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| Wybrand de Geest Portrait of an Officer ca. 1625-35 oil on panel Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun Julie Le Brun looking in a Mirror 1787 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| John Bellany My Father 1966 oil on board Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh |
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| Anthony van Dyck Portrait of an Old Woman 1618 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
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| Annibale Carracci Portrait of Lute-Player Giulio Mascheroni ca. 1593-94 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie, Dresden |
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| Gilbert Stuart Portrait of Marianne Ashley Walker 1799 oil on canvas Indianapolis Museum of Art |
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| John Singleton Copley Portrait of Nathaniel Hurd ca. 1765 oil on canvas Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio |
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| John Singer Sargent Portrait of Miss Beatrice Townsend 1882 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Natalie Dower Portrait of Patrick George 1958 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| George Romney Portrait of Mrs Davies Davenport ca. 1782-84 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Thomas Eakins Study of the Head of Robert C.V. Meyers 1875 oil on paper, mounted on panel Philadelphia Museum of Art |
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| Rembrandt Man with a Sheet of Music 1633 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| Christian Krohg Sick Girl 1881 oil on canvas National Gallery of Norway, Oslo |
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| Anonymous Italian Artist Portrait of Alessandro Alberti, with Page ca. 1544-45 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
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| William Orpen Anita 1905 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Titian Portrait of Cardinal Pietro Bembo ca. 1539-40 oil on canvas National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
Before the Concert
If I could lay hold
on this glass of water and the stable
transparency of its contents
that contain an image of the table
on which it stands – under the glass
a draped, red cloth –
then I should possess not only
that coolness and that red, but both
of the foreshortened lutes
waiting to make music there,
under a curving window
on either side of the reflected score,
but the lutenist
(whose throat is sore today)
lowers a Brobdingnagian hand
and takes away
this universe, and I
watch it wash and disappear
over the threshold of his dryness,
until it's clear –
those minute instruments,
their world quicksilvering into water
under a melting window –
that is a room I shall never enter.
– Charles Tomlinson (1990)
