Ossian Awakening the Spirits on the Banks of the Lora with the Sound of his Harp, c. after 1801
Oil on canvas
184,5 x 194,5 cm
Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of epic poems published by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, under the title The Poems of Ossian.
Ossian, a blind bard, sings of the life and battles of Fingal, a Scotch warrior. Characters and passages of Ossian are based on established Celtic and Scottish folklore.
The poems achieved international success. Napoleon and Diderot were prominent admirers and Voltaire was known to have written parodies of them. Thomas Jefferson thought Ossian “the greatest poet that has ever existed”,] and planned to learn Gaelic so as to read his poems in the original. They were proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical writers such as Homer. More on Ossian
François Pascal Simon Gérard (4 May 1770–11 January 1837), titled as Baron Gérard in 1809, was a prominent French painter. He was born in Rome, where his father occupied a post in the house of the French ambassador, and his mother was Italian. He was made a baron of the Empire in 1809 by Emperor Napoleon…
Please follow link for full post
Zaidan Gallery 