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| Edgar Degas Visit to a Museum ca. 1879-90 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Visual art offers many different kinds of interest. Any attempt to argue that one kind is superior to all the rest regularly ends up as not much more than apology for one's own narrowmindedness. But what is possible, I think, and maybe necessary to criticism, is to identify a kind of interest that certain works of art have which marks them off from the forms of image-making all around them. (It is not the only kind of interest that even these works of art have to offer. It is just the kind that is peculiar to them.) Certain works of art, I should say, show us what it is to "represent" at a particular historical moment – they show us the powers and limits of a practice of knowledge. That is hard to do. It involves the artist in feeling for structures and assumptions and patterns of syntax that are usually (mercifully) deeply hidden, implicit, and embedded in our very use of signs; it is a matter of coming to understand, or at least to articulate, what our ways of world-making most obviously (but also most unrecognizably) amount to. I think that such work is done with real effectiveness – and maybe can only be done – at the level of form. It is the form of our statements, and the structure of our visualizations, that truly are our ways of world-making – at any rate the ways that hold us deepest in thrall. That means there is a necessary (though of course not sufficient) relation between the intensity and complexity of a work of art's formal ordering and its success in pursuing the questions: What is it we do, now, when we try to make an equivalent of the world? And what does the form that such equivalence now takes tell us about the constraints and possibilities built into our dealings with Nature and one another?"
– T.J. Clark, from Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)
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| Edgar Degas Dancer with arms crossed ca. 1872 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Lorenzo Lotto Madonna and Child with St Jerome and St Nicholas of Tolentino 1523-24 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Dirck van Baburen The Procuress 1622 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Diego Velázquez Portrait of poet Luis de Góngora y Argote 1622 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Diego Velázquez Don Baltasar Carlos with Court Dwarf 1632 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Singer Sargent Villa di Marlia, Lucca 1910 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Singer Sargent Villa di Marlia, Lucca - Fountain 1910 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Édouard Manet Street Singer ca. 1862 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Singer Sargent Portrait of Charles Stewart, Sixth Marquess of Londonderry carrying the Great Sword of State at the Coronation 1904 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Claude Monet Road at La Cavée, Pourville 1882 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Claude Monet Poppy field in hollow near Giverny 1885 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| John Singleton Copley Boy with Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) 1765 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Mary Ann Wilson Young woman wearing a turban ca. 1800-1825 watercolor Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |