"Nude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... serpentine curves laboriously sought by painters and sculptors,—curves which Nature herself draws so delicately with her lissom outlines, revealed to the eye of artists in spite of swathing linen and thick clothes, which mould themselves, inevitably, upon the nude. Sincere, simple, and natural, Veronique set these beauties of her form into relief by movements that were wholly free from affectation. She brought out her "full and complete effect," if we may borrow that ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... notion of the sex of the wearer could be gained, nor from the faces, if it were not for the shaven eyebrows and black teeth. The short petticoat is truly barbarous- looking, and when a woman has a nude baby on her back or in her arms, and stands staring vacantly at the foreigner, I can hardly believe myself in "civilised" Japan. A good-sized child, strong enough to hold up his head, sees the world right cheerfully looking over his mother's shoulders, but it is a constant ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic traditions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology, the ideal—all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a new way; the small country, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the various buildings. The saloons were here more elaborate than at Hangman's, the gambling places larger, and with some slight attempt at San Francisco splendour. That is to say, there were large gilt-framed mirrors on the walls, nude pictures, and in some cases a stage for musical performers. One of the three stores was devoted entirely to clothing and "notions," to us a new departure in specialization. We were sadly in need of garments, so we entered, and were at once met by a very oily, suave specimen of the chosen ...
— Gold • Stewart White
... thy loves, O Thalassian, O 'noble and nude and antique!' Unashamed in the 'fearless old fashion' Ere washing was done by the week; When the 'roses and rapture' that girt you Were visions of delicate vice, And the 'lilies and languors of virtue' Not nearly ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... this morbid crisis the necessary corrections made by reason cannot take place, since the sick man is for the time deprived of it, and he is in fact a dreamer, whose condition is intensified by abnormal excitement. Entification is now displayed in its nude and native state, and serves to explain the constant mental process, and the true nature of the representations of the intellect. The transition is easy from delirium to madness, for although an insane person is not always delirious, but ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... studied the traditions of the British Navy at the commencement of the nineteenth or twentieth century (the battle was fought in that period), he would have shown the gallant tars serving the guns in a costume not more elaborate than that assumed by the nude inhabitants of the North Pole. It is amusing to note in this connection that, until the discovery of the summit of the earth, it was supposed that the centre of the Arctic Regions was bitterly cold. Our ancestors in the remote ages had no idea that that fiery region ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... No. 192, Enkidu has human legs like Gilgamesh; also No. 189, where it is difficult to say which is Gilgamesh, and which is Enkidu. The clothed one is probably Gilgamesh, though not infrequently Gilgamesh is also represented as nude, or merely with ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes, and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... by praising the German field officers, saw soldiers of the active army stripping perfectly nude one of our men who had a perforated lung, and whom they had made prisoner after ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... which is not a little undignified; the colors of their plumes are somewhat coarse and dark—one is covered with silky hair, instead of feathers. The souls they contend for are indeed of sweet expression; but exceedingly earthly in contour, the painter being unable to deal with the nude form. On the whole, he seems to have reserved his highest powers for the fresco which follows next in order, the ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... saw, in a corner of the atelier where her glance had not before penetrated, a nude woman sitting on a stool, the sight of whom drove ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... imagine that he saw female garments on the bank, petticoats fallen in a circle, boots and stockings hard by; he could hear the splashing of water on the other side of the holly bushes; he could feel the weight of the nude form slung across his shoulder as he galloped into the gloom with his prey. And later, under the increasing stress of his adolescence, he used to have a dread of realities—a conviction that he could not trust himself. He thought at this period not of legends, but of ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... of my visit an actively smoking volcano in the far distance added a picturesque feature. In the vicinity is another noble Hindu structure, the so-called temple of Mendut, inside of which is found a large and singular Buddha sitting on a chair, legs hanging down. The figure is nude and the expression on its ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... Here was a new complication. I had lost, of course, the best nude model I had ever seen. I looked at Tessie. Her face was scarlet. Alas! Alas! We had eaten of the tree of knowledge, and Eden and native innocence were dreams of ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... midshipman to the colossal professional beauty sitting in her own costly perambulator (a present from Mrs. Pratt), felt the heat, and showed it by their moist countenances. The only person who was cool was a small, nude, china infant in its zinc bath, the property of Stella, whose determination to reach central facts, and to penetrate to the root of the matter, at present took the form of tearing or licking off all that could be torn or licked from ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... wide gallery on three sides of the hall. The marble was so beautiful, the steps were so impressive to look upon, that one was forcibly reminded of the staircase in the Opera House in Paris, of course in miniature. On the lowest step on either side were carved marble pillars supporting nude figures of great size and bearing each an electric lamp gold-shaded to set off the yellow-tinted marble and the Turkey carpets of gold and of richest blue. In one corner stood a Mongolian monster, a green and gold dragon of porcelain resting on a valuable faience pedestal—a bit of ancient ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... a defence of the study of the nude, based on the life and work of this Florentine painter (born 1600), who at the age of forty also became a priest. According to his biographer, Filippo Baldinucci,[128] Furini was not only a skilful artist, but a conscientious priest, and a good man. No reproach attached ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... being quickly over, we landed. The beauty of the distant view was instantly dispelled; one glance and there was a wild desire to take those dirty, almost nude creatures in hand and, holding them at arm's length, dip them into some cleansing caldron. The sanitary efforts of our army are effecting changes beyond praise both in the people ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... allure men by presenting to their minds all kinds of attractive tableaux, to the earth-bound spirits of drunkards and libertines, transformed into horrors of the sub-human, sub-animal order of phantasms—things with bloated, nude bodies and pigs' faces, shaggy bears with fulsome, watery eyes; mangy dogs, etc. I have watched these things that still possess—and possess in a far greater degree—all the passions of their life ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... return to Chicago I found Lorado in his studio, modeling a more or less conventional female form, and my resentment took words. "If you will come with me, down among the Cheyennes, I will show you men who can be nude without being naked. In White Eagle's camp you can study warriors who have the dignity of Roman Senators and the grace ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... Take what art you pleased, Tyre was a dunce. Even to music, the most persuasive of the arts, it was deaf. Surely, of all cities, it had not been built to music. It possessed, indeed, one private-spirited town-councillor, who insisted on presenting it with nude sculptures and mysterious paintings which it furiously declined. If Tyre was to be artistically great, it must certainly be with a ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... in terror lest he find the situation changed when next he approached the fortune-teller's cabin, a few hours later, but the little blond boy, half nude, was playing in the lush grass before the open door. The visitor was bolder now, being accompanied by officers of the law; so bold indeed that he was able to pity the grief of the poor, unintelligible squaw, volleying forth a world of words ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... building is usually occupied by the shop for the sale of the product, the ornamental shrine serving as a kind of screen to shut off the manufacturing department; but by stepping behind you see crowds of almost nude workmen, hard at work, making by hand with the aid of the rudest appliances almost every article known. The wages of a tradesman—a carpenter, for instance—is fifteen cents per day; in addition the master has to give him three times per day his rice, etc., estimated to cost six to eight cents more. ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... fancied that it must be one of the friendly Malay islands that I was approaching. A closer scrutiny of the smoke signals, however, soon convinced me that I was mistaken. As I drew nearer, I saw a number of natives, perfectly nude, running wildly about on the beach and brandishing their spears in ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... Herds of cattle roam along the shore, while in the fields from raised platforms half-nude men and boys scare wild-fowl from the ripening crops. The smoke of many fires on shore and from the craft upon the water rises perpendicularly in the still air, as the frugal morning meal is being prepared ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... Rabbi M athia gouging out his eyes supplanted the nude figure of the previous quotation in ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... by strangers in a nude or partially nude state may have any one of a dozen acceptable excuses for being so circumstanced. An earthquake may have caught one unawares, say; or inopportunely a bathroom door may have blown open. Once ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... to-day, in houseboats of high and low degree, and in land camps composed of tents and board shanties, with rows of seines and tarred pound-nets stretched in the sun to dry; tow-headed children abound, almost as nude as the pigs and dogs and chickens amongst which they waddle and roll; women-folk busy themselves with the multifarious cares of home-keeping, while their lords are in shady nooks mending nets, or listlessly examining ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... artisans. He, too, has his chariot races, his castaways, his carnivals of blood in the arena. He, too, takes us through shipwrecks, revolutions, assassinations, gaudy heroisms, abominable treacheries. But always he illuminates the nude and amazing event with shafts of light which reveal not only the last detail of its workings, but also the complex of origins and inducements behind it. Always, he throws about it a probability which, in the end, becomes almost ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... sickroom, the doors and windows may be opened wide for several minutes every few hours, while the patient's body and head are well protected. There is absolutely no danger of taking cold if these precautions are taken. Under right conditions of room temperature, frequent exposure of the patient's nude body to air and the sunlight will be found most beneficial and will often induce ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... biliousness. It is also marked here and there by long streaks of light, called faculae, which look like foam flecks below a cataract. The spots on the sun vary from minute pores the size of an ordinary school district to spots 100,000 miles in diameter, visible to the nude eye. The center of these spots is as black as a brunette cat, and is called the umbra, so called because it resembles an umbrella. The next circle is less dark, and called the penumbra, because it so closely ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... to stern,—gold cordage looped the sails,—on the deck a band of young gals clad in white, and crowned with flowers, knelt, playing softly on quaintly shaped instruments,—and a cluster of tiny, semi-nude boys, fair as young cupids, were grouped in pretty reposeful attitudes along the edge of the gilded prow holding garlands of red and yellow blossoms which trailed down to the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... bronze David now in the Bargello we seem to see youth itself dreaming after the first victory of all the conquests to come, while a smile of half-conscious delight, is passing from the lips; tyranny is dead. It is the first nude statue of the Renaissance made for Cosimo de' Medici before his exile. For Cosimo, too, the Amorino was made that study of pure delight, where we find all the joy of the children of the Cantoria, but without their unction and seriousness. And ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... period, shouted "He's got 'em on!" whereupon both burst into peals of robustious but inane laughter. Now, if I had turned to them, and said, "He would be funnier if I hadn't," and paraphrased, however wittily, Carlyle's ironical picture of a nude court of St. James's, they would have punched my head under the confused idea that I was trying to bamboozle them. Which brings me to my point of departure, my remark to Judith as to the futility of jesting ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... beyond them, around and about them, drifted and eddied a horde—great as that with which Tamerlane swept down upon Rome, vast as the myriads which Genghis Khan rolled upon the califs—men and women and children—clothed in tatters, half nude and wholly naked; slant-eyed Chinese, sloe-eyed Malays, islanders black and brown and yellow, fierce-faced warriors of the Solomons with grizzled locks fantastically bedizened; Papuans, feline Javans, Dyaks of hill and shore; hook-nosed Phoenicians, Romans, ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... or, by God, I cashier you!" roared O'Hara, his raised lids laying nude the debauchery ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... woman who has won a place for herself as an artist tells the story of her first nude drawing. She was of scarcely more than kindergarten age when, one day before supper, her fancy produced a sketch of her ten-year-old brother in nature's own attire. Pleased with the result, she took it to the supper table and ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... look in a nude or native state, with all her youthful graces about her, still the poetic line, that beauty unadorned, adorned the most, is not entirely true. Woman never appears so thoroughly charming as when her graces are enveloped in a becoming dress. These ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... the thinnest, finest silk bathing dress which clung to the perfect body, as does the soft fragrant skin to the peach, she was nude, and so unaware of eyes upon her that the man held his breath, fearing she might spy ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... asked. "No, I don't." At this moment his whole mind was taken up by strange images that in some unaccountable way rose up in his imagination. By the side of this strong and handsome Philip he seemed at this minute to see the nude figure of Kolosoff as an artist's model; with his stomach like a melon, his bald head, and his arms without muscle, like pestles. In the same dim way the limbs of Sophia Vasilievna, now covered with silks ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... wild tangles of rank growth, cactus, giant ferns, brake and netted vines; birds of gorgeous plumage and discordant note, alligators basking on the sunny bank of a sluggish stream, half-dressed natives at work in coffee fincas, sugar-cane and cotton fields; nude children standing in the doorways of palm-thatched huts, staring with still and stupid wonder at the train, and looking like inanimate clay models of a fairer, finer race to come. It is all like a curious dream from which we waken at Escuintla to take our eleven o'clock breakfast. ...
— Under the Southern Cross • Elizabeth Robins
... is speedily discerned in a forest village bazar, and is the most interesting object in it. His almost nude figure, wild, tangled hair innocent of such inventions as brush or comb, lithe wiry limbs and jungly and uncivilised appearance, mark him out at once. He generally brings a few mats or baskets which he has made, or fruits, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... also took possession of the two little girls of the family, nine and fourteen years of age, to wait upon them. And the first command that was given these children was that they should wait upon the men nude! The youngest child was not old enough to understand what this meant, but the older one was in terror, and they begged and cried and pleaded but all to no purpose. The officer was inexorable. He told them that if they did not obey they would ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... delicate as the pink of the flamingo. Bands of red, yellow, scarlet, mauve and black were embroidered upon the cloth, and upon the shoulders were scarlet tufts resembling epaulets. Willy stepped overboard, barefooted and nude save for his rolled up shirt, and began to shove. A three-foot water moccasin lay coiled on a mud bank in his path and the Indian's bare foot flung it aside as one might kick away a stick. Presently he paused, deep in liquid mud to his thighs, his ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... is again, in a sense, the mainstay of the Society (British Artists), partly through his own individuality and partly through the innovations he has introduced.... He has several oil and pastel pictures, very slight in themselves, of the female nude, dignified and graceful in line and charmingly chaste, entitled "Harmony," "Caprice," and "Note." Beneath the latter Mr. Whistler has written, "Horsley soit ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... the clothes from the fine form of the loyal young Jew. Then, when he was absolutely nude, they fastened ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... true spirit of piety with the ideal of natural beauty in art was strongly felt by Savonarola. Rio (L'Art chretien, vol. ii. pp. 422-426) has written eloquently on this subject, but without making it plain how Savonarola's condemnation of life studies from the nude could possibly have been other than an obstacle to the liberal and scientific prosecution of the art ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... in the town when the earth shines in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the soil is marked by the dry fissures of tortuous furrows ... the stones in the stream, and the mud on the banks are dried up ... here neither nude statues, comic actors, nor Hippodrome are to be found ... the noise of the waters is so great that it drowns conversation. From the dining-room, if you have time to spare at meals, you can occupy it with the delight of looking at ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... far wall, squatting on either side of a heap of fibrous plants. Both were nude, clothed only in the matted hair that fell below their shoulders. The belt of strange tools could not be classified as clothing. Even the child wore a tiny replica of her mother's. Putting down a length of plant ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... beau'ti ful lieu feud'al sluice cu'ti cle nude cu'bic juice mu'ti ny suit flu'id ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... praise than he does for the flight and submersion of Maxentius painted on the other wall, wherein he made a group of horses in foreshortening, so marvellously executed that they can be truly called too beautiful and too excellent for those times. In the same story he made a man, half nude and half clothed in the dress of a Saracen, riding a lean horse, which reveals a very great mastery of anatomy, a science little known in his age. For this work, therefore, he well deserved to be richly rewarded by Luigi Bacci, whom he portrayed there in the scene ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... painted in large yellow letters, intended to be gold, the legend "Dime Museum." In the front entrance were several cheap wax figures of a theatrical nature, and some still cheaper scenes, showing the figure of a nude savage without arms, biting the head off a huge fish and eating it alive apparently. On the canvas were also painted pictures of a wild man from Borneo, a tattooed man, a skeleton, numerous fat ladies, mermaids, sylphs, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... nude state are not liable criminally, any more than bright and beautiful children commit a felony by being born thus; but it is the solemn duty of those having these children in charge to put appropriate, ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... one of the fire-iron holders. No fire either in the fireplace or in the stove. A heap of frightful sweepings replaces the heaps of cinders. No looking glass on the mantelpiece, but a picture of varnished canvas representing a nude negro at the knees of a white woman in a decolletee ball dress in an arbour. Opposite the mantelpiece, a man's cap and a woman's bonnet hang from nails on either side of a ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... officer was in the act of having his morning bath when the shell exploded, the bhisti standing at his side and pouring over him, when squatted on a tent-mallet, his massuck of water. He rolled over and over on the ground, presenting such a ludicrous appearance in his wet, nude state, and covered with earth, that, notwithstanding the awful surroundings of the scene, I and others could not forbear laughing. The shot had been quite a chance one, but it proved how deadly was the effect of a shrapnel shell exploding, ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... be. Leave to the multitude their riot! Here will we house ourselves in quiet. It is an old, transmitted trade, That in the greater world the little worlds are made. I see stark-nude young witches congregate, And old ones, veiled and hidden shrewdly: On my account be kind, nor treat them rudely! The trouble's small, the fun is great. I hear the noise of instruments attuning,— Vile din! yet one must learn to bear the crooning. Come, come along! It must be, I declare! ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... up. Even in his dream he recognized that cry. Night or day. Rajah always shrieked when some one entered the room. Warrington silently slid out of bed and dashed to the door which led to the gallery. A body thudded against his. He caught hold. The body was nude to the waist and smelled evilly of sweat and fish-oil. Something whip-like struck him across the ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... led them to the grand saloon. It was the glory of the castle, this great room of forty feet in width and sixty in length. The ceiling supported upon either side by slender Corinthian pillars, was panelled and exquisitely frescoed with nude female figures that were reflected in the highly polished floor of marquetry woods. The walls were covered with old tapestries and rare pictures. There were two immense windows; the one at the south end of the room was quite twenty feet square of Egyptian style. The one to the north ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... curls I loved to beg For keepsakes on the earth be strewed, Leaving her cranium like an egg Incomparably nude. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... and "hair raising" effect may be produced by painting the entire body of one of the male guests with phosphorus. As this glowing nude stalks uncannily through the darkened rooms you may easily imagine the ghastly effect—especially upon ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart
... glories which excited the romantic imagination—but for its snuff, which was the best in London, and above all for its punch. Hayward led them into a large, long room, dingily magnificent, with huge pictures on the walls of nude women: they were vast allegories of the school of Haydon; but smoke, gas, and the London atmosphere had given them a richness which made them look like old masters. The dark panelling, the massive, tarnished gold of the cornice, the mahogany tables, gave the room an air of sumptuous comfort, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... it was over. He was borne down by sheer weight of numbers. Though he fought with the insanity of despair they were too many for him. He went a second time to the floor, beneath a dozen half-nude bodies. Below him lay another, with an arm encircling his throat, the elbow beneath his chin compressing his windpipe. Powerless to move hand or foot, he gave up ... and wondered dully why it was that a knife ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... was putrid with decaying fish; the very skins and mats that covered the lodge-poles were black with rancid salmon and filth. Many of the men were nude; most of the women wore only a short garment of skin or woven cedar bark about the waist, falling scarcely to the knees. The heads of many had been artificially flattened; their faces were brutal; their teeth worn to the gums with eating sanded salmon; and ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... settle to what class of art it belongs,—then is the new work dragged up to fight with the old one, like the poor beggar Irus in front of Ulysses; then are they turned over and applied, each to each, like the two triangles in Euclid; and then, if they square, fit and tally in every quarter—with the nude to the draped in the one, as the nude to the draped in the other—with the standing to the sitting in the one, as the standing to the sitting in the other—with the fat to the lean in the one, as the fat to the lean in the other—with the young to the old in the one, as the young ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... photograph of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus." Venus, being a pity, spoilt the picture, otherwise so charming, and Miss Bartlett had persuaded her to do without it. (A pity in art of course signified the nude.) Giorgione's "Tempesta," the "Idolino," some of the Sistine frescoes and the Apoxyomenos, were added to it. She felt a little calmer then, and bought Fra Angelico's "Coronation," Giotto's "Ascension of St. John," some Della Robbia babies, and some ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... visitor as he perambulates these miles of sculptured terraces is the complete absence of any offensive or indecent figure. Mere nudity is not, of course, an outrage to the artistic soul; but here there is not even a nude or grotesque figure. Each is draped in the fine flowing robes of the East, not in monotonous regularity but suggestive of prince and peasant, princess and maids, down even to the jewels they wear. Strangely enough, no particularly Javanese type of face ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... dream. Society could not feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit an arbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social conditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude continued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical statues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic sculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and confesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... lamps shed dim violet, scarlet and pale-rose lights around. At the end I perceived two figures standing as if in silent guard on each side of a door tapestried with the python's skin. One was a post-replica in Parian marble of the nude Aphrodite of Cnidus; in the other I recognised the gigantic form of the negro Ham, the prince's only attendant, whose fierce, and glistening, and ebon visage broadened into a grin of intelligence as I came nearer. Nodding to him, I pushed without ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... in a closet with a tire-woman, who stripped her of all clothing, and while in a perfectly nude state she thrust her fair round arm through a diamond hole in the door of the closet, and the gallant Major clasped the hand of the nude and buxom widow, and was married in due form by the jolliest parson in Vermont. At the close of the ceremony the tire-woman dressed the ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... he is what is termed, I believe, a concentrationist. For instance, in a nude figure which he is exhibiting in his studio, it's all a rough block of marble except, in the middle of the upper part, there is ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... its procession of moving tableaux. A huge float comes along, depicting the stone age and the primitive man, every detail carefully studied from the museums. Another represents the last day of Babylon. One sees a nude captive, her golden hair and white flesh in contrast with the black velvet litter on which she is bound, being carried by a dozen stalwart blackamoors, followed by camels bearing nude slaves and the ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... timid keep their features hidden between their hands, whilst, from behind, a matron—no doubt, their mother—encourages them. Others, with heads enveloped in black shawls, and the rest of their bodies quite nude, seem, at a distance, like statues of flesh. As soon as a man flings money on their knees, they rise. And one can hear kisses amid the foliage, and ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... which there was the wax head of a man. She made no attempt to modify her hilarity over the patriotic monument representing the old Emperor in a traveling coat and a peaked cap, together with Prussia, the German States, and a nude Genius of War. She made remarks about anything in the faces of the people or their way of speaking that struck her as funny. Her victims were left in no doubt about it as she maliciously picked out their ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the reply; and it was given with such calm dignity that colour, the half-nude figure, and the blur of slavery were forgotten by the lookers-on, and the feeling of wonder at the lieutenant's treatment of their ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... for this and for other reasons which could be given, first strive in drawing to express to the eye in a manifest shape the idea and the fancy originally devised by thy imagination; then go on adding or removing until thou art satisfied; then arrange men as models, clothed or nude, according to the intention of thy work, and see that, as regards dimension and size, in accordance with perspective there is no portion of the work which is not in harmony with reason and natural effects, and this will be the way to ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... standing at one side of the pool, near the center. Directly opposite us, seated on the bottom of the pool, was a human figure, nude save for a great mass of tawny hair that fell about her like a silken mantle. The strangely graceful figure of a girl, one leg stretched out straight before her, the other drawn up and clasped by the interlocked fingers of her hands. Even in the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... borrow and lend their wives, one neighbor not scrupling to ask the loan of another's wife to complete some farming task, which loan is readily granted, with the understanding that the favor is to be returned in kind. In England, scantily clothed women work by the side of nude men in coal pits, and, harnessed to trucks, perform the severe labor of dragging coal up inclined planes to the mouth of the pit, a work testing every muscle and straining every nerve, and so severe that the stoutest men shrink from ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... skill and beauty in a short chiton, but taking a bath seems to have been among her every-day habits as is shown by the numerous bathing scenes on vases. In one of them, a slave pours the contents of a hydria over her nude mistress. Cowering on the floor in another we see an undressed woman catching in her hand the water-spout issuing from a mask of Pan in the wall into a bath. An alabastron and comb are lying on the floor. A picture on an amphora in the museum ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... as the best, and one may pass an hour here very pleasantly. There is a room appropriated to Belgian artists, of which I never saw the like: they are, like all the rest of the things in this country, miserable imitations of the French school—great nude Venuses, and Junos a la David, with the drawing ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... woman lives to please her husband, who is a spoiled man. She gave birth to a child soon after marriage, but was left an invalid for some years. She told me coition always hurt her, and she said it made her sick to see her husband nude. I was therefore surprised, years afterward, to hear her say, in reply to a remark of another person, 'Yes; women are not only as passionate as men, I am sure they are more so.' I therefore questioned ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... his features, and I shuddered at their repulsiveness; the hideous war paint was streaked most fantastically across his cheeks and forehead and over his body, for, with the exception of a pair of abbreviated leggings he was quite nude. His scalp-lock was adorned with a profusion of eagles' feathers, and his wrists and arms were set off with bracelets. Dangling from his girdle was an object that thrilled me with anguish, as the long white hair ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... this arid tract, they detected a volume of smoke rising from a ravine. Cautiously approaching, they discovered an Indian warrior perfectly nude, standing by a fire and watching an earthen pot in which something was simmering. He was greatly frightened and offered them his food. They smiled, treated him kindly and gave him several trifling presents which ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... the fever returns, in which event the whole process of applying cold water must be repeated. The simplest way of reducing the fever consists in laying the patient, entirely nude, on a canvas cot or wire mattress, binding ice to the back of his neck, and having an attendant stand on a chair near by and pour ice water upon the patient ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... island, as they were afraid of being returned to slavery at the close of the war, and desired to push as far into the free States as possible, and very loath to go back "an inch," as one of the officers expressed it. I took the names of these almost nude people, whom I instructed to come to my tent; as the officers said I should have one for the purpose of giving out clothing to the most needy among them. They assured them that their freedom was a fixed fact; that they would never see the day again when they would be separated ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... apparently he penned with his own hand and published under another name! For he was a weird admixture of qualities—like most of us. I could not help meditating, myself, upon the really extraordinary differences between France and England. Imagine a nude statue of Tennyson in St. James's Park! You cannot! But, assuming that some creative wit had contrived to get a nude statue of Tennyson into St. James's Park, imagine the enormous shindy that would occur, the horror-stricken Press of London, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... into effect, the inspectors found in the squalid region, a great number of children so destitute, that they were absolutely unfit to attend school; decency forbidding that the sexes in far more than semi-nude condition should mingle in the school-rooms, and although a number of noble-hearted ladies banded together and decently clothed three hundred of these almost naked boys and girls, they were compelled ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... evidently once bare stomach, but has now been painted the brightest blue that could be found, so that it does not catch the eye as flesh; a little further examination was enough to make us strongly suspect that the figures had both been originally nude, and in this case the story current in Varallo ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... been Montcalm's greatest opportunity; a chance to bring mankind priceless gifts from worlds beyond. But Montcalm was a solid family man—and what about that nude ...
— The Gift Bearer • Charles Louis Fontenay
... For that reason he even refrained from going to the shore at the bathing hour, or bathing there himself. By degrees, however, he grew accustomed to it, seeing that nobody thought anything of it, and that the almost nude figures disported themselves among their equally unconcerned parents, relatives, and friends with the naive unconsciousness of South ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... Hamadi, which lies on the Nile not far below Koptos, where an ancient caravan-track leads by Wadi Hammamat to the Red Sea. On one side of the handle is a battle-scene including some remarkable representations of ancient boats. All the warriors are nude with the exception of a loin girdle, but, while one set of combatants have shaven heads or short hair, the others have abundant locks falling in a thick mass upon the shoulder. On the other face of the handle is carved a hunting scene, two hunters with dogs and desert animals being arranged ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... the city, and was already booted for his journey, he was detained for a little while that he might witness a novel entertainment. He was taken to a garden where a number of young girls, selected for their extraordinary beauty and entirely nude, executed in his presence the most obscene dances. It was two churchmen that are said to have provided the boy-king with this infamous diversion—Cardinal Charles of Bourbon and Cardinal Louis ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... to represent a Laocoon, a Niobe, and a Philoctetes, does not care for the king, the princess, or the king's son; he keeps to the man. Accordingly the skilful statuary sets aside the drapery, and shows us nude figures, though he knows quite well it is not so in real life. This is because drapery is to him an accidental thing, and because the necessary ought never to be sacrificed to the accidental. It is also because, if decency and physical necessities have their laws, these laws are not those ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... not as if with the ears, but with the deeper sensatory nerves. And without consciously grasping what the air was I had suffered an abrupt voyage through space. I saw a torch-lit sward, ringed with blue and saffron faces and high forest walls; I saw the half-nude, golden loveliness of a Polynesian woman shaken like a windy leaf. And the beat of a goat-hide drum was the beat of my blood. I felt ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... inadvertently selected an ant-hill as his seat, that was all; but that was sufficient to check his devotion to art, and necessitate his retirement to a rocky defile, where he devoted himself to the study of "the nude" in his own person, and whence he returned ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... previous evening a photograph of the image that was to be worshipped next day in the Abbey; and, in a fit of loathing, had torn it to shreds. It represented a nude woman, huge and majestic, entrancingly lovely, with head and shoulders thrown back, as one who sees a strange and heavenly vision, arms downstretched and hands a little raised, with wide fingers, as in astonishment—the whole attitude, with feet and knees ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... I caught sight of a glossy span of horses that in their perfect beauty of symmetry, high heads and tossing manes looked as though they were just prancing out of some Arabian dream. The animals seemed nude of rein or harness, save only a jeweled strap that crossed the breast of each, together with a slender trace at either side connecting with a jaunty little phaeton whose glittering wheels slivered the sunshine ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... one shoulder, saw her standing there, got down off his log—blushing a little at his comparative nakedness. It seemed to him that he must appear shockingly nude, since the upper part of his body was but thinly covered by a garment that opened wide over his breast. He felt a good deal like a shy girl first appearing on the beach in an abbreviated bathing suit. But Sophie seemed unconscious ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... little present on my birthday. Madame Belot was once his model," Karen added, "and is quite du peuple, and I believe that some of his friends were sorry that he married her; but she makes him very happy. That beautiful nude in the Luxembourg by Chantefoy is of her—long before she married, of course. She does not sit for the ensemble now, and indeed I fear it has lost all its beauty, for she is very fat. It would be nice to go to Paris on our wedding-tour and ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... had hastily snapped up—a shadow under the eyelids, a wave of emotion that passed beneath the skin like a shiver across the water, a smile just brushing against the lips like a sun ray, and his palm pressed on, nestled against the nude softness of the two extended hands—these precious fragments that endeavored to reunite the magic fantasy of love in a single close embrace. He would not permit that noises from without should enter there. The outside was for him a tiresome visitor. ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... by Constantine we see upon the reverse a nude figure crowned with rays, with the right hand elevated toward the east, and a round object in the left hand. In the field is a cross widened at the extremities, and the surrounding legend is a significant one, Soli ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... the second group represented Circe with the companions of Ulysses changed into swine. The marvellous Lady Rupper was to represent Circe. She entered dramatically, half nude, her tunic open to her waist, caught at intervals by diamond clasps, her peplum held in place by a garland of bay leaves. She was very beautiful. Her husband, a wealthy American, laughed at sight of her, a coarse laugh, the laugh of ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... massive dead Christ in Gobelin tapestry covered the whole side of one wall, and from the opposite one the threaded features of Joseph and his brethren stared gloomily down. These subjects accorded ill with several pieces of marble statuary scattered about the room—a reeling Bacchus, a nude Psyche, and an unchaste presentment of Leda drooping her head over an amorous swan. A broken statue of a pastoral shepherd had been laid on a table in the corner and partly covered with a cloth, where it looked very much like a corpse awaiting its ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... without doubt early, for there is a primitive character in the arrangement of the inconsequent groups of figures, Adam and Eve stand nude either side the tree, couples in weird though contemporaneous costume to the work are dotted over the ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... excellent group of bathers—one man taking off his hose, another putting them on again, a third standing naked with his back turned, and a fourth shivering half-dressed with a look of curious sadness on his face. The nude has been carefully studied and well realised. The finest composition of this series is a large panel representing a double action—Salome at Herod's table begging for the Baptist's head, and then presenting it to her mother Herodias. The costumes ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... lissome grace. From waist to ankle they were tightly wrapped in kains of brilliant batik, which defined, without revealing, every line and contour of their hips and lower limbs, but from the waist up they were entirely nude, barring the flame-colored ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... snapped he rushed back to the boat yelling and howling. I did not know what was the matter until he returned in about ten minutes, wearing an abbreviated pair of pants and a short coat. He was willing to walk about nude but when it came to being pictured he suddenly became modest. This state of mind, however, is not general in ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... if there be no shelter at hand, not infrequently, when alone or only with his companions, takes off his clothing and places it in some sheltered rock-crevice, where it keeps dry, until the storm has passed, he himself remaining nude and unconcerned amid the downpour. A mouthful of mezcal, or fiery native spirit, ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... big rosettes Peeped out under your kilt skirt there, While we sat smoking our cigarettes (Oh, I shall be dust when my heart forgets') And singing that self-same an, And between the verses, for interlude, I kissed your throat and your shoulders nude. ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... upward, visibly, like a young cane. She worked hard, but she worked willingly, and she was well nourished on sound food, though it had little variety and was entirely vegetable; and every day she went down and bathed in the river at the same place where she had sat nude under the dock leaves whilst her skirt dried ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... though I now am with the aesthetics of different schools, is inherent in Cabanel's work; but at the time I am writing of, my nature was too young and mobile to resist the conventional attractiveness of nude figures, indolent attitudes, long hair, slender hips and hands, and I accepted Jules Lefevre wholly and unconditionally. He hesitated, however, when I asked to be taken as a private pupil, but he wrote out the address of a studio where he gave instruction every Tuesday morning. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... many who are utterly cast down and lost. Many a Russian has gone down here in this great city and been lost, vanished into the hideous underworld of the Levant. They sell all their jewels and then sell the last jewel of all. In the cabarets and night-halls of low amusement there is nude dancing and drink, lascivious Greeks, drunken American sailors capable of enormities of behaviour, British Tommies with the rolling eye, "seeing the world and being paid for it" as the posters say. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... about twice the age of either Penrod or Sam, had lived to find himself in a unique position. He was nude, possessing neither harness nor halter; all he had was a name, Whitey, and he would have answered to it by a slight change of expression if any one had thus properly addressed him. So forlorn was Whitey's case, he was actually an independent horse; he had not even an owner. For two days and ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... there at a night-school, painting in water colors from nude models and arrangements of drapery, but not taking lessons from any regular instructor. He never applied himself much to figure-painting, however. He sold his paintings chiefly to American travellers, and when the Revolution broke out in 1848, he returned to Sorrento, where his ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... from a heliogravure, is life-sized, and represents a nude youth, of archaic type. His attitude may be compared to that of some early representations of Apollo, but the expression of the face and the modelling of some parts of the body are realistic rather than conventional. Both hands are missing, so that it is impossible to state ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand To wring food from desert nude, his foothold from the sand. His neighbors' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest; He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed; He shall desire loneliness and his ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... more than once over the body of a woman and with the blood of a child, sacrificed for the occasion, in the chalice (see section on Sacrifice). The woman, who served as the altar for these masses, was always nude, and was the person for whose benefit the ceremony was performed. Marguerite Montvoisin makes ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... the resentment deepened. And each evening it forced him to the wings against his will. He stood watching, though every burst of approval wrung his heart. Soured, and sexless, he watched her. An intense jealousy of the slim nude figure posturing in the limelight took possession of him. It had robbed him of his plaudits! He grew to hate it, to loathe the white loveliness that had dethroned him. It was no longer the figure of a mistress that he viewed, ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Italian craftsmen of the quattrocento were not averse to setting thus together, in one frame-work, the myths of our first parents and Alemena's son; partly, perhaps, because both subjects gave scope to the free treatment of the nude; but partly, also, we may venture to surmise, because the heroism of Hellas counterbalanced the sin of Eden. Here, then, we see how Adam and Eve were made and tempted and expelled from Paradise and set to labor, how Cain killed ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds |
