when he was a boy.

After school I went to college, first in Hereford, then to Exeter where they told me that I would never make it as an illustrator and from there I escaped to Bath Academy, set in a beautiful stately home in Corsham. Here I developed a love for peacocks. These bright birds with their ridiculous tails would fly into our gardens.

After college I moved briefly to London, just off Balham High Road. I thought you had to live in London because that is where most of the publishing houses are. (It didn't take me long to realize that I was not born to live in a city) It was here that my real education began as I took my portfolio around magazine publishers and book publishers. I worked in magazines and books for seven years, for The New Statesman, New Socialist, Independent, Guardian and Radio Times. I designed cards and calendars for Greenpeace and Amnesty International and fell into children's books by accident.

I moved to Wales just before starting my first children's book, Jo's Storm, by Caroline Pitcher and have lived in the same place ever since, a small cottage held together by spider's webs. Cats come and go. At the moment I share the house with Tom and Hannah, my son and daughter, Floss and Bella, two odd dogs, and Maurice, Pixie, Elmo, Martha and Max, cats of various colour but mostly ginger.

Things I like: Blue, cats, the smell of honeysuckle, rose petals, birds, words, fires, good books, crayons and paint, the smell of a new book, polar bears, moonlight and moonshadows, ... long gold grass of late summer, the sound of the wind in the trees, the brush of a butterfly's wings, the fragility of bone, wasp's nests, washing on a line blowing in the wind on a sunny winter's day, the patterns the sea draws on a beach each day and night.

Music I like: Bjork, Stephen Fearing, Sufjan Stevens, Paulo Nutini, Nina Simone, Seth Lakeman, Cara Dillon,...

Books I like: The Book Thief, anything by Robin Hobb, Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, The Arrivals by Shaun Tan, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Ropemaker, The Stolen Child and many more.

Films I like: Mirrormask, Stardust, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Sleepy Hollow, Big Fish, Pirates of the Caribbean, In the Mood for Love, Tears of the Weeping Camel, House of Flying Daggers, Hero and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Science of Sleep, Cave of the Yellow Dog, Atonement, Butch Cassady and the Sundance Kid.

Wishes and Desires: I would like a grandfather clock that chimes the hour and has a big key to wind it up. It would sit in my studio and when I have painted for six hours I would get up to make tea and wind back time, because what I need more than anything is more hours in the day. I would like infinite patience and a quiet mind. I would like a tidy house, clean and smelling of roses or frankincense, instead of a house that looks as if it inhabited by trolls and smelling of wet dogs. I would like my garden to be consumed by the hillside, to grow heather and foxgloves and all things wild, where snakes and spiders live with butterflies and birds.


Things I like to do: Walk, fly kites, watch birds fly, lie back on a high rock and watch clouds form and disperse, lie back in a wood and watch leaves fall, read, watch a good film under a blanket of cats, ....

Artists I like: Angela Barrett, Brian Wildsmith, Maurice Sendak, James Mayhew, Marc Chagall, Sophie Rider, Chris Riddell ( who can draw a straight line and make it more beautiful than any other), Medieval illuminated manuscripts and the anonymity of the artists who made them,.....

Poems I love: The Stolen Child by Yeats, Amulet by Ted Hughes, Lone Dog, Until I Saw the Sea, He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven by Yeats, the madness of nursery rhymes.

Books I like: Tarka the Otter, anything by Robin Hobb, 100 years of Solitude, House of the Spirits,Where the Wild Things Are, The Mousehole Cat, The Patchwork Cat, Hanta Yo, Last Night in Twisted River,

Films I like: Serenity, The English Patient, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Tears of the Weeping Camel, Betty Blue, Birdy, Blade Runner, The Secret of Roan Innish, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Open Range, Robin Hood-Prince of Thieves, Waterworld, Star Trek ( the new one),The Unbearable Lightness of being, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.


The artist helpfully includes alternate bio's, like:

...Jackie Morris is a grumpy, over weight, middle aged woman who feels life is slipping away far too fast. She lives in a small house by the sea and would love an apartment in Venice for occasional weekends. She likes painting, sometimes and at other times finds it very frustrating.....

Or in the words of one of her cats

.... ( as dictated by Elmo the Cat) Jackie Morris spends far too much time painting and drawing and too little time feeding and caring for Her cats that live with Her. She has a very strange dress sense and no fur.

A sample of her work--






There is more lovely detail at her website, and also her cat blog.

February 15, 1748

We are grateful to the Great Cat website for information on Jeremy Bentham (February 15, 1748 to June 6, 1832).

This English philosopher coined the phrase the greatest happiness for the greatness number as the goal of man. This of course is silly. But Jeremy Bentham was not silly about his cats. We know the name of one: Langbourne, or as Bentham sometimes referred to him: Reverend Sir John Langbourne, D.D.

Jeremy Bentham argued against the idea that if an animal did not have reason, it could not suffer. He wrote in 1843 : It is proper... to forbid every kind of cruelty to animals, whether by way of amusement or to gratify gluttony...The time will come when humanity will extend its mantel over everything which breathes."

February 14, 2016

A lost and then found cat story was happily concluded on February 14, 2016. The story starts in Greece:

Ashley Anderson.... was volunteering in Greece when the family came ashore
But in the chaos of the landing, the cat ...panicked and fled
It turned up days later, after the family had been moved to a holding centre
Ms Anderson has spent £480 flying the cat to an temporary home in Berlin
She is trying to track down and reunite him with his original owners





Kunkush's [as his name turned out to be]  return to his family was no simple affair — it required help from dozens of do-gooders from all over the world and the help of a dedicated Facebook group to publicize the search. His journey began when the mother and five children, fled Iraq last year, bringing along their beloved family cat.

They eventually made their way to the Mediterranean and crossed to the Greek island of Lesbos aboard a crowded boat in an attempt to build a new life in Europe. Kunkush was right there with them, carried in a small basket. But soon after they landed on the shore, the frightened cat hopped out of the basket and ran away. The family and local volunteers looked for several hours, but had no luck finding him. Eventually, the family had to move on to a registration camp without him, and then like thousands of others, they continued on.

But the cat returned a week later, and was found by volunteer workers who remembered that the family had lost him. They named him Dias, the modern Greek name for the god Zeus, and took him in. They were sure the family was further along on their journey into Europe. The crew tried doggedly to hunt down the cat's owner, plastering reception centers with posters of the cat, spreading the information through a network of aid workers and providing contact details so the family could reach them.

All of the searching finally came to an end on Feb. 14, when volunteers behind the reunion Facebook page shared the exciting news that the family had been found. An Iraqi family in Norway, who wished to remain anonymous, had seen the Facebook page and reached out to connect the cat with his owners.

February 13, 1869

The painter of this portrait was  Robert Braithwaite Martineau. (January 19, 1826 to February 13,
1869)

[He] ...was born in Gailford Street, London....[the] son of Philip Martineau, taxing-master to the court of chancery, and Elizabeth Frances, his wife, daughter of Robert Batty, M.D.... Martineau was educated at University College, London, and, being intended for the legal profession, was articled to a firm of solicitors. He, however, abandoned the law to follow his predilection for art, and became a pupil in the school of F. S. Cary ... In 1848 he was admitted a student at the Royal Academy, where he obtained a silver medal for a drawing from the antique. He then became a pupil of Mr. W. Holman Hunt, in the latter's studio at Chelsea. In 1852 he exhibited for the first time at the Royal Academy, sending 'Kit's Writing Lesson' (afterwards the property of Mr. C. Mudie), and subsequently 'Katharine and Petruchio' (1865), 'Picciola' (1856), 'The Allies' (1861), 'The Last Chapter' (1863), 'The Knight's Guerdon' (1864), and other small pictures; but his time was chiefly occupied on a large picture of his own invention, entitled 'The Last Day in the Old Home,' which was exhibited at the International Exhibition of 1862, and was the subject of much comment at the time. Afterwards he began an important picture, 'Christians and Christians,' but died of heart disease [before finishing it].... An exhibition of his pictures and drawings was held in the following summer at the Cosmopolitan Club, Charles Street, Berkeley Square. Martineau married in 1865 Maria, daughter of Henry Wheeler of Bolingbroke House, Wandsworth, by whom he left one son and two daughters.

Thus the Dictionary of National Biography, the 19th century forerunner of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, on Robert Braithwaite Martineau.

"A Girl with a Cat" is dated 1860.

February 11, 1800

Some of the very first photographs were those taken by Henry Fox Talbot (February 11, 1800 to September 17, 1877). He also contributed to the processses necessary for developing photographs. His name was in the news a few years ago:

British group working to preserve the work of influential 19th century photographer William Henry Fox Talbot has discovered previously unseen work by the innovator.

A project led by Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries has been working to preserve the largest extant pivate collection of Talbot’s work since family members revealed last year that they were working with a New York dealer who could sell key works to private collectors.

The group won a £200,000 donation ... from the national Art Fund, leaving it with another £375,000 to raise to meet the £2.25 million ( $3.37 million U.S.) target required to secure all the work. The family also gave the Bodleian group a one-year extension on the February 2013 deadline they originally had set to raise the money.

In the midst of the campaign, archivists stumbled across 42 previously unknown works by Talbot, depicting botanical specimens, architectural works and more, including a striking image of a tiger.

Talbot started experimenting with photography in the 1830s, as Louise Daguerre refined what would become the daguerrotype. He invented the calotype process, which used paper treated with silver iodide to create negatives from which multiple prints could be made.

The process became the foundation for the negative film and printing methods that came to dominate photography, yet for some reason, Talbot took more heat and kind of lost the popularity contest at the time.

Talbot’s prints and negatives are extremely delicate — some observers at the time remarked about them seeming to change in color and intensity as they watched — required extraordinary preservation measures.

Here is an update on this work at Oxford:

The complete works of William Henry Fox Talbot - hailed as the British father of photography - have been brought together on a new website launched by the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford.

The free site has been launched in time to celebrate the anniversary of the pioneer's birthday, which was February 11, 1800.

The catalogue features more than 1,000 early Victorian photographic images, and is expected to grow to 25,000 images by 2018.

Professor Larry J Schaaf, project director for the Talbot Catalogue Raisonne, said: 'There has been nothing like this before in the history of photography.'


The site where you can view many newly available Victorian photographs, including those of Fox Talbot is here.

This is the picture of Fox Talbot's recently rediscovered "tiger:"







We are not sure where it was taken, but there were these beasts at zoos in Britain in that century. This picture shows the haunted, despairing look of such creatures.

February 10, 1981

Holly Willoughby (February 10, 1981)is an English television presenter. That means she hosts television programs, in her case, for ITV. She married in 2007, Dan Baldwin, and they have three children. Holly Willoughby is also a high profile cat person. This picture is from www.moggies.co.uk

February 9, 1932

Gerhard Richter (February 9, 1932) is a German painter. His mother is said to have been passionate about literature and music, and his father studied mathematics and physics. Richter refuses to be bound by any traditions, even ones he created, in his art. Thus we see a photorealism in this depiction from the 1960s:






He would later find his color chart paintings widely acclaimed. You get a sense of the variety of his work here.

His art now sells for millions of dollars.

February 8, 1940

Averil Cameron (February 8, 1940) was Warden of Keble College from 1994-2010, and before that Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at King's College ...

Her fame is such that books of hers are reviewed in the popular as well as academic press. We present here a recent example-- the reception of her Byzantine Matters (2014). We learn about an interesting topic as a way of introducing Averil Cameron.

For many of us, Byzantium remains "byzantine"—obscure, marginal, difficult. Despite the efforts of some recent historians, prejudices still deform popular and scholarly understanding of the Byzantine civilization, often reducing it to a poor relation of Rome and the rest of the classical world. In this book, renowned historian Averil Cameron presents an original and personal view of the challenges and questions facing historians of Byzantium today.

The book explores five major themes, all subjects of controversy. "Absence" asks why Byzantium is routinely passed over, ignored, or relegated to a sphere of its own. "Empire" reinserts Byzantium into modern debates about empire, and discusses the nature of its system and its remarkable longevity. "Hellenism" confronts the question of the "Greekness" of Byzantium, and of the place of Byzantium in modern Greek consciousness. "The Realms of Gold" asks what lessons can be drawn from Byzantine visual art, and "The Very Model of Orthodoxy" challenges existing views of Byzantine Christianity.

Throughout, the book addresses misconceptions about Byzantium, suggests why it is so important to integrate the civilization into wider histories, and lays out why Byzantium should be central to ongoing debates about the relationships between West and East, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, and the ancient and medieval periods. The result is a forthright and compelling call to reconsider the place of Byzantium in Western history and imagination.

Averil Cameron is professor emeritus of late antique and Byzantine history at the University of Oxford and former warden of Keble College, Oxford. Her books include The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, The Byzantines, and The Later Roman Empire.

Reviews:

"Byzantine Matters is a fighting book. It may well be that the title was chosen to echo Cornel West's Race Matters. In a more restrained and academic vein than West--but with no less tenacity--Cameron points to an injustice: the absence of Byzantium from the historical consciousness of Western Europe. . . . Seen from the mean streets of university and state policies in the United Kingdom, Cameron's book makes depressing reading. But seen as a program for Byzantine studies in themselves, it is a crackling description of an intellectual trajectory."--Peter Brown, New York Review of Books

"No one has written about the history and culture of Byzantium with such luminous intelligence as Averil Cameron."--Peter Thornemann, Times Literary Supplement

"This is a robust, insider critique of the field by an important and highly influential scholar with a formidable international reputation. . . . Four elegant chapters, dealing in turn with empire, identity, visual culture and religion, demonstrate with clarity and economy the extent to which too much recent work on Byzantium continues to wall itself off from new lines of inquiry. . . . Cameron's feisty and provocative manifesto should immediately be placed under every Byzantinist's pillow."--Christopher Kelly, Times Literary Supplement

Here is another book of interest: Images of Women in Antiquity was edited by Cameron and Amelie Kuhrt.  The first edition was 1983. We quote from her book:

A well known ritual practitioner in Hittite texts is the "Old Woman"....She performed a wide variety of purificatory and healing rituals, and operated under the aegis of the royal court a divinatory technique which cannot apparently be derived from any Mesopotamian source....

In magical contexts "Tongues" and 'Binding' refer to sorcery...[for example] the binding by the Great River of its flood, the fish, the mountains, road, and valley and by the Stormgod, of the clouds, the cord, the eagle's wing and the bearded snake in its coil; the wildsheep, the panther, the wolf, the lion, the antelope, the milk of the antelope and the Throne of the Protector god.

Averil Cameron married in 1962 Alan Cameron, another scholar of the ancient world. The marriage ended in 1980; they have a son and daughter.

February 7, 1941

Kevin Crossley-Holland, (February 7, 1941) is a poet, and editor and children's author. His father was a professor and his first wife, Caroline Fendall, was the daughter of Prof. L. M. Thompson. That marriage, in 1962, resulted in two sons. He married three more times. Crossley-Holland graduated with an Oxford degree. Here is the cover of one of his books.

The Fox and the Cat, 1985.






His career includes posts as:

An editor (fiction and poetry), at Macmillan., 1962–69;
Gregory Fellow in Poetry, Univ. of Leeds, 1969–71;
Talks Producer, BBC, 1972;
Editorial Director, Victor Gollancz, 1972–77;
Visiting Professor of English and Fulbright Scholar, St Olaf Coll., Minnesota, 1987–90; 

Professor, and Endowed Chair in Humanities and Fine Arts, Univ. of St Thomas, Minnesota, 1991–95;
Visiting Lecturer for the British Council in Germany, Iceland, India, Malawi, Yugoslavia, Slovakia.
He was a Patron of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society, 1999–2011;

A sampling of his publications follows:

Poetry books: 

The Rain-Giver, 1972;
Waterslain, 1986;
Poems from East Anglia, 1997;

Other books, including his translations:
Storm and Other Old English Riddles, 1970;
Beowulf, 1982; 

(with Gwyn Thomas) The Mabinogion, 1984; 

Axe-Age, Wolf-Age, 1985;   

Small Tooth Dog, 1988; 

The Exeter Book Riddles, 1978; 

The Illustrated Beowulf, 1987; 

The Anglo-Saxon Elegies, 1988; 

He edited (I hope I sorted these titles correctly):

The Faber Book of Northern Legends, 1977; 

The Anglo-Saxon World, 1982; 

The Riddle Book, 1982;

The Oxford Book of Travel Verse, 1986; 

Northern Lights, 1987; 

Medieval Lovers, 1988; 

Medieval Gardens, 1990; 

My listing is erratic and does not give a good sense of how prolific Crossley-Holland is. We should mention his memoir: The Hidden Roads, 2009

Kevin Crossley-Holland was born in Mursley, Buckinghamshire, England.  Mursley is recorded in the Domesday Book and is related to the deep passion for East Anglia and its neighbors, which informs this writer.

February 5, 1948

The Wallechinsky's are a creative family. The grandfather changed the family's last name to Wallace when they arrived in this country as Russian Jewish refugees. David Wallechinsky (February 5, 1948) chose to resume the Russian version for his own writing. David's father and sister, both writers, collaborated with him on some books, notably the "Book of Lists" series.

The fourth book of lists, (the first three were published in 1977, 1980, and 1983, respectively) is titled The People's Almanac Presents the Book of Lists: the 90's edition (1995). Therein we find a list of "11 cats who traveled long distances to return home."

David Wallechinsky and his wife and children live in Santa Monica and the south of France.

February 4, 1932

Mona Caird (May 24, 1854 to February 4, 1932) was a Victorian novelist. An article on this writer in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography summarized the thematic content of her work:

[O]f the five novels she published between 1883 and 1915, The Wing of Azrael (1889), A Romance of the Moors (1891), and The Daughters of Danaus (1894), ... have received the most attention from literary critics. In A Romance of the Moors she tells the story of Dick Coverdale and his lover, Bessie Saunders. The plot's catalyst involves Dick's meeting Mrs Margaret Ellwood, a widowed London artist who has lost her way on the moor, who introduces the two young people to the idea of independence. She advises Dick and Bessie to reject the traditional ideas about marriage and to marry when they are mature and able to act reasonably and responsibly. In the end Mrs Ellwood encourages Bessie to return to London with her where she can 'form other interests; that will bring [her] nearer to Dick, not take [her] farther away from him'. While this novel indicates that women's liberation can sometimes be accomplished peacefully, in The Wing of Azrael Caird has the main character, Viola Sedley, murder her husband Philip to end a violent marriage. She escapes into the wilderness to avoid prosecution and she must reject her long-time lover, Harry Lancaster, to save him from a destructive association with her. The ideas expressed in these two novels, while poles apart in tone and action, reflect the positions on women's lives which Caird espoused in her non-fictional tracts and essays as well.

In 1897 Caird collected essays which previously had been published in the North American Review, the Westminster Review, the Fortnightly Review, and Nineteenth Century for her book The Morality of Marriage and other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Women. Her general ideas are focused on equality for women in marriage and for equal partnerships in the home which will 'bring us to the end of the patriarchal system' .... which she described as repressive both for men, who were trained to see only 'the woman's-sphere and woman's-responsibility condition of things'... and for women, whose 'best qualities ... will disappear'.... if they keep within such a system. Her essays are frequently derisive and she employs irony to make her points about the repressive order of society which cannot separate wives from other types of property. As a progressive thinker, Caird sought legal reforms in childcare and divorce which would improve women's social positions by removing the stigmas of irresponsibility and ignorance.[sic] ... Her efforts earned her the label of 'feminist' in her lifetime and she has been described by John Sutherland as 'one of the most aggressive of the New Woman novelists' .... She was also active in the temperance movement, and was an outspoken antivivisectionist, publishing two works on the subject in 1894 and 1896.

It is not apparent above but Caird can portray touching domestic scenes. This is from The Wing of Azrael (1889):

Mother and daughter descended the stairs together, followed in a zigzag course by the singular and devoted cat. Viola took her up and placed her on her shoulder, entering the dining-room with the creature curling affectionately about her....

Mona Caird's father was an "an inventor from Midlothian." She married James Alexander Caird, son of Sir James Caird, at Christ Church, London in 1877.The couple lived in Hampstead, London, for the next 44 years. Their only child was born in 1884, and named after her father and her husband's father:  Alison James Caird.

February 3, 1826

Britannica describes Walter Bagehot, (February 3, 1826, to March 24,1877), as an

"[E]conomist, political analyst... editor ...[and] one of the most influential journalists of the mid-Victorian period.

His father’s family had been general merchants for several generations, while his maternal uncle Vincent Stuckey was the head of the largest bank in the west of England. ....

Bagehot had the severe schooling of an early Victorian.....

Because his father was a Unitarian, the obvious choice for Bagehot’s higher education was University College, London (at that time Oxford and Cambridge were decidedly Anglican). ... Bagehot’s somewhat sardonic manner did not endear him to all of his contemporaries, but he did make a number of lasting friends at University College, notably Richard Holt Hutton, who was for the latter part of the century the distinguished editor of The Spectator; Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet; and, of an older generation, Henry Crabb Robinson, who had been the friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and who had served as a correspondent for The Times during the Napoleonic Wars. In 1846 Bagehot took his bachelor’s degree with first-class honours at University College, despite bad health, and in 1848 he earned his master’s degree with the university’s gold medal in moral and intellectual philosophy.

He studied law for three years after his graduation but never liked it, and it was chance that took him into literature. Bagehot happened to be in Paris at the end of 1851 when Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat took place. He wrote a series of articles in the leading Unitarian journal describing the coup and defending Napoleon and thereby stirred controversy among readers because the coup was widely condemned in England. This, however, convinced Bagehot that he could write, which he began to do while settling down to work in Stuckey’s bank. ...

As a banker, Bagehot had written various economic articles that had attracted the attention of James Wilson, financial secretary to the treasury in Lord Palmerston’s government and an influential member of Parliament. Wilson had founded The Economist in 1843. Through this acquaintance, Bagehot met Wilson’s eldest daughter, Eliza. The two were married in April 1858.

The following year Wilson was asked to go to India to reorganize the finances of the Indian government, and he died in Calcutta in 1860, leaving Bagehot, then the manager of the Bristol branch of Stuckey’s bank, in charge of The Economist. For 17 years Bagehot wrote the main article, improved and expanded the statistical and financial sections, and transformed the journal into one of the world’s foremost business and political publications. More than that, he humanized its political approach by emphasising social problems.

Bagehot described himself as a conservative Liberal ....Unlike many Liberals, he had grown up in the deep countryside and believed strongly that rapid industrialization and urbanization were creating social problems in Britain. He was also an acute observer of international affairs, with an instinctive affection for France and an equal distrust of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany. ...

[His] The English Constitution, [(1867) was] an attempt to look behind the facade of the British system of government crown, Lords, and Commons—to see how it really operated and where true power lay. He was one of the first to observe the overriding power of the Cabinet in the party that commanded an effective majority in the House of Commons. He cultivated many close political friendships, notably with William Ewart Gladstone, who became the first Liberal prime minister in 1868; with Lord Carnarvon among the Conservatives (the author of the British North America Act, the constitution of Canada); and with William Edward Forster (the author of the first public education act in Britain).

Bagehot never succeeded, however, in entering politics himself. ... [H]e was a poor speaker and failed each time....

The greatest tribute to Bagehot’s lively style, humanity, and insight is that his books have been read, republished, and subjected to a continuous stream of critical essays ever since his death.

One essay Bagehot wrote was titled : "Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning; or, Pure, Ornate, and Grotesque Art in English Poetry" (1864). Wordsworth's writing is an example of Pure Art, and Browning, the Grotesque.

The poetry of Robert Browning, is represented by his long poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." This excerpt will suffice:
...

To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin was a pity.

‘‘ Rats'
They fought the dogs, and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cook's own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats
.....

Walter Bagehot uses his analysis of Browning to characterize his own mid Victorian times:

It is singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the surface should be examples of ornate art and grotesque art, not of pure art. We live in the realm of the half educated. The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning, but aimless : wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy; never even in the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it guide — did it even seriously try to guide— the taste of England. Without guidance, young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of books; they have to choose which they like. Many of them would much like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew how : but left to themselves, they take not pure art, but showy art; not that which permanently relieves the eye, and makes it happy whenever it looks and as long as it looks, but glaring art, which catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature — the fatigue–arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an instant and then is passed by for ever. These conditions are not favorable to the due appreciation of pure art, of that art which must be known before it is admired, which must have fastened irrevocably on the brain before you appreciate it, which you must love ere it will seem worthy of your love....

Every time you read this, it makes more sense.

February 1, 1918

We can I think take the word of her biographer, that Muriel Spark (February 1, 1918 to April 13, 2006),
was, after the death of Graham Greene, "the greatest living British writer." (Muriel Spark: The Biography, Martin Stannard, (2009)).

He mentions in this text the much quoted advice to a would-be writer in Spark's novel A Far Cry from Kensington:  “If you want to concentrate deeply on some problem, and especially some piece of writing or paper-work, you should acquire a cat."

Some of her other titles include:

(ed) Selected Poems of Emily Brontë, 1952;
Child of Light: a Reassessment of Mary Shelley, 1951, 

John Masefield, 1953, 

(joint) Emily Brontë: her Life and Work, 1953; 

(ed) The Brontë Letters, 1954;

(ed jointly) Letters of John Henry Newman, 1957;  

poems: 

The Fanfarlo and Other Verse, 1952; 

Going Up to Sotheby’s and other poems, 1982; 

All the Poems of Muriel Spark, 2004; 

fiction: 

The Comforters, 1957;

The Go-Away Bird, 1958; 

Memento Mori, 1959 (adapted for stage, 1964; televised, BBC, 1992); 

The Ballad of Peckham Rye, 1960 (Italia prize, for dramatic radio, 1962); 

The Bachelors, 1960; 

Voices at Play, 1961; 

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961 (adapted for stage, 1966, filmed 1969, and BBC TV, 1978); 

Doctors of Philosophy (play), 1963; 

The Girls of Slender Means, 1963 (adapted for radio, 1964, and BBC TV, 1975); 

The Mandelbaum Gate, 1965 (James Tait Black Memorial Prize); 

The Public Image, 1968; 

The Very Fine Clock (for children), 1969 (Edward Gorey illustrated this book).

The Driver’s Seat, 1970 (filmed 1974); 

Not to Disturb, 1971; 

The Hothouse by the East River, 1973; 

The Abbess of Crewe, 1974 (filmed 1977); 

The Takeover, 1976; 

Territorial Rights, 1979; 

Loitering with Intent, 1981; 

Bang-Bang You’re Dead and other stories, 1982; 

The Only Problem, 1984; 

A Far Cry from Kensington, 1988; 

Symposium, 1990; 

The French Window and The Small Telephone (for children), 1993; 

Reality and Dreams, 1996; 

Aiding and Abetting, 2000; 

The Finishing School, 2004

Stannard quotes: "The one critic she relied on was her Persian cat, Bluebell, [who was] “a gifted clairvoyante.” Her autobiography was Curriculum Vitae, published in 1992;