"Nude" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for the sight of some living thing there upon those high peaks. Silence supreme and dreadful, in which even their voices, hushed and tremulous, sounded profane, cowed them by its unending solemnity and the relentless grip. Gray and nude save for their pall of dust the mountains rose into the sky, eternal in their ghostly majesty. And the dark valleys between with their gray lips of death looked like the ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... under a cross of strips of plaster, could not obtain dismissal for him. And he had one eye of sinister hue, showing beside its lighted-grey fellow as if a sullen punished dragonwhelp had couched near some quick wood-pigeon. The two eyes blinked rapidly. He was a picture of Guilt in the nude, imploring ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... deed was done. 'Erb, with his accustomed push, Was advancing when the bush Dragged the last remaining stitches From the bag he called his breeches, Leaving nothing but the dregs Of the red stripe down his legs. 'Erbert paused; though not a prude, He had never liked the nude. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... sang, and 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
... 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
... themselves with a quiet dignity and 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
... were concerned about a picture in the house of Maitre Boucher, it was not so much on account of the painting as of the doctrine. These three women that the wealthy Maitre Boucher kept in his house were doubtless nude. The painters of those days depicted on small panels allegories and bathing scenes, and they painted nude women. Full foreheads, round heads, golden hair, short figures of small build but with embonpoint, their nudity minutely represented and but thinly veiled; many such were ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... recent pictures of the painter Gerome unite all these attributes in a singular degree; above all, the fleshliness and materialism which make his studies of the nude, in my judgment, altogether inadmissible into the rank ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... were of a peculiar nature. Bride and bridegroom, linked arm in arm, marched up and down on a pad about twenty yards in length, a nude minstrel marched in front, and drew unearthly music from a kind of mouth organ. Girls squatting in the dust en route clapped their hands and chanted a chorus. The groom hopped first on one leg and then on the other, and tried to look gorgeously happy; the bride kicked her satin ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Facts in a 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
... painted, was strewn with costly stuffs and furs. Before a life-size statue in bronze of Venus, a copy of that Venus Callipyge given by Heliogabalus to Syracuse, a fire of shifting, many-tinted flames burned on a metal tripod, whose stems represented the figures of beautiful, nude women. The air was heavily scented from the burning woods and spices in the brazier, sandal and cinnamon and cassia. Hanging lamps, of strangely fantastic design, filled the wide room with ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... 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, ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... of supposed medicinal virtue. Soon they scattered and ran apparently without concert, the rapid racing causing the brands to throw out long brilliant streamers of flame over the hands and arms of the dancers. Then they proceeded to apply the brands to their own nude bodies and to the bodies of their comrades in front of them, no man ever once turning round; at times the dancer struck his victim vigorous blows with his flaming wand; again he seized the flame as if it were a sponge and, keeping close to the one pursued, rubbed the back of the latter ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... 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 natives all seemed anxious that ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... preserved in Rome. In the beginning of its existence as a power only religious dances were practised, and many of these were of Etruscan origin, such as the Lupercalia, the Ambarvalia, &c. In the former the dancers were demi-nude, and probably originally shepherds; the latter was a serious dancing procession through ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... lie wanton to the breeze, "The fields are nude, the groves unfrocked, "Bare are the shivering limbs of shameless trees, "What wonder is it that the ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... young to destroy a grub at the root of a cotton plant. The task is indeed a difficult one, they being as unruly as an excited Congress. They gambol round the door, make pert faces at old mamma, and seem as happy as snakes in the spring sun. Some are in a nude state, others have bits of frocks covering hapless portions of their bodies; they are imps of mischief personified, yet our heart bounds with sympathy for them. Alive with comicality, they move us, almost unconsciously, to fondle them. And yet we know not why we would fondle the sable ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... 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 ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... her and immediately realized that she had placed herself exactly opposite to "Wedded." She turned her eyes away from the large nude arms of the bending man and met Rosamund's gaze fixed steadily upon her. That gaze told her not to delay, but to go straight to the tragic business which had brought ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... gentlemen," said the canon gravely, "men who pay so fervent a worship to art, though it be only to its form, deserve the greatest respect. It is better to be an artist, and delight in the contemplation of beauty, though this be only represented by nude nymphs, than to be indifferent and incredulous in every thing. The mind that consecrates itself to the contemplation of beauty, evil will not take complete possession of. Est Deus in nobis. Deus, be ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... early; sometimes she appeared at luncheon, sometimes she did not; sometimes she took supper, sometimes she dispensed with it. When we had no guests with us she more often than not walked about the house in a semi-nude condition, and was not ashamed to appear before us—even before the servants—in a white chemise, with only a shawl thrown over her bare shoulders. At first this Bohemianism pleased me, but before very long it led to my losing ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... that time. In like manner, the Madonna is draped with so great grace and dignity that nothing better can be imagined, the flow of the folds being very beautiful and soft, while the borders of the draperies are seen following closely the nude form of the figure, which, with its very covering, reveals every curve of the limbs; and below this Madonna there is a S. Thomas, who is receiving the Girdle. In short, this work was executed by Jacopo in four years with all the possible perfection that he could give ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... and dance, but on serious business." When shown, at Ghent, the glorious masterpiece of Flemish art, the crowning glory of the Burgundian time, Van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb, he objected to the nude figures of Adam and Eve and had them removed. He appeared in simple uniform, accompanied by one servant, stayed at the public inn and travelled in public coaches. He spent most of his time in government offices, taking no opportunity to mix with the people and visiting in a hurried ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... cast is that from the panel of the tomb door, upon which Talas is represented standing: the second represents a group of females; and the third an ancient entertainment with figures reclining on couches with children; a figure playing the double flute, and to the right a nude figure called Hecatomnas. Six casts from tombs hereabouts (153-6), exhibit inscriptions, two of which are in two languages—the Lycian and the Greek, declaring that the owners have built the tombs for themselves and their ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... around quickly, as if in search of something which would help to bring the conversation to conventional levels; but her eye fell upon a terra- cotta figure which sent the blood surging into her head so fiercely that a rushing sound seemed to fill her ears. It was the nude figure of a soldier lying dead upon a trampled mound, with broken poppies about him, while across ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... 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 ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... those 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
... 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 or figure is represented—all ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... explains the perplexities of the normal censor. He, being a "practical man," regards emotion and vision, feeling and ideas, as leading to action. He does not see that art arises out of ritual and that even ritual is one remove from practical life. In the censor's world the spectacle of the nude leads straight to desire, so the dancer must be draped; the problem-play leads straight to the Divorce Court, therefore it must be censored. The normal censor apparently knows nothing of that world where motor-reactions are ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... She danced, near nude, to tom-tom beat, With swaying arms and flying feet, 'Mid swirling spangles, gauze and lace, Her all was ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... you had spent here at Hatton. 'Uncle Jacques,' you informed us, 'is a delightful survival, bearing a really remarkable resemblance to a camel. Excepting his weakness for classic statuary and studies in the nude, his life is of Mayflower purity. He made his fortune on the Baltic Exchange, was knighted owing to a clerical error, and built the ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... not all usages connected with the organs of generation were religious of origin. It is pointed out above[712] that the origin of circumcision and excision is to be sought in another direction. Ithyphallic images are sometimes merely attempts at realism in art; a nude figure (as in modern art) must be represented in its full proportions. Such seems to be the nature of certain images among the Western Bantu,[713] and this may have been the case with the images of ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... a corner and looked about him. The walls were decorated with crude purple crayons of underfed sirens. A statue of a nude woman distressed Clay. He did not mind the missing clothes, but she was so dreadfully emaciated that he thought it wise for her to cling to the yellow-and-red draped barber pole that rose from the pedestal. On the base was the legend, "The Weeping Lady." After he had tasted ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... four o'clock in the afternoon, illuminated the rosework of the windows, cast upon the gravelled paths rainbow-like beams that crept gently up the bronze or marble of the statues, suffusing a lovely nude body with bright colors and giving to the vast museum something of the aspect of a garden. Felicia, absorbed in her profound, melancholy reverie, did not see the man who came toward her, superb, refined, fascinating, through the throng of visitors, who respectfully opened a passage for him, while ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern versus the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing—these are the successive themes ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the sea, in which the grotesque emblems of the middle age, and a landscape full of its peculiar feeling, and even its strange draperies, powdered all over in the Gothic manner with a quaint conceit of daisies, frame a figure that reminds you of the faultless nude studies of Ingres. At first, perhaps, you are attracted only by a quaintness of design, which seems to recall all at once whatever you have read of Florence in the fifteenth century; afterwards you may think that this quaintness must be incongruous with the subject, and that the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... grass huts, with a ragged patch of sugar-cane beside them, gave us an excuse for half an hour's rest. An old woman in a red sack, much tattooed, with thick short grey hair bristling on her head, sat on a palm root, holding a nude brown child; a lean hideous old man, dressed only in a malo, leaned against its stem, our horses with their highly miscellaneous gear were tethered to a fern stump, and Upa, the most picturesque of the party, served out tea. He and ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... them more foreign than ever, it came to going forth for fresh drafts upon his credit they wandered again up the hill to the rampart instead of plunging into distraction with the crowd on the sands or into the sea with the semi-nude bathers. They gazed once more at their gilded Virgin; they sank once more upon their battered bench; they felt once more their distance from the Regent's Park. At last Mrs. Wix became definite about their friend's silence. "He IS afraid of her! She has forbidden ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... at the end of a path. Accompanying him was a specimen of the creature known on tennis lawns as "a fourth." He was almost nameless, tall, very young, with the seedlings of a moustache and a space of nude calf between his knickerbockers and his socks. He was very ceremonious, shy, ungainly and blushful. He played a fair-to-middling game; and nothing more need be ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... young heroes for some woman's person. Probably he was also able to point out classical examples by which the boyish sculptor might be guided in the undertaking. The subject made enormous demands upon his knowledge of the nude. Adult and youthful figures, in attitudes of vehement attack and resistance, had to be modelled; and the conditions of the myth required that one at least of them should be brought into harmony with equine forms. Michelangelo wrestled vigorously with these difficulties. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... is shown as a nude goddess standing on a lion; she may be a form of Ashtaroth, as patroness of the qedosheth girls attached to her service. The position on a lion is a well-known one of ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... it one way or the other," answered Frank, "I have so much time to kill, and that's no worse than any other way. We go to the theatre and see those same girls half nude and hear them say just as naughty things as they said to us that night, so what's the harm? We are a little nearer to them, that is all, and pay extra for ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... noon after—the sad wife sitting by the bedside—suddenly, right in the centre of the room, with the door open behind him, stood the magnificent, half-nude form of Bras-Coupe. He did not fall down as the mistress's eyes met his, though all his flesh quivered. The master was lying with his eyes closed. The fever had done a ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... matter of the position of women. But, to be candid, it will not be that that lingers in my mind when I look back upon my sojourn here. What then? Perhaps a sea of palm leaves, viewed from the lighthouse top, stretching beside the sea of blue waves; perhaps a sandy river bed, with brown nude figures washing clothes in the shining pools; perhaps the oiled and golden skins glistening in the sun; perhaps naked children astride on their mothers' hips, or screaming with laughter as they race the motor-car; perhaps the huge tusked elephant that barred our way ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... struggle between the two heroes, where Enkidu strives to rescue his friend from the fatal charms of Ishara, is probably depicted on seals also. On one of the seals published by Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia, No. 459, a nude female stands beside the struggling heroes. [12] This scene not improbably illustrates the effort of Enkidu to rescue his friend from the goddess. In fact the satyr stands between Gilgamish and ...
— The Epic of Gilgamish - A Fragment of the Gilgamish Legend in Old-Babylonian Cuneiform • Stephen Langdon
... little audience on the further bank, though, which watched Bob's fishing without ceasing, though unseen by the young fisherman. This audience consisted of three half-nude Malays, lying in a sampan hidden amidst the reeds of the river's side, and these men seemed greatly interested in all that was going on, till, as the evening drew near, Bob, who had captured at least ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... 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 it; while their degradation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... compulsory education law went 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 to admit the humiliating fact that they ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... supper, when he was startled to hear some one address him by name, and looking up, he saw a powerfully-built black fellow with a long black beard and smiling face standing a dozen yards or so away. He was all but nude, but round his waist was buokled a broad leather police belt with two ammunition pouches; in his right hand ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... violently anti-Semitic. General Pershing returns from the battlefields of Europe universally acclaimed a model of military efficiency and wearing so many medals that alongside him John Philip Sousa, by contrast, looks absolutely nude. His friends project him into the political arena and the result is summed in a phrase—"Lafayette, he ain't there!" Unavailing efforts are made by a rebellious and unreconciled few of us to find a presidential candidate willing to run on a platform of but four planks, namely: ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... that foreigners, who are cradled, nursed and brought up in these customs, will be affected in like manner. American and English tourists are alike shocked and provoked at the sight of the innumerable nude statues and paintings, on the, pleasure gardens and in the art galleries, but the ladies of the continent seem to see as little of indecencies or improprieties in those things, as we do in opening our Bibles and seeing saints and apostles represented with bare feet—the toes standing ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... she stood still and silent before me, the effulgent radiance that had almost blinded my vision, after a time left it unobscured, and I was able so to portray her every aspect to my mind, as her whole beauteous figure was impressed on my memory. I saw that she was nude, except for a thin and delicate drapery of purple, which, albeit in some parts it covered the milk-white body, yet no more concealed it from my ravished eyes than does the transparent glass conceal the portrait beneath it. Her head, the hair whereof as much surpassed gold in its luster ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... a confectioner on Fulton street sought to attract customers by exhibiting in his window a painting by a great artist. If memory serves, it was "The Triumph of Charles V." by Hans Makart. Figures of nude females were in the picture, and Comstockery established in its censorship of art and solemnly unconscious of its appalling ignorance, but true to its fundamental pruriency, ordered the picture removed from the window. And it was ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... is 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 surface ...
— Jacobean Embroidery - Its Forms and Fillings Including Late Tudor • Ada Wentworth Fitzwilliam and A. F. Morris Hands
... contrive! Come, let vengeance fall, You that below the waist are still alive, Off with your tunics at my call— Naked, all. For a man must strip to battle like a man. No quaking, brave steps taking, careless what's ahead, white shoed, in the nude, onward bold, All ye who garrisoned Leipsidrion of old.... Let each one wag As youthfully as he can, And if he has the cause at heart Rise at ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... heaven of beauty, the loveliest nature crowned with the finest art, shifted and shone what was in itself a perfect type of both, the grace of harmonious motion in naked youths and men. For in Greek athletics, by virtue of the practice of contending nude, the contest itself became a work of art; and not only did sculptors draw from it an inspiration such as has been felt by no later age, but to the combatants themselves, and the spectators, the plastic beauty of the human form grew to be more than its prowess ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... poets and pseudo-medievalists, or so he thought afterwards. But, fresh from school, wearied a little with the perpetual society of barbarian though worthy boys, he had in his soul a charming image of womanhood, before which he worshipped with mingled passion and devotion. It was a nude figure, perhaps, but the shining arms were to be wound about the neck of a vanquished knight; there was rest for the head of a wounded lover; the hands were stretched forth to do works of pity, and the smiling lips were to murmur not love alone, but consolation in defeat. Here was ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... 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 he received with ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... attempted to force the clothing upon him, rent the air with horrible shrieks heard by many others of the party, and by exertion of the unnatural strength which insanity confers, broke from his captor and escaped. Mr. K—— humorously comments on the difficulty of holding a nude antagonist. If we were inclined to be facetious on the subject we might suggest that mens sana in corpore sano is not an infallible rule. Late in the evening the maniac horresco referrens made a furious attack on the residence of Mr. G—— who was unfortunately absent at the time. Mrs. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... to take the second-rate in every art and scout the best. Write a book poorly and feebly, and it passes. Write the same thing powerfully and well, and the cry is—It's improper! It's just the same thing in painting. Paint a nude woman snowy white, without a shade or a shadow, and looking altogether as no mortal woman ever did look, and the picture will be hung at the Academy, and people will say, 'How charming! So artistic!' But paint a woman with a glow on her neck and bosom, and the warm blood running in her arms, ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... organs, the Lingam and the Yoni, have been objects of worship in India from the earliest times. With the Sakti ceremonies, Hindu religion dispenses with symbols, and devotion is paid to a naked woman selected for the occasion.[84] This worship of a nude female is a very familiar phenomenon in the history of religion. Some of the early Christian sects were said to have practised it, and it is a feature of some Russian religious sects to-day. The subject will be dealt ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... American witticism of doubtful truthfulness; "charcoal would make a white mark!" Divesting them of dust, you would have no difficulty in determining their complexion. Their little plump bodies were nude, from the top of their woolly heads to their long projecting heels. There roll they, black and yellow urchins, all the day, playing with pieces of sugar-cane, or melon-rind, or corn-cobs—cheerful and happy as any little lords could be in their well-carpeted nurseries in ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... line as by color, so that generally their draped figures are preferable, as in the Francia of our own gallery. But these, with Michael Angelo and the Venetians, except Titian, form a great group, pure in sight and aim, between which and all other schools by which the nude has been treated, there is a gulf fixed, and all the rest, compared with them, seem striving how best to illustrate ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... his senses, the fancy was almost strong enough to be a hallucination. He could 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 facts—of things that ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... people, forty of whom were males over sixteen years of age and the rest women and children. The tepees were arranged in a circle with a large space in the center, around which braves, squaws and almost nude children squatted or lay in the sunshine. One solitary white man was seen standing in front of a tepee. He was dressed in a dark pair of pantaloons, brown duck overcoat and his head was surmounted by a large, broad brimmed, drab felt hat, with a big dinge in each side of it. The ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... prosaic conditions. One buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured in his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautiful partly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letter to Mr. Graham in ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... seizing the opportunity with well-affected surprise. 'You really astonish me. He was a Croatian, I believe, or an Illyrian—I forget which—and he studied at Rome under Giulio Romano. Wonderful draughtsman in the nude, and fine colourist; took hints from Raphael and Michael Angelo.' So much he had picked up from Menotti and Cicolari, and, being a distinguished connoisseur, had made a mental note of the facts at once, for future reproduction upon a fitting occasion. 'Well, this missal ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... and good. It should see these things. Only, without comment. Let nothing be exaggeratedly hidden. By instinct, let us preserve the decent privacies. But if a child occasionally sees its parent nude, taking a bath, all the better. Or even sitting in the W. C. Exaggerated secrecy is bad. But indecent exposure is also very bad. But worst of all is dragging in the mental consciousness of these shadowy ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... the first who dared to draw Mankind the mixture that he saw; Not wholly good nor ill, but both, With fine intricacies of growth. He pulled the wraps of flesh apart, And showed the working human heart; He scorned to drape the truthful nude With smooth, ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... Headquarters. They 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 ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... intended, permanently in Rome. "When I dream of home," she told him, "it is merely of paying a short visit and coming back here before my trunk is unpacked." Miss Lander was not a painter, but a sculptor, and, in spite of what my father had said against the nude in sculpture, I think he liked clay and marble as a vehicle of art better than paint and canvas. At all events, he consented to give her sittings. He was interested in the independence of her mode of life, and they got on very comfortably together; the results ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... situations, 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, will ward ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... could prevent it, each threw himself upon the one who had inflicted the worst suffering upon him; and here might be seen an emaciated man clutching the throat of his stronger foe, yonder a band of nude women horribly disfigured by want and neglect, rush upon the man who had most rudely insulted, beaten, and abused them, and with teeth and nails wreak upon him their ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... grace which I am forced to admit even now, saturated 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 ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... anxiety, though I was careful enough to select a seat from which I could keep watch both up and down the ravine, convinced that our time of trial was not far away. In consequence of this chosen vantage of position I was the first to note those stealthy nude figures silently stealing from rock to rock, like so many flitting shadows, making their way down toward our position from the north. How they attained entrance to the gorge I could not conjecture; my eyes first detected their movement when their leaders stole noiselessly as ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... forgotten. The torn, bruised and mutilated bodies of the victims are lying in a row on the floor of the planing mill which looks more like the field of Bull Run after that disasterous battle than a work shop. The majority of the bodies are nude, their clothing having been torn off. All along the river bits of clothing—a tiny shoe, a baby dress, a mother's evening wrapper, a father's coat, and in fact every article of wearing apparel imaginable may be seen hanging to stumps of trees ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... eyes I saw a naked great savage hurl his little boy against the rocks for a trifling fault; saw the poor mother gather up her dying child and hug it to her breast and weep, uttering no word. Did my mind stop to mourn with that nude black sister of mine? No—it was far away from that scene in an instant, and was busying itself with an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of mine. In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my shirt, cringing and dodging about in the midst ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... cries of the women and men picked up in life-boats by the Carpathia were horrible. The women were clothed only in night robes and wrappers. The men were in their night garments. One was lifted on board entirely nude. All the passengers who could bear nourishment were taken into the dining rooms and cabins by Captain Rostron and given food and stimulants. Passengers of the Carpathia gave up their berths ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... man accompany him respectfully to the entrance to the big building, where they stood a moment in conversation. Terry's interest quickened as he recognized the big American as a member of his own service; he watched him approach the ship through the crowd of half-nude sweating Moros who now swarmed ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... 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 inevitability. His "Nostromo," for example, in its externals, is ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... noticed her semi-nude state. Dropping, his pugree at her feet he turned away. She shook out its many folds and draped it about her body. Then she related what had befallen her and pointed towards the ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... of the chapel opened and there came forth a tall negro, entirely nude, and bearing in his hand the sacrificial knife. He was followed by an apparition still more strange and shocking: Madam Mendizabal, naked also, and carrying in both hands, and raised to the level of her face, an open basket of wicker. It was filled with coiling snakes; and these, as she stood ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 him ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... loose folds, draped it gorgeously from stem 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
... followed by a cheer, as the nude figure of a stalwart black was dragged in, to sink helpless, perfectly insensible, in the ...
— The Black Bar • George Manville Fenn
... and rustic though fairly famous church in my neighbourhood there is a window supposed to represent an Angel on a Bicycle. It does definitely and indisputably represent a nude youth sitting on a wheel; but there is enough complication in the wheel and sanctity (I suppose) in the youth to warrant this working description. It is a thing of florid Renascence outline, and belongs to the highly pagan period which introduced all sorts ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... 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 ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... her way of my works, of which she knows neither the whole design nor the bearing; it is her right. I submit to all judgements. . . . Your aunt makes me think of a poor Christian who, entering the Sistine chapel just as Michael-Angelo has drawn a nude figure, asks why the popes allow such horrors in Saint Peter's. She judges a work from at least the same range in literature without putting herself at a distance and awaiting its end. She judges the artist without knowing ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... and niche, nude nymph beguiled Fair goddesses of world-wide fame, But Psyche's self was put to shame By one who from the ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... fall, the other of Hercules and his labors. 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 ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 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
... very little for the nude, for the delicate curves of the body and the exquisite colors of flesh. Yet to overbalance this disregard of beautiful form was his strong predilection for finery. None ever loved better the play of light upon jewels and satin and armor, the rich effectiveness of Oriental stuffs and ecclesiastical ...
— Rembrandt - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... This plebeian Don Juan observed me from behind a hackney car and sent me in double envelopes an obscene photograph, such as are sold after dark on Paris boulevards, insulting to any lady. I have it still. It represents a partially nude senorita, frail and lovely (his wife, as he solemnly assured me, taken by him from nature), practising illicit intercourse with a muscular torero, evidently a blackguard. He urged me to do likewise, to misbehave, to sin with officers of the ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... so that finally, they ceased struggling and allowed her to lead them whither she would, which was to the small laundry, that stood at some slight distance from the house. Here she sternly regarded each bedaubed, but otherwise nude, little figure, with so fierce an expression upon her usually pleasant face that the young miscreants winced, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... everything in place according to the laws of anatomy. You color the features with flesh-tones, mixed beforehand on your palette,—taking very good care to shade one side of the face darker than the other; and because you draw now and then from a nude woman standing on a table, you think you can copy nature; you fancy yourselves painters, and imagine that you have got at the secret of God's creations! Pr-r-r-r!—To be a great poet it is not enough to know the rules of syntax and write faultless grammar. Look at your saint, ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... The spirit of the Western Hemisphere is conceived as taurine and characterized as a human bull. The base of the Equestrian is surrounded by a frieze of architecturalized fish and the rearing sea horses that furnish the principal upper motif for the play of water. Energy himself is presented as a nude male, typically American, standing in his stirrups astride a snorting charger - an exultant super-horse needing no rein - commanding with grandly elemental gesture of extended arms, the passage of the Canal. Growing from his shoulders, winged figures ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... love, strayed into the flowery garden of polished blackguardism. It was the moment of clever, double meanings; veils raised by words, as petticoats are lifted by the wind; tricks of language, cleverly disguised audacities; sentences which reveal nude images in covered phrases, which cause the vision of all that may not be said to flit rapidly before the eyes of the mind, and allow well-bred people the enjoyment of a kind of subtle and mysterious love, a species of impure mental contact, due to the simultaneous evocations ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... slaves whose half-nude bodies exposed to view such interlacements of muscle as the ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... raising her glass. Her eyes sought Miss Quiney's; but Miss Quiney's, lifted heavenward, had encountered the ceiling upon which Mr. Manley had recently depicted the hymeneals of Venus and Vulcan, not omitting Mars; and the treatment—a riot of the nude—had for the moment put the redoubtable little lady out ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch |
