Today is the birthday of English poet and Dandy, John Gray. As a writer, Gray is best-known for Silverpoints,The Long Road, and Park: A Fantastic Story. Though celebrated in his day, today he is perhaps best known for being the rumored inspiration for Oscar Wilde’s fictional character and literature's most famous Decadent and Dandy, Dorian Gray.

John Gray was born on 2 March, 1866 in Bethnal Green, London, the first of nine children. Like most people with great taste, he came from a working class background. At thirteen he quit school and began working as an apprentice metal-worker (continuing his education with evening classes). In 1882 he passed the Civil Service exams and five years later passed the University of London matriculation exams. He subsequently joined the Foreign Office and became a librarian. Gray’s evening classes had included (among other foreign languages) the study of French and he translated the work of Symbolists Arthur Rimbaud, Jules Laforgue, Paul Verlaine, and Stéphane Mallarmé into English -- some for the first time.

Simeon Solomon was a Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter. He was born 9 October, 1840 at No. 3 Sandys Street, Bishopsgate, London, England. Were he alive today he'd be turning 172.

Solomon was the eighth and last child Michael (Meyer) Solomon, manufacturer of Leghorn hats, and artist Catherine Levy. Two of his older siblings, Abraham and Rebecca, were also painters. It was Abraham, in fact, who first gave painting instruction to Solomon around 1850.

In 1852 he began attending the Royal Academy where, that same year, his sister's work was being exhibited. At the Academy, Solomon became friends with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the other Pre-Raphaelites, their associates, and Dandy and Decadent poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne.

His first exhibition at the Academy took place in 1858 and, until 1872, he continued exhibiting -- also at the Dudley Gallery. The subject matter of his work was in many ways typical of the Pre-Raphaelites although also drawn from The Tanakh. In 1865 he contributed illustrations to Swinburne's posthumously-published pornographic novel, Lesbia Brandon. Some of his high-profile patrons included Eleanor Tong Coltart, James Leathart, and Lord Battersea.

This edition of the neighborhood blog is about The Arts District... or The Artist District... or is it The Artist-In-Residence District... or perhaps The Artists' District? This, and other issues, will be sorted out by blog's end to everyone's satisfaction.



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            William Wolfskill                                                                      La Grande Station

A performative, competitive dance known as the chalk line walk first appeared around the 1850s on the plantations along the Gulf Coast. Its origins lay in the African-derived dance known as the bamboula -- also the name of a drum -- and it was performed in New Orleans, where on Sundays slaves were allowed to congregate. In their limited freedom, they not only danced the bamboula, but also dances like the pile, chactas and the carabine in Congo Square and at their masters' homes. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a local creole composer was inspired by the dances and wrote "Bamboula, dance des nègres, Op.2" in 1848. By the 1850s, the bamboula's popularity had spread to Florida, where it possibly mixed with the dance traditions of the Seminole. It eventually developed into the cakewalk, which quickly became popular throughout the Gulf Coast. 


Whereas the minstrelsy craze of the 1840s-1860s was the first major cross-racial American musical exchange, cakewalk's heyday from the 1850s-1890s was probably the second and importantly, a reversal. Minstrelsy was a product of white musicans seeking to simultaneuosly imitate and mock black customs, but cakewalks were initially produced by black performers imitating and mocking whites. Thus began a long history of back and forth musical and cultural dialogues that have been behind nearly every significant innovation in American music.