October 24, 1904

 

Jean Duvet (1485 to sometime after 1562 ) was a 16th century French goldsmith and engraver. He left us a series of prints of the Apocalypse, a popular subject in his era. These attracted the attention of the art historian, Lady Emilia Francis Strong Dilke. (September 2, 1840 to October 24, 1904). First some background on the historian:

Lady Dilke was raised in a home of affluence and enthusiasm for cultural endeavors. William Holman Hunt proposed to her. John Ruskin guided her career. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography account of her life, 

After completing her art education, Strong[her maiden name] returned to Oxford, where she became engaged to the 48-year-old scholar Mark Pattison (1813-1884), rector of Lincoln College, in June 1861, and married him at Iffley church on 10 September 1861. Despite her intellectual marginalization as a woman in Oxford, Francis Pattison entered upon a life of serious scholarship, focusing upon the study of French cultural history and art. At the same time she cut a striking figure socially, developing an artistic and intellectual circle more in keeping with the salons of seventeenth-century France-upon which she was establishing herself as an authority-than with the stuffy masculine culture of Oxford college life....
She began to carve out her own scholarly and critical principles, differentiating her approach to art equally from the moral aesthetic of her former mentor, Ruskin, and the ahistorical impressionism of Walter Pater....

After the death of her first husband, our art historian married an old friend, who was emerging from a divorce scandal, Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, second baronet (1843-1911). They were happy, and Lady Dilke published in a variety of forms, and also participated in the trade union movement. She wrote of the effect of social convention on a woman's ambitions but showed by example how perseverance could be rewarded.

Lady Dilke was the author of  The Renaissance of Art in France (1879). 

Herein she describes an engraving dating 1555, a self portrait of the artist -- Jean Duvet-- working amidst apocalyptic events. There is a mouse under his chair and a dog and cat beside it, the last animals brushing each other. The cat seems most interested in an approaching swan. The dog is alert but calm. The mouse is nervous.

Here are the words of Lady Dilke about this print:

Amongst those illustrations of the Apocalypse which are indisputably of Duvet's own invention, first in order, is the frontispiece. He has here represented himself an old man, still strong and vigorous. The figure, which is partially draped, has much dignity. On the table, before which he sits, lie two tablets which contain the inscription before quoted. An hour-glass stands near the tablets, and a graver lies ready to hand.

Behind rises a thick wood, and to right and left appear an angel and a demon, and on the old engraver's head the angel lays his hand. A broad river flows down from top to bottom of the picture, and narrows suddenly after reaching the jutting eminence of the bank on -which Duvet has set his table, flowing under a little step, and then out past a stone in the near foreground amongst lovely groups of flowering rushes, amidst which two slender birds are fighting.

High up above, on the stone, sit a cat and a dog; the cat, stealthily crouching, ready to spring; she has forgotten the presence of the dog, and even the attraction of the mouse who has sought shelter beneath the engraver's chair, in the fury to which she is excited by the approach of a swan, who, having broken the chain which fastened him to a post in the river, floats across towards the bank where Duvet awaits him, bearing in his bill a dart.

It sounds to me like my tastes and Lady Dilke's are  similar.