Louis Aston Knight paintings

Louis Aston Knight paintings
Leon Bazile Perrault paintings
Leon-Augustin L'hermitte paintings
Collins and I spent several economical and instructive weeks together in Ravenna. A bleak wind blew from the Adriatic among those mighty tombs. In an hotel bedroom designed for a warmer season, I wrote long letters to Sebastian and called daily at the post: office for his answers. There were two, each from a different address, neither giving any plain news of himself, for he wrote in a style of remote fantasy - ...’Mummy and two attendant poets have three bad colds in the head, so I have come here. It is the feast of S. Nichodemus of Thyatira, who was martyred by having goatskin nailed to his pate, and is accordingly the patron of bald heads. Tell Collins, who I am sure will be bald before us. There are too many people here, but one, praise heaven! Has an ear trumpet, and that keeps me in good humour. And now I must try to catch a fish. It is too far to send it to you so I

Don Li-Leger paintings

Don Li-Leger paintings
David Hardy paintings
Dirck Bouts paintings
have for a long time hesitated to tell this story of Edward. For six weeks past, since Edward late one evening interrupted my essay to grow expansive over my whiskey, I have done the manly thing and told no one—at least practically no one. But lately this wasting of “copy”—as all good journalists are wont to describe the misfortunes of their friends—has been for me a matter of increasing and intolerable regret; and now that I have learned from Anne “in a manner which it is not convenient to record,” much of which Edward and Poxe are ignorant, I find it wholly impossible to remain silent. I have obscured the identities of the chief actors so far as it has been in my power to do so. Edward at any rate I feel should be safe from detection.
The more I consider the nature of Edward the more incredible it all seems. He is to all outward showing the most wholly and over-masteringly ordinary undergraduate. Every

Frida Kahlo paintings

Frida Kahlo paintings
Frederick Carl Frieseke paintings
Flamenco Dancer paintings
him. Mostly she spent her day alone with her needlework and in correspondence connected with one or two charitable organizations with which, in age, she had become involved. She was sewing when Basil sought her out after luncheon (oysters again, two dozen this time with a pint of champagne—his strength waxed hourly) and she continued to stitch at the framed grospoint while he confided his problem to her.
“Yes, I’ve met Charles Albright. He’s rather a friend of Robin’s.”
“Then perhaps you can tell me what Barbara sees in him.”
“Why, you, of course,” said Sonia. “Haven’t you noticed? He’s the dead spit—looks, character, manner, everything.”
“Looks? Character? Manner? Sonia, you’re raving.”
“Oh, not as you are now, not even after your cure. Don’t you remember at all what you were like at his age?”
“But he’s a monster.”
“So were you, darling. Have you quite forgotten? It’s all as clear

Warren Kimble paintings

Warren Kimble paintings
Wassily Kandinsky paintings
William Etty paintings
Well, ladies, I think that finishes the workout for this morning. We’re getting along very nicely. We mustn’t expect immediate results you know. Same routine tomorrow.” He replaced the lid on a small enamelled bin. The ladies looked hungrily at it but went in peace.
“Whisky,” said Basil.
“Whisky? Why, I couldn’t give you such a thing even if I had it. It would be as much as my job’s worth.”
“I should think it is precisely what your job is worth.”
“I don’t quite follow, sir.”
“My wife had grouse pie this morning.”
He was a cheeky young man much admired in his own milieu for his bounce. He was not abashed. A horrible smirk of complicity passed over his face. “It wasn’t really grouse,” he said. “Just a stale liver pâté the grocer had. They get so famished here they don’t care what they’re eating, the poor creatures.”
“Don’t talk about my wife in those terms,” said Basil, adding: “I shall know what I’m drinking, at a pound a snort.”

Peter Paul Rubens paintings

Peter Paul Rubens paintings
Rudolf Ernst paintings
Robert Campin paintings
Well, she won’t want you.”
“Pobble, you sound awfully feeble.”
“Who wouldn’t who’s only had one carrot in the last three days.”
“Oh, you are brave.”
“Yes.”
“How’s mummy?”
“Your mother is not keeping the régime as strictly as I am.”
“I bet she isn’t. Anyway, please, can I go back to London?”
“No.”
“You mean ‘No’?”
“Yes.”
“Fiend.”
Basil had gone hungry before. From time to time in his varied youth, in desert, tundra, glacier and jungle, in garrets and cellars, he had briefly endured extremities of privation. Now in the periods of repose and solitude, after the steam bath and the smarting deluge of the showers, after the long thumping and twisting by the huge masseuse, when the chintz curtains were drawn in his bedroom and he lay towel-wrapped and supine gazing at the pattern of the ceiling paper, familiar, forgotten pangs spoke to him of his past achievements

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida paintings

Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida paintings
Joseph Mallord William Turner paintings
Julien Dupre paintings
You’re fat and red.”
“So are you.”
“Yes, why not? Almost everyone is.”
“Except Ambrose.”
“Well, he’s a pansy. I expect he takes trouble.”
“We don’t.”
“Why the hell should we?”
“We don’t.”
“Exactly.”
The two old friends had exhausted the subject.
Basil said: “About those shirts. How did your girl ever meet a fellow like that?”
“At Oxford. She insisted on going up to read History. She picked up some awfully rum friends.”
“I suppose there were girls there in my time. We never met them.”
“Nor in mine.”
“Stands to reason the sort of fellow who takes up with undergraduettes has something wrong with him.”
“Albright certainly has.”
“What does he look like?”
“I’ve never set an eye. My daughter asked him to King’s Thursday when I was abroad. She found he had no shirts and she gave him mine.”
“Was he hard up?”
“So she said.”

Andrew Atroshenko What a Wonderful Life painting

Andrew Atroshenko What a Wonderful Life paintingAndrew Atroshenko Just for Love paintingEdward Hopper Sunday painting
companies of young warriors. Major Gordon breathed gratefully. This was the world he understood, arms, an army, allies, an enemy, injuries given and taken honourably. Very high above them a huge force of minute shining bombers hummed across the sky in perfect formation on its daily route from Foggia to somewhere east of Vienna.
“There they go again,” he said. “I wouldn’t care to be underneath when they unload.”
It was one of his duties to impress the partisans with the might of their allies, with the great destruction and slaughter on distant fields which would one day, somehow, bring here where they seemed forgotten. He delivered a little statistical lecture to Bakic about block-busters and pattern-bombing. But another part of his mind was all the time slowly being set in motion. He had seen something entirely new, which needed new eyes to see clearly: humanity in the depths, misery of quite another order from anything he had guessed before. He was as yet not conscious of terror or pity. His steady Scottish mind would take some time to assimilate the experience.

Thomas Gainsborough River Landscape painting

Thomas Gainsborough River Landscape paintingThomas Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews paintingSandro Botticelli Madonna and Child painting
sharp edge of stone. He suddenly felt defeated, sick and stupid, as he had as he lay on the Italian hillside with his smashed knee. Then as now he had felt weariness even more than pain.
“, darling.”
Suddenly he roused himself. “No,” he almost shouted. “No, no, no.”
“Darling, what is the matter? Don’t get excited. Are you feeling ill? Lie down on the sofa near the window.”
He did as he was told. He felt so weary that he could barely move from his chair.
“Do you think would keep you awake, love? You look quite fit to drop already. There, lie down.”
He lay down and, like the tide slowly mounting among the rocks below, sleep rose and spread in his mind. He nodded and woke with a start.
“Shall I open the window, darling, and give you some air?”
“Elizabeth,” he said, “I feel as if I have been drugged.” Like the

Pablo Picasso Girl Before a Mirror painting

Pablo Picasso Girl Before a Mirror paintingClaude Monet Sunflowers paintingJohannes Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring painting
Things were made easy for her by his taking a lonely lighthouse for their honeymoon. He was very rich and she wanted his money. All she had to do was confide in the local doctor and a few neighbours that her husband frightened her by walking in his sleep; she doped his Coffee, dragged him from the bed to the balcony—a feat of some strength—where she had already broken away a yard of balustrade, and rolled him over. Then she went back to bed, gave the alarm next morning, and wept over the mangled body which was presently discovered half awash on the rocks. Retribution overtook her later, but at the time the thing was a complete success.
“I wish it were as easy as that,” thought John, and in a few hours the whole tale had floated away in those lightless attics of the mind where films and dreams and funny stories lie spider-shrouded for a unless, as sometimes happens, an intruder brings them to light.
Such a thing happened a few weeks later when John and Elizabeth went

John William Godward Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder painting

John William Godward Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder paintingJohn William Waterhouse Echo and Narcissus paintingJohn William Waterhouse The Lady of Shalott painting
sure she has filled in all the correct forms? Or are commissars of her rank above such things?”
Uncle and aunt laughed uneasily. John made his little jokes with such an air of weariness, with such a droop of the eyelids that they sometimes struck chill in that family circle. Elizabeth regarded him gravely and silently.
John was far from well. His leg was in constant pain so that he no longer stood in queues. He slept badly; as also, for the first time in her life, did Elizabeth. They shared a room now, for the winter rains had brought down ceilings in many parts of the shaken house and the upper rooms were thought to be unsafe. They had twin beds on the ground floor in what had once been her father’s library.
In the first days of his Homecoming John had been amorous. Now he never approached her. They lay night after night six feet apart in the darkness. Once when

Paul Cezanne The Black Clock painting

Paul Cezanne The Black Clock paintingPaul Cezanne Still Life with Onions paintingPaul Cezanne Poplar Trees painting
What the devil’s all this talking about?” he asked.
Now, O’Malley had not the smallest intention of giving Tamplin a “late.” It was a delicate legal point, of the kind that was debated endlessly at Spierpoint, whether in the circumstances he could properly do so. It had been in O’Malley’s mind to appeal to Tamplin’s better nature in the morning, to say that he could take a joke as well as the next man, that his official position was repugnant to him, that the last thing he wished to do was start the term by using his new authority on his former associates; he would say all this and ask Tamplin to “back him up.” But now, suddenly challenged out of the darkness, he lost his head and said, “I was giving Tamplin a ‘late,’ Anderson.”
“Well, remind me in the morning and for Christ’s sake don’t make such a racket over it.”
“Please, Anderson, I don’t think I was late,” said Tamplin; “it’s just that I took longer than the others over my prayers. I was perfectly ready when we were told to say them.”
“But he was still out of bed when I put the light out,” said O’Malley.
“Well, it’s usual to wait until everyone’s ready, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Anderson. I did wait about five minutes.”
“I see. Anyhow, lates count from the time you start saying your dibs.

Thomas Gainsborough Mrs Sheridan painting

Thomas Gainsborough Mrs Sheridan paintingThomas Gainsborough Landscape with Cattle paintingSandro Botticelli Venus and Mars painting
must remember that if there’s any unpleasantness with Peacock. What else did he say?”
“Oh, we talked about people, you know, and their characters. Would you say O’Malley had poise?”
“Good God, no.”
“That’s just what Graves thinks. He says some people have it naturally and they can look after themselves. Others, like O’Malley, need bringing on. He thinks authority will give O’Malley poise.”
“Well, it doesn’t seem to have worked yet,” said Charles, as O’Malley loped past their beds to his corner.
“Welcome to the head of the dormitory,” said Tamplin. “Are we all late? Are you going to report us?”
O’Malley looked at his watch. “As a matter of fact, you have exactly seven minutes.”
“Not by my watch.”
“We go by mine.”
“Really,” said Tamplin. “Has your watch been put on the Settle, too? It looks a cheap kind of instrument to me.”
“When I am speaking officially I don’t want any impertinence, Tamplin.”
“His watch has been put on the Settle. It’s the first time I ever heard one could

Leonardo da Vinci Virgin of the Rocks paintingLeonardo da Vinci The Virgin and Child With St Anne paintingLeonardo da Vinci St John the Baptist painti

Leonardo da Vinci Virgin of the Rocks paintingLeonardo da Vinci The Virgin and Child With St Anne paintingLeonardo da Vinci St John the Baptist painting
There was a scent of dust in the air; a thin vestige surviving in the twilight from the golden clouds with which before chapel the House Room fags had filled the evening sunshine. Light was failing. Beyond the trefoils and branched mullions of the windows the towering autumnal leaf was now flat and colourless. All the eastward slope of Spierpoint Down, where the buildings stood, lay lost in shadow; above and behind, on the high lines of Chanctonbury and Spierpoint Ring, the first day of term was gently dying.
In the House Room thirty heads were bent over their books. Few form-masters had set any preparation that day. The Classical Upper Fifth, Charles Ryder’s new form, were “revising last term’s work” and Charles was his diary under cover of Hassall’s History. He looked up from the page to the darkling texts which ran in Gothic script around the frieze. “Qui diligit Deum diligit et fratrem suum.”

Thomas Gainsborough Paintings

About Thomas Gainsborough: The English Artist, Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his pencilling skills so that he let him go to London to study art in 1740. In London he first trained under engraver Hubert Gravelot but eventually became associated with William Hogarth and his school. One of his mentors was Francis Hayman. In those years he contributed to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens. Thomas Gainsborough painted more from his observations of nature (and human nature) than from any application of formal academic rules. The poetic sensibility of Thomas Gainsborough paintings caused Constable to say, "On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them."

I think the most famous painting by Gainsborough is The Blue Boy