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| Hippolyte Bellangé "C'est beau, les arts" (Passersby in the street watching an artist paint a quince on a canvas attached to an exterior wall, while standing on a chair) 1824 lithograph British Museum |
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| John Everett Millais Touching-up Morning at the Royal Academy (Crowd of artist-onlookers including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown, with J.M.W. Turner at far right, seen from behind, standing on a box and wielding a brush) 1850 (later collector erroneously labeled the work "1851") drawing British Museum |
For the Imagists at the British Museum
Your tearoom has been modernized
and now the masses trundle through
with quick-dry trays
and infants squealing like unfixed alarms.
It's hard to imagine you
among the mummies,
it's hard to imagine your spacious living brains.
Thought is pretty costly here,
if thought relies on more
than a slender view of winter trees
above the burglar-proof windows.
There are too many images here,
commotion and hunger (it's 4 o-clock,
they've stopped tea, there's nothing
but paper plates, no doilies, no
music, a few sticky buns,
some ale without the alcohol . . .).
My feet hurt among the Roman coins,
the gift shop's chosen to plasticize
Tutankhamen and his friends.
This is how order shapes
the new world:
packed, humidity controlled,
shipped breathing
from the desert before which
art students with pastels
crouch in prayer.
– Shannon Nelson-Deighan (1994)
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| Horatio Joseph Lucas In the Studio of a Friend 1871 etching British Museum |
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| Louis Fagan Painter at work 1872 etching British Museum |
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| Louise Danse Painter working at an easel before 1888 etching British Museum |
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| Charles Baude after Gustave Courtois Portrait of Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret painting 1889 wood-engraving from Le Monde Illustré British Museum |
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| Hubert von Herkomer Etcher at work ca. 1891 etching (book-illustration, for title-page) British Museum |
Victorian Hummingbird Case
Against the brown branches arranged in the glass,
you do not photograph well, tiny brown silences.
Unhooked from your song, the visibles pass.
Face, face and face, lovers, children and grass
outside the curator's window reflect green alliances
against the brown branches arranged in the glass.
Testament to chemist and architect of what lasts,
miniature wings, hollowed throats, bony appliances
unhook from your song as the visibles pass.
Live, motors of beauty, precise, utterly fast,
you amaze the rare seconds
against the brown branches arranged in the glass.
The feather dance whirrs in the intricate past.
These literal pilgrims announce the ghostly ascendence
hooked to one song as the visibles pass and pass.
This, this and this: flecked stasis and grass,
surreal against the pterodactyl's webby transcendence
of human time, birdsong, the whole unhooked visible passing.
The brown branches arranged in the glass push against nothing.
– Shannon Nelson-Deighan (1994)
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| Frédéric Florian after Paul Renouard Portrait of Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier with painting of Napoleon on easel ca. 1891 wood-engraving British Museum |
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| Anonymous English photographer/printmaker Edward Burne-Jones painting a mural ca. 1890-1915 photogravure British Museum |
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| Paul Naumann after Richard Westall Queen Victoria at age eleven, sketching in a landscape 1892 wood-engraving from Illustrated London News British Museum |
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| Jan Veth Portrait of Joseph Israels painting 1893 lithograph British Museum |
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| Jean-Louis Forain Self-portrait making a lithograph 1895 lithograph British Museum |
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| Arthur Ellis Portrait of engraver Charles William Sherborn in his Chelsea studio 1898 wash drawing British Museum |
Victorian Parlor
Let hands be gentle when they part the curtain
Whose foliage and flowers of gold brocade
Protect this place. Here everything is certain
Forever, though stars fade.
When it is time for tea the sunset blazes
Red dew upon the crystal chandelier,
The mirror fills and flows with forest hazes:
Let hands be folded here.
Far from the world of bare and plushless noises,
The other plane of streamlines raw in brass,
Let hands learn peace where on the mantel poises
A shepherd of white glass.
– Elizabeth Bohm (1941)
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| Thomas Robert Way Portrait of Henry Ospovat, age 22, drawing 1899 lithograph British Museum |
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)