 |
| Pieter Coecke van Aelst Study Head of Bearded Man ca. 1525-50 watercolor and gouache private collection |
 |
| Balthasar Gerbier Portrait of Charles I as Prince of Wales ca. 1616 watercolor miniature on vellum Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Peter Oliver Elizabeth of Bohemia (the Winter Queen) ca. 1623-26 watercolor miniature on vellum Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Richard Gibson Sir William Kingsmill ca. 1655 watercolor miniature on vellum Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Richard Gibson Sir William Portman ca. 1658 watercolor miniature on vellum Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Bernard Lens King Henry V 1732 watercolor miniature on vellum Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| George Dance Soldier's Head, front and back ca. 1790 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
 |
| Domenico Bossi Portrait of a Lady in Van Dyck Costume ca. 1810 watercolor and gouache miniature on ivory Sinebrychoff Art Museum, Helsinki |
 |
| Louis-Bertin Parant Portrait of artist Dominique Vivant-Denon ca. 1810-20 watercolor miniature on ivory Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Alfred Edward Chalon Opera House, 1823 1823 watercolor British Museum |
 |
| attributed to Edward Ward Foster Portrait of Miss Tamplin 1834 watercolor miniature on card Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
 |
| Honoré Daumier Head of a Man ca. 1860 watercolor National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
 |
| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Joan of Arc 1864 watercolor on board Tate Gallery |
 |
| Anders Zorn In Mourning 1880 watercolor on paper Nationalmuseum, Stockholm |
 |
| Nicolaas van der Waay Portrait of painter George Hendrik Breitner ca. 1895 watercolor Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
 |
| Édouard Vuillard Portrait of actor Coquelin Cadet ca. 1890-1910 watercolor on paper Musée du Louvre |
 |
| Gustaw Gwozdecki Head ca. 1920 watercolor Yale University Art Gallery |
Mourning
A peacock on an olive branch looks beyond
the grove to the road, beyond the road to the sea,
blank-lit, where a sailboat anchors to a cove.
As it is morning, below deck a man is pouring water into a cup,
listening to the radio-talk of the ships: barges dead
in the calms awaiting port call, pleasure boats whose lights
hours ago went out, fishermen setting their nets for mullet,
as summer tavernas hang octopus to dry on their lines,
whisper smoke into wood ovens, sweep the terraces
clear of night, putting the music out with morning
light, and for the breath of an hour it is possible
to consider the waters of this sea wine-dark, to remember
that there was no word for blue among the ancients,
but there was the whirring sound before the oars
of the great triremes sang out of the seam of world,
through pine-sieved winds silvered by salt flats until
they were light enough to pass for breath from the heavens,
troubled enough to fell ships and darken thought –
then as now the clouds pass, roosters sleep in their huts,
the sea flattens under glass air, but there is nothing to hold us there:
not the quiet of marble nor the luff of sail, fields of thyme,
a vineyard at harvest, and the sea filled with the bones of those
in flight from wars east and south, our wars, their remains
scavenged on the seafloor and in its caves, belongings now
a flotsam washed to the rocks. Stand here and look
into the distant haze, there where the holy mountain
with its thousand monks wraps itself in shawls of rain,
then look to the west, where the rubber boats tipped
into the tough waves. Rest your eyes there, remembering the words
of Anacreon, himself a refugee of war, who appears
in the writings of Herodotus:
I love and do not love, I am mad and I am not mad.
Like you he thought himself not better,
nor worse than anyone else.
– Carolyn Forché (2016)