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| Anonymous American Designer Floral Wreaths ca. 1908 machine printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous British Designer Tulips 1907 intaglio-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
-Bust-of-a-Woman-with-Irises1900-porcelain-Chrysler-Museum-of-Art-Norfolk-Virginia.jpeg) |
| Duxer Porzellanmanufaktur (Bohemia) Bust of a Woman with Irises ca. 1900 porcelain Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
-Bust-of-a-Woman-with-Lady-Slippers-c1900-porcelain-Chrysler-Museum-of-Art-Norfolk-Virginia.jpeg) |
| Duxer Porzellanmanufaktur (Bohemia) Bust of a Woman with Lady Slippers ca. 1900 porcelain Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Aubrey Beardsley Untitled ca. 1890 line-block print Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Ethel Reed The Boston Sunday Herald ca. 1895 lithograph (advertising poster) National Museum of American History, Washington DC |
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| René Lalique Medal for Army Orphans 1916 brass Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| René Lalique Stick Pin Finial with Butterfly ca. 1890-1910 opal and silver, partly enameled Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Georges-Alfred Bottini Woman with Irises 1898 lithograph Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Friedrich König Design for Ornamental Figure ca. 1905 watercolor on paper Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Anonymous French Designer Anemone de Venus ca. 1910 block-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Anonymous American Designer Blossoms ca. 1906-1907 machine-printed wallpaper Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
-Mermaid-Tile-c1898-glazed-ceramic-National-Museum-of-American-History-Washington-DC.jpg) |
| Grueby Faience Company (Revere, Massachusetts) Mermaid ca. 1898 glazed ceramic tile National Museum of American History, Washington DC |
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| Hector Guimard Paperweight from Madame Guimard's Desk ca. 1909-1913 alabaster, bronze and gold Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Henry van de Velde Tropon - l'Aliment le plus concentré 1898 lithograph (advertising poster) Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum |
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| Henri Martin Young Woman in Flowered Dress ca. 1900 oil on canvas Musée Henri Martin, Cahors |
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| Fernand Moreau Vase ca. 1905 glazed earthenware Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina |
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| Tiffany & Co. Vase ca. 1910 glass Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina |
24 May 1946
In the church the great marble memorial in the chapel next to the chancel hung over me, brooding in its eighteenth-century conceit. What a world of egoism it was in itself!
Family pride sweeping and stinking and swaggering up to God. The marble peruke, the bloated marble bags under the eyes, the marble sneer (I mean a sneer) on the cold lip. The sneer is nothing assumed, not a facial trick: it is just the black look of worldliness solidified. Perhaps sneer is wrong. It is not contempt; it is just preening, puffing of one's gold guineas and fine acres. But I loved its solidity. The medieval things in a church are nearly always ruthlessly repaired, so one flies to the memorials, the eighteenth-century marble world for relief.
10 August 1946
It was the New Yorker yesterday that asked me for a story. Now today I am sent the Sun Bathing Review and told that Bernard Shaw, Laurence Housman, Naomi Mitchison, Vera Brittain, A.E. Coppard, J.C. Flugel, Robert Gibbings and C.E.M. Joad have written for it and will I write too – a likely theme, the value of nudity in schools "as a means of countering the unhealthy practices with which anyone who has been educated at a boarding school is familiar."
I think the only thing I can truthfully say in reply is that I feel that nudity would increase the "unhealthy practices" whatever they may be, perhaps set a fashion through the whole school for them – that is, "nudity" of this magaziny-shiny-photograph sort. The booklet is uncomfortable. I know that if someone came into this room at this moment, I would hurriedly explain that it had been sent to me, and that I had not bought it for my own delight. Why do other people's fetishes seem ugly and improper? I am fond of naked people, but not of a great to-do and business of nakedness. To read this magazine is to be half told that if everyone would suddenly strip off their clothes the world might be made quite wonderful.
– from The Journals of Denton Welch (who was born in 1915, gravely injured in 1935, then wrote the journals between 1942 and his early death in 1948), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (1984)