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| Jean-Étienne Liotard A Dutch Girl at Breakfast ca. 1756 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| George Morland The Fortune Teller ca. 1790 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| George Morland The Tea Garden ca. 1790 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Jan Stolker Portrait of Theodorus Bisdom van Vliet and his Family 1757 oil on canvas Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Photographs
In the past we listened to photographs. They heard our voice speak.
Alive, active. What had been distance was memory. Dusk came,
Pushed us forward, emptying the laboratory each night undisturbed by
Erasure.
In the city of X, they lived together. Always morose, her lips
soothed him. The piano was arranged in the old manner, light entered the
window, street lamps at the single tree.
Emotion evoked by a single light on a subject is not transferable to
photographs of the improved city. The camera, once
commented freely amid rivering and lost gutters of treeless parks or avenue.
The old camera refused to penetrate the unknown. Its heart was soft,
unreliable.
Now distributed is photography of new government building. We are
forbidden to observe despair silent in old photographs.
– Barbara Guest (2002)
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| Carle Vanloo Académie ca. 1740-50 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Hendrik de Flines Académie ca. 1784-98 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Hendrik de Flines Académie ca. 1784-98 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Louis Fabritius Dubourg Académie ca. 1723 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
Chamber Thicket
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps
and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent
air was thick-alive with pearwood,
ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse
howled, and cat skreeled, and then,
when the Grösse Fugue was around us, under us,
over us, in us, I felt I was hearing
the genes of my birth-family, pulled, keening
and grieving and scathing, along each other,
scraping, and craving, I felt myself held in that
woods of hating longing, and I knew
and knew myself, and my parents, and their parents,
there – and then, at a distance, I sensed,
as if it were thirty years ago,
a being, far off yet, oblique-approaching,
straying toward, and then not toward,
and then toward this place, like a wandering dreaming
herdsman, my husband. And I almost wanted
to warn him away, to call out to him
to go back whence he came, into some calmer life,
but his beauty was too moving to me,
and I wanted too much to not be alone, in the
covert, any more, and so I prayed him
come to me, I bid him hasten, and good welcome.
– Sharon Olds (2001)
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Anonymous French printmaker Couple in bed ca. 1750-1800 etching Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)