Top Tweets for #SundayBeautiful

No one painted the blue hour like Peder Krøyer. This is Summer Evening on Skagen's Southern Beach, and it shows two women, the painter Anna Ancher and Krøyer's wife Marie, walking arm in arm along the shore at the end of a summer day. It captures the blue hour, when the horizon almost dissolves into the evening mist and a scattered blue light is reflected in the sea. Krøyer loved that moment more than any other, describing the time of the evening when the two sources of natural light could be captured together as a particular favourite. The scene was real. It was inspired by a walk the two women took on the beach after a dinner party at the Krøyers' home in the summer of 1892, when the guests had gone down to the shore to enjoy the evening. And there was a secret behind it that no one discovered for almost a century: a 1990 exhibition revealed the painting had been based on photographs Krøyer took of the two women. After a month of studies, he wrote to friends that he finally began one beautiful morning, and "on the evening of the fourth day the picture was as it stands."

🐱 The elusive Pallas's cat has been caught on film in the highlands of Nava, Larijan, in Iran's Mazandaran province. Majid Batebi, an Iranian nature explorer, captured the wild cat after setting up a camera trap. Native to Central Asia, the felines are slightly larger than domestic cats, and are rarely seen because of their secretive behaviour. 🎧 https://t.co/FwHpFLEPZt

Hokusai’s Great Wave has taken over Brussels’ Grand-Place, recreated with more than 700,000 flowers. For the 2026 Brussels Flower Carpet, Japanese artist Hiro Sugiyama reinterpreted Katsushika Hokusai’s *The Great Wave off Kanagawa* as a monumental 1,680 m² (18,083 sq ft) floral installation. The Flower Carpet is on view at the Grand-Place through August 16.

Nothing about his start hinted at any of this. Seattle. 1954. An ordinary family. An ordinary house. He had an older brother. Daniel. Born with a developmental disability. Alan grew up beside him. He watched how the world treated Daniel. He watched who got help. He watched who got skipped. He never said much about it. His friends noticed anyway. He went into banking in the 1980s. Suits. Numbers. Good money. He met a man named Shashi Karan there. They stayed friends for 30 years. Then he quit. He started fostering children. A few of them. Kids nobody else would take. Then he changed careers completely. He went to work for the state. The Department of Social and Health Services. His job was the phone. After hours. Nights and weekends. A child is in danger at 2 in the morning. Somebody has to pick up. Alan picked up. For 20 years. The salary was $67,234. That was it. That was his whole career. So he worked side jobs. Sometimes three at once. Just to stay standing. And he saved. Every dollar he could catch. He wore the same shoes until they fell apart. Then he wrapped them in duct tape and kept going. He bought his jeans at Costco. His T-shirts came from the grocery store. Same aisle as the milk. He hit the deli at closing for the markdowns. He drove cars that barely ran. He took his best friends out to eat. Cheap fast food. Every time. The day he qualified for senior discounts, he was thrilled. He told people about it. "Saving money was sort of a game to him," Karan said. He bragged about whole days out spending nothing. His brother Daniel died in 2013. That year Alan did something strange. He bought himself a car. A small Scion. Cheap. "It's a nice little sports car," Karan said. "But not a Mustang or a Corvette. Not the Porsche he could easily have afforded." Nobody understood that sentence yet. Because Alan had money. Real money. He inherited millions when his father died. He invested and saved millions more. He never told a soul. He never spent it. He answered that emergency phone in duct taped shoes. Then the cancer came. He had plans. Road trips. Maybe a house with a view. He let them all go. He spent his last months at the computer. Researching charities. Reading their filings. Choosing. He joked with Karan about it. Said he was doing foundation work. Like Bill Gates. He told Karan what was coming. "My gift is going to be bigger than their whole annual budget." He was right. The Pediatric Interim Care Center got $10,000 online first. They phoned him to check the zeros. They thought it was a typo. It wasn't. He wrote them a letter to explain. Early on, he had a fragile baby and nowhere to put her. One frantic night. The center's founder drove over and took the child herself. He never forgot it. He left them $2.5 million. The largest gift in their history. They paid off the mortgage on their building. Treehouse got $5,000 while he lived. Then $900,000 after. They help kids in foster care. Years before, he'd brought his own foster kids to their free warehouse. He let them pick out toys. Then more. Little Bit Therapeutic Riding Center. WestSide Baby. Childhaven. Make-A-Wish. Boys Town. His parents' church. Disabled American Veterans. January 2018. Alan died. Age 63. No wife. No children of his own. Then his friends found out. $11 million. Nearly all of it to poor, sick, disabled and abandoned kids. Think about the arithmetic of that. He heard the worst nights of children's lives for 20 years. Two in the morning. A voice on a phone. Then he went home to a life that looked like poverty. He let the people closest to him believe he had nothing. He was sitting on a fortune the whole time. He was saving every cent of it for them. "He left it all to charities," Karan said. "Mostly to kids. The part of society that couldn't help themselves." "The frugality he lived by," a Treehouse director said, "was all for this." The story hit the wire and circled the planet. NPR. CNN. CBS. Papers in Canada and Britain. A drug exposed newborn in Washington is being weaned off right now. Warm. In a building with no mortgage left on it. A foster kid is meeting a career counselor this week. Neither of them knows the man who paid. He was the guy in the taped shoes. He wanted it that way. https://t.co/e02SbZhNOG