Frame Choices - Louvre

Giovanni Bellini
Virgin and Child with St Jerome and St Sebastian
ca. 1475-1500
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Nicolas Bertin
Phaeton driving the Chariot of the Sun
ca. 1715-20
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Carolus-Duran
Triumph of Marie de' Medici
1878
oil on canvas, mounted to ceiling
Musée du Louvre

workshop of Corneille de Lyon
Charles de Cossé, comte de Brissac
ca. 1550
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
Zingara au tambour de basque
before 1875
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jean Cousin the Elder
Eva prima Pandora
ca. 1550-60
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Edgar Degas
La Sortie du Bain
ca. 1895
pastel on paper
Musée du Louvre

Hippolyte Flandrin
Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer
1837
oil on canvas
(painted in Rome)
Musée du Louvre

Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Rinaldo in Armida's Garden
(scene from Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata)
ca. 1760-65
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Jan Gossaert
Carondelet Diptych
(Jean Carondelet, left - Virgin and Child, right)
1517
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Filippino Lippi
Scenes from the story of Esther
ca. 1485
oil on panel
(originally part of a marriage coffer)
Musée du Louvre

Marco Palmezzano
Dead Christ supported by Cherubs
1510
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Pontormo (Jacopo Carrucci)
Virgin and Child with St Anne and four additional Saints
ca. 1529
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Peter Paul Rubens
Ixion, King of the Lapiths deceived by Juno
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Johannes Vermeer
The Lacemaker
1669-70
oil on canvas, mounted on panel
Musée du Louvre

Horace Vernet
Portrait of the artist's daughter Louise
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Cornelis de Vos
Portrait of a Man at age 45
1632
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

    There was a third element at the origin of this little story.  The story had a model, a poem I have read for decades now, an untitled folk poem translated by the poet Anselm Hollo from the Cheremis language.  I had read it repeatedly because – in the same sense as Ashbery's experience with the painting by Parmigianino – this poem had "bothered" me for a long time.  It puzzled me because it was a piece of writing that had continued to have the same surprising impact on me though I knew it so well.  How did it do that?  It is only three lines long.

            I shouldn't have started these red wool 

                    mittens.

            they're done now,

            but my life is over.

What a small poem.  But as with other short and simple pieces of writing, and long and complex ones too, there is the surface sense of it and then more beneath the surface – in this case, the fact that whatever our projects may be, life comes to an end, we come to an end.  Or that our projects consume our life, and then we die.  Or that we spend our life on activities that may turn out to have used up our life pointlessly. 

– Lydia Davis, from Into the Weeds (Yale University Press, 2025)