The First and Only and the Foundation of the English School "Mediocre minds cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly uses his intelligence." Albert Einstein: amateur mathematician "The truth ... is that to the dilettante the thing is the end, while to the professional as such it is the means; and only he who is directly interested in a thing, and occupies himself with it from love of it, will pursue it with entire seriousness. It is from such as these, and not from wage-earners, that the greatest things have always come." Arthur Schopenhauer, 1851 "Truth is born into this world only with pangs and tribulations, and every fresh truth is received unwillingly. To expect the world to receive a new truth, or even an old truth, without challenging it, is to look for one of those miracles which do not occur" Alfred Russel Wallace "Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will ignore you." William Blake, 1790-3 "The very character of bureaucratic administration automatically screens out all those who are capable of doing any other sort of work. ..... An administrator in a bureaucratic world is a man who can feel big by merging his nonentity in an abstraction. A real person in touch with real things inspires terror in him." Marshall McLuhan, June 22 1951 "Scholars belong to guilds held together by common opinions, attitudes, and methods. As a rule, innovation is welcome only when it is confined to surface details and does not modify the structure as a whole." Cyrus H.Gordon, 1982 "..... a scholarly myth can spread 'like a computer virus' until it becomes accepted historical fact." Helen Morales, TLS, May 15, 2009, p 11 Iain Pears' 1988 study, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England 1680-1768, is the most refreshing art-historical work I have read. Unblinkered by hereditary prejudice, or the self-perpetuating replication of bureaucratic thinking, it sheds brilliant light on the murky backwaters of academic research into the pre-Hogarthian origins of English art. My regret is that I did not discover it until the end of 2001, after this website was well under way. Any examination of Peter Monamy's life and work, 1681-1749, should start with a close reading of Pears, whose scholarship, in the words of Charles Saumarez-Smith "completely transforms one's conception" of these years in English painting, and gives lucid expression to the themes I was only stumbling and groping towards in the early 1980s. This website is indebted to numberless people A Conference Paper: January 2004 A Conference Paper: January 2005 introduction background Visit the Marine Art Information Center! Not every Monamy is a Monamy mail cichw-0@cichw.net © Charles Harrison Wallace 2001, 2004 |
