Monday, January 22, 2018

Faces Reproduced on Copper Surfaces (Rijksmuseum)

Anonymous Dutch artist
Miniature Portrait of Josina Cornelisdr van Esch
1632
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Dutch artist
Miniature Portrait of Cornelia Cornelisdr van Esch
1632
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Dutch artist
Miniature Portrait of Maria Cornelisdr van Esch
1632
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Anonymous Dutch artist
Children playing with Nest of Birds
1718
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

attributed to Willem Cornelisz Duyster
Miniature Portrait of a Woman
1629
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

from The Portrait

This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.
I gaze until she seems to stir, –
Until mine eyes almost aver
That now, even now, the sweet lips part
To breathe the words of the sweet heart: –
And yet the earth is over her.

– Dante Gabriel Rossetti (ca. 1875)

Jan Verkolje
Portrait of a man
1685
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jan Verkolje
Portrait of a woman
1691
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Willem Bartel van der Kooi
Portrait of Adriaen Pieter Twent
1809
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jean-Étienne Liotard
Portrait of Empress Maria Theresa
1747
enamel on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

PORTRAIT

Quick with your paints and palette there! the color
Ebbs from my languid arteries.  Oh, be quick!
I feel my hair grow grey, my eyes grow duller,
And all the youthful contour blurred and thick.
I hear your nervous brushes rub and click,
Racing with time to catch my brief reflection.
Keenly I hear the numbered minutes tick,
Outdistancing your patience for perfection.

Can you retrace the masque of life, the section
Of universal chaos that was I?
The scars of flame, the gleams of resurrection
From loves that wither into lusts that die?
O then be quick! before those vanish hence,
Leaving a shell of blank indifference.

– Robert Hillyer (1926)

Cornelis Pronk
Miniature Self-portrait
ca. 1710-30
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacob Toorenvliet
Portrait of Carel Quina, Amsterdam-born explorer of Asia
1669
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jan Maurits Quinkhard
Portrait of a Man
1744
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacob Lyon after Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt
Miniature Portrait of Maurice, Prince of Orange
ca. 1612
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

attributed to Willem van Mieris
Miniature Portrait of a Man
ca. 1660-81
oil on copper
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The Portrait

For my little ballads,
those strange, sunset-red laments,
spring paid me a gull's egg.

I bade my lover paint my portrait
                                              on its thick shell.
He painted a new bulb in brown soil –
on the other side, a powdery mound of sand.

– Edith Södergran, translated from Swedish by Brooklyn Copeland (2011)


Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)