Thursday, February 3, 2022

Nineteenth-Century French Taste (Images)

William Adolphe Bouguereau
Hay Maker
1869
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

William Adolphe Bouguereau
Youth and Love
1877
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Honoré Daumier
Troubadour
ca. 1868-73
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Edgar Degas
The Bath
ca. 1895
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

Henri Fantin-Latour
Still Life - Corner of a Table
1873
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Henri Fantin-Latour
Un Atelier aux Batignolles
1870
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Valpinçon Bather
1808
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Valpinçon Bather (detail)
1808
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
La Grande Odalisque
1814
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Édouard Manet
Portrait of Émile Zola
1868
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Bathing Nymphs and Child
ca. 1855-60
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Antoine-Jean Gros
Générale-Conte François Fournier-Sarlovèze
before 1812
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Edgar Degas
After the Bath
ca. 1890-95
pastel
National Gallery, London

Edgar Degas
After the Bath
ca. 1886
pastel
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome

Edgar Degas
After the Bath
ca. 1885-90
pastel
Musée du Louvre

An Entertainment for W.S.Graham for Him Having Reached Sixty-Five

What are you going to do
With what is left of yourself
Now among the rustling
Of your maybe best years?
This is not an auto-elegy
With me pouring my heart
Out into where you
Differently stand or sit
On the Epidaurus steps.
What shall I say to myself
Having put myself down 
On to a public page?

Where am I going now?
And where are you going 
Tricked into reading
Words of my later life?
Let me pretend you are
Roughly of my age.
Are you a boy or a girl?
And what has happened to you?

Look at the chirping various
leaves of Mr Graham's
Spanking summer. Where are
You at? I know my face
Has changed. My hair has blanched
Into a wrong disguise
Sitting on top of my head.

Beside each other perched
On the Epidaurus steps.
Where am I going to go?
Shall I rise to follow
The thin sound of the goats
Tinkling their bells?

– W.S. Graham (1983)

The poet died in 1986, three years after the occasion of this Entertainment