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| Cherryl Fountain Self Portrait with Giant Pansies 1981 acrylic on canvas Museum of Modern Art, Powys, Wales |
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| Roger Jeffs Vittis (Monica Vitti) 1963 oil on board Southbank Centre, London |
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| Ruskin Spear Mrs Maud Drysdale ca. 1960 oil on canvas Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, Sussex |
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| Tom Wood Elaine Wood 1983 oil on canvas The Hepworth, Wakefield, Yorkshire |
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| Dorothy Mead Self Portrait 1973 oil on canvas London South Bank University |
Mirror
I grow old under an intensity
Of questioning looks. Nonsense,
I try to say, I cannot teach you children
How to live. – If not you, who will?
Cries one of them aloud, grasping my gilded
Frame till the world sways. If not you, who will?
Between their visits the table, its arrangement
Of Bible, fern and Paisley, all past change,
Does very nicely. If ever I feel curious
As to what others endure,
Across the parlor you provide examples,
Wide open, sunny, of everything I am
Not. You embrace a whole world without once caring
To set it in order. That takes thought. Out there
Something is being picked. The red-and-white bandannas
Go to my heart. A fine young man
Rides by an horseback. Now the door shuts. Hester
Confides in me her first unhappiness.
This much, you see, would never have been fitted
Together, but for me. Why then is it
They more and more neglect me? Late one sleepless
Midsummer night I strained to keep
Five tapers from your breathing. No, the widowed
Cousin said, let them go out. I did.
The room brimmed with gray sound, all the instreaming
Muslin of your dream . . .
Years later now, two of the grown grandchildren
Sit with novels face-down on the sill,
Content to muse upon your tall transparence,
Your clouds, brown fields, persimmon far
And cypress near. One speaks. How superficial
Appearances are! Since then, as if a fish
Had broken the perfect silver of my reflectiveness,
I have lapses. I suspect
Looks from behind, where nothing is, cool gazes
Through the blind flaws of my mind. As days,
As decades lengthen, this vision
Spreads and blackens. I do not know whose it is,
But I think it watches for my last silver
To blister, flake, float leaf by life, each milling-
Downward dumb conceit, to a standstill
From which not even you strike any brilliant
Chord in me, and to a faceless will,
Echo of mine, I am amenable.
– James Merrill (1958)
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| Philip Akkerman Self Portrait No. 38 1996 oil on board New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester |
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| Francis Bacon Study for a Portrait of P.L., No. 2 1957 oil on canvas Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich |
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| Matthew Smith Patricia Neal 1954 oil on canvas Guildhall Art Gallery, London |
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| Jacqueline Clarke Josh ca. 1990 oil on canvas Wolverhampton Art Gallery, West Midlands |
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| Malcolm Gwyon Dafydd Iwan yn y Glaw 2008 acrylic on canvas National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth |
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| Richard Hamilton Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland 1964 oil and photomontage on panel Southbank Centre, London |
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| Graham Sutherland Mrs Ramsey Hunt 1959 oil on canvas National Museum Cardiff, Wales |
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| John Kirby Looking On 1999 oil on board Yale Center for British Art |
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| Richard Stone Queen Elizabeth II 1991 oil on canvas Colchester Town Hall, Essex |
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| Stuart Pearson Wright Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 2003 oil on linen Royal Society of Arts, London |