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| Holkam Hall / Red Parrot Bedroom |
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| Holkam Hall / North Dining Room |
There are nine pairs of pictures in this post, but what they have in common (either within the pairs or among the pairs) is not necessarily a lot.
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| Chintz / Ethel Sans |
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| Edwardian Parlor |
Mainly, the unifying force is my own determination to look at these images in just this way (and to preserve them for my own future reference in just this way).
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| Gallery / Frans Franken |
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| Roma Antica / Giovanni Paolo Pannini |
Fabricating daily features on a rolling screen like this obviously requires much gathering of images. Some few of the gathered ones never quite fit. Those become potential orphans.
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| Concert : Friedrichs des Grossen / Adolf Menzel |
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| Madame de Pompadour / François Boucher |
Orphans come from who-knows-where, but they don't become true orphans until they have sat around for months or years waiting for a meaningful context that never arrives.
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| Château de Chantilly |
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| Château de Chantilly |
Here and now, these particular orphans have become unusually impatient and have crowded willy-nilly into an unlikely proximity which can never become coherent.
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| Trinity College, Cambridge |
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| Trinity College, Cambridge |
But with the spread of higher education during the past century, the quality of coherence itself has assumed an exaggerated authority, as if life itself were a classroom with a lesson plan.
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| Library |
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| Salon |
Now at last the eighteen orphans here can in conscience be dispatched to the featureless void of virtual storage (a destination resembling the afterlife, as the Ancients conceived it).
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| Winter Palace / Red Drawing Room |
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| Stroganov Palace / Yellow Drawing Room |
How thoroughly, how rapidly have the people depicted in these orphaned pictures disappeared from the world and from the thoughts of the living. Yet their furniture lingers on.
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| Dinner party / Marcellus Laroon |
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| Musical Tea Party / Marcellus Laroon |