Full Beaver Moon - Full moon in Gemini plus lunar eclipse

 

November’s full Beaver Moon rises on Monday, November 30. Learn when to spot it in your area and the meaning behind this Moon’s name.

WHEN TO SEE NOVEMBER’S FULL MOON

The Beaver Moon reaches peak illumination in the early morning hours of Monday, November 30, at 4:30 A.M. EST. Of course, it will be very close to full the night before, so plan to look for it starting on Sunday, November 29, just after sunset!

Find out exactly what time the full Moon will appear above the horizon in your area with The Farmer's Almanac  Moonrise and Moonset Calculator.

WHY IS IT CALLED THE BEAVER MOON?

November’s full Moon was traditionally called the Beaver Moon by a number of Native Americans and colonial Americans. Many Native American groups used the monthly Moons and nature’s corresponding signs as a calendar to track the seasons.

Why the “Beaver” Moon? This is the time of year when beavers begin to take shelter in their lodges, having laid up sufficient stores of food for the long winter ahead. During the time of the fur trade in North America, it was also the season to trap beavers for their thick, winter-ready pelts. 

Other November Moon Names

The November full Moon has also been called the Frost Moon and the Freezing Moon. Judging by the chilly weather that becomes more and more common at this time of year, it’s not hard to understand how these names came about! Another name, the Digging (or Scratching) Moon, evokes an image of animals scratching at the fallen leaves, foraging for fallen nuts or remaining shoots of green foliage—with the implication that winter is on its way.

See all Full Moon names and their meanings.

MOON PHASES FOR NOVEMBER 2020

Below are the times for each of the Moon phases (in Eastern Time). Click here to see the Moon Phase dates and times for your location.

	Last Quarter: November 8, 8:46 A.M. EST
	New Moon: November 15, 12:07 A.M. EST
	First Quarter: November 1, 11:45 P.M. EST
	Full Moon: November 30, 4:30 A.M. EST

When is the next full Moon? Consult our Full Moon Dates chart.

FULL BEAVER MOON VIDEO

An Almanac editor shares more facts and folklore about November’s Full Beaver Moon. Click below to watch the video.

disabled in your browser.</div></div>

BEST DAYS IN NOVEMBER 2020

Below are the best days for certain activities, based on the Moon’s sign and phase in November.

For Harvesting:

• Aboveground crops: 18, 19, 27, 28
• Below ground crops: 1, 9, 10

For Setting Eggs: 

• 1, 2, 28–30

For Fishing:

• 15–30

See Best Days for more activities.

MOON FACTS

• Did you know: The spin-time of the Moon on its own axis is identical to the time it takes the Moon to revolve around Earth, which is why the Moon always keeps almost exactly the same face toward us.
• How much would you weigh on the Moon? Just multiply your weight (it doesn’t matter if it’s in pounds or kilograms) by 0.165. You’d weigh about 80 percent less!    

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/1596/november-2020-the-next-full-moon-is-the-cold-moon/

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/11/10187682/full-beaver-moon-november-2020-spiritual-meaning

https://risingwoman.com/gemini-lunar-eclipse/

Sunday Soup

 

William Blake, Visionary and prophetic artist. Born on this day in 1757

William Blake, (born Nov. 28, 1757, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1827, London), English engraver, artist, poet, and visionary, author of exquisite lyrics in Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) and profound and difficult “prophecies,” such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The First Book of Urizen (1794), Milton (1804[–?11]), and Jerusalem (1804[–?20]). The dating of Blake’s texts is explained in the Researcher’s Note: Blake publication dates. These works he etched, printed, coloured, stitched, and sold, with the assistance of his devoted wife, Catherine. Among his best known lyrics today are “The Lamb,” “The Tyger,” “London,” and the “Jerusalem” lyric from Milton, which has become a kind of second national anthem in Britain. In the early 21st century, Blake was regarded as the earliest and most original of the Romantic poets, but in his lifetime he was generally neglected or (unjustly) dismissed as mad.

Blake's The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with Sun (1805) is one of a series of illustrations of Revelation

Even the sun is raging, as dark clouds gather over guilty Cain. Finding of the body of Abel, as envisioned by William Blake,

Blake's Ancient of Days, 1794. The "Ancient of Days" is described in Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel. This image depicts Copy D of the illustration currently held at the British Museum

Gloom. Despair. Agony. Illustration from America: A Prophecy in 1795 but very current sentiment as well. By William Blake, born on this day in 1757.

Blake's Newton (1795) demonstrates his opposition to the "single-vision" of scientific materialism: Newton fixes his eye on a compass (recalling Proverbs 8:27, an important passage for Milton) to write upon a scroll that seems to project from his own head.

William Blake grew up in modest circumstances. What teaching he received as a child was at his mother’s knee, as most children did. This he saw as a positive matter, later writing, “Thank God I never was sent to school/ To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool.”

Visions were commonplaces to Blake, and his life and works were intensely spiritual. His friend the journalist Henry Crabb Robinson wrote that when Blake was four years old he saw God’s head appear in a window. While still a child he also saw the Prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields and had a vision, according to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist (1828–61), of “a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Robinson reported in his diary that Blake spoke of visions “in the ordinary unemphatic tone in which we speak of trivial matters.…Of the faculty of Vision he spoke as One he had had from early infancy—He thinks all men partake of it—but it is lost by not being cultiv[ate]d.” In his essay “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” Blake wrote: I assert for My Self that I do not behold the outward Creation… ‘What’ it will be Questiond ‘When the Sun rises, do you not See a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying ‘Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’

https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Blake

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Famous, fantastic and fabulous artist of bohemian Paris

Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa or simply Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (24 November 1864 – 9 September 1901) was a French painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and illustrator, whose immersion in the colorful and theatrical life of Paris in the late 1800s yielded a collection of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Toulouse-Lautrec is known along with Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin as one of the greatest painters of the Post-Impressionist period.

He was an aristocrat, the son and heir of Comte Alphonse-Charles de Toulouse and last in line of a family that dated back a thousand years. Henri's father was rich, handsome, and eccentric. His mother was overly devoted to her only living child. Henri was weak and often sick, the product of generations of inbreeding. By the time he was 10 he had begun to draw and paint.

 Mr. Toulouse paints Mr. Lautrec (ca. 1891)

At 12 young Toulouse-Lautrec broke his left leg and at 14 his right leg. Due to extreme inbreeding, (both his grandmothers were sisters and his parents were first cousins), his bones failed to heal properly, and his legs stopped growing. He reached young adulthood with a body trunk of normal size but with abnormally short legs. He is reported to have had hypertrophied genitals.

Deprived of the kind of life that a normal body would have permitted, Toulouse-Lautrec lived wholly for his art. He stayed in the Montmartre section of Paris, the center of the cabaret entertainment and bohemian life that he loved to paint. Circuses, dance halls and nightclubs, racetracks--all these spectacles were set down on canvas or made into lithographs.

 In the Restaurant La Mie

 Toulouse-Lautrec was very much a part of all this activity. He would sit at a nightclub table, enjoying the show, drinking, and constantly sketching. The next morning in his studio he would expand the sketches into bright-colored paintings.

 In Bed

In order to become a part of the Montmartre life--as well as to protect himself against the crowd's ridicule of his appearance--Toulouse-Lautrec began to drink heavily. The invention of the cocktail "Earthquake" or Tremblement de Terre is attributed to Toulouse-Lautrec: a potent mixture containing half absinthe and half cognac (in a wine goblet, 3 parts Absinthe and 3 parts Cognac, sometimes served with ice cubes or shaken in a cocktail shaker filled with ice).

The style and content of Lautrec's posters were heavily influenced by Japanese ukiyo-e prints. Areas of flat color bound by strong outlines, silhouettes, cropped compositions, and oblique angles are all typical of woodblock prints by artists like Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858) . Likewise, Lautrec's promotion of individual performers is very similar to the depictions of famous actors, actresses, and courtesans from the so-called "floating world" of Edo-period Japan

 La Goule

 

His size also prevented him from having a "normal" relationship with a woman and from early on, he frequented brothels. Some of his most compassionate and powerful work is of the prostitutes of 19th century Paris. Since he was a cripple himself, he could look at these women as fellow-sufferers, wounded and brutalized and suffering underneath the power and rouge that they donned for their customers.

La Toilette, 1889

In the 1890s the drinking and syphillis started to affect his health. He was confined to a sanatorium and to his mother's care at home, but he could not stay away from alcohol.

Woman before a Mirror, 1897. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (French, 1864–1901)

Toulouse-Lautrec died on Sept. 9, 1901, at the family chateau of Malrome. Since then his paintings and posters--particularly the Moulin Rouge group--have been in great demand and bring high prices at auctions and art sales.

https://www.toulouse-lautrec-foundation.org/

References: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/laut/hd_laut.htm
Artchive: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/T/toulouse-lautrec.html

Toulouse-Lautrec: The Soul of Montmartre (Pegasus Library)
Toulouse Lautrec, A life by Julie Frey

Magritte. Painter of the mysterious

"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist." 

November 21, 1898. René François Ghislain Magritte ( 21 November 1898 - 15 August 1967) was a Belgian Surrealist artist. He became well known for creating a number of witty and thought-provoking images. Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art and conceptual art. In this image: Surrealist portrait of patron Edward James Le Principe du Plaisir (Pleasure Principle). Courtesy Sotheby's.

Magritte reimagined painting as a critical tool that could challenge perception and engage the viewer’s mind. His was a method of severing objects from their names, revealing language to be an artifice—full of traps and uncertainties. Introduction by Natalie Dupêcher, independent scholar, 2017

https://www.theartstory.org/artist/magritte-rene/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Magritte

Agnolo Bronzino. Painter to the Medici & the elite of 16th century Florence.

Poet Laura Battiferi of Urbino, Rome, and Florence, painted in 1560 holding a book of Petrarch's sonnets, by Agnolo Bronzino.

Agnolo Bronzino’s was the man to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and bells of the Counter-Reformation. (Holland Cotter.) 

Exquisite lady in red and her son

Bronzino — a nickname — was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori in 1503, the son of a Florentine butcher. After initial training with so-so artists, he had the luck to be taken on by Pontormo, who was only nine years his senior and on the cutting edge of new Florentine art. Temperamentally they were opposites, Pontormo a misanthrope, Bronzino a people person. Yet they developed a close bond, and collaborated on and off for decades.

Portrait of a lady with her lapdog, in 1537

Eleanora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo d'Medici 1, in a glorious dress, w/ her son Giovanni de’ Medici, in 1544

What Eleanora looked like after having 11 children,.
She died with her sons Giovanni and Garzia in 1562, when she was only forty; all three of them were struck down by malaria while traveling to Pisa.

Bronzino’s “Portrait of a Young Man,” owned by the  Met. Done in the 1530s, it is a portrait of an unknown but superbly supercilious member of Florence’s elite, someone who wears his basic black with arrogant, aristocratic flare. 

Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time: the painting that defines all that is weird and wonderful about Italian mannerism. Painted in the 1540s by Agnolo Bronzino

He was a favorite student and assistant of Jacopo Pontormo, was influenced by Michelangelo. In 1530 he received an order in Pesaro, but two years later he returned to Florence. In the art of Bronzino, mannerism reaches its highest peak. The paintings are filled with figures that form in their outlines a beautiful, complex drawing; they are located in friezes parallel to the picture plane; while the master does not seek to transfer the real three-dimensional space. The verticals and diagonals are underlined, the figures are artificially elongated, their modeling is rigid, sculptural. These features are clearly visible in the paintings of the Piet (1565) and The Descent into Hell (both in the Uffizi Gallery).

In Palazzo Vecchio, Bronzino designed the chapel of Eleonora of Toledo with scenes of the Creation of the World and the faces of saints.

In the years 1540-1555 Bronzino drew sketches for tapestry workshops in Florence, among them - 16 scenes from the history of the Old Testament Joseph, on which he worked together with Francesco Salviati. The tapestries Giovanni Rost and Nicholas Carher created their works for the motives of his sketches.

At the same time, Bronzino wrote altarpieces for the Florentine churches and allegorical canvases for the duke, the most famous of which is the “Allegory of Love."

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/painting-of-the-week-agnolo-bronzino-an-allegory-with-venus-and-cupid/

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Il-Bronzino

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/bronzino

Happy birthday to Claude Monet (Nov 14, 1840 - Dec 5, 1926 )

 Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet consistently depicted the landscape and leisure activities of Paris and its environs as well as the Normandy coast. He led the way to twentieth-century modernism by developing a unique style that strove to capture on canvas the very act of perceiving nature.

"Claude Monet, to many art lovers, calendar connoisseurs and collectors of museum postcards, is Impression itself. For them, it's all about light in his paintings -- morning light and moonlight, blazing summer sunshine and a pallid winter glow, light reflected in water and refracted into a prismatic dazzle of color. The subjects that he painted again and again -- haystacks, water lilies, a cathedral facade -- are often seen as scaffolding for his real preoccupation: light, in all its infinite manifestations and glory." Stephen Winn

When he was 5, Monet's father moved the family from Paris to Le Havre. Monet's early artistic efforts there were charcoal caricatures. He met the legendary regional painter Eugène Boudin when he was 18 and learned to paint landscapes in oil from him. Following a productive stint in Argenteuil, near Paris, in the 1870s, Monet returned to Normandy and began his serial paintings (of haystacks and other subjects) in the 1880s and '90s. He spent the last 40 years of life in Giverny, the site of his oft-painted garden.

Did you know the Art Institute has the largest group of Monet’s 'Stacks of Wheat' in the world? Explore these paintings among the 28 works by Monet now on view: http://bit.ly/2NKWBoW

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Claude-Monet

https://www.biography.com/artist/claude-monet

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cmon/hd_cmon.htm