Tuesday, October 21, 2025

Ornamental

Master of Claude de France (French painter)
Violets
ca. 1510-15
gouache on vellum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York


Master of the Die (Italian printmaker)
Couple gazing into a Mirror
ca. 1530-60
engraving
British Museum

Master G.A. with the Caltrop (Italian printmaker)
Corinthian Columna Base
ca. 1535-37
engraving
British Museum

Franz Kobell
Landscape with Classical Ruins
before 1822
drawing
British Museum

Jean-Adrien Mercier
Buster Keaton in L'Opérateur
ca. 1928
lithograph (poster)
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Jan Matulka
Arrangement with Phonograph, Mask and Shell
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Theyre Lee-Elliott
Imperial Airways
1933
lithograph (poster)
National Air & Space Museum, Washington DC

Jean Metzinger
Nautical Still Life
ca. 1953
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Elaine Lustig Cohen
Politics by Harold Lasswell
ca. 1958
offset-lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Richard McLean
Prim Style
1970
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Philip Michelson
Awning Series IV 2
1983
watercolor on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Mendell & Oberer (Munich)
Bayerns Staatliche Museen
1984
offset-lithograph (poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Beatriz Milhazes
Head of a Woman
1996
screenprint
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Beatriz Milhazes
In Albis
1995-96
acrylic paint and felt-pen on canvas
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Judith McMillan
Campanula
2002
gelatin silver print
Akron Art Museum, Ohio

Elad Lassry
Four Eggs
2012
C-print
Gugenheim Museum, New York

Lee Mary Manning
Both (Ode to Will S.)
2023
C-print and watercolor
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

from An Hymn of the Fairest Fair

    O King, whose greatness none can comprehend,
Whose boundless goodness doth to all extend, 
Light of all beauty, ocean without ground,
That standing flowest, giving dost abound;
Rich palace, and indweller ever blest,
Never not working, ever yet in rest!
What wit cannot conceive words say of thee,
Here where, as in a mirror, we but see
Shadows of shadows, atoms of thy might,
Still owly-eyed when staring on thy light,
Grant that, releasèd from this earthly jail,
And freed of clouds which here our knowledge veil,
In heaven's high temples, where thy praises ring,
I may in sweeter notes hear angels sing.

– William Drummond of Hawthornden (1630)