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| Hippolyte Flandrin Portrait of brothers René-Charles Dassy and Jean-Baptiste-Claude-Amédé Dassy (detail) 1850 oil on canvas Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| James Barry Self Portrait as ancient Greek painter Timanthes 1803 oil on canvas National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin |
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| Pelagio Palagi Portrait of Conte Colonnello Teodoro Arese Lucini ca. 1810 oil on panel private collection |
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| Jeanne-Élisabeth Chaudet Portrait of Letizia Murat (Napoleon's niece) cradling a Bust of Napoleon ca. 1810 oil on canvas Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica |
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| Edgar Degas Self Portrait 1854-55 oil on canvas Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York |
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| Gaetano Esposito Portrait of painter Vincenzo Migliaro 1876 oil on canvas Banco Commerciale Italiana, Naples |
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| Francisco Goya Portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel before 1805 oil on canvas National Gallery, London |
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| Antoine-Jean Gros Portrait of Christine Boyer, wife of Lucien Bonaparte ca. 1800 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Amédée-David, conte di Pastoret ca. 1823-26 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres Portrait of Amédée-David, conte di Pastoret (detail) ca. 1823-26 oil on canvas Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Jacques-Louis David Self Portrait 1794 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| François-Joseph Navez Self Portrait 1826 oil on canvas Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels |
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| Théodore Chassériau Self Portrait 1835 oil on canvas Musée du Louvre |
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| John Opie Portrait of a Lady posing as Shakespeare's Cressida ca. 1800 oil on canvas Tate Britain |
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| Théodore Géricault Portrait of painter Eugène Delacroix ca. 1820 oil on canvas private collection |
Romantics
Johannes Brahms and
Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
"how far it went," their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone's eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
– Lisel Mueller (1996)