"Bear Necessities"

P. Brownlee offered this for the game. 

Pat Lang

Comments

[Dave of Maryland]

This has been up for a few hours & still no takers, so I will plunge in.

The setting is Antartica, but the polar bears are arctic. This means an English representation of Shakleton's 1914-16 adventure.

[K. Berg]

Edwin Henry Landseer,
"Arctic Shipwreck"

Thank you for your site,
Col. Lang!

[Patrick Henry]

I Dont know Pat..Gave it a Try..

But I think this is what Happens when You Miss the Half Time Pizza delivery ..

To a Raving Bunch of BEAR FANS..

[James Pratt]

All of Shackleton's crew survived. This might be an artist's speculation about the lost Franklin expedition in arctic Canada.

[Patrick Henry]

An Illustration in a Book about Sir John Franklins Expedition to find the Northweast Passage..in 1845..

[lightflyer]

At least the bears had ice to play with in those days.

Changing the subject: Re the US Embassy Baghdad, from Tom Dispatch (tp://tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=120725): "According to Paul McGeough, the $787 million "embassy," a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (not reliant on the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems) will pack significant bang for the bucks -- its own built-in surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a sports center. As essentially a "suburb of Washington," with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says, with all the hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're not leaving. Never."

I can understand Krispy Kreme and Starbucks, they are price you have to pay for security. But, SAM emplacements do suggest that the bad guys are expected to get air force at some point. Am I missing something?

[jeremy adamson]

The correct title of this painting is below -- from a 1981 review of a Landseer show by Hilton Kramer in the NYT.

"It is only in the bleakest of Landseer's paintings - and ''Man Proposes, God Disposes'' is surely the bleakest of them all - that we see the artist stepping out of his familiar social role and attempting to come to terms with his troubled inner spirit. And it is in such pictures that we come to understand what it must have cost him all those years to go on producing the awful succession of sweet, showy, sentimental pictures that make up the bulk of this exhibition and that won Landseer his immense popularity and success. ''Man Proposes, God Disposes'' is Landseer's ''Dover Beach,'' and with that painting, at least, he joins the ranks of those disabused Victorian prophets that we still have ample reason to admire and to heed."

[ikonoklast]

Especially irritating, because I just saw it a month or so ago and can't remember where.

I'm thinking William Bradford?

[pbrownlee]

It is indeed "Man Proposes, God Disposes" painted in 1863-64 by Edwin Landseer, (1802-1873), oil on canvas, 36" x 96" and belongs to Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham, Surrey. (We have Newfoundland dogs so Landseer is part of daily life here.)

http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/picture-gallery/http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/picture-gallery/

The painting is quite a counter-blast to anyone who thinks Nineteenth Century narrative painting is all about cheap sentimentality. According to Royal Holloway "(s)o disturbing is the painting that it is covered up when students sit exams in the Picture Gallery, to avoid bringing bad luck" -
http://www.rhbnc.ac.uk/picture-gallery/

It may have been a product of the first Darwinian furor - http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/2006/spring/feature1.html - and was on show at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh until August 27.

The fate of the last Franklin expedition to discover the North-West Passage offers rich pickings for ironists -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_expedition

The very sober account of Sir John Franklin in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online concludes: "His courage was admirable, but a more accomplished explorer, Rae or Stefansson for example, would have avoided the circumstances that called for such courage. He was more willing to learn from others and from his own experiences than some of his detractors have suggested, but he was slow to learn and slower still to adapt to unexpected circumstances. His determination to succeed was unwavering but was blended with an extreme loyalty to duty – with a dangerous tendency blindly to carry out instructions. That tendency was a major failing on his first expedition and it may have contributed to the tragedy of his last. In short, Franklin is vulnerable to criticism for his record in exploration, but his defects as an explorer are quite inseparable from his considerable virtues as a man".

http://www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBioPrintable.asp?BioId=37516