Laura Knight pinxit - horses & circuses

Salvete omnes,

let us move away from Polish history tonight and canter closer to our times - XX century Britain.

when I was a kid, several times a year our town would receive a visit  from a wondering' circus on their country-wide, year long circuit - each visit being full of clowns, acrobats and above everything many animals, wild or beautiful or both - :) .
I used to love watching various wild and domestic animals perform tricks and drills, from Asiatic elephants, African lions, Siberian tigers and other wild cats, monkeys, seals, or just our old good dogs and birds doing various tricks, and finally a big number of each show;  teams of horses and equestrian acrobatics performed by most graceful and agile gymnasts on top of these well-trained and beautiful steeds.

In this spirit I wanted to bring to my blog the art of Laura Knight, British painter of the late XIX and most of the XX century, especially Ms Knight's equestrian art.

-Circuses, horses and acrobats & clowns -

-Gypsy and other  horse scenes from the bygone era -

 

I look fondly at these field plowing paintings - I did some of it when a teenager, I wanted to learn how to turn over and break the soil with a team of horses pulling a plough/plow, and I was lucky enough some of my grand-uncles had horses and used plows, be it with some nostalgia for the bygone times...  

Wiki Commons gallery image

and Alfred Munnings' canvas of Laura Knight painting :

all images are presented here under the Creative Commons licence,

Valete

Monuments to Tadeusz Kosciuszko - hero of 'two eagles'

Salvete Omnes,
this is as good time as any to bring here the images of various equestrian monuments dedicated to general Tadeusz Kosciuszko, hero of Poland (White Eagle) and United States (Bold Eagle), hence the hero of two eagles.

but I am going to start with this monument - erected at the Lafayette Park, Washington DC (and copy in Warsaw). It was sculpted by a Polish sculptor Antoni Popiel and dedicated by the US president William Howard Taft  on May 11, 1910.

 this wonderful monument has been damaged and defaced by the protesters and rioters in the BLM /George Floyd killing protest past weekend in DC.
 
There is this little subtitled video about it .  And his famous last will demanding
that his estate executor would purchase black slaves with the funds from his estate and liberate them et al. It is so ironic, isn't it? Nota bene even our friends the Russians put this article about this travesty.
Back to the monuments 
Chicago, Illinois - sculpted by a Polish artist Kazimierz Chodziński  and erected in 1904.

 

 

Detroit, Michigan - a replica -  the original was sculpted by a Polish sculptor Leonard Marconi for the royal city of Krakow and destroyed by the Germans in 1940 etc - a blog article on the monument with more pictures.
 
Milwaukee, Wisconsin - (Poles in Milwaukee)
 sculpted by Gaetano Trentanove in 1904 and was a gift from the Polish National Alliance, dedicated on June 18, 1905.
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Krakow, Poland - the original sculpted( 1/4 size) by a Polish sculptor Leonard Marconi, finished after Marconi's death by Antoni Popiel and cast in 1900,  and destroyed by the Germans in 1940, a replica was made in the Saxon (the Soviet East German) city of Dresden and gifted to the city of Krakow in 1960.


 
 
Końskie, Poland  - sculpted by Wojciech Durek  in  1946.


 there is also one in Chorzele, Poland.
Valete