Nymphenburg - Delacroix - Lairesse - Degas

Nymphenburg Manufactory (Munich)
Ottavio
(Commedia dell'Arte figure)
ca. 1760
porcelain
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Nymphenburg Manufactory (Munich)
Lucinda
(Commedia dell'Arte figure)
ca. 1765-70
porcelain
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Nymphenburg Manufactory (Munich)
Angel
ca. 1755
porcelain
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Nymphenburg Manufactory (Munich)
Angel
ca. 1755
porcelain
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Eugène Delacroix
Women of Algiers
1834
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Eugène Delacroix
Doge Francesco Foscari
1847
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Eugène Delacroix
Figure of Satyr and other studies
before 1863
drawing
Menil Collection, Houston

Eugène Delacroix
Study of Seated Model
before 1863
drawing
Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Gérard de Lairesse
Portrait of art collector Philips de Flines
ca. 1675
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Gérard de Lairesse
Portrait of art collector Philips de Flines
1682
oil on canvas
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Gérard de Lairesse
Wedding Night of Alexander the Great and Roxana
1664
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Gérard de Lairesse
Apollo and the Muses receiving Athena on Mount Helicon
ca. 1700
oil on canvas
National Gallery, Athens

Edgar Degas
Bathers
ca. 1890-95
pastel and charcoal on paper
Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia

Edgar Degas
Bathers
ca. 1890-95
pastel and charcoal on paper
Dallas Museum of Art

Edgar Degas
Dancers on Stage
1883
pastel on paper
Dallas Museum of Art

Edgar Degas
Dancers
ca. 1891
pastel on paper
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

from Part Four of The Age of Anxiety

     

As they drove through the half-lit almost empty streets, the effect of their dream had not yet worn off but persisted as a mutual mood of discouragement. Whether they thought of Nature, of her unending stream of irrelevant events without composition or center, her reckless waste of value, her alternate looks of idiotic inertia and insane ferocity, or whether they thought of Man, of the torpor of his spirit, the indigent dryness of his soul, his bottomless credulity, his perverse preference for the meretricious or the insipid – it seemed impossible to them that either could have survived so long had not some semi-divine stranger with superhuman powers, some Gilgamesh or Napoleon, some Solon or Sherlock Holmes, appeared from time to time to rescue both, for a brief bright instant, from their egregious destructive blunders. And for such a great one who, long or lately, has always died or disappeared, they now lamented thus.

          Sob, heavy world,
          Sob as you spin
     Mantled in mist, remote from the happy:
     The washerwomen have wailed all night,
     The disconsolate clocks are crying together,
          And the bells toll and toll
     For tall Agrippa who touched the sky:

          Shut is that shining eye
     Which enlightened the lampless and lifted up
     The flat and foundering, reformed the weeds
     Into civil cereals and sobered the bulls;
          Away the cylinder seal,
     The didactic digit and dreaded voice
     Which imposed peace on the pullulating
     Primordial mess. Mourn for him now,
          Our lost dad,
          Our colossal father.

– W.H. Auden (1944-46)