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| Rik Wouters Head of artist Edgard Tytgat 1910 bronze Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam |
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| Keith Vaughan The Woodman 1949 lithograph Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand |
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| Southworth & Hawes The Letter ca. 1850 daguerreotype National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Helene Schjerfbeck Costume Picture (Girl with Orange - The Baker's Daughter) 1908-1909 oil on canvas Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki |
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| Roman Empire Bust of Tyche (the Barberini Tyche) 1st century AD (marble head) 17th century (alabaster and marble body) Musée d'Art Classique de Mougins |
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| Alphonse Legros Half-Length Study of Model ca. 1900 drawing National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Samuel van Hoogstraten Christ crowned with Thorns 1657 oil on canvas Alte Pinakothek, Munich |
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| Duncan Grant Seated Woman - Ka Cox ca. 1912 oil on panel Courtauld Gallery, London |
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| François-Xavier Fabre Portrait of Marquis Luigi Grimaldi della Pietra 1804 oil on canvas Musée Fabre, Montpellier |
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| Jacques-Louis David Study for the Figure of Plato in The Death of Socrates ca. 1787 drawing Musée Magnin, Dijon |
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| Eugène Carrière Mélancolie 1888 oil on canvas Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai |
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| William Adolphe Bouguereau Veiled Model seated on the Ground 1884 oil on canvas Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Arnold Böcklin Self Portrait 1873 oil on canvas Hamburger Kunsthalle |
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| Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz Landscape painter Georg Heinrich Crola in his Studio 1832 oil on canvas Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
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| Giambattista Zelotti Reclining Figure ca. 1560 drawing Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum Basel |
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| Rogier van der Weyden Portrait of Philippe de Croy as Praying Donor 1460 oil on panel Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
This night-breathing deceives, it is so calm.
The headland glitters with beached faces, lunar stares,
a tidal moon-haul of wrecks and drownings.
Their gazes are blank and lasting,
outfacing constellations even, crystalline.
My mother feared the wash and plunge,
that huge pull from the loosening shore.
Night after night she surfaced there again
in the small hours, the shallows, panting:
in the small hours, the shallows, panting:
her near death refreshed by nightmare.
A child, I shut my eyes like oysters
on the green light, weird particles migrating upwards
A child, I shut my eyes like oysters
on the green light, weird particles migrating upwards
from the bed, from whose choked throat
arose the swallow-sound I'd closed my ears on.
Now as I watch her sleeping and submerged
I see them, those obsessive dead –
their watery features sea-blurred, merged, evasive.
I hold my breath above her sinking head,
I hold my breath above her sinking head,
dreading their opaque past and fossil histories,
inky and indistinct as night water.
inky and indistinct as night water.
– Caitríona O'Reilly, The Nowhere Birds (2001)