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| Minna Citron She Earns an Honest Living 1934 oil on panel Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Hans Bellmer La Poupée ca. 1934 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| James Abbe Dr Goebbels ca. 1933 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Ilya Bolotowsky Cobalt Green 1939 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Muirhead Bone Church Interior ca. 1930 drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Ilse Bing Balcony View, Paris 1931 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Henri Clemens Kabyle Village ca. 1930 oil on canvas Musée d'Art et d'Histoire de Narbonne |
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| Joseph Cornell Défense d’Afficher 1939 assemblage (wood, glass, printed paper, found objects) National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Sergey Chekhonin Portrait of a Girl ca. 1932 watercolor on paper Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Henri Cartier-Bresson Hyde Park, London 1938 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Stella Bowen Embankment Gardens ca. 1938 oil on board Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide |
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| Brassaï At Suzy's ca. 1932-33 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Rudy Burckhardt Times Square ca. 1938 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Leonora Carrington Portrait of Max Ernst ca. 1939 oil on canvas Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh |
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| Milton Bellin Two Women ca. 1935 oil on canvas Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York |
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| Berenice Abbott New York ca. 1932 gelatin silver print Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Peter Blume Light of the World 1932 oil on board Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
Many have studied to exasperate the ways of death, but few hours have been spent to soften the last necessity. That the smoothest way unto the grave is made by Bleeding, as common opinion presumeth, the experiment in Lucan and Seneca will make us doubt, under which the noble Stoick so deeply laboured that he was fayne to retire from the sight of his wife to conceal the affliction thereof: and was not ashamed to implore the merciful hand of his physician to shorten his misery therein. Nor will they readily be of that belief who behold the sick and fainting Languors which accompany the effusion of blood when it proceedeth unto death.
Ovid, the old Heroes, and the Stoicks who were so afrayd of drowning, as dreading thereby the extinction of their Soules, which they conceived to be fire, stood surely in fear of an easier way of death wherein the water entering the possessions of air makes a temperate suffocation, and kills as it were without a fever.
Surely many who have had the spirit to destroy themselves have not been ingenious in the contrivance. Twas a dull way practised by Themistocles to overwhelm himself with Bull's blood, who being an Athenian might have held an easier Theorie of death from the authentick and state potion of his country, from which Socrates seemed not to suffer more than from the fitt of an Ague. Cato is much to be pitied who mangled himself with poyniards; and Hannibal seems more subtle, who carved his deliverie, not in the poynt but the pummel of his sword (wherein he is said to have carried a something that might upon a straight despatch and deliver him from all misfortunes).
The Aegyptians were merciful contrivers, who destroyed their malefactors by Aspes, charming their senses unto an irrecoverable sleep, and killing as it were with Hermes his rod. The Turkish Emperour odious for other crueltie was herein a remarkable master of mercy, killing his favourite in his sleepe and sending him from the shade into the howse of darknesse. He that had been thus destroyed, would hardly have bled at the presence of his destroyer, where men are already dead by metaphor, and pass but from one sleep unto another, wanting herein the eminent part of severitie to be made to feel themselves die, and escaping the sharpest attendant of death, the lively apprehension thereof.
– Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)