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| Georges Seurat Haymakers at Montfermeil 1882 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Édouard Vuillard Child wearing a Red Scarf 1891 oil on cardboard National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Vilhelm Hammershøi Interior 1899 oil on canvas Tate Gallery, London |
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| Georg Achen Interior 1901 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| Gari Melchers Writing ca. 1905-1909 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Thomas Eakins William Rush carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River c1908 oil on canvas Brooklyn Museum |
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| George Washington Lambert The Pond 1908 oil on canvas Leeds Art Gallery, Yorkshire |
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| Algernon Talmage The Mackerel Shawl 1910 oil on canvas Bristol Museum and Art Gallery |
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| Spencer Gore Balcony at the Alhambra 1911-12 oil on canvas York City Art Gallery |
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| Pierre Bonnard La Toilette ca. 1914-21 oil on canvas Musée d'Orsay, Paris |
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| John Lavery Daylight Raid from My Studio Window 7 July 1917 oil on canvas Ulster Museum, Belfast |
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| Giorgio Morandi Still Life 1918 oil on canvas Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan |
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| Malcolm Drummond Chelsea Public Library 1920 oil on canvas Burton Gallery, University of Leeds |
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| Max Ernst Untitled Dada ca. 1922-23 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| M. Gluck Léonide Massine waiting for his cue to go on stage in On with the Dance 1925 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London |
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| Katherine Hartnell Life Drawing Class 1926 oil on canvas University College London Art Museum |
from The New Intelligence
After knowledge extinguished the last of the beautiful
fires our worship had failed to prolong, we walked
back home through pedestrian daylight, to a residence
humbler than the one left behind. A door without mystery,
a room without theme. For the hour that we spend
complacent at the window overlooking the garden,
we observe an arrangement in rust and gray-green,
a vagueness at the center whose slow, persistent
movements some sentence might explain if we had time
or strength for sentences. To admit that what falls
falls solitarily, lost in the permanent dusk of the particular.
That the mind that fear and disenchantment fatten
comes to boss the world around it, morbid as the damp-
fingered guest who rearranges the cheeses the minute the host
turns to fix her a cocktail. A disease of the will, the way
false birch branches arch and interlace from which
hands dangle last leaf-parchments and a very large array
of primitive bird-shapes. Their pastel feathers shake
in the aftermath of the nothing we will ever be content
to leave the way we found it.
– Timothy Donnelly (2010)