Gerard de Lairesse

Gerard de Lairesse , 1641-1711, Flemish painter of allegorical and religious subjects, b. Liège. Most of his life was spent in Holland, where he achieved great success in decorating the homes and palaces of Amsterdam with allegorical themes in a classical style. His books on the principles of drawing and painting, dictated after he became blind, were illustrated with his own etchings. They were translated into English, French, and German. Among his best-known paintings are Revolution and Mars, Venus, and Cupid (Rijks Mus.) and Cleopatra Landing at Tarsus (Louvre).

Aeschylus (525–456 bc), Athenian tragic poet. He is noted for the scope and grandeur of his conceptions and style, but only seven of his many plays have survived, three of which form the famous trilogy the Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephoroe, Eumenides). Aeschylus was hardly known in England before Thomas Stanley's edition of the plays in 1663. Milton gave some Aeschylean traits to Samson Agonistes (1671), but his true popularity dates from the 19th cent. when interest in Aeschylus became a feature of the Romantic movement. This centres initially on his play Prometheus Bound. Byron's ‘Prometheus’ (1816) was followed by Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1820); S. T. Coleridge's essay On the Prometheus of Aeschylus (1825); a translation of the play (1833) by Elizabeth Barrett (Browning); R. Browning's outline of the legend in ‘With Gerard de Lairesse’ (1887); and Bridges's Prometheus the Firegiver (1883). From Landor on attention shifted to the Oresteia and has stayed there in the 20th cent., resulting in O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1930), a recasting of the Oresteia in terms suggested by Freudian psychology, and, less obviously, T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion (1939). See also Browning's The Agamemnon of Aeschylus. There have been notable translations by Louis Mac Neice (Agamemnon, 1936) and T. Harrison (Oresteia, 1981).

De Brahm, William Gerard (1718–99?) surveyor, cartographer, and military engineer, born in Koblenz, Germany. De Brahm settled in Georgia but remained a Loyalist all his life. De Brahm was responsible for design and construction of fortifications for Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah. He surveyed and mapped the eastern coast of Florida, including detailed descriptions of its flora and fauna; these maps and reports have proved accurate and valuable to the present day. His observations on the Gulf Stream current helped accelerate voyages from the Colonies to Europe, and his maps played an important role in the Revolutionary War.

De Brahm embraced Quakerism later in life and abandoned all scientific and geographic pursuits. Afterwards his writings were exclusively of a religio-philosophical bent, dealing with biblical themes and revelations.