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| Anthony van Dyck Head Study ca. 1618-19 oil on paper Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Jan Cossiers Study of Young Woman before 1671 drawing British Museum |
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| Corneille van Clève La Loire et le Loiret (detail) 1707 marble Musée du Louvre |
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| Dante Gabriel Rossetti Elizabeth Siddal 1855 drawing Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Camille Pissarro Jeanne Rachel Pissarro (Minette) ca. 1862 watercolor on paper Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Julia Margaret Cameron May Prinsep (Coleridge's Christabel) 1865 albumen silver print from glass negative Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Mosé Bianchi Seclusion 1890 oil on canvas Villa Reale, Milan |
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| Marie Spartali Stillman Cloister Lilies 1891 watercolor and gouache on paper Ashmolean Museum, Oxford |
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| Clarence H. White Clarence H. White and Jean Reynolds ca. 1906 cyanotype Princeton University Art Museum |
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| Alfred Stieglitz Portrait of a Woman 1907 autochrome National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Raphael Soyer Waiting for the Audition ca. 1950 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Richard Pousette-Dart Mark Rothko ca. 1950 gelatin silver print Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Francis Bacon Study for a Portrait IV (after Life Mask of William Blake) 1956 oil on canvas Museum of Modern Art, New York |
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| Richard Diebenkorn Woman in a Window 1957 oil on canvas Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York |
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| Michelangelo Pistoletto Features of People 1962 oil on paper, mounted on steel San Francisco Museum of Modern Art |
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| Marion Brenner Galia 1998 gelatin silver print San Francisco Museum of Modern Art |
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| William T. Wiley Slightly Ahead of the Seasons 2001 lithograph Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC |
Every art is based upon a selection, and the art of Racine selected the things of the spirit for the material of its work. The things of sense – physical objects and details, and all the necessary but insignificant facts that go to make up the machinery of existence – these must be kept out of the picture at all hazards. . . . But, as a rule, Racine's characters speak out most clearly when they are most moved, so that their words, at the height of passion, have an intensity of directness unknown in actual life. . . . Very different is the Shakespearean method. There, as passion rises, expression becomes more and more poetical and vague. Image flows into image, thought into thought, until at last the state of mind is revealed, inform and molten, driving darkly through a vast storm of words. Such revelations, no doubt, come closer to reality than the poignant epigrams of Racine. In life, men's minds are not sharpened, they are diffused, by emotion; and the utterance which best represents them is fluctuating and agglomerated rather than compact and defined. But Racine's aim was less to reflect the actual current of the human spirit than to seize upon its inmost being and to give expression to that.
– Lytton Strachey on Racine (1908)