Glazed

Christiaan Johannes Lanooy
Three Vessels
1920
glazed earthenware
Museum de Fundatie, Zwolle, Netherlands

Anonymous German Potter
Tile with Crucifixion Scene
ca. 1560-1600
lead-glazed earthenware stove tile
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Florentine Imitator of Giovanni della Robbia
Judith and Holofernes
ca. 1800-1850
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Giovanni della Robbia
Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St Jerome
ca. 1525
glazed terracotta
Bode Museum, Berlin

Staffordshire Potteries
Dessert Dish
ca. 1755-65
lead-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Potter working in Delft
Birdcage
ca. 1700-1730
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Staffordshire Potteries
Medici Venus
ca. 1815-20
lead-glazed earthenware figurine
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger
Portrait of Louis XV
ca. 1745
lead-glazed earthenware (faience)
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Posset Pot
1699
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Bow Porcelain Manufactory (London)
Youth as Personification of Autumn
ca. 1765-70
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Patanazzi Family (Urbino)
Inkstand with River God
ca. 1575-1605
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

attributed to Domenico da Venezia
Pharmacy Jar
ca. 1560-70
maiolica
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Brislington Pottery (near Bristol)
Wash-Basin as Scallop-Shell
1683
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous British Potter
Game Board
1723
tin-glazed earthenware
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Anonymous Japanese Potter
Hare
18th century
porcelain
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

When old Fuseli made the famous remark that Constable's landscapes made him call for his greatcoat and umbrella, he showed he understood the kind of truth the master was aiming at.  Not the dry but the humid, not the linear but the atmospheric, not the lasting but the transient.  As Constable himself said in the preface to his published landscapes, to give "one brief moment caught from fleeting time a lasting and sober existence."  Lasting and sober.  We do well to remember these beautiful honest words before we rashly fall in with the view that Constable's finished paintings are less interesting, less artistic than his sketches.

The source of this preference is clear.  We prefer suggestions to representations, we have adjusted our expectations to enjoy the very act of guessing, of projecting.  And we rationalize this preference by fancying that the sketch must be nearer to what the artist saw and to what he felt than the finished work.  I do not deny that artists are human and sometimes spoil their works.  But I consider it a heresy to think that any painting as such records a sense impression or a feeling.  All human communication is through symbols, through the medium of a language, and the more articulate that language the greater the chance for the message to get through.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Solids

Gregorio di Lorenzo
(Master of the Marble Madonnas)
Portrait of a Young Woman
ca. 1460-70
stucco
Bode Museum, Berlin

Andrea della Robbia
St Ambrose
ca. 1490
glazed terracotta
Bode Museum, Berlin

Anonymous Italian Artist
Dish with Death of Nadab and Abihu
16th century
tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous French Artist after Odoardo Fialetti
Venus combing Cupid's Hair
ca. 1650
tin-glazed earthenware (faience)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacob Cressant
Portrait of silk merchant David van Mollem
1740
terracotta
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Roman Anton Boos
Hercules and the Erymanthean Boar
ca. 1779
terracotta
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Joseph-Charles Marin
Bacchante carrying Child
ca. 1780-95
terracotta
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Anonymous Italian Artist
Vase with Cover
18th century
tin-glazed earthenware (maiolica)
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Staffordshire Potteries
Cachepot with Triton (detail)
19th century
glazed earthenware
Newport Mansions Preservation Society, Rhode Island

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
Portrait of a Woman
ca. 1870-75
terracotta
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Paul Gauguin
Vase
ca. 1887-88
painted stoneware
Art Institute of Chicago

Charles Francis Annesley Voysey
Panel of Six Tiles
ca. 1900
glazed earthenware
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Rookwood Pottery (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Tile
ca. 1905
glazed earthenware
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Betty Woodman
Vase
ca. 1989-90
glazed and painted earthenware
Phoenix Art Museum

Virgil Ortiz
St Bartholomew
2014
painted terracotta
Denver Art Museum

Koen Taselaar
Le monde entier est un cactus (Totem #1)
2016
partly-glazed earthenware and wood
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

Look not in my eyes, for fear

    They mirror true the sight I see,

And there you find your face too clear

    And love it and be lost like me.

One the long nights through must lie

    Spent in star-defeated sighs,

But why should you as well as I

    Perish? gaze not in my eyes. 

– A.E. Housman (1896)

Faienceries de Longwy - Fabre - Falciatore - Evans

Faienceries de Longwy (Alsace-Lorraine)
Covered Box
ca. 1925
glazed earthenware
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Faienceries de Longwy (Alsace-Lorraine)
Covered Box
ca. 1925
glazed earthenware
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Faienceries de Longwy (Alsace-Lorraine)
Jardinière
ca. 1873-80
glazed earthenware
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Faienceries de Longwy (Alsace-Lorraine)
Vase
ca. 1920-25
glazed earthenware
Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto

François-Xavier Fabre
Portrait of writer Louis-François Bertin
1803
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

François-Xavier Fabre
Portrait of Caroline Scitivaux
ca. 1808-1814
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

François-Xavier Fabre
Compositional Study for The Judgment of Solomon
ca. 1800
drawing
British Museum

François-Xavier Fabre
Marius at Minturnae
ca. 1796-1800
etching and aquatint
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Filippo Falciatore
Hercules and Lichas
before 1768
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Filippo Falciatore
An Assault by Brigands
ca. 1735-40
oil on canvas
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Filippo Falciatore
An Assault by Pirates
ca. 1735-40
oil on canvas
Staatsgalerie Stuttgart

Filippo Falciatore
Concert in a Garden
1750
oil on canvas
Detroit Institute of Arts

Terry Evans
Roadless Area near Yaak Valley, Montana
1999
C-print
Art Institute of Chicago

Terry Evans
Oak Street Beach, Chicago
2004
inkjet print
Art Institute of Chicago

Terry Evans
Field Museum, Brown Creeper Nest, 1914
2001
inkjet print
Art Institute of Chicago

Terry Evans
Field Museum, Trumpeter Swan, North Dakota, 1891
2001
inkjet print
Art Institute of Chicago

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted. 

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch's cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards. 

Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

                Now, far from women's arms

and memory of women, in our father's hut

we sleep, are never hungry. 

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln –

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness. Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

– Louise Glück (1975)

Reverent European Renderings of Antiquities

Pseudo Pacchia
Antique Sculpture Group -
Romulus and Remus with She-Wolf
ca. 1530
drawing
British Museum

Baldassare Peruzzi
Study after the Antique
ca. 1533
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

workshop of Jacopo Tintoretto
Studies of Antique Sculpture
ca. 1570
drawing
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Willem Panneels
The Belvedere Antinoüs
ca. 1628-30
drawing
Statens Museum for Kunst,
Copenhagen

Anonymous Italian Artist
Study of Antique Torso
ca. 1650
drawing
National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

Luis Paret y Alcázar
Roman Military Trophies
ca. 1770
drawing
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Anonymous Italian Artist after Polidoro da Caravaggio
Roman Military Trophies
ca. 1775-1800
drawing
Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Felice Giani
Ancient Sacrifice and Head of Satyr
ca. 1790
drawing
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Theodor Kittelsen
Classical Torso
ca. 1875
drawing
National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

Thorolf Holmboe
Classical Torso
1890
drawing
National Gallery of Norway, Oslo

Jerry Uelsmann
Untitled
1964
gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery

John Skippe
Classical Figure holding Salver aloft
ca. 1781-83
chiaroscuro woodcut
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Nicolas Beatrizet
Antique Sculpture of Oceanus
1560
engraving
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Clodion
Minerva
1766
terracotta
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous Artist
Crouching Venus
ca. 1697
lead cast of antique sculpture
National Trust, Knole, Sevenoaks, Kent

Jacob van der Kool
The Spinario
(pastiche of antique sculpture)
ca. 1725-40
faience
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Logic

A trailed and lagging grass, a pin-point island
Drags the clear current's face it leans across
In ripple-wrinkles. At a touch

It has ravelled the imaged sky till it could be

A perplexity of metal, spun

Round a vortex, the sun flung off it

Veining the eye like a migraine – it could

Scarcely be sky. The stones do more, until we say

We see there meshes of water, liquid

Nets handed down over them, a clear

Cross-hatching in the dance of wrinkles that

Re-patterns wherever it strikes.

So much for stones. They seem to have their way.

But the sway is the water's: it cannot be held

Though moulded and humped by the surfaces

It races over, though a depth can still

And a blade's touch render it illegible. 

Its strength is here: it must

Account for its opposite and yet remain

Itself, of its own power get there. 

Water is like logic, for it flows

Meeting resistance arguing as it goes:

And it arrives, having found not the quickest

Way, but the way round, the channel which

Entering, it may come to a level in,

Which must admit, in certain and crowding fusion,

The irrefutable strength which follows it. 

– Charles Tomlinson (1967)