Sunday, August 17, 2025

Paradigms (Western)

John Lyman
Joséphine
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec


Eugene Edward Speicher
Lucia
1931
oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Eileen Robey
Portrait of writer Mollie Panter-Downes
ca. 1935
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

George Hurrell
Ann Southern
1935
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Malcolm Osborne
Kathleen Gill
1935
drypoint
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Charles Pollock
Portrait of Elizabeth Pollock
1937
casein on board
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Jan Sluijters
Young Woman
ca. 1938
oil on canvas
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

George Hoyningen-Huene
Portrait of fashion editor Carmel Snow
1939
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

Nathan Lerner
Tanya, New York
1943
gelatin silver print
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Robert Hyndman
Portrait of Joan Hyndman
1943
oil on canvas
Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario

Willem De Kooning
Queen of Hearts
1943-46
oil paint and charcoal on board
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

George Tooker
Subway Rider
1944
tempera on paper
Archives of American Art, Washington DC

Walter Thomas Monnington
Study of a Woman
before 1945
drawing
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Walker Evans
Trini Barnes
ca. 1945
gelatin silver print
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Douglas Gorsline
Brooklyn Local
1945
engraving
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Guy Pène Du Bois
Flora Macculloch Miller
1947
oil on linen
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Carl Van Vechten
Marian Anderson, operatic contralto
1947
gelatin silver print
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

ASSONANCE – An imperfect form of rhyme which counts only the vowel sound of the chief rhyming syllable.  This principle was the original one of rhyme in French, and has always held a considerable place in Spanish.  But in English it has never established itself in competent literary poetry; though it is frequent in the lower kind of folk-song, and though attempts to naturalise it – in forms even further degraded – were made by Mrs. Browning, and have been suggested since.  As an instrument of vowel-music, very delicately and judiciously used at other parts of the line than the end, it has its possibilities, but must always be an offensive substitute in rhyming verse, and an almost equally offensive intruder in blank.

– George Saintsbury, from Historical Manual of English Prosody (1910)