Reflecting

John Fox
Reflected Still Life
ca. 1975
oil on canvas
private collection

Karl Knathes
Marble Mantel
1966
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Joan Brown
The Vanity
1973
enamel on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Anonymous French Photographer
Mirror reflecting Camera
ca. 1910
gelatin silver print
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Charles Thurston Thompson
Venetian Mirror circa 1700 from the collection of John Webb
1853
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous Dutch Painter
Truth presenting a Mirror to the Vanities of the World
ca. 1620-30
oil on canvas
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Robert Bechtle
Cookie Jar
1964
oil on canvas
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Fernand Léger
The Mirror
1925
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Roy Lichtenstein
Interior with Mobile
1992
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Anonymous French Makers
Mirror
ca. 1740
chimneypiece mirror framed in giltwood
Musée du Louvre

Anonymous French Makers
Mirror
ca. 1660-61
vanity mirror mounted in silver with royal crest
(originally the property of Anne Hyde, Duchess of York)
Musée du Louvre

Charles Thurston Thompson
Late Seventeenth-century Silver Repoussé Mirror
1853
albumen silver print
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Robin Philipson
Odalisque in Mirror
1962
oil on board
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Toussaint Dubreuil
Hyante et Climène à leur toilette
(illustration to La Franciade by Pierre de Ronsard)
before 1602
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Sylvia Gosse
Pair of Gloves before a Mirror
1913
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Laura Knight
Make-up
1924
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Pablo Picasso
La Toilette
1906
oil on canvas
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York

from Prometheus Unbound

            Meanwhile thy spirit lifts its pinions

            In music's most serene dominions;

Catching the winds that fan that happy heaven.

            And we sail on, away, afar, 

            Without a course, without a star,

But, by the instinct of sweet music driven;

            Till through Elysian garden islets

            By thee, most beautiful of pilots,

            Where never mortal pinnace glided,

            The boat of my desire is guided:

Realms where the air we breathe is love,

Which in the winds and on the waves doth move,

Harmonizing this earth with what we feel above.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820)

Assertions

Giuseppe Ghislandi (Fra Vittore Galgario)
Portrait of Bartolomeo Manganoni
1696
oil on canvas
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Narbonne

Michele Giambono
The Sudarium
before 1462
tempera on panel
Palazzo Malaspina, Pavia

Felice Giani
Personification of Justice and Peace
ca. 1813-18
drawing
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Corrado Giaquinto
Descent from the Cross
ca. 1754
oil on canvas
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts
Trompe l'Oeil with Studio Wall and Vanitas Still Life
1668
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Eric Gill
A.R.P. (Air Raid Precaution) Badge
ca. 1939
molded metal
British Museum

Sam Gilliam
T-Shirt
1973
screenprint
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Harold Gilman
Norwegian Interior
(compositional study for painting)
1913
drawing
British Museum

Luca Giordano
The Finding of Moses
ca. 1685-90
 oil on canvas
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Giovanni Antonio da Brescia
Hercules and the Cretan Bull
ca. 1514-15
engraving
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Anne-Louis Girodet
Armin witnessing the Deaths of his Children
(scene from James Macpherson's Ossian)
ca. 1799
drawing (study for painting)
British Museum

Girolamo da Treviso the Younger
Virgin of the Rosary
before 1544
watercolor on paper
(formerly owned by Joshua Reynolds)
British Museum

Hans Gjesme
Life Class
ca. 1920-23
drawing
Sogn-og-Fjordane Kunstmuseum, Norway

Milton Glaser and Cosmos Sarchiapone 
Reciprocal Portraits of Each Other
1976
gelatin silver print
Archives of American Art, Washington DC

Grigory Gluckmann
Full-Blown
ca. 1955
oil on panel
Frye Art Museum, Seattle

Hendrik Goltzius after Anthonie Blocklandt
Departure of Lot from Sodom
1582
engraving
Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum Basel

Henry Goodwin
Dr James Murray and his son at Sunnyside, Oxford
(photographed while editing the Oxford English Dictionary)
1907
gelatin silver print
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

from The Father of the Family

    "It seems, moreover, that nature has not only created animals for men's service but has also made some men fit to obey for the service of those men who are fit to rule.  Consequently, the acquisitions made by preying upon an enemy in war are also just, provided the war is just, and I do not want to omit Thucydides' observation, in the preface to his history, that in the most ancient times the art of preying was not shameful.  We see in reading the poets that asking a man whether he is a pirate is hardly an insult, and Virgil reflects this custom or way of speaking when he puts the following boast in the mouth of Numanus:

                            We crush grey hair with a helmet and rejoice

                            To gather fresh prey and live by plunder.

Today, the booty that the Knights of Malta and others have taken from the people of Barbary can be called a natural and just acquisition.  Thus it seems that all these arts of natural acquisition, and especially agriculture, are suitable for the father of the family, and if he were to blend all these arts and market all the things he gets by them, he might perhaps practice an art that would not be unseemly for a father.  This art is now commonly called trade, and there are many kinds of it.  Most just is the kind that transports the surplus goods from one region to another where they are needed and returns with things from the second region that are lacking in the first.  Discussing this subject in the Offices, Cicero says that trade is sordid when conducted on a small scale, but when carried out on a grand scale is not to be blamed overmuch."

– Torquato Tasso (ca. 1580), translated by Dain A. Trafton and Carnes Lord (1982)

Revelations

Francesco Giuseppe Casanova
Bolt of Lightning
1791
oil on canvas 
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

James Casebere
Subdivision with Spotlight
1982
gelatin silver print
Guggenheim Museum, New York

Giacomo Ceruti (il Pitocchetto)
Still Life with Lobster
before 1767
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Jack Chambers
Regatta no. 1
1968
oil on canvas
Museum London, Ontario

Cima da Conegliano
Christus
before 1517
oil on panel
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Minna Citron
New Hampshire Golds
1955
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

George Clausen
Filling Sacks
ca. 1926
etching
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Adriaen Collaert
Christopher Columbus braving the Ocean
ca. 1590
etching
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich

Gerard Collins
My Backyard Garden
1996
oil on canvas
New Brunswick Museum, Saint John

Joannes Cordua 
Vanitas Still Life
1650
oil on canvas
Seattle Art Museum

Joseph Cornell
The Lanner Waltzes
before 1972
collage, pressed leaves and watercolor on paper
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

attributed to Correggio (Antonio Allegri)
Virgin and Child
ca. 1505-1510
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Lucas Cranach the Younger
Ernest III, Duke of Brunswick-Grubenhagen
ca. 1541-42
tempera on paper (portrait study)
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

Gregory Crewdson
Jim's House of Shoes
2022
inkjet print
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Jan van Dalen
Vanitas Still Life
ca. 1665
oil on panel
Phoenix Art Museum

Charles-François Daubigny
Landscape
ca. 1865
oil on panel
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Reims

F. Holland Day
Evening
before 1896
platinum print
National Museum of American History, Washington DC

"You must take into consideration that I grew up not in an American, and not in an English, but in a European atmosphere; my father was naturalized in Eng. only around the time I was born – his background was Jewish, Russian, Central European – and my mother, herself proudly Welsh, had lived in Poland, Germany, & Denmark etc. all the years between 1910 & 1923.  And then, when I came to the U.S., I was already 24 years old – so tho' I was very impressionable, good melting-pot material, the American idiom is an acquired language for me.  Certainly I am an American poet, if anything – I know I am not an English one – nevertheless . . . "

– Denise Levertov, from a letter to William Carlos Williams, 1960