Quiz Answers and Result

1. Caravaggio 2. Benvenuto Cellini 3. Richard Dadd 4. Apollinaire 5. Eubie Blake 6. Irving Berlin. 7. Irving Caesar 8. George Abbott 9. Joseph Napoleon 10. Nabokov 11. Saul Bellow 12. John Updike 13. Schoenberg’s Erwartung 14. Philip Glass 15. Claude Monet 16. Jean-Baptiste Lully 17. Alkan 18. Adriaen Brouwer 19. Granados 20. Jacques Louis David.

It is a slight embarrassment to me that the winner of my quiz, Ken Duffy, should be someone I know well. No underhand dealings were involved and the small print, which I am giving as a prize is not something that as a person so long involved with the printmaking world he would particularly covet in any case. I asked Ken to try my quiz and added that I had tried to make it google proof. He replied that no such thing was possible. Proving this point obviously became a challenge and he has been successful. I congratulate him.

I see google-quiz-solving in action every Christmas if my daughter spends it with us. She enjoys The Independent on Sunday's quiz that consists of a block of sixteen details from paintings, which must be identified. We usually get six or so straight off. Then books are consulted and finally the laptops are brought out. With collections all over the world available to consult, everything can be tracked down.

Ken had three answers to my questions different from the list above. For no.13 he gave Schoenberg’s Three Pieces for Piano. Like Erwartung the work is from 1909 and is therefore a possible answer. Of the group of questions about writers who compared a woman’s bottom to an upside down valentine heart, he got Nabokov and Updike but gave James Joyce as the third writer. I take this to be wrong unless he can convince me otherwise. I am intrigued to how he got Nabokov and Updike without also getting Bellow. In Craig Raine’s essay Nabokov: The Russian Years, collected in In Defence of T.S. Eliot, he suggests other writers picked up the Nabokov’s trope like a virus. Nabokov’s phrase in Bend Sinister is: ‘her rump, which in those days of tight skirts, looked like an inverted heart.’ Saul Bellow wrote in Humboldt’s Gift: ‘You have a bottom like a white valentine greeting’ and in Rabbit Redux John Updike’s phrase, salutary or unconsciously smitten was: ‘the upside-down valentine of a woman’s satin rear.’ This question was I hoped very google proof and if I got anybody to look at Raine’s essay collections, I am very pleased, as they should be also, as he is a splendid critic as well as a superb poet. These were the questions that most were at sea with.

Ken’s third differing answer was to give Titian or Caravaggio as painters who might have been collected by both Rembrandt and Rubens. I suspect he thought this worth a guess because the northern painters were influenced by these Italian masters. The painter who they in fact collected, was the Flemish genre painter Adriaen Brouwer.

In truth, I didn’t get a very large entry for my quiz. Nobody came anywhere near Ken’s 18/20. But unlike The Independent on Sunday I was not offering a case of champagne

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