Possible Pairs

Willem De Kooning
Abstraction
1949-50
oil on cardboard
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Willem De Kooning
Red Man with Mustache
1971
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

James Ensor
Chinoiserie with Fans
1880
oil on canvas
Musée Fin-de-Siècle, Brussels

James Ensor
Still Life with Tulips and Roses
1882
oil on canvas
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Juan Gris
Still Life with Violin and Sheet Music
1914
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Juan Gris
The Checkerboard
1915
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond
Eruption of Stromboli Volcano, 30 August 1842
1842
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
private collection

Jean-Charles-Joseph Rémond
Cascade at Tivoli
ca. 1822-25
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Canaletto
Canale di Santa Chiara, Venice
ca. 1730-40
oil on canvas
Musée Cognacq-Jay, Paris

Canaletto
Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto, Venice
ca. 1722
oil on canvas
Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca' Rezzonico, Venice

John Constable
Cloud Study
1822
oil on paper
Courtauld Gallery, London

John Constable
Cloud Study
1822
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Tate Britain

Tom Roberts
Coming South
1886
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Tom Roberts
The Sculptor's Studio
1885
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

George Stubbs
Pumpkin with a Stable Lad
1774
oil on panel
Yale Center for British Art

George Stubbs
Lion and Lioness
1770
enamel on copper
Yale Center for British Art

Lioness Asleep

Content that now the bleeding bone be swept

Out of her reach, she lay upon her side.

In a blonde void sunk deep, she slept, she slept

Bland as a child, slept, breathing like a bride.

Color of noons that shimmer as they sing

Above the dunes, her sandy flanks heaved slow.

Between her paws curled inward, billowing

Waves of desert silence seemed to flow.

The crowd had gone, the bars were gone, the cage

Thinned into air, the sawdust and the fleas

Winnowed by sleep to nothing. After food,

Absence possessed her: bliss keener than rage,

If slumber's prisoner at a bound could seize

This ghostly freedom, lapping it like blood.

– Babette Deutsch (ca. 1940)

Painted Impressions of British Private Spaces (Interiors) - I

Arthur Devis
The Reverend Streynsham Master and his wife Margaret
1743-44
oil on canvas
Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, Lancashire

William Hogarth
Francis Matthew Schutz in his Bed
ca. 1755-60
oil on canvas
Norfolk Museums

David Wilkie
Reading the News
ca. 1820
oil on panel
Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

John Partridge
The Artist and his Family in their House at 21 Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London
ca. 1828-35
oil on canvas
Museum of London

James Digman Wingfield
Picture Gallery at Stafford House (now Lancaster House)
1848
oil on canvas
Government Art Collection, London

Edward Matthew Ward
John Forster in his Library
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Edward Matthew Ward
Hogarth's Studio in 1739
1863
oil on canvas
York City Art Gallery

James McNeill Whistler
Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks
1864
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Chinoiserie

My mother in her dress of red Viyella, teetering like a tiny idol
on three-inch lacquered spikes, chignon dressed with little gold-
throated bells that chirped more sweetly than the cricket,
held her small, perfect hands to the torrent pouring from the slot.
Money went like water through our fingers: was dammed
by budgets, released, then abruptly gone at the China Starr,
that grotto, festooned with red and vivid lanterns.
Dark as the inside of a limousine, that saloon was where
our lives, dulled by the copper barons, were cleansed,
where we bade good-bye to the limp and stutter
of bad goods, to the wince of the creaky rocker, to the vast
grandmother dying in its clutch, to the dirty, wrinkled ones
and tens pieced together to cover the week. Hello, we said,
to the beautiful dark starlit bar and the luxury therein:
the runcible spoons with their slippery cargo: the snarled silk
of tinned bean sprout, the wrinkled flame of the dried lily.
Hunched over our beakers of jasmine tea, we let the exotic
rinse over us – impractical and non-negotiable.

– Lynn Emanuel (1992)

John Callcott Horsley
A Pleasant Corner
1865
oil on canvas
Royal Academy of Arts, London

William David
Interior, Speke Hall
ca. 1854-70
oil on canvas
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Albert Letchford
Interior of Sir Richard Burton's Bedroom
ca. 1880
oil on panel
Orleans House Gallery, London

Henry Stacy Marks
A Treatise on Parrots
1885
oil on canvas
Sudley House, Liverpool

John Haynes-Williams
The Miniature
ca. 1885
oil on canvas
Darlington Library, County Durham

William Rothenstein
The Browning Readers
1900
oil on canvas
Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford, Yorkshire

James Dickson Innes
The Corner of a Room
1908
oil on canvas
University College London Art Museum