Auguste Rodin | L'Adieu / Farewell, 1898

The Farewell or The Convalescent / L'adieu - is composed of Camille Claudel with short hair (1884) and two independent hands added in front of her face, the work attests to Rodin's passion for assemblages, evident in both his narrative and portraiture registers.

By placing her head and hands on a block of plaster, Rodin shed light on his thoughts about pedestals.

The construction causes Camille's face to stand out slightly from the plaster block and conveys a sense of slow absorption that contributes to the melancholy of the composition.

Auguste Rodin | L'Adieu /Farewell, 1898 | Musée Rodin, Paris

Stefan Zweig | The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European / Il mondo di Ieri, 1942

Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) was an Austrian writer.

At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world.

The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (German title Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers) is the memoir of writer Stefan Zweig.

It has been called the most famous book on the Habsburg Empire.

He started writing it in 1934 when, anticipating Anschluss and Nazi persecution, he uprooted himself from Austria to England and later to Brazil.

He posted the manuscript, typed by his second wife Lotte Altmann, to the publisher the day before they both committed suicide in February 1942.

The book was first published in the original German-language by an anti-Nazi Exilliteratur publishing firm based in Stockholm (1942), as Die Welt von Gestern.

It was first published in English in April 1943 by Viking Press.

In 2013, the University of Nebraska Press published a translation by the noted British translator Anthea Bell.

In "The World of Yesterday", Stefan Zweig states:

"We of the new generation who have learned not to be surprised by any outbreak of bestiality, we who each new day expect things worse than the day before, are markedly more skeptical about a possible moral improvement of mankind.

We must agree with Freud, to whom our culture and civilization were merely a thin layer liable at any moment to be pierced by the destructive forces of the "underworld".

Caspar David Friedrich | Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 | Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg

John George Todd | Genre painter

Henry George Todd (1847-1898) was an English artist active in Suffolk.

Henry was the son of George Todd (1820-1904), a painter and decorator and grainer to whom he became apprenticed.

In 1865 he attended art school and later progressed onto the Royal College of Art.

After a period working in his father's decoration and gilding business in Bury St Edmund's when both Henry and his father George exhibited their works in the Todd's St Andrew's Street North shop.

Oscar Wilde | Se non avessimo amato / Ay! had we never loved

Se noi non avessimo amato,

Chi sa se quel narciso avrebbe attratto l'ape

Nel suo grembo dorato,

Se quella pianta di rose avrebbe ornato

Di lampade rosse i suoi rami!

Caspar David Friedrich | Ruins of the Oybin, 1835 | Hermitage Museum

Louis Wain | Postcard artist

Louis William Wain (1860-1939) was an English artist best known for his drawings of anthropomorphised cats and kittens.

Wain was born in Clerkenwell, London.

In 1881 he sold his first drawing and the following year gave up his teaching position at the West London School of Art to become a full-time illustrator.

He married in 1884 but was widowed three years later.

In 1890 he moved to the Kent coast with his mother and five sisters, and, except for three years spent in New York, remained there until the family returned to London in 1917.