Category: Art

Barbie was the brainchild of Ruth Handler, a pioneering entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Mattel, a leading toy company. Born on November 4, 1916, in Denver, Colorado, Ruth Handler possessed an innovative spirit and a keen eye for child development. As her own daughter grew older, Ruth noticed how she and her friends enjoyed playing with paper dolls, often imagining different lifestyles and career paths for them. This observation became the inspiration for her most famous creation, Barbie.

To begin with, Hans Christian Andersen seemed fated to live a life of ill-luck. Born at Odense, on one of the islands of Denmark, he spent the early part of his life living in a single room with his mother and father, a cobbler who had suffered from ill health for most of his life.

Statue of King Alfred the Great (c.848-900) in his home town of Wantage in Berkshire. Alfred is renowned as a man of action, a warrior who fought tirelessly against the Viking invaders, but he also loved to read, according to the monk Asser who wrote his biography in the ninth century.

During his lifetime, Francois Villon was infamous as a criminal rather than famous as a poet, and even his name was variable. Little is known of his birth, except that it probably took place in Paris in 1431, and almost nothing is known of his parents, except that they were very poor. His own surname was either Montcorbier or de Logos and the name Villon he took from his benefactor.

Experiments to add sound to films had started as early as 1900, when the silent cinema was in its infancy. By 1913, the Frenchman, Eugene Lauste, working in London, had made a sound-on-film projector and a reproducing apparatus. The outbreak of World War One in 1914, however, halted his work. – When did Films begin to speak?

It was an unlikely place for a revolution. Down in the basement of a café in Paris, two French brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumière, presented a short film to a select audience. It showed workers leaving the brothers’ factory for their dinner hour and it was the first film to be presented publicly on a screen. The date was 1895 and it is a nice coincidence that Lumière is the French for light. – How did the Cinema commence?

One of the greatest British painters, Thomas Gainsborough, was born in 1727 at Sudbury, Suffolk. He was the fifth son of a cloth merchant, John Gainsborough, and showed an early interest in painting. He sketched both his mother and father while still a child. The Blue Boy

Every day newspapers, books and magazines — millions and millions of them — carry the printed word and picture to each and every one of us. Printing is a vital part of our lives. Through it we are informed, amused, guided and taught. Through printing, knowledge of all kinds has spread widely. The Gutenberg Bible

The French Revolution (1789-94) and the Napoleon Wars that followed it, affected the arts as well as politics. The “classical” arts of the 18th century, though not unromantic, obeyed certain rules. “Romantics” regarded these as less important than vivid colours and vitality. The leading French Romantic was Eugène Delacroix, born in 1798. A frail, lonely child, he first showed talent at his Bordeaux school for the violin. – Eugène Delacroix