Monday, March 30, 2026

Convergences - II

Dennis Miller Bunker
In the Greenhouse
1888
oil on canvas
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Jean-François Debord
Retour de Belle Isle I
1986
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Jean-François Debord
Retour de Belle Isle II
1986
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Pau

Kristina Eldon
Biographical Landscapes No. 24 (Fox Talbot's Teapot)
2021
inkjet print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Kerstiaen de Keuninck
Mountainous Landscape with Waterfall
ca. 1600
oil on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Henri Le Sidaner
Garden at Hampton Court
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes

Isaak Levitan
Birch Grove
ca. 1885-90
oil on canvas
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

August Macke
Kandern IV
1914
watercolor on cardboard
Clemens-Sels Museum, Neuss, Germany

Henri Matisse
Interior with Eggplants
1911
tempera on canvas
Musée de Grenoble

Piet Mondrian
Color Scheme for Salon of Ida Bienert
1926
gouache on paper
Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden

Georgia O'Keeffe
Blue and Green Music
1921
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

William Trost Richards
Woodland Glade
1860
oil on canvas
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Roelant Savery
Rocky Landscape
ca. 1632
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

Hans-Christian Schink
Bach Ma (4A)
2005
C-print
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Ivan Shishkin
Edge of a Forest
ca. 1892-93
oil on canvas
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

Stanley Spencer
Redlands Road, Reading
1956
oil on canvas
High Museum of Art, Atlanta

Eutychides the lyric poet is dead. Fly, ye people who dwell under earth; Eutychides is coming with odes, and he ordered them to burn with him twelve lyres and twenty-five cases of music. Now indeed Charon has got hold of you. Where can one depart to in future, since Eutychides is established in Hades too? 

Simylus the lyre-player killed all his neighbours by playing the whole night, except only Origenes, whom Nature had made deaf, and therefore gave him longer life in the place of hearing.

A stone-deaf man went to law with another stone-deaf man, and the judge was much deafer than the pair of them. One of them contended that the other owed him five months' rent, and the other said that his opponent had ground corn at night. Says the judge, looking at them: "Why are you quarreling? She is your mother; you must both maintain her."

When Calpurnius the soldier saw the battle by the ships painted on a wall, as is the custom, the warrior lay stretched out pulseless and pale, calling out, "Quarter, ye Trojans dear to Ares." Then he enquired if he had been wounded, and with difficulty believed he was alive when he had agreed to pay ransom to the wall.

All say you are rich, but I say you are poor, for, Apollophanes, their use is the proof of riches. If you take your share of them, they are yours, but if you keep them for your heirs, they are already someone else's. 

Thou reckonest up thy money, poor wretch; but Time, just as it breeds interest, so, as it overtakes thee, gives birth to grey old age. And so having neither drunk wine, nor bound thy temples with flowers, having never known sweet ointment or a delicate little love, thou shalt die, leaving a great and wealthy testament, and of all thy riches carrying away with thee but one obol.*

– from Book XI (Convivial and Satirical Epigrams) of the Greek Anthology, translated and edited by W.R. Paton (1917)

*that which it was customary to put in the corpse's mouth