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| Thomas Eakins Head of Water Nymph ca. 1876-77 plaster (study for painting) Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Edward Burne-Jones Head of Cupid ca. 1880 drawing Morgan Library, New York |
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| Alphonse Legros Head of an Italian Model in London ca. 1880 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Alphonse Legros Head of an Italian Model in London ca. 1880 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Samuel Richards Study Head 1882 drawing Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| Auguste Rodin Small Head ca. 1882 plaster Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Jean-Jacques Henner Study of a Woman ca. 1887 oil on canvas Princeton University Art Museum |
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| François-Raoul Larche Head of Young Christ ca. 1890 bronze Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia |
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| Denman Waldo Ross Portrait Study of Edward Kenny ca. 1890 oil on canvas Harvard Art Museums |
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| Alphonse Legros Head of a Man in Profile ca. 1892 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Edgar Degas Head Study for a Portrait of Mathilde Salle ca. 1892 terracotta National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Alfred Stieglitz Head of a Woman ca. 1895 glass lantern slide Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Luc-Olivier Merson Head of Singing Boy ca. 1898 drawing (study for mural painting) Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| F. Holland Day A Head ca. 1898 platinum print Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Conrad Dressler Bust Portrait of the Artist's Wife, Nita Maria Schonfeld 1898 painted terracotta Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Aristide Maillol Head of a Woman 1898 bronze Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
The Mausoleum
an epilogue
It is already six. From the steeple
The even tones of a steady chime
Greet with their punctuality our lateness.
The hall is shut. But one may
Visit the mausoleum in its now public grove
Without cost or hindrance, and
With half as many steps as one would lose
Were one to proceed. Here is the turning.
The trees thin and one sees its pyramid
A steep roof tapering above stone steps.
Climb them. It is empty. The dead
Have buried their dead and the living
Can approach it without fear and push open
(As one may find it) the frayed door
To stand where a child might and where children do
Play under the bare shelves of stone tiers.
We enter, the sunlight just about
To fade on the wall and, from its glowing ground,
A blurred shadow detaches itself hovering
And cannot decide whether a green or blue
Will the more grace its momentary existence
Or whether a shot-red could invade
Decorously so impoverished a kingdom.
The light withdraws and the shadow softens
Until it floats unnameably, gathered up
Into the colourless medium of early dusk:
It is then that the eye, putting aside
Such distractions can move earnestly
Past the slung swag, chipped where it hangs
Under a white tablet, and slowly
Climb upwards with its burden of questions.
For the tablet-square, remotely white
But yellowed as if an effect of ivory
That has aged and which age has cracked,
Proffers, scarified like the swag beneath it,
Unhealed wounds: ivory fractures
But marble bruises, flakes and these dark
Incursions, heavy with shade, are the work
Of hands, recording such meanings as you shall read.
Were I a guide, you would vouchsafe my legend
Of how a race halted in tumult here
To exorcize in such wavering light
The authority of death, and by left-hand magic
Practised not against that but procreation,
Signing each with his own name
Their composite work. But you must judge
As you will and as the light permits.
For to grant to such fears their myth
Is to distinguish them out of pity for a failing house.
Unleashed, it was no flickering colonnade
Debouched this horde. The elegant swag
With the trim incision of the epitaphs no less
Than the stone skull, mocked their impatience
And the blackened streets, the creeping architraves
Of their Pandemonium, a city of mean years.
Swarming the base of the narrow walls
As far as the raised arm can incise
Graffiti and beyond that as high as stone
Can be aimed against stone in such a confine
The legend is complete however it is simple,
Is plain, though under this dimmed
Clerestory the darkness liquifies it,
And the work, however many the hands, one.
As surely as the air cooling and the scents
That burn on the chillness at our exit,
The gravel rasping its trodden canon
Under the weave of thought, usher us
Into that world to which this silence
Scarred by so many hands is prologue,
You will concede that they have gained it whole
Whatever they have lost in its possession.
– Charles Tomlinson (1956)