Saturday, July 1, 2023

Staring Hard at Certain Things

Themistocles von Eckenbrecher
Corner of a Meadow with Fountaingrass
ca. 1870
watercolor
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

William Eggleston
Memphis
ca. 1969
dye-transfer print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Pieter van Anraedt
Still Life
1658
oil on canvas
Mauritshuis, The Hague

Gianlorenzo Bernini
Chair of St Peter
1658
terracotta
(modello for monument in St Peter's Basilica)
Detroit Institute of Arts

John Yenn
Design for Garden Obelisk
ca. 1795
drawing, with watercolor
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Denton Welch
Cow at Oxenhouth House
(Oxon Hoath Manor, Kent)
ca. 1940
drawing, with watercolor
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Agnes Mary Webster
Drapery Study
ca. 1890
drawing
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Haydn Reynolds Mackey
Portrait of the artist's wife, Florence
1942
drawing
Royal Academy of Arts, London

George Elgar Hicks
Gnarled Tree Trunk
ca. 1880
oil on paper
Ulster Museum, Belfast

Philip Reinagle
Group of Conch Shells
ca. 1790
watercolor
Royal Academy of Arts, London

James Ensor
Shells
1896
oil on canvas
Musée Fin de Siècle, Brussels

Jacobus Schijnvoet
Ram's Skull
before 1733
drawing
(print study)
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Edmund Thomas Parris
Head of an Old Man
ca. 1844
drawing
Royal Academy of Arts, London

Walt Kuhn
Pink Roses in Blue Vase
1938
oil on canvas
private collection

Alexander Kanoldt
Table in the Studio
1924
oil on canvas
Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany

John Constable
Study of Sky and Trees
ca. 1821
oil on paper
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Dawn at St. Patrick's 

There is an old
statue in the courtyard
that weeps, like Niobe, its sorrow in stone.
The griefs of the ages she has made her own.
Her eyes are rain-washed but not hard,
her body is covered in mould,
the garden overgrown.

One by one
the first lights come on,
those that haven't been on all night.
Christmas, the harshly festive, has come and gone.
No snow, but the rain pours down
in the first hour before dawn,
before daylight.

Swift's home
for 'fools and mad' has become
the administrative block. Much there
has remained unchanged for many a long year –
stairs, chairs, Georgian windows shafting light and dust,
of the satirist;

but the real
hospital is a cheerful
modern extension at the back
hung with restful reproductions of Dufy, Klee and Braque.
Television, Russian fiction, snooker with the staff,
a snifter of Lucozade, a paragraph
of Newsweek or the Daily Mail

are my daily routine
during the festive season.
They don't lock the razors here 
as in Bowditch Hall. We have remained upright –
though, to be frank, the Christmas dinner scene,
with grown men in their festive gear,
was a sobering sight.

I watch the last
planes of the year go past,
silently climbing a cloud-lit sky.
Earth-bound, soon I'll be taking a train to Cork
and trying to get back to work
at my sea-lit, fort-view desk
in the turf-smoky dusk.

Meanwhile,
next door, a visiting priest
intones to a faithful dormitory.
I sit on my Protestant bed, a make-believe existentialist,
and stare at the clouds of unknowing. We style,
as best we may, our private destiny;
or so it seems to me

as I chew my thumb
and try to figure out
what brought me to my present state –
an 'educated man,' a man of consequence, no bum
but one who has hardly grasped what life is about,
if anything. My children, far away, 
don't know where I am today,

in a Dublin asylum
with a paper whistle and a mince pie,
my bits and pieces making a home from home.
I pray to the rain-clouds that they never come
where their lost father lies; that their mother thrives; and that I
may measure up to them
before I die. 

Soon a new year
will be here demanding, as before,
modest proposals, resolute resolutions, a new leaf,
new leaves. This is the story of my life,
the story of all lives everywhere,
mad fools whatever we are,
in here or out there.

Light and sane
I shall walk down to the train,
into the world whose sanity we know,
like Swift to be a fiction and show.
The clouds part, the rain ceases, the sun
casts now upon everyone
its ancient shadow. 

– Derek Mahon (1991)