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| Édouard Vuillard The Green Interior 1891 oil on cardboard, mounted on panel Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Anthony Green My Mother Alone in Her Dining Room 1975-76 oil on board Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich |
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| Frits Guldbrandsen A Student's Room ca. 1838 oil on paper, mounted on panel Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Robert Hope The Green Door ca. 1895 oil on canvas Stewartry Museum, Kirkcudbright, Scotland |
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| John Frederick Peto The Poor Man's Store 1885 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Marcel Maeyer Fair Tent II 1976 acrylic on canvas Ulster Museum, Belfast |
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| Alfred Munnings Still Life ca. 1897 oil on canvas Norfolk Museums |
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| Paolo Farinati Janus ca. 1590 ceiling fresco Sala Verde, Villa Nichesola Conforti, Ponton di Sant'Ambrogio di Valpolicella |
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| Otto van Veen Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma ca. 1585 oil on copper Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Vincent van Gogh Self Portrait (dedicated to Paul Gauguin) 1888 oil on canvas Harvard Art Museums |
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| Riduan Tomkins Jacky ca. 2005 oil on canvas Southampton City Art Gallery |
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| Walter Sickert Variation on Peggy 1934-35 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Malcolm Gwyon Portrait of Dafydd Iwan yn y Glaw 2008 acrylic on canvas National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth |
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| David Willetts Trees and Sun 1976 oil on board Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art |
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| Ignacio Zuloaga Irene ca. 1910 oil on canvas Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome |
The Marché aux Puces and the Jardin des Plantes
The sight of beauty simply makes us sick:
There are too many hours in the day,
Too many wicked faces built like flowers
And far too many bargains for a song.
Jade and paste, cashmere and ormolu –
Who said that all the arts aspire to music?
It's obvious, for time is obvious,
That all that art aspires to is junk.
Blackmailed by these mathoms of the past,
One is indebted for another perspective
To quaint giraffes and quainter wallabies,
The nearly human and the faintly monstrous,
The outrageously contemporary joke.
Trespassing on a no man's territory,
Unlike the moralist one is at a loss
Where to be human is not to be at home.
In a zoo, you see, one can acquire nothing:
Zebras aren't wishes. Nor is the flea market
Exactly the place for those who know what they want.
Like far out stations on the Metro (which they are)
Somewhere, in heaven perhaps, they correspond,
In the heaven of open arms and unpaid bills,
Where beer is drunk on the lawn all afternoon
And every night we bid, and make, a slam.
– Daryl Hine (1968)