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| Vincent van Gogh Cottages 1890 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Édouard Vuillard In a room 1899 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"Maria was in the country of the lost. They were everywhere – a small man with a chair strapped to his back walking down Varick Street, a woman in the middle of Broadway, going through the contents of her handbag as the cars swerved past. It was a parallel world. It was just over the other side. Maria had always known it was there, but, now she was in it, she did not know how to get back out again."
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| Édouard Vuillard Young woman in a room ca. 1892-93 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"She could hear a child's toy spinning across the floor of the room upstairs. It sounded like a marble. Over and over. First she heard the sound of a winding mechanism and then the sound of a marble, hopping out on to the floor. Which meant that it wasn't a marble after all – there is no such thing as a mechanical marble. Maria listened for hours and tried to figure out what kind of toy it might be."
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| Édouard Vuillard Madame Vuillard by the fireplace ca. 1895 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Édouard Vuillard Madame Vuillard in the drawing room ca. 1893 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"At two in the morning, her eye was caught by a lampshade hanging over an archway in a flat across the road. For a second it looked like a body hanging there: the archway as a dark coat, and the lampshade was the head, broken at the neck like a blossom on its stem. Of course, it didn't exist, except in the corner of her eye, but the face was awful, dead and fleshy and somehow pleased with itself, and the coat, or cloak, the shapelessness, was worse. The face was blank when she saw it first, down-looking, perhaps a little sad and surprised by the sight of the floor. It was only when she saw what it really was that it took on this pleased expression, no doubt because she had been fooled."
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| Pierre Bonnard Behind the fence 1895 oil on cardboard Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Albert Baertsoen Evening on the Schelde 1895 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Naiad 1896 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"At three in the morning the silence woke her. She got out of bed, stood in the kitchen in her bare feet and punched at the ice with the breadknife, white slabs breaking wetly as they hit the tiles. The ice creaked and broke as she levered open the freezer compartment that had been frozen shut for months. She threw out the packet of spinach she found there, then worked the ice with her bare hands. She wanted to get it out clean, she wanted to hold a box in her hands that she could leave in the sink, melting like a treasure."
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| Theophile Alexandre Steinlen Dance-hall in a Paris suburb ca. 1892 pastel Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Claude Monet Cliffs near Dieppe 1897 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"At six in the morning she woke, exactly conscious of where she was, her eyes seeking and finding the faces in the wallpaper – over the mantelpiece, by the wardrobe, to the left of the light switch. She had been dreaming about a lost letter. She spotted it in a costume drama and rang the props department of the BBC to tell them it was addressed to her, but when it arrived, all scrawled and rubber-stamped, she saw it was years old. It was from one of the boys, the one she had kissed, but he had nothing new to say to her. He had looked for her, and missed her, years before."
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| Ferdinand Jean Monchablon Figure studies ca. 1893 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Henri Rovet Portrait of a girl 1893 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Auguste Renoir Woman in flowered hat 1892 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
"Twenty-four years ago, she went into Clery's for the January sale and bumped into Joan. It was in the lingerie department and the place was stuffed with nuns, she remembered, in for the annual corset – and, it had to be said for them, never much more than a glance at the lacy stuff, never so much as a smile or a look of regret. They had a fierce grip on themselves."
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| Jean-Louis Forain Music-hall ca. 1895-96 oil on canvas Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
– quoted passages are from the novel What Are You Like? by Anne Enright (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000)