Effulgent - II

Gerhard Munthe
A Room in the Artist's House
ca. 1902
watercolor and gouache on paper
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Gustaf Magnusson
Interior at Waldemarsudde
1939
tempera on paper
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

Vibeke Slyngstad
Villa Stenersen IV
2012
oil on canvas
Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

Leif Wigh
Window Ledge
1976
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Gustav Kampmann
Sunlight in the House
ca. 1904-1905
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Jean-Baptiste Mallet
Geneviève de Brabant baptizing her Infant in Prison
1824
oil on canvas
Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg

Eva Gonzalès
Morning Awakening
1876
oil on canvas
Kunsthalle Bremen

Édouard Debat-Ponsan
The Massage
1883
oil on canvas
Musée des Augustins de Toulouse

Henri Fantin-Latour
The Awakening
1898
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Edvard Munch
Youth
1908
oil on canvas
KODE, Bergen, Norway

Lovis Corinth
On the Beach at Forte dei Marmi
1914
oil on canvas
Ostdeutsche Galerie, Regensburg

Hermann Joseph Wilhelm Knackfuss
Children in a Sunny Meadow
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Carl Moll
In the Prater, Vienna
1928
oil on canvas
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Paul Signac
Capo di Noli near Genoa
1898
oil on canvas
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne

Auguste Renoir
View of the Sea from Haut de Cagnes
1903
oil on canvas
Osthaus Museum, Hagen, Germany

Claude Monet
The Seine at Port Villez
1894
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen

Orestes:  You don't see these creatures, I do!  I'm being driven, driven away!  I can't stay here!  [He staggers off, in the same direction from which he entered at the start of the play.] 

Chorus:  

May you prosper, and may god willingly watch over you and protect you with timely strokes of fortune!
See, this is now the third tempest
that has blown like a squall
upon the royal house, and come to an end. 
What first began it were the sad sufferings
of him who devoured his children;
the second time the victim was a man, a king,
as, slain in his bath, there perished the man
who led the Achaeans in war;
and now again, thirdly, there has come from somewhere a saviour – 
or should I say, death?
So where will it end, where will the power of Ruin
sink into sleep and cease?

– Aeschylus, from The Libation-Bearers (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)

Effulgent - I

Gardar Eide Einarsson
This Is It
2012
installation (aluminum and neon)
KORO (Public Art Norway), Oslo

Lennart af Petersens
Drottningholms Slottsteater, Stockholm
1955
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Anonymous
The Marvellous Scintillator Beams
1933
halftone print (postcard)
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Godfried Schalcken
James Stuart, 1st Duke of Richmond and 4th Duke of Lennox
ca. 1692-96
oil on canvas
Leiden Collection, New York

Théodore Chassériau
Macbeth before the Apparitions
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes

John Hertzberg
Still Life
ca. 1929
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

August Ahlborn
Egyptian Temple Ruins
1830
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum Hannover

August Babberger
Young Men before an Alpine Vista
1908
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

August von Bayer
Strasbourg Cathedral
ca. 1845
oil on canvas
Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Fidus (Hugo Höppener)
Prayer to the Light
1894
oil on canvas
Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Carlo Dolci
St John the Evangelist on Patmos
1656
oil on copper
Galleria Palatina, Palazzo Pitti, Florence

F.P. Stevens
After the Storm
1900
platinum print
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Carl Johan Bernhard
The Londoner
1957
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Helga Härenstam
Photo Album Dreaming
2009
C-print
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Wilhelm Brücke
View on the Capitoline Hill in Rome
1839
oil on canvas
Landesmuseum Hannover

Harry Callahan
Eleanor
1948
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Chorus:  No, you have done well!  Don't harness your lips to harmful speech, and don't give utterance to ill-omened words.  You have liberated the entire city of Argos by deftly cutting off the heads of that pair of serpents.

Orestes [in sudden and intense terror]:  Ah, ah! I see these hideous women looking like Gorgons – clad in dark-grey tunics and thickly wreathed with serpents!  I can't stay here!

Chorus:  Dearest of men to your father, what are these fancies that are whirling you about?  Hold firm, don't be afraid – you have won a great victory!  

Orestes:  These afflictions are no fancies I am having: these are plainly my mother's wrathful hounds!

Chorus:  Ah, the blood is still fresh on your hands; that, you see, is the cause of this confusion falling on your mind.

Orestes:  Lord Apollo, there are more and more of them!  And they're dripping a loathsome fluid from their eyes!

– Aeschylus, from The Libation-Bearers (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)

Imitation Sunlight - II

Anna Ancher
Interior with the artist's mother reading
1910
oil on canvas
Skagens Museum, Denmark

Pierre Bonnard
Before the window in Grand-Lemps
1923
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Carl Gustav Carus
Balcony in Naples
ca. 1829-30
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Franz Ludwig Catel
Portrait of Karl Friedrich Schinkel in Naples
1824
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Wilhelm Gail
Foscari Loggia in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice
1834
oil on canvas
Bildgalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam

Wilhelm von Gegerfelt
Farm at Balingsta
1891
oil on panel
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

Johann Erdmann Hummel
Granite Basin in the Lustgarten, Berlin
1831
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

 

Peder Severin Krøyer
Self Portrait
1888
oil on canvas
Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Norway

Gotthardt Kuehl
Garden Room
ca. 1895-1900
oil on canvas
Galerie Neue Meister (Albertinum), Dresden

Louis Lozowick
Checkerboard under the El
1926
lithograph
Addison Gallery of American Art,
Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts

Abraham van Strij
The Drawing Lesson
ca. 1800
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Henry van de Velde
Woman reading in the sun (Jeanne Biart)
1892
pastel on paper
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Frederik Vermehren
Courtyard, Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen
1845
oil on canvas
Hirschsprung Collection, Copenhagen

Édouard Vuillard
Boulevard des Batignolles
ca. 1910
oil on cardboard
Landesmuseum, Hannover

Camille Pissarro
Corner of the Garden, Éragny
1897
oil on canvas
Ordrupgaard Art Museum, Copenhagen

Henri Matisse
Street in Arcueil
ca. 1903-1904
oil on canvas
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Chorus:

There is much, at any rate, that strikes deep into the soul:

one knows the men one sent off,

but instead of human beings

urns and ashes arrive back

at each man's home.

Ares, the moneychanger of bodies,

holding his scales in the battle of spears,

sends back from Ilium to their dear ones

heavy dust that has been through the fire,

to be sadly wept over,

filling easily-stowed urns

with ash given in exchange for men.

And they lament, and praise this man

as one expert in battle,

that man as having fallen nobly amid the slaughter –

"because of someone else's wife".

That is what they are snarling, under their breath,

and grief steals over them, mixed with resentment

against the chief prosecutors, the Atreidae.

And over there, around the city wall,

the men in their beauty occupy 

sepulchres in the land of Ilium:

the enemy's soil covers its conquerors. 

– Aeschylus, from Agamemnon (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)

Imitation Sunlight - I

Frédéric Bazille
Les Lauriers Roses
1867
oil on canvas
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio

Baldovino Bertè
Borgo della Morte,  Parma
1872
oil on panel
Galleria Nazionale di Parma

Gustave Caillebotte
Path in the Garden
1886
oil on canvas
Dallas Museum of Art

Adolf Dietrich
Garden in Summer
1925
tempera on paper
Kunsthalle Mannheim

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
Sailor parting from his Beloved
1840
oil on canvas
Ribe Kunstmuseum, Denmark

Anselm Feuerbach
Rocky Landscape
1855
oil on canvas
Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

Erik Hoppe
Wilders Plads, Copenhagen
ca. 1937
oil on canvas
Göteborgs Konstmuseum, Sweden

Ekke Abel Kleima
Dune Landscape on Texel
1939
oil on canvas
Groninger Museum, Netherlands

Henri Loubat
La famille Loubat à Saint-Jean-de-Luz
ca. 1904
oil on board
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gaillac

Albert Marquet
In the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris
1902
oil on canvas
Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

Firmin Salabert
Conversation dans une Allée près du Lac
ca. 1860
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gaillac

P.C. Skovgaard
View of the Sea from Møns Klint
1850
oil on canvas
Skovgaard Museet, Viborg, Denmark

Vincent van Gogh
Lane near Arles
1888
oil on canvas
Pomeranian State Museum, Greifswald

Carl Moll
Prater Scene
ca. 1925
oil on canvas
Leopold Museum, Vienna

Claude Monet
Double Herbaceous Borders under Trees at Giverny
1902
oil on canvas
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Antoine-Pierre Mongin
Corner of a Park
ca. 1795
oil on paper, mounted on canvas
Morgan Library, New York

Clytemnestra: Today the Achaeans are in possession of Troy.  I imagine that the city is marked by shouts and cries that do not blend well.  If you pour vinegar and olive oil into the same vessel, they'll keep apart and you'll call them very unfriendly; so too one can hear separately the voices of the conquered and the conquerors – can hear their distinct fortunes.  On one side, they have prostrated themselves to embrace the bodies of husbands and brothers, and children those of their aged progenitors, and from throats that are no longer free they cry out their laments for the death of their dearest.  On the other, weary nocturnal patrolling after the battle has led to their mustering, famished, at breakfasts consisting of what the city has available, with no criteria for taking turns, but just as each individual draws fortune's lot.  They are now living in captured Trojan dwellings, freed at last from the frosts and dews of the open air, and they will sleep the whole night without needing guards, like happy men.  If they act reverently towards the protecting gods of the city and land they have captured, there is no risk, you may be sure, that after capturing it they may become victims in their turn.  Only let no desire first fall on the army to plunder what they should not, overcome by the prospect of gain; for they have still to return safely home, turning the bend and coming back for the second leg of the double run.  If the army should return without having offended the gods, the pain of the dead would be appeasable, if no unexpected stroke of evil fate occurs.  This, I tell you, is what you have heard from me, a woman; but may the good prevail, unequivocally, for all to see!  I choose to enjoy that, in preference to many other blessings.

– Aeschylus, from Agamemnon (458 BC), translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2008)