Dawkins later dropped Clinton from his name by deed poll. Ĭlinton Richard Dawkins was born on 26 March 1941 in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya during British colonial rule. ĭawkins has been awarded academic and writing awards, and he makes television, radio, and internet appearances, predominantly discussing his books, atheism, and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual. Dawkins's atheist stances have sometimes attracted controversy. In The God Delusion (2006), Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker, in that reproduction, mutation, and selection are unguided by any designer. In The Blind Watchmaker (1986), Dawkins argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. With his book The Extended Phenotype (1982), he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. ĭawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. An atheist, he is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was Professor for Public Understanding of Science in the University of Oxford from 1995 to 2008. Oil on canvas.Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is a British evolutionary biologist and author. Walter Gay (1856–1937), Interior of the Artist's Apartment, undated. Across Photoarchive files, researchers can make their own connections among themes of portraiture and emptiness, and artists like Water Gay, Joseph Ducreux, and Goya and his followers. In Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, Ducreux stands in as the identifiable face to Walter Gay’s living room, and the directness of Ducreux’s portrait remains central to both pictures. Working in his own home, Gay sometimes included images of himself and Matilda, adding a more literal expression of portraiture to his work. Half-closed doors, wrinkled sheets, and cluttered arrangements of bibelots speak as much to the unseen occupants as they do to those qualities innate to a space itself. The portrait also complemented Walter Gay’s interior scenes, in which he imbues rooms with moods and personalities. It is also possible that the Goya-esque quality observed in 1949 references Matilda Gay’s appreciation of the Spanish temperament: in a diary entry, she describes an acquaintance who “looks just like a Goya, and has the fougueux quality of a man of that epoch.” The picture presumably appealed to the Gays’ love of eighteenth-century French art. It is not known when the Gays might have acquired this version of Ducreux’s painting, of which several replicas and copies are known to exist. Its twenty-first-century fame is due largely to a 2009 internet meme called “Archaic Rap,” in which images of Ducreux’s paintings captioned with slangy one-liners and Britishisms were widely tweeted and shared on Facebook. When Interior of the Artist’s Apartment was exhibited at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, in 1949, five years before it was accessioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the portrait was listed as “probably by Goya or one of his followers.” Today, it is recognized as a self-portrait by the French painter Joseph Ducreux (1735–1802). The portrait hangs above a bright blue settee and is surrounded by a cluster of five small landscapes.
Prominently featured in this corner of the room is a large portrait of a man, grinning and pointing at the viewer. Interior of the Artist’s Apartment, made sometime after 1910 by the American painter and watercolorist Walter Gay, shows a narrow view of a sitting area in Walter and his wife Matilda’s Paris apartment at 11 Rue de l'Université, where the couple had moved in May 1909.