Undergraduates work with a model in a sculpture class, 1949.
The Creative Arts program was founded at Princeton in 1939 “to allow the talented undergraduate to work in the creative arts under professional supervision while pursuing a regular liberal arts course of study, as well as to offer all interested undergraduates an opportunity to develop their creative faculties in connection with the general program of humanistic education.”
Photo courtesy of Princeton University Archives
Great photograph!.....I can see and feel the creativity continuing from the past into the future....100 years ago a member of the class of 1877, Edwin Manners, released some "creative writing" in his journal....
January 4, 1909
The papers still teem with accounts of the disastrous earthquake that occurred last week in Sicily and Calabria, Southern Italy. Messina and Reggio were practically destroyed. The loss of life and property is appalling. It is considered one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest of recorded calamities. It rivets one’s attention anew to the beauty, the history and absorbing interest of the scene. It brings back so vividly my passage last March of the Strait of Messina. With what fascination I viewed Mount Aetna and later Stromboli and Vesuvius, those ominous vents of Earth’s passion. Intermittingly lost to reality I became another Ulysses strapped to the mast and saw with subduing dread and pity six of my best sailors, who to avoid the whirling Charybdis, had steered too near the opposing rock, seized from their faithful tasks to the summit by the rapacious heads of Scylla, their helpless cries and struggles being soon smothered in the black cavern. The subtle charm of the sea and landscape so impressed me, imbued as it is with the magnetism of related age, history and legend, that I spontaneously exclaimed, O God, am I to see this actuated dream no more forever! I felt deep down in my soul the tears of travel, the mordant sorrow of evanescence.
January 7, 1909
Even Achilles has a vulnerable heel.
At the theatre last night; a spotty piece, “The Queen of the Moulin Rouge”; reminiscences of my Paris nights! – ha, ha, ha! The Red Mill has been clipped into familiar comic opera, but it’s tradition remains and is still practiced in Montmartre. The Bal Tabarin seemed to be the cheese when I was there.
January 8, 1909
No doubt modesty when properly modulated is a virtue, but it should be kept to its right accent and proportion. The other day I was reading a memoir that should have been an interesting memoir, but the author was so afraid of projecting himself that the result was positively lame and disappointing. It reminded me of Goethe’s saying, that merit and modesty had nothing in common between them excepting the initial letter. If you would autobiographing go, do not burden yourself with too many reserves or take too much reticence with you; then your hand will be freer to find self-expression and pick by the way the flowers of self-revealment.