ABSTRACT
The year of Rontgen's experiment was a promising one in experimental physics. In Paris, Henri Becquerel prepared for his researches on uranium salts. Also in Paris, Marie Sklodowska of Poland, then studying physics at the Sorbonne, married Pierre Curie. Across the English Channel, Ernest Rutherford arrived in Cambridge to begin a research fellowship under J J Thomson. The year 1895, more generally, marked the midpoint in an intellectually stimulating decade second to none. This was the heyday in the cultural history of the 19th century. In literary circles, the decade was dominated by the giants Henry James, Anton Chekhov, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, and Oscar Wilde: James experiencing his second productive period devoted to purely English subjects; Chekhov's period of full-length plays; Hardy turning from Victorian novels to poetry; Kipling's two Jungle Books; Wilde building his dramatic and witty reputation from Lady Windermere's Fan to The Importance of Being Ernest. In the musical arena, there was Giacomo Puccini with his Manon Lescaut and La Boheme, Giuseppe Verdi's last great masterpiece Falstaff, Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov turning to opera while also rewriting most of his earlier work, and, finally, Jean Sibelius' first great symphonic poem Finlandia made its debut late in the decade. France, on the other hand, offered Henri Matisse, who came under
il<fluence of Impressionism Neo-lmpressionism in this Claude Monet with his mature studies of light in landscape renderings, and Pierre Auguste Renoir in the flowering of his last great period.
