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These featured pictures, as scheduled below, appeared as the picture of the day (POTD) on the English Wikipedia's Main Page in the last 30 days.
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July 7
Flora MacDonald Denison (1867–1921) was a Canadian activist, journalist, and businesswoman known for her leadership in the Canadian suffragist movement and her stewardship of Bon Echo Provincial Park in Ontario. She joined the Canadian Suffrage Association in 1906 when it was founded by Augusta Stowe-Gullen and became an active member and campaigner. In 1906, Denison traveled to Copenhagen as Canada's delegate to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. She also attended the International Woman's Suffrage Alliance convention in Budapest in 1913. After meeting the British activist Emmeline Pankhurst in London, she organized the latter's first trip to Canada in 1909. She served as president of the Canadian Suffrage Association from 1911 to 1914, until her controversial support for the militant tactics of the Women's Social and Political Union in England resulted in her forced resignation. Photograph credit: Lyont E.; restored by Adam Cuerden
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July 6
The scintillant hummingbird (Selasphorus scintilla) is a species of hummingbird that is endemic to the Central American countries of Costa Rica and Panama. It inhabits brushy forest edges, coffee plantations and occasionally gardens at altitudes from 900 to 2,000 metres (3,000 to 6,600 ft), and up to 2,500 metres (8,200 ft) when not breeding. It is only 6.5 to 8.0 centimetres (2.6 to 3.1 in) long, including the bill, making it one of the smallest birds in existence, marginally larger than the bee hummingbird. This female scintillant hummingbird was photographed in the cloud forest of Mount Totumas in Panama. Photograph credit: Charles J. Sharp
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July 5
Pseudatelus is a genus of shield bugs of the family Pentatomidae. They range from 14 to 20 millimetres (0.55 to 0.79 in), depending on the species, and have a typical shield-shaped body. They are usually brown or dark brown in colour, with a triangular-shaped scutellum. This Pseudatelus shield bug was photographed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Photograph credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim
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July 4
The Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital (also known as USPHS Hospital No. 43) was a United States Public Health Service hospital on Ellis Island in New York Harbor that operated from 1902 to 1951. It is part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. The hospital had two functions: treating immigrants who were ill upon arrival, and treating immigrants with conditions that were prohibited by immigration laws. These latter patients were stabilized and often sent back to their home countries. More than 275,000 patients were treated at Ellis Island; there were approximately 4,000 fatalities and 350 babies were born there. Efforts to restore the hospital buildings and other structures on the island are being made by the non-profit organization Save Ellis Island. This photograph depicts a window in the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, decorated in 2014 by the French artist JR with reproductions of photographs of immigrants at the hospital. Artwork credit: JR; photographed by Rhododendrites
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July 3
Les Troyens is a grand opera in five acts by Hector Berlioz with a French-language libretto written by the composer himself based on Virgil's Aeneid. The score was composed between 1856 and 1858, but Berlioz did not live long enough to see the work performed in its entirety. However, the last three acts, substantially abridged, were performed during his lifetime under the title Les Troyens à Carthage by Léon Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, in Paris in 1863. For this performance, Berlioz added an orchestral introduction and a prologue. He was not happy with the result, noting bitterly that he had agreed to let Carvalho do it "despite the manifest impossibility of his doing it properly. He had just obtained an annual subsidy of a hundred thousand francs from the government. Nonetheless the enterprise was beyond him. His theater was not large enough, his singers were not good enough, his chorus and orchestra were small and weak." This is the cover of the piano–vocal score of Les Troyens, published in 1863 by Choudens, with a lithographic illustration by Antoine Barbizet. Lithograph credit: Antoine Barbizet; restored by Adam Cuerden
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July 2
James A. Garfield (1831–1881) was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March to September 1881. On July 2, 1881, four months into his presidency, Garfield was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed and delusional office seeker. Garfield died two months later from infections caused by his doctors. He remains the only sitting member of the United States House of Representatives to be elected to the presidency. Photograph credit: unknown; restored by PawełMM and Quibik
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July 1
The willie wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys) is a passerine bird native to Australia, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, and eastern Indonesia. It measures about 19–21.5 cm (7+1⁄2–8+1⁄2 in) in length. The willie wagtail is insectivorous and spends much time chasing prey in open habitat. Its common name is derived from its habit of wagging its tail horizontally when foraging on the ground. Aggressive and territorial, the willie wagtail will often harass much larger birds such as the laughing kookaburra and wedge-tailed eagle. It has responded well to human alteration of the landscape and is a common sight in urban lawns, parks, and gardens. It is widely featured in Aboriginal folklore around Australia and New Guinea in a variety of roles, from stealer of secrets and liar to a good omen for successful crops. Photograph credit: JJ Harrison
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June 30
Ignace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673) was a French Catholic priest and scientist. His celestial atlas, entitled Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio, comprised six charts of the night sky and was first published in 1674. The atlas uses a gnomonic projection so that the plates make up a cube of the celestial sphere. The constellation figures are drawn from Uranometria, but were carefully reworked and adapted to a broader view of the sky. This is the fourth plate from a 1693 edition of Pardies's atlas, featuring constellations including Virgo, Libra and Boötes, visible in the northern sky. Map credit: Ignace-Gaston Pardies |
June 29
The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul is a Roman Catholic church located in the neighbourhood of Antakalnis in Vilnius, Lithuania. Its interior has masterful compositions of some two thousand stucco figures by Pietro Perti and ornamentation by Giovanni Maria Galli da Bibiena, and is unique in Europe. The church is dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, whose feast day is celebrated on 29 June. This photograph of the interior depicts the church's chancel with the main altar. The large central painting by Franciszek Smuglewicz depicts the emotional final parting of Peter and Paul. A life-sized sculpture of Jesus, known as Jesus of Antakalnis, is visible in a niche on the left of the image. Photograph credit: David Iliff
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June 28
Silver certificates are a type of representative money issued between 1878 and 1964 in the United States as part of its circulation of paper currency. They were produced in response to silver agitation by citizens who were angered by the Coinage Act of 1873, which had effectively placed the United States on a gold standard. Since 1968 they have been redeemable only in Federal Reserve Notes and are thus obsolete, but they remain legal tender at their face value and hence are still an accepted form of currency. This is a complete set of the 1891 series of large-size silver certificates, designed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and comprising eight denominations from $1 to $1000. Each banknote bears the signatures of James Fount Tillman (Register of the Treasury) and Daniel N. Morgan (Treasurer of the United States), and a portrait of a different individual, identified above. Banknote design credit: Bureau of Engraving and Printing; photographed by Andrew Shiva
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June 27
François Certain de Canrobert (27 June 1809 – 28 January 1895) was a French general who held the title of Marshal of France. A staunch supporter of Emperor Napoleon III, he became one of the leading figures in the Bonapartist party under the French Third Republic. This photograph of Canrobert in military uniform was taken by the French photographer Nadar. Photograph credit: Nadar; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 26
The diamond firetail (Stagonopleura guttata) is a species of estrildid finch that is endemic to Australia. To safeguard their eggs and nestlings, they are often recorded building their nests into the base of the large stick-nest of a bird of prey, such as a whistling kite, white-bellied sea eagle, wedge-tailed eagle, brown falcon, nankeen kestrel, or square-tailed kite; one recorded nest of a whistling kite contained nine diamond firetail nests within. This diamond firetail was photographed in Glen Alice, New South Wales. Photograph credit: John Harrison
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June 25
Crystal Eastman (June 25, 1881 – July 28, 1928) was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She is best remembered as a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, as a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Photograph credit: Edmonston, Washington, D.C.; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 24
Reaper is a series of three oil-on-canvas paintings by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh of a man reaping a wheat field under a bright early-morning sun. This is the second painting in the series, which Van Gogh appears to have completed in a single day in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, while taking breaks to write a letter on 4–5 September 1889. In a later part of the letter, he announced: "Phew – the reaper is finished, I think it will be one that you'll place in your home". Van Gogh initially preferred this version over the earlier study, describing it as "an image of death as the great Book of Nature speaks to us about it – but what I sought is the 'almost smiling'. It's all yellow except for a line of violet hills – a pale, blond yellow. I myself find that funny, that I saw it like that through the iron bars of a cell." The painting is now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Painting credit: Vincent van Gogh
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June 23
Théophile Thoré-Bürger (23 June 1807 – 30 April 1869) was a French journalist and art critic. He is best known today for his rediscovery of the work of painter Johannes Vermeer and several other prominent Dutch artists, such as Frans Hals. This portrait photograph of Thoré-Bürger was taken by the French photographer Nadar. Photograph credit: Nadar; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 22
Wells Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Wells, Somerset, commenced around 1175 on the site of a late-Roman mausoleum and an 8th-century abbey church. The cathedral has been described by the architectural historian John Harvey as Europe's first truly Gothic structure, lacking the Romanesque work that survives in many other cathedrals. It is the seat of the bishop of Bath and Wells. This photograph depicts the St Andrew's Cross arches under the tower, viewed from the nave. Photograph credit: David Iliff
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June 21
Isaac Cruikshank (1764–1811) was a Scottish painter and caricaturist. He was born in Edinburgh and spent most of his career in London. Cruikshank is known for his social and political satire. His first known publications were etchings of Edinburgh "types", from 1784. He produced illustrations for books about the theatre, did the frontispiece for Witticisms and Jests of Dr Johnson (1791), and illustrated George Shaw's extensive General Zoology (1800–1826). With James Gillray, Cruikshank developed the figure of John Bull, the nationalistic representation of a solid British yeoman. He died of alcohol poisoning at the age of fifty-five as a result of a drinking contest, of which he was declared the winner. This 1799 illustration by Cruikshank, titled "Indecency", depicts a woman urinating in the street and saying: "B[las]t you what are you stareing [sic] at?" Engraving credit: Isaac Cruikshank; restored by Lise Broer
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June 20
Gina Krog (20 June 1847 – 14 April 1916) was a Norwegian suffragist, teacher, liberal politician, writer and editor. She played a central role in the Norwegian women's movement from the 1880s until her death, notably as a leading campaigner for women's right to vote. In 1884, Krog co-founded the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights with liberal MP Hagbart Berner. Over the next two decades, Krog co-founded the Women's Voting Association, the National Association for Women's Suffrage, and the Norwegian National Women's Council, spearheading the presentation of women's suffrage proposals to the Storting (the Norwegian parliament). She was an early member of the Liberal Party and served as a deputy member of its national board. Krog was regarded as an unapologetic liberal progressive during her time, seeking full and equal voting rights for all women on the same conditions as men, which was achieved in 1913. She was the first woman in Norway to receive a state funeral. Photograph credit: Eivind Enger; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 19
The Hunting of the Snark is a nonsense poem by the English writer Lewis Carroll, telling the story of ten characters who cross the ocean to hunt a mysterious creature known as the Snark. The poem was published in 1876 with illustrations by Henry Holiday. This is the sixth plate from Holiday's illustrations, depicting the search for the snark planned in "Fit the Fourth" and commencing in "Fit the Fifth": They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care; Illustration credit: Henry Holiday; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 18
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1769–1852) was an Anglo-Irish soldier and Tory statesman who was one of the leading military and political figures of 19th-century Britain, serving twice as prime minister. He is one of the commanders who won and ended the Napoleonic Wars when a coalition of European powers defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815. This oil-on-canvas portrait, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence shortly after the Battle of Waterloo, depicts Wellington wearing the uniform of a field marshal with the insignia of the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Golden Fleece. The painting is part of the collection of Apsley House, the London townhouse of the Dukes of Wellington. Painting credit: Thomas Lawrence; image restored by Hohum
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June 17
Bolungarvík is a small town and the only built-up area in the municipality of Bolungarvíkurkaupstaður in the northwest of Iceland, located on the peninsula of the Westfjords, approximately 14 kilometres (8.7 miles) from the town of Ísafjörður and 473 kilometres (294 miles) from the capital city Reykjavík. The town is near abundant fishing grounds and has been used as an outpost for fishing since the 17th century, making it one of the earliest in Iceland. Bolungarvík was not accessible by road until 1950, and in 2010 a tunnel was opened under the mountain to bypass the old road, which was frequently subject to avalanches and rock falls. This panoramic photograph of Bolungarvík was taken in early July 2018 from the avalanche dam that overlooks the town. Lupin, which covers much of this area of Iceland in summer, is visible at the extreme bottom left of the image. Photograph credit: Veggies
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June 16
An odd-eyed cat is a cat with one blue eye and one eye either green, yellow, or brown. This is a feline form of complete heterochromia, a condition that occurs in some other animals, including humans. There is also partial heterochromia, where there can be one blue eye and one eye that is partially blue and partially another color. The condition most commonly affects white cats, but may be found in a cat of any color, provided that it possesses the white-spotting gene. This white domestic cat has complete heterochromia, with a blue left eye and a yellow right eye. Photograph credit: Keith Kissel
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June 15
Guano is the accumulated excrement of seabirds and bats. As a manure, guano is a highly effective fertilizer due to its exceptionally high content of nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium: key nutrients essential for plant growth. Guano was also, to a lesser extent, sought for the production of gunpowder and other explosive materials. The demand for guano in the 19th century spurred the human colonization of remote bird islands in many parts of the world, resulting in some of the first examples of United States colonialism and the expansion of the British Empire. However, the guano-mining process resulted in ecological degradation through the loss of millions of seabirds. This photograph, taken near Île-de-Bréhat in northwestern France, depicts a herring gull (Larus argentatus) excreting waste, which accumulates to form guano. Photograph credit: Nicolas Sanchez
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June 14
The checker shadow illusion is an optical illusion published in 1995 by Edward Adelson, an American professor of vision science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The phenomenon features an image of a checkerboard with light and dark squares, partly shadowed by another object, such as a cylinder as in this illustration. The optical illusion is that the area labeled A appears to be darker than the area labeled B. However, within the context of the two-dimensional image, they are of identical brightness – in other words, they would be printed with identical mixtures of ink, or displayed on a screen with pixels of identical color. Optical illusion credit: Edward Adelson; illustrated by Pbrks
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June 13
The Danube Delta is the second-largest river delta in Europe, after the Volga Delta, and the best preserved on the continent. While a small part of the delta lies in Ukraine (Odessa Oblast), a majority of its area of 3,446 km2 (1,331 sq mi) lies in Romania (Tulcea County). With the lagoons of Razim–Sinoe, located south of the main delta, the combined territory of 5,165 km2 (1,994 sq mi) is designated a World Heritage Site. Photograph credit: European Space Agency
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June 12
The Notre-Dame fire broke out in the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 15 April 2019, causing severe damage to the building's spire, roof, and upper walls. The fire resulted in the contamination of the site and nearby areas of the city with toxic dust and lead. Investigators believed that the fire was caused by a cigarette or an electrical short circuit; the prosecutor of Paris found no evidence showing the fire was started deliberately. The cathedral's wooden spire, or flèche, was built by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in the Gothic Revival style and installed in 1859, weighing around 250 tons. This photograph, taken during the 2019 fire, depicts the spire of Notre-Dame aflame; it collapsed shortly afterwards. Photograph credit: Guillaume Levrier
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June 11
Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer who is considered to be one of the most important portraitists of the 19th century. She is known for her soft-focus close-ups of famous Victorian men and for illustrative images depicting characters from mythology, Christianity and literature. Cameron also produced sensitive portraits of women and children. After showing a keen interest in photography for many years, she took up the practice at the relatively late age of 48, when her daughter gave her a camera as a present. She quickly produced a large body of work capturing the genius, beauty, and innocence of the men, women, and children who visited her studio, and created unique allegorical images inspired by tableaux vivants, theatre, 15th-century Italian painters, and the work of her creative contemporaries. Her photography career was short but productive; she made around 900 photographs over a twelve-year period. This portrait of Cameron, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was taken in 1870 by her son Henry Herschel Hay Cameron. Photograph credit: Henry Herschel Hay Cameron; restored by Adam Cuerden
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June 10
Sinopterus dongi was a species of pterosaur that lived in the Early Cretaceous, about 120 million years ago. Like all the other members of the family Tapejaridae, Sinopterus is known for its large skull, which has a prominent crest and a birdlike pointed beak, and its lack of teeth. It was also a member of the Jehol Biota, an Early Cretaceous ecosystem mainly found in Liaoning, China best known for its feathered dinosaurs that has a crucial impact on studying the relationship between dinosaurs and birds. This S. dongi fossil specimen was collected in Chaoyang, in the western part of Liaoning. Part of the collection of the Beijing Museum of Natural History, the fossil was temporarily exhibited at the National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung, Taiwan. Photograph credit: Y.-C. Tsai
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June 9
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp is a 1632 oil-on-canvas painting by Rembrandt housed in the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, Netherlands. The painting is regarded as one of Rembrandt's early masterpieces. In the work, Nicolaes Tulp is pictured explaining the musculature of the arm to a group of doctors. Some of the spectators are various doctors who paid to be included in the painting. The painting is signed in the top-left hand corner Rembrandt. f[ecit] 1632. This may be the first instance of Rembrandt signing a painting with his forename (in its original form) as opposed to the monogram RHL ("Rembrandt Harmenszoon of Leiden"), and is thus a sign of his growing artistic confidence. Painting credit: Rembrandt
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June 8
Robert Bruce is an 1846 pastiche opera in three acts, with music by Gioachino Rossini and Louis Niedermeyer to a French-language libretto by Alphonse Royer and Gustave Vaëz, after Sir Walter Scott's History of Scotland. The music was stitched together by Niedermeyer, with the composer's permission, with pieces from La donna del lago, Zelmira, and other Rossini operas. The work was premiered on 30 December 1846 by the Paris Opera at the Salle Le Peletier. This illustration is the set for act 3 of the opera, taking place in the ramparts of Stirling Castle, designed by Charles-Antoine Cambon. Set design credit: Charles-Antoine Cambon; restored by Adam Cuerden
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