Jamie Lee Curtis won an Oscar. She is, of course, the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. There are lots of successful actors and actresses who are the sons or daughters of other successful actors and actresses. So I got to thinking, are there first-grade classical musicians who were the sons or daughters of other first-grade classical musicians? Well, immediately I thought of David Oistrakh, the great violinist, and his son Igor, also a first-grade violinist. But I could not think of any other examples. There are no great philosophers who are the sons or daughters of other great philosophers, so far as I could think of. Nor could I come up with great poets or novelists or classical composers who are sons or daughters of other great poets or novelists of classical composers.
After a while, it occurred to me that this might be an
interesting question to put to the readers of this blog. Can any of you come up
with interesting examples of father – son or father – daughter or mother – son
or mother – daughter great artists of any sort?
60 comments:
Johann Sebastian Bach and his children come to mind, particularly Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Johann Christian Bach. Of course, they do not have the same stature as their father, but they were nevertheless very accomplished.
How about John Stuart Mill being the son of James Mill?
James Mill is less known than his son, but he rates a separate entry in the Stanford Encyclopia of Philosophy.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/james-mill/#Bio
Kingsley Amis and his son Martin were/are both well-regarded and famous novelists. Do they qualify as great? I don't know. If we extend the discussion to siblings, then the Bronte sisters are surely worth mentioning, as are Henry and William James.
Peter Serkin is the son of Rudolph Serkin.
Hephizbah Menuhin is the daughter of Yehudi Menuhin.
Wilfred Sellars was the son of Roy Wood Sellars.... both great in their way.
I consider Galen Strawson, son of P. F., to be a near-great philosopher, and perhaps even better than that.
The Wyeth family spanned three generations of painters. Mozart’s father was well-known in his time. Johann Strauss Jr. was the Waltz King, but his father had a great deal to do with popularizing the waltz in the first place. The Rossetti family was full of poets. Oh, gosh, and the Brueghel family!
Alexander Dumas pére and Alexander Dumas fils
If singing qualifies as a form of musicianship, then Ravi Shankar, the great sitarist, is the father of Norah Jones, the superb popular singer.
In the arts the only indisputable case of 'great' I can think of is Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean Renoir. I follow the herd that prefers fils to père, and in any case no sane person would wish to live without Rules of the Game. In jazz there's of course Dewey Redman and Joshua Redman, although I'm not confident about saying they're great as opposed to very good, highly accomplished, eminently listenable, etc. There are also many cases where one is great and the other accomplished. I wouldn't think that Jane Fonda qualifies for greatness, even though, unlike her father, she was the addressee of a Jean-Luc Godard (along with Jean-Pierre Gorin) film.
On Trump:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2023/03/21/donald-trump-possible-indictment-former-manhattan-da-saland-cnntm-vpx.cnn
Thomas Mann, certainly a great novelist, with three children, Klaus, Erika and Golo, all of whom are notable, if not great, novelists.
Heinrich Mann, Thomas's brother, is a also a notable novelist.
I almost forgot – Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist essayist who also wrote two novels: Mary: A Fiction and Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman.
Mozart's father was a competent musician and composer. Chopin's parents were both competent amateur musicians. Beethoven's father was a drunkard, but had a nice singing voice and was a passable violinist in his youth.
Nasir Jones ("Nas"), is a legend in the NYC hip-hop scene. His father is Olu Dara, an accomplished (if not "legendary") jazz musician.
Ellis Maraslis Jr. was an accomplished jazz musician whose children, Wynton and Branford, are respectively legendary and famous in their own right.
Lucien Freud, grandson of Sigmund, painted works of art that sell for tens of millions of dollars (not the same discipline though, obviously.)
Jacob Dylan is an accomplished, if not elite, popular musician and is the son of the legendary Bob.
And who can forget Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger - who wikipedia tells us are Uncle and Nephew (although not father and son.).
I don't know about "great," but these are all notable enough to appear on Wikipedia, anyway... :)
Immanuel Hermann Fichte (son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte) was a minor figure in 19th-century German philosophy - Wikipedia article here.
Arthur Schopenhauer's mother Johanna "was the first German woman to publish books without a pseudonym, an influential literary salon host, and in the 1820s a popular author in Germany" (Wikipedia).
Henry James Sr. "was an American theologian, father of the philosopher William James, the novelist Henry James, and the diarist Alice James."
Well, given the number of ineligible pairs named above, I can offer Turgenev, who wrote Fathers and Sons, the offspring of his literary imagination.
Another interesting story - Mark Everett, frontman of the highly regarded Alt Rock band The Eels, is the son of renowned physicist and defense theorist Hugh Everett III, whose doctoral dissertation laid out the multiple worlds theory of quantum mechanics. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/
In painting, the Brueghel family included Pieter the Elder and his two sons, Pieter the younger and Jan the Elder, both of whom were notable. There were further descendants who had success in painting, though I am insufficiently knowledgeable to say how well they are regarded.
However, as the visuals arts were (and still are more often than you might assume) generally the products of workshops in which the master is credited for work which relies upon the labors of the uncredited pupils and apprentices, I wonder how much of the relevant inheritance was talent and how much the more concrete means of production in the form of the workshop and its employees.
Barenboim pere et fils
Lennon pere et fils
dylan pere et fils
judy garland & liza minelli
debbie reynolds & carrie fisher
francis ford coppola & sofia coppola
Are athletics artful? Then
Dell & Steph Curry
Calvin & Grant Hill (football vs. basketball!)
And, in honor of spring (but I have to wonder whether baseball is athletics):
The Ken Griffeys
Bobby & Barry Bonds (though maybe not include this pair)
Felipe & Moises Alou
Mel & Todd Stottlemyre
The Jose Cruz's
Sandy and Roberto Alomar
Carl Yastrzemski & his grandson Mike Yastrzemski
Still Hollywood but not actors: Francis Ford Coppola and Sophia Coppola.
OK, I’ll see you your “Mark Everett” and raise you one:
Robert Quine was a brilliant avant-garde rock/jazz/new wave guitarist, an echt-East Village bohemian ... and a lapsed tax lawyer, believe it or not.
He was the nephew of W.V.O. Quine. So here we have a first-rate musician who was the close relation of a first-rate philosopher.
Not father-son or mother-daughter, obvs, but maybe the next best thing? It's hard to see this as purely coincidental ...
It does raise an interesting question: is there any family resemblance between RQ's guitar playing and WVOQ's philosophy? Just a couple months ago, I discovered (through Aperture magazine, I think) that Derek Parfitt is a keen amateur photographer. His photos are easily accessible on the web. I'd describe them as "atmospheric postcards" ... they're very strange. I've never really read any of his work, but it made me wonder if it resembles the photography in any way.
BTW, Robert Quine came to a sad, tragic end: he committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 61, after his wife had died of cancer the year before.
Probably the most interesting relationship which I see above is the one Michael mentions between Arthur Schopenhauer and his mother Johanna, whose novels, by the way, are still available, which means someone buys them.
They had a highly competitive relationship, they disparaged each others' work, they fought over money (inheritance from Schopenhauer's father who committed suicide) and they didn't speak to each other for 20 or 30 years (I forget the exact figure).
Johanna was a close friend of Goethe, whose approval Arthur sought without ever obtaining it.
Anthony Trollope also had a very difficult relationship with his novelist mother.
Another popped in my head--if not 'great', then both certainly more than highly accomplished, and both indispensable in a full account of the arts in the twentieth-century: The potter Michael Cardew, and the composer Cornelius Cardew.
I'd add the celebrated bass Alexander Kipnis (1891-1978) and his son Igor (1930-2002), a noted harpsichordist.
And don't forget Johan Strauß sr. and jr.
About philosophers, I'd eschew the epithet "great", since great philosophers are few and far between (I would certainly not include Roy Wood Sellars!), there are a handful of fairly well-known philosopher-pairs in the Anglophone world: John Mackie and Penelope Mackie, Israel Scheffler and Sam Scheffler, Barry Stroud and Sarah Stroud, Ernie Sosa and David Sosa. Kate Elgin's son Samuel Elgin is just starting his career, at UCSD, with a PhD from Yale.
I had forgotten the progenitor of them all:
Diagoras of Rhodes and his sons (!!) Damagetos, Akousilaos & Dorieus. Honorable mention to his grandson Peisirrhodos.
This is beginning to approach the Bach-family league.
The Adams family (not this one) - John, John Quincy, Charles, and Henry probably also bear mention.
This is getting out of hand. You are all coloring outside the lines! Sports, acting! Uncles, nephews! Dysfunctional families! Please!
This is symptomatic of the breakdown in the social order. Prof. Wolff proposed a simple game, naming parents and off-spring – other than actors – who have excelled in the same artistic field. What do we get? Athletes, politicians, more actors, and not so great philosophers1 People breaking the rules, making up the rules as they go along! This all started with Dr. Spock, and his cockamamie ideas about child rearing. Everyone needs to be told that they have done a “good job,” no matter how mediocre the job is. And where has this led us? I’ll tell you where it’s led us - it’s led us to Trump and his attack on all social norms, that’s where it has led us!
Marc,
I assume that your criticism of others for going off topic is ironic, because it would be pretty weird if the number one rule-breaker in this space, you, were to criticize others for doing the same.
I woke up this morning to see your comment in the previous thread about the TV program you saw last night, a comment which had absolutely nothing to do with the original topic.
John Adams/John Quincy Adams. Darryl F. Zanuck/Dick Zanuck - The Son Also Rises.
Without apologies----Dipping into the obscure sports realm:
Cecil and Prince Fielder.
Re my comment about Roy Wood Sellars:
Well, I am relieved that Warren Goldfarb did not also object to my characterization of Galen Strawson as near great.
s. wallerstein,
There is no one more virtuous than a reformed wh re!
(The blog would not allow me to use the full word.)
Are we permitted to mention famous 'step children' of famous philosophers? If so, there's Emmanuel Macron, an intimate of Paul Ricoeur. ["I set apart the names of those who, in addition to their friendship, have shared their competence with me: . . .and, finally, Emmanuel Macron to whom I am indebted for a pertinent critique of the writing and the elaboration of the critical apparatus of this work." (Memory, History, Forgetting, p. xvii)] Seeing the word "competence" attached to Macron's name is at least amusing in light of the current news from France?
PS. I share s.w.'s amazement (at 3:05 pm)
John Pillette: Fascinating about the Quines! And yes, I have seen someone try to compare Parfit's photography and philosophy - the point, IIRC, was that both were pleasingly sparse and devoid of persons. (Or at least, devoid of what look like persons from a commonsense orientation.)
Just to annoy Marc: Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and his father Rocky have both been champion pro wrestlers with WWE. Pro wrestler Peter Maivia was also related to Dwayne as adoptive maternal grandfather. ;)
David Zimmerman @1:58 p.m.
Anthony Trollope's mother Frances Trollope was not only a novelist; she also published a memoir of her time in the U.S., very critical of American "manners" and Americans generally. (There's an amusing brief discussion of it in Leo Damrosch's book on Tocqueville.)
That makes sense to me. I should add that, having never really read any Parfit or been much interested in anything that he chose to write about, seeing his photography didn't make me think I ought to revise my opinion. Rather the opposite. I thought, these are really kind of boring, and not in any kind of interesting way.
What do I mean? Martin Parr (I think it was) edited a photography book called "Boring Postcards", filled with, yes, boring postcards. It's actually a pretty interesting book ... but Derek Parfit's photographs are the opposite of that.
I read that Parfit went through his negatives and obsessively photoshopped all signs of messy human life out of them (not that there was much of that to begin with), as if he were the anti-Garry Winogrand; tells you what you need to know, I think.
Scientists, not artists. Niels Bohr and his son Aage Bohr—both won the Nobel Prize in physics. Marie Curie won the Nobel in physics and her daughter Irène Joliot-Curie won it in chemistry. Luis Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in physics and then working with his son Walter Alvarez figured out what happened to the dinosaurs. Arthur Kornberg and his son Roger both won the Nobel Prize—the father in biology (or physiology/medicine), the son in chemistry. Both are famous for their work in nucleic acids.
Robert Paul Wolff and Patrick Wolff
King Solomon was a great philosopher-king who wrote the Book of Proverbs & Ecclesiastes, while his father David was a harp-musician who sang the Psalms.
Yes, I know, both not in the same category of occupation--although both were kings.
"I’ll tell you where it’s led us - it’s led us to Trump and his attack on all social norms, that’s where it has led us!"
Come to think of it, Trump's father was a notorious scoundrel as well!
Per Wikipedia, Ze'ev "William" Chomsky -- father of Noam -- was cited as "one of the world's foremost Hebrew grammarians" by the Associated Press in their obituary.
The Wittgensteins were another famously talented bunch. Karl Wittgenstein, the father, was during his time one of the wealthiest business tycoons on the planet (here we'll probably need to put "greatness" in quotation marks). And most notable of Ludwig's siblings was probably Paul, his elder brother Paul, who (again per Wikipedia) "was an Austrian-American concert pianist notable for commissioning new piano concerti for the left hand alone, following the amputation of his right arm during the First World War. He devised novel techniques, including pedal and hand-movement combinations, that allowed him to play chords previously regarded as impossible for a five-fingered pianist."
I still remember the moment in Robert Paul Wolff's memoirs where he tells of one day catching his juvenile son Tobias -- now an esteemed Ivy League law professor -- pouting in a funk. What's wrong, he asks? "I'm the only one in the family without a national reputation," the young Tobias answers.
One could add Benjamin Peirce and Charles Sanders Peirce, father and son. The elder Peirce was a very notable mathematician (professor at Harvard), arguably one of the most important American mathematicians (and physical scientists) of the 19th century, and his son was, well of course, the first really great American philosopher and the founder of pragmatism (or pragmatism, as he preferred to call it) and a founder of mathematical logic. And then there’s Erasmus Darwin and Charles Darwin, on the other side of the Atlantic, with a generation in between them. Charles has a great to the nth granddaughter (Emma Darwin, born in 1964) who is a pretty highly-regarded contemporary novelist.
Correction: I meant to write that Charles Sanders Peirce called his version of pragmatism "pragmaticism." He said that this term was so ugly and awkward that nobody would try to steal it, like they had pragmatism.
Well, if you can't beat them, join them.
We mustn't forget three generations of Hustons - Walter Huston; John Huston; and Angelica Huston.
There are three generations of Kims too.
Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-Il and Kim Jong-un.
s. wallerstein,
What a comeback!
There are also, I assume, three generations of Wallersteins, and three generations of Susselmans, and, I suspect, three generations of everybody who has commented on this thread, but none as notable as the three generations of Hustons for their acting ability, nor as notable as the three generations of Kims, for their cruelty.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
The latter, of course, the Sup Ct Justice; the former was a doctor but better known as a poet/aphorist/writer (e.g. _The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_).
One of the most prominent examples that comes to mind is the duo of Dumas the father and Dumas the son. The father authored renowned literary works such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, while the son created The Lady of the Camellias, which later became the inspiration for the celebrated opera La traviata.
Charles I and Charles II. A talent for getting into trouble, or at least for not dealing with it well. And then there's the hallowed Queen Victoria and her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm.
Nature, nurture or the combined effect of both?
Charles I and his son, Charles II, were totally different, both in personality and government skills. Charles I was socially clumsy and maladroit. His lack of diplomatic skills ended in his beheading. Charles II, by contrast, was verbally and socially adroit and charming. He was a happy-go-lucky bon vivant, of whom it was said “He could tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually looked forward to the trip.”
Eddy and Peter Duchin
Thankfully there are no descendants of Hitler. I hope the Russians got him. Conspiracy theorists say he went to Argentina, or even Antarctica, or another planet by via Antarctica. The only redeeming quality he had was that he was a vegetarian.
When he met the judges in Hades, he probably said something like this:
'Pluto, I killed millions of innocent people, but I ate good!!!'
Kings David and Solomon? Good chance they might not have existed to begin with (at least not in the way they are described in the canonical texts).
It's interesting how unprovable events have a 50% chance they're true & a 50% chance they are false. Montaigne said we are more certain about things no one can prove than about things that some of us can prove. Kant would probably say the 50% true or false probability of unproven events are really part of the filtering processes of a non omniscient mind. I mean since we all have finite minds, isn't it natural for many things to go unexplained for all of us?
Damn it, LFC beat me with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. I came too late. In statistics we have Karl Pearson and Egon Pearson. Both have lended their names to numerous essential theorems.
Sorry, MAD.
Btw Sheldon Novick's biography of Holmes (Jr) is pretty good, I think, though it's been quite a while since I read it.
Interesting that no one, not even Michael Llenos, has mentioned God and Jesus ;)
My bad...
Surprised to see no mentions of Woody and Arlo Guthrie. Arlo never reached quite the height of Woody, but Alice's Restaurant is an enduring legacy.
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