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| Anonymous Russian artist View of Moscow from Trinity Gates of the Kremlin ca. 1800-1810 watercolor Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Samuel Prout Stonehenge ca. 1805 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
The Chair and Table Maker
The chair-maker has democratized the throne.
The chair is the throne of all men. There now is something which even the bear who wisely sits himself down on the moss, – there now is something which even the bear has not invented.
Like the leech and the pig, man also eats. But decently the aforesaid maker presents him with a chair.
Ever since then he eats in state, higher than the beasts.
The maker of chairs and tables separates us from the earth.
"It is seemly," says he, "not to eat where the worms wait for us."
Then, by means of the table he brings the food half-way to our mouths. For the table is the first floor of the earth, as heaven is its garret.
Oh, admirable work of this man, which delivers the featherless biped from the animality which lives on the earth.
The Greek has not done better for our sublimity.
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| Joseph Mallord William Turner On the Washburn ca. 1815 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Caspar David Friedrich Rock Gates in Neurathen ca. 1826-28 watercolor Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| John Sell Cotman A Summer Day ca. 1827-37 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
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| Adam Menelaws Landscape in the Alexander Park at Tsarskoye Selo after 1828 watercolor Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
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| Caspar Scheuren Study of a Tree 1830s watercolor Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Andreas Achenbach Snowy Forest 1835 watercolor Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf |
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| Jean Lubin Vauzelle Jardin des Tuileries, Paris watercolor before 1837 British Museum |
The Alchemist
His wife each morning entreats him to remember that gold is the only god of the household. As regards himself, gold is not his care, nor the finding of it, nor the secret of life. The intoxication of research alone takes hold of him in its adorable cradle.
Death is his dreaded enemy, for undoubtedly it will come but a few hours before the moment in which he should have triumphed.
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| Samuel Palmer Summer storm near Pulborough, Sussex ca. 1851 watercolor Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Edward Lear Abu Simbel, 10:30 am, 9 February 1867 watercolor, gouache Yale Center for British Art |
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| Léon Bonvin The Farm 1885 watercolor Morgan Library, New York |
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| Henri Harpignies The Fisherman 1886 watercolor Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| James McNeill Whistler Silver and Blue - Southampton 1887 watercolor Hermitage, Saint Petersburg |
The Electrician
He weaves the nervous system into the flesh of houses.
He endows them with a sensitive epidermis. The house lives in all its corners, everywhere the wires creep along the crevices.
If one knocks on the wall, the nerves cry out, ring, crackle, blaze up; it is a loud hysteria.
The electrician with his long wires adds to our will. We are all at once in the cellar, in the garret, in the garden, at the front door. Prospero had no swifter messenger. Everywhere the winged sprite flies on our service taking the narrow road of the wires.
– poems are from 12 Occupations by Jean de Boschère (1878-1953), translated in 1913 by Ezra Pound