The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, La Liberte guidant le people, but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Theodore Gericault's Le Radeau de la Meduse, for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a key but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, Scene des massacres de Scio.

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the great English portrait and landscape painters of the eighteenth century. His modern manner of painting based on emotions was criticized by contemporaries such as Joshua Reynolds, but it gave Gainsborough a special position in an art world dominated by academic rigor and earned him the greatest appreciation from English society.

Mas de 30 maravillosos relatos de amores desacertados a los que tambien se sumaran otros, tan increibles como cautivadores.

Text in English & German. The beautiful Lau, the heroine of Eduard Moerike's story, is only half a water spirit -- her mother was a human woman, and her father was a water nix of royal blood. She has thin webs between her toes, but apart from this she is not externally different to a human being. Because she cannot laugh and can bear only dead children, her husband, the Donaunix, sends her to the Blautopf lake. Before she can be permitted to return, she must laugh five times. The Blautopf is located in Blaubeuren, and is the source of the river Blau. It is a "pot spring", and connected to a cave system that was first studied in the 1950s. One of the great caverns discovered by explorers -- the so-called "Moerike-Dom" -- is 25 m wide, 30 m high and 125 m long. The spring waters are deep blue in colour, and change from turquoise blue to dark blue as the light shifts -- on overcast days, the water actually appears to be almost black. During Germany's Romantic period, the Blautopf gave rise to all kinds of speculations and stories, and Moerike, one of the most prominent exponents of Swabia's group of Romantic poets, who spent a night in Blaubeuren during a journey in 1840, took his inspiration from this striking place.