Archive for March, 2024

George Eliot

Posted in Highgate Cemetery with tags , on March 25, 2024 by Cade

November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880

What’s in a name?

Born Mary Anne Evans – but known more prominently by her pen name – George Eliot was a Victorian novelist known for her depictions of rural English life and the intertwining themes of politics and humanism. Like contemporaries Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, Eliot became very popular thanks in part to her vivid accounts of Victorian life, specifically the countryside in which her books took place.

But, her writing was probably the most Victorian thing about Mary Anne Evans (who also went by “Mary Ann” and “Marian” at various points of her life). The rest of her life was anything but the buttoned-up ideal of the time.

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Gaspard Ulliel

Posted in Père Lachaise Cemetery with tags , on March 18, 2024 by Cade

November 25, 1984 – January 19, 2022

César Award winning actor, Gaspard Ulliel, was one of the most promising French actors of the early 21st Century. By the time he was 30, Ulliel had appeared in a number of international hits including A Very Long Engagement and as the titular characters in both Hannibal Rising and Saint Laurent.  In addition to winning two César Awards (for Engagement and  Saint Laurent) he was nominated for a number of other prestigious awards during his brief career.

Ulliel also appeared in more than a dozen television shows and made-for-TV movies in France. His first English-language series, Disney and Marvel’s Moon Knight, would end up being his last performance.
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Camille Pissarro

Posted in Père Lachaise Cemetery with tags , on March 11, 2024 by Cade

July 10, 1830 – November 13, 1903

The (arguably literal) father of French Impressionism, Camille Pissarro convened, nurtured and pushed the collective that defined one of the most famous movements in modern art history. Born on the island of St. Thomas in the Danish West Indies, Pissarro learned painting from local masters and initially concentrated on the lives and culture of the Caribbean people. He attended boarding school in France and – after spending some time in South America – returned to Paris at the age of 25 to embark on a career as an artist.

His focus on natural settings and rural life remained throughout his career. While he continued his studies at the Académie Suisse and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Pissarro met fellow artists like Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne. They shared frustration with the strict rules that surrounded the official Salon in Paris. Together, the artists explored themes and techniques that allowed them to express themselves in new, unconventional ways.
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Susan Sontag

Posted in Montparnasse Cemetery with tags , on March 4, 2024 by Cade

January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004

Susan Sontag was an American novelist and essayist whose criticism covered a wide range of topics throughout the 1960s, ’70s and 80s. Her breakout work was 1964’s essay Notes on ‘Camp’ which popularized “camp” as an aesthetic sensibility. She went on to write Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor as well as a number of novels and other fictional works. Sontag was also a filmmaker and occasionally directed theatre…including a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a war-torn theatre in Bosnia in 1994. She was a prolific activist who wrote and spoke out about subjects like the Vietnam war, feminism, human rights and the AIDS epidemic of the ’80s.

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