Acrylics

Paul Baylock
Universal I
2013
acrylic on panel
New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut

Ilya Bolotowsky
Study for Main Entrance Lobby Mural
1975
acrylic on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Jonathan Borofsky
Male Aggression - Now Playing Everywhere
1981-83
acrylic on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Michel Boulanger
Refuge près de Chute aux Damnés
1994
acrylic on canvas
Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec

Paul-Édouard Bourque
Wozzeck IV
1997
acrylic on paper
Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick

Dale Chisman
Wire and Stone Heads
1974
acrylic on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Dan Christensen
Myrtle Beach
ca. 1970
acrylic on canvas
Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina

Chris Cran
Beef-Cake
2003
acrylic on canvas
Museum London, Ontario

Chris Cran
Cheese-Cake
2003
acrylic on canvas
Museum London, Ontario

Sarah Crowner
Sliced Tropics, Fragment
2018
acrylic on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Roy De Forest
Leaves from the Notebook of a Horse Girl
1970
acrylic on canvas
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Roy De Forest
Slow Time in Arcadia
1977
acrylic on canvas
San Jose Museum of Art, California

Jean Dubuffet
Mire G117 (Kowloon)
1983
acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Jean Dubuffet
Tower
1975
acrylic on shaped panel
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

Audrey Flack
Bounty
1978
acrylic on canvas
Reynolda House Museum of American Art,
Winston-Salem, North Carolina

Audrey Flack
Queen
1976
acrylic on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Sonia Gechtoff
Sienna
1991-2001
acrylic on canvas
San Jose Museum of Art, California

    Again, how can death be evil, sith it is the thaw of these vanities which the frost of life bindeth together?  If there be a satiety in life, then must there not be a sweetness in death?  Man were an intolerable thing, were he not mortal; the earth were not ample enough to contain her offspring, if none died.  In two or three ages, without death, what an unpleasant and lamentable spectacle were the most flourishing cities!  For, what should there be to be seen in them, save bodies languishing and courbing again into the earth, pale disfigured faces, skeletons instead of men?  And what to be heard, but the exclamations of the young, complaints of the old, with the pitiful cries of sick and pining persons?  There is almost no infirmity worse than age. 

– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)

Substantial

Anonymous Italian Maker
Double Cameo - recto, Head of a Woman
ca. 1400-1450 - onyx carved
ca. 1530-50 - gold mount added in Antwerp
British Museum

Anonymous Italian Maker
Double Cameo - verso, Virgin and Child
ca. 1400-1450 - onyx carved
ca. 1530-50 - gold mount added in Antwerp
British Museum

Francesco di Simone Ferrucci
Virgin adoring the Child
ca. 1470-90
marble relief
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Anonymous French Makers
Book Clasps
ca. 1500
silver-gilt with embroidered silk straps
British Museum

Anonymous German Makers
Book Cover for the Epistles
commissioned for Ulm Münster
ca. 1506
silver (partly enameled and partly gilt)
British Museum

Anonymous Italian Makers
Hat Jewel with the Judgment of Paris
ca. 1525-75
enameled gold set with garnets, sapphire and peridot
British Museum

Anonymous German Makers
Hat Jewel with the Conversion of Saul
ca. 1550
enameled gold set with rubies and diamonds
British Museum

Anonymous Mexican Makers
Reliquary Pendant in Lantern Form
holding wooden Ecce Homo
ca. 1550-1600
partly-enameled gold, rock crystal, wood
British Museum

Anonymous Flemish Maker
Marcus Curtius leaping into the Chasm
(fragment of parade armour for a horse)
ca. 1570
embossed, chased and damascened iron 
British Museum

Suzanne de Court
Dish with Apollo and the Muses
ca. 1600
enamel on copper
British Museum

Anonymous English Maker
Locket
ca. 1610-20
enameled-gold set with diamonds and pearl
British Museum

Anonymous Dutch Maker
Portrait of Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange
1627
partly-enameled gold
British Museum

Anonymous Austrian Sculptor
Hercules and Achelous
ca. 1650-75
ivory
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Anonymous Austrian Sculptor
Hercules and Achelous
ca, 1650-75
pear wood
British Museum

Anonymous Italian Maker
Plaque with Sale of Cupids
(after antique fresco excavated at Herculaneum)
ca. 1800-1830
rock crystal
British Museum

Giacomo Balla
Ballerina II
1922
(reconstructed in 1968)
chrome-plated brass wire
Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Herbert Ferber
Running Water I
1954
brass and copper
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

    Our strength, matched with that of the unreasonable creatures, is but weakness.  All we can set our eyes upon in these intricate mazes of life is but alchemy, vain perspective and deceiving shadows, appearing far otherwise afar off than when enjoyed and looked upon at a near distance.  O! who, if before he had a being he could have knowledge of the manifold miseries of it, would enter this woeful hospital of the world and accept of life upon such hard conditions?  

    If death be good, why should it be feared, and if it be the work of nature, how should it not be good?  For nature is an ordinance, disposition and rule which God hath established in creating this universe, as is the law of a King which can not err.  For how should the maker of that ordinance err, sith in him there is no impotency and weakness by the which he might bring forth what is unperfect, no perverseness of will, of which might proceed any vicious action, no ignorance, by the which he might go wrong in working; being most powerful, most good, most wise, nay, all-wise, all-good, all-powerful?  He is the first orderer and marshalleth every other order, the highest essence, giving essence to all other things; of all causes the cause.  He worketh powerfully, bounteously, wisely, and maketh nature (his artificial organ) do the same.  How is not death of nature, sith what is naturally generate is subject to corruption, and sith such an harmony, which is life, arising of the mixture of the four elements, which are the ingredients of our bodies, can not ever endure; the contrarieties of their qualities, as a consuming rust in the baser metals being an inward cause of a necessary dissolution?  O of frail and instable things the constant, firm and eternal order!  For even in their changes they keep ever universal, ancient and uncorruptible laws. 

– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)

Substantial

Bertoldo di Giovanni
Portrait of Filippo de' Medici
ca. 1462-74
bronze medallion
British Museum

attributed to Bertoldo di Giovanni
Bellerophon slaying Chimera
before 1491
plaquette in base metal with gilding
British Museum

attributed to Baccio Bandinelli
Bust of a Man
ca. 1540-50
marble
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest

attributed to Valerio Belli
Plaque with Scene of Ancient Sacrifice
before 1546
rock crystal
British Museum

Jean de Court
Dish with Destruction of Pharaoh's Army
ca. 1560-80
enamel on copper (Limoges)
British Museum

Jean de Court
Dish with Destruction of Pharaoh's Army
(detail with grotesques on rim)
ca. 1560-80
enamel on copper (Limoges)
British Museum

Meinrad Bauch
Table Ornament with Bacchus astride Barrel
ca. 1590-1600
silver-gilt figure on mother-of-pearl barrel
British Museum

Anonymous German Sculptor
Portrait of a Man
1625
pear wood
British Museum

Anonymous German Sculptor
Seated Pasha
ca. 1650-1700
enameled-gold set with diamonds and baroque pearl
British Museum

attributed to André-Charles Boulle
Cabinet
ca. 1680, on Egyptian revival stand (added ca. 1800)
oak and pine veneered with exotic woods and ormolu
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

François-Joseph Bosio
Catherine, Princess of Württemberg
ca. 1810-15
marble
Dallas Museum of Art

Antonio Canova
Ideal Head
ca. 1817
marble
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Boston & Sandwich Glass Co.
Dolphin Candlestick
ca. 1850
pressed glass
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Thomas Ball
Saint John the Divine
ca. 1860
marble
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia

Thomas Ball
Eve
1874
marble
San Diego Museum of Art

Herbert Ferber
The Sun, the Moon and the Stars II
1956
brass
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Joost Baljeu
Synthetic Construction W-III [2c+d]
1958
enamel on wood relief
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

    Thus sciences, by the diverse motions of this globe of the brain of man, are become opinions, nay, errors, and leave the imagination in a thousand labyrinths.  What is all we know, compared with what we know not?  We have not yet agreed about the chief good and felicity.  It is perhaps artificial cunning.  How many curiosities be framed by the least creatures of nature (who like a wise painter showeth in a small portrait more ingine than in a great) unto which the industry of the most curious artisans doth not attain!  Is it riches?  What are they but the idols of fools, the casting out of friends, snares of liberty, bands to such as have them, possessing rather than possessed, metals which nature hath hid (foreseeing the great harms they should occasion), and the only opinion of man hath brought in estimation?  They are like to thorns, which laid in an open hand are easily blown away, and wound the closing and hard-gripping.  Prodigals mispend them, wretches mis-keep them: when we have gathered the greatest abundance, we ourselves can enjoy no more of them than so much as belongs to one man.  They take not away want, but occasion it: what great and rich men do by others, the meaner and more contented sort do by themselves.  Will some talk of our pleasures?  It is not, though in the fables, told out of purpose, that Pleasure, in haste being called up to heaven to disburthen herself and become more light, did here leave her apparel, which Sorrow (then naked, forsaken, and wandering) finding, did afterwards attire herself with.  And if we would say the truth of most of our joys, we must confess them to be but disguised sorrows: remorse ever ensueth them, and (being the heirs of displeasure) seldom do they appear, except sadness and some wakening grief hath really preceded and forewent them.  Will some ladies vaunt of their beauty?  That is but skin-thick, of two senses only known, short even of marble statues and pictures; not the same to all eyes, dangerous to the beholder and hurtful to the possessor; an enemy to chastity, a frame made to delight others more than those that have it, a superficial varnish hiding bones and the brains, things fearful to be looked upon: growth in years doth blast it, or sickness or sorrow preventing them. 

– William Drummond of Hawthornden, from A Cypress Grove (London: Hawthornden Press, 1919, reprinting the original edition of 1623)