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| Michael Peter Ancher Christmas Day, 1900 painted 1902 oil on canvas Skagens Museum, Denmark |
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| Andreas Martin Andersen Torso of Dionysus at Fenway Court 1902 oil on canvas Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston |
-In-Sure-and-Certain-Hope-1902-photogravure-Fralin-Museum-of-Art-Charlottesville-Virginia.jpg) |
| Frederick H. Evans York Minster: In Sure and Certain Hope 1902 photogravure Fralin Museum of Art, Charlottesville, Virginia |
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| Eugène Atget Bassin de Neptune, Versailles 1902 albumen print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Eugène Atget Bosquet de l'Arc de Triomphe, Versailles 1903 albumen print Art Institute of Chicago |
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| Thomas Eakins Portrait of Mrs Mary Hallock Greenewalt 1903 oil on canvas Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Robert Henri Barnacles on Rocks 1903 oil on panel Portland Museum of Art, Maine |
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| Max Kurzweil The Cushion 1903 color woodblock print (trial proof) Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Max Kurzweil The Cushion 1903 color woodblock print Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna |
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| Alexandre Lunois Le Magazin de Nouveautés 1903 lithograph Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts |
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| Henri Matisse Studio under the Eaves 1903 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
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| Koloman Moser Frommes Kalender, Vienna 1903 lithograph (poster) Leopold Museum, Vienna |
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| Pablo Picasso Young Woman holding a Cigarette 1903 oil on canvas Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia |
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| John Sloan The Burglars 1903 etching (magazine illustration) Wichita Art Museum, Kansas |
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| Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida On the Beach of the Santa Clara Sanitorium 1903 oil on canvas Museo de Bellas Artes Gravina en Alicante |
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| Friedrich Viktor Spitzer Woman from Kattwyk 1903 photogravure Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin |
from The Rock
II
The Poem as Icon
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,
And if we are the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.
The fiction of the leaves is the icon
Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness,
And the icon is the man. The pearled chaplet of spring,
The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood,
Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock.
These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man.
These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves,
In the predicate that there is nothing else.
They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change.
They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock,
They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout,
New senses in the engenderings of sense,
The desire to be at the end of distances,
The body quickened and the mind in root.
They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love.
They bear their fruit so that the year is known,
As if its understanding was brown skin,
The honey in its pulp, the final found,
The plenty of the year and of the world.
In this plenty, the poem makes meanings of the rock,
Of such mixed motion and such imagery
That its barrenness becomes a thousand things
And so exists no more. This the cure
Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves.
His words are both the icon and the man.
– Wallace Stevens (1954)