D’Artagnan

Romantic Young Man

D’Artagnan Detail
3 hour oil sketch
9×12 Canvas

This sketch was begun at our Monday Night Drawing/Painting meetings.  Knowing I had only the two hours and we wouldn’t have a chance to do additional work on this pose, I decided to develop the head and shoulders sufficiently before moving on.  I added the sword, breeches and banner at home.

boy holding sword

D’Artagnan

 

Here’s a little Tennyson to go with this sketch of an adventurous dreamer.  This poem has surely inspired many an older person to follow the dreams of their youth.   From Tennyson’s Ulyssees:

…I am a part of all that I have met:

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untraveled world, whose margin fades

Forever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

As though to breathe were life.  Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains; but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this grey spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

…There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark broad seas.  My mariners,

Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me —

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads — you and I are old:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all:  but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

…’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall tough the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.