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| Gustav Klimt Portrait of a lady with cape and hat 1897-98 drawing Albertina, Vienna |
"Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with caution of life – all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love. No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended."
– Jamaica Kincaid, from The Autobiography of My Mother: a Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996)
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| Hyacinthe Rigaud Portrait of a Marshal of France ca. 1740 drawing on blue paper Albertina, Vienna |
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| Egon Schiele Self-portrait, grimacing 1910 drawing, pigment Leopold Museum, Vienna |
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| Jan van Eyck Portrait of Cardinal Niccolò Albergati ca. 1435 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Portrait of Jane Morris 1871 drawing Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery |
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| Henri Fantin-Latour Self-portrait 1861 drawing Phillips Collection, Washington DC |
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| Jean Clouet Portrait of Jacques Ricard, called Galiot, Seigneur d'Assier en Quercy ca. 1515 drawing British Museum |
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| François Clouet Portrait of Henri II ca. 1547 drawing British Museum |
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| John Hoppner Portrait of a lady 1780s drawing Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Giovanni Battista Piazzetta Self-portrait 1735 drawing Albertina, Vienna |
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| Jean-Louis Forain Self-portrait ca. 1900 drawing Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Maurice Quentin de La Tour Portrait of Louis de Silvestre ca. 1753 drawing Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Charles Samuel Keene Self-portrait ca. 1845 drawing Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Andrea Pozzo Self-portrait 1703 drawing Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |