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| Johann Christoph Erhard Painter Johann Adam Klein at the easel in his studio in the Palais Chotek in Vienna 1818 watercolor Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin |
"August Comte remarked that mental equilibrium was, first and foremost, due to the fact that the physical objects of our daily contact change little or not at all, providing us with an image of permanence and stability. They give us a feeling of order and tranquility, like a silent and immobile society unconcerned with our own restlessness and changes of mood. In truth, much mental illness is accompanied by a breakdown of contact between thought and things, as it were, an inability to recognize familiar objects, so that the victim finds himself in a fluid and strange environment totally lacking familiar reference points. So true is it that our habitual images of the external world are inseparable from our self that this breakdown is not limited to the mentally ill. We ourselves may experience a similar period of uncertainty, as if we had left behind our whole personality, when we are obliged to move to novel surroundings and have not yet adapted to them."
"More is involved than merely the discomfort accompanying a change of motor habits. Why does a person become attached to objects? Why does he wish that they would never change and could always keep him company? Let us leave aside for the moment any considerations of convenience or aesthetics. Our physical surroundings bear our and others' imprint. . . . Although one may think otherwise, the reason members of a group remain united, even after scattering and finding nothing in their new physical surroundings to recall the home they have left, is that they think of the old home and its layout. Even after the priests and nuns of Port-Royal were expelled, nothing was really affected so long as the buildings of the abbey stood and those who remembered them had not died."
– Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), from On Collective Memory, translated by Lewis A. Coser (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
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| William Blake St Peter and St James with Dante and Beatrice ca. 1824-27 watercolor National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne |
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| Richard Parkes Bonington Venetian Scene ca. 1828 watercolor Wallace Collection, London |
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| Hendrik Jan van Amerom Reading Man before 1833 watercolor Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"It may be that, in the imaginary representation that an individual of the beginning of the twenty-first century forms of the world, space and time have come to the point of merging and exchanging their properties. We know that time is spontaneously identified with succession, and space with simultaneity. Let us repeat, then, that we now live in times in which nothing disappears anymore but everything accumulates under the effect of a frenetic archiving, times in which fashions have ceased to follow one another and instead coexist as short-lived trends, in which styles are no longer temporal markers but ephemeral displacements that take place indiscriminately in time or space. Hype, or fashion miniaturized. For modernism, the past represented tradition, and it was destined to be supplanted by the new. For postmodernism, historical time took the form of a catalogue or repertoire. Today the past is defined in territorial terms: when one travels, it is often to change epochs. Conversely, to consult a book of art history today is to encounter a geography of contemporary styles and techniques."
– Nicolas Bourriaud, from The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2009)
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| Eduard Bendemann Gymnastic Games ca. 1838 watercolor Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Théodore Chassériau Sophie leaping into the sea from the Leucadian promontory ca. 1840 watercolor Louvre, Paris |
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| Franz Xavier Winterhalter Victoria and Albert wearing fancy dress ball costumes from the time of Charles II 1851 watercolor Royal Collection, Windsor |
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| Eugène Delacroix Cavalier before 1863 watercolor British Museum formerly owned by Edgar Degas |
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| Eugène Boudin Women on a Beach 1865 watercolor Morgan Library, New York |
"Try to understand what I paint and what I'm now writing. I'm going to explain: in my painting, as in my writing, I try to see strictly within the moment when I see – and not to see through the memory of having seen in an instant now past. The instant is that. The instant is of an imminence that takes my breath away. The instant is in itself imminent. At the same time that I live it, I hurl myself into its passage to another instant."
– Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), from The Stream of Life, translated by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
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| Honoré Daumier Saltimbanques changing places ca. 1865 watercolor Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Gustave Moreau Diomedes devoured by Horses 1866 watercolor Getty Museum, Los Angeles |
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| Paul Cézanne Bathers at Rest ca. 1875-77 watercolor Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo |
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| Louisa Anne Beresford Mrs Walter Alexander and Captain Ogle examining a folio 1888 watercolor National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Constantin Guys Coachmen before 1892 watercolor National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |