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| attributed to Daniel Mytens Portrait of Sir Henry Peyton ca. 1621 oil on canvas Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Essex |
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| Jusepe de Ribera St James the Greater ca. 1630-32 oil on canvas Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London |
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| Willem Wissing and Jan van der Vaart Portrait of Princess Anne (younger daughter of James II, later Queen) ca. 1685 oil on canvas Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Herman van der Mijn Portrait of Carew Hervey Mildmay 1733 oil on canvas Government Art Collection, London |
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| Robert Edge Pine Portrait of Captain William Baillie ca. 1760 oil on canvas Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries |
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| Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun Portrait of le comte d'Espagnac 1786 oil on canvas Wallace Collection, London |
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| Edward Atkinson Hornel Portrait of an Old Man in a Scarlet Tunic 1881 oil on canvas Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, Yorkshire |
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| William Blake Richmond Portrait of Mrs Luke Ionides 1882 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| James McNeill Whistler Red and Black: The Fan ca. 1891-94 oil on canvas Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow |
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| Henry Treffry Dunn after Dante Gabriel Rossetti Jane Morris ca. 1896-98 oil on panel National Trust, Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton |
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| Robert Brough Portrait of Dolly Crombie ca. 1896 oil on canvas Aberdeen Art Gallery |
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| John Bulloch Souter Portrait of George Smith ca. 1922 oil on canvas University of Aberdeen |
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| Marion Adnams Variation on Red 1949 oil on panel Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Manchester |
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| Helen Fergus Untitled 1979 oil on canvas Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen |
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| Susan Wilson Joe in a Red Shirt 1993 oil on canvas Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge |
The Red Shoes
Someone buried red slippers under the floorboards
and the mice nested in them. The floors splintered no matter
how many cans of deck paint we used. And one night
at the Embajada I broke a tooth, and the very next
night three teenagers were shot dead as they sat at
a booth by the window eating mofongo. The neighbor
woman used to sing a funny song from the forties
about a "road" and "clear day," a fast car and a woman
with a pistol. You could see her back had been broken,
and she dragged her left foot behind her down the
stairs to the mail room. And Junior began smoking
crack after his church on Columbus failed and started
going by his birth name which was Jesus, until he
fell in love with Irma of the hideous rabbit-fur-and-
white-leather jacket, who stopped the cars by waving
her watery hands, smoothing her moth-bitten hair
from her moon-pale face, the violet lipstick she
always wore, until she wound up drowned in the East
River, and no one would say if it was suicide or
murder. But Junior said there were eels inside her and
began preaching again, doped on the corner. Mr.
Rodriguez fired him, though he didn't want to, and after
Mr. Rodriguez often looked sweaty and pale as he
labored to move stuff to the basement, which he had once
done with Junior to help him. We painted our rooms
cinnamon, Aegean blue, repainted them eggshell, gris-perle.
We fought, and you tore all my letters and diaries and
sprinkled them out the window where they landed on
the roof of your car, plastered there by a violent
summer storm. It took hours to scrape them off; I wept
and Mr. Rodriguez gave me a small plastic-wrapped
packet of Kleenex and a month later you wound up in St.
Luke's on lockdown and Junior caught pneumonia,
died that November. He was thirty-eight, though we
had believed him older. They buried him in Calvary
Cemetery in Queens. Once I rode a cab out that way –
we got lost, so many ticking minutes among the
slender white spikes of the graves. The red slippers –
they must have been for dancing, thin soled as if with
mouse skin, a powder inside that might have been talc,
rosin, or years of plaster dust, a piece of broken ribbon,
black at the edges as if burned off or torn and smeared with
shoe polish. Or the mice had gnawed it. And you
said "The name of the film," and I said I thought it was a
story older by far, a girl who puts on the shoes and cannot
get them off, who skips down a road, then another and
across the world, until her feet fall off, and her hands
and they make her wooden ones.
– Sheila Black (2014)