Diane Romanello paintings

Diane Romanello paintings
Diego Rivera paintings
Don Li-Leger paintings
curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
Sebastian lived at Christ Church, high in Meadow Buildings. He was alone when I came, peeling a plover’s egg taken from the large nest of moss in the centre of his table. ‘I’ve just counted them,’ he said. ‘There were five each and two over, so I’m having the two. I’m unaccountably hungry today. I put myself unreservedly in the hands of Dolbear and Goodall, and feel so drugged that I’ve begun to believe that the whole of yesterday evening was a dream. Please don’t wake me up.
He was entrancing, with that epicene beauty which in extreme youth sings aloud for love and withers at the first cold wind.

George Inness paintings

George Inness paintings
George Frederick Watts paintings
Guercino paintings
it, they got more cheerful. I handled stores with them for the first half hour; then broke off to meet the company second-in-command who came down with the first returning truck. ‘It’s not a bad camp,’ he reported; ‘big private house with two or three lakes. Looks as if we might get some duck if we’re lucky. Village with one pub and a post office. No town within miles. I’ve managed to get a hut between the two of us.’ By four in the morning the work was done. I drove in the last lorry, through tortuous lanes where the overhanging boughs whipped the windscreen; somewhere we left the lane and turned into a drive; somewhere we reached an open space where two drives converged and a ring of storm lanterns marked the heap of stores. Here we unloaded the truck and, at long last, followed the guides to our quarters, under a starless sky, with a fine drizzle of rain beginning now to fall.

James Childs paintings

James Childs paintings
John Singleton Copley paintings
Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida paintings
thud and a wispered warning. Then silence. The two men Baycraw and Fidon crept up stairs and having opened the door Mr. Cantonville’s room switched on the light. The old man turned over binked and started only to find himself looking down the barrel of a “colt” revolver
“Make a sound and your a dead man” wispered Braycow
“Who are you” murmered the terrified man
“You know very well! You havn’t such a bad memory as all that. Come no think can’t remember a certain bank robery in which a certain Cargon figurgered, do you not recall what he said when you found him out eh? something about revenge? well I am he and this—Fidon at this moment broke off as Braycaw raising a knife plunged it down ward there was a strangled and stilness.
“This” continued Fidon “Is our revenge

Jean-Honore Fragonard paintings

Jean-Honore Fragonard paintings
Jehan Georges Vibert paintings
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paintings
Midnight boomed from the old clock tower and still the two men played on. Ralfe the eldest son of Gerald Cantonville had got in debt to a villainous money lender and in desperation had taken to gambling in a great efort to “raise the wind” all in vain on he played and still Baycraw won. Sudenly the door opened and in came a young boy of nineteen he had just left his public school carrying away nearly every cup at the sports. He was certainly not clever clever for he had never got any higher than the upper fifth “Hullo Ralfe still playing I should turn in” The elder brother looked up sharply “Get off to bed youngster” he growled and then returned to the . Tom Cantonville shrugged his shoulders and went out with despair in his heart.
Baycraw tiptoed down stairs and opened the window a cold draft of air blew in. He wistled softly and a dark form was siluetted for a moment against the bleu without. Then

Vincent van Gogh Irises painting

Vincent van Gogh Irises paintingWassily Kandinsky Farbstudie Quadrate paintingGustav Klimt The Bride painting
People make trouble for them.”
“Who?”
“Partisan people dat hadn’t got no coats and boots. Dey make trouble wid de Commissar so de Commissar move dem on last night.”
Major Gordon had with the Commissar. The Anti-Fascist Theatre Group was organizing a Liberation Concert and had politely asked him to supply words and of English anti-fascist songs, so that all the allies would be suitably represented. Major Gordon had to explain that his country had no anti-fascist songs and no patriotic songs that anyone cared to sing. The Commissar noted this further evidence of Western decadence with grim satisfaction. For once there was no need to elaborate. The Commissar understood. It was just as he had been told years before in Moscow. It had been the same thing in Spain. The Attlee Brigade would never sing.
When the was over Major Gordon said: “I see the Jews have moved.”
Bakic was left outside nowadays, and the intellectual young man acted as

Horace Vernet Judah and Tamar painting

Horace Vernet Judah and Tamar paintingJean Auguste Dominique Ingres Princesse Albert de Broglie paintingJean Auguste Dominique Ingres Ingres The Source painting
fortunate. I relied on Dr. Fe for my naturalization. Whom shall I turn to now? My wife thought that perhaps you could do something for us in England to make us British subjects.” haunted face told Miss Bombaum that she had not made herself clear.
“You’ve surely heard of the Underground? It’s”—she quoted from one of her recent articles on the subject—“it’s an alternative map of Europe, like a tracing overlying all the established frontiers and routes of communication. It’s the new world taking shape below the surface of the old. It’s the new ultra-national
“There is nothing I can do.”
“No, I suppose not. Nor in America?”
“Still less there.” guy who invited me hasn’t shown up.”
A ghastly fear, cold in that torrid

Winslow Homer Gloucester Harbor painting

Winslow Homer Gloucester Harbor paintingEdward Hopper The Long Leg paintingEdward Hopper The Camel's Hump painting
She was a neat, impersonal young woman, part midwife, part governess, part shop-walker, in manner. “Very Important Persons,” she replied without evident embarrassment.
“But is it all right for me to be here?”
“It is essential. You are a V.I.P.”
I wonder, thought Scott-King, how they treat quite ordinary, unimportant people?
There were two fellow-travellers, male and female, similarly distinguished, both bound for Bellacita, capital city of Neutralia; both, it presently transpired, guests of the Bellorius Celebration Committee.
The man was a familiar type to Scott-King; his name Whitemaid, his calling academic, a dim man like himself, much of an age with him.
“Tell me,” said Whitemaid, “tell me frankly”—and he looked furtive as men do when they employ that ambiguous expression—“have you ever heard of the worthy Bellorius?”
“I know his work. I have seldom heard it discussed.”

Pierre Auguste Renoir Au bord de la mer painting

Pierre Auguste Renoir Au bord de la mer paintingLorenzo Lotto Venus and Cupid paintingLorenzo Lotto Mystic Marriage of St Catherine painting
met him in the London library, late one afternoon.
“Are you going to the young Simmondses’?” he said.
“Not so far as I know.”
“They’ve a party today.”
“Roger never said anything to me about it.”
“He told me to tell everyone. I’m just on my way there now. Why don’t you come along?”
So we took a taxi to Victoria Square, for which I paid.
As it turned out, Roger and Lucy were not expecting anyone. He went to work now, in the afternoons, with a committee who were engaged in some in sending supplies to the Red Army in China; he had only just come in and was in his bath. Lucy was listening to the six o’clock news on the wireless. She said, “D’you mind if I keep it on for a minute? There may be something about the dock strike in Madras. Roger will be down in a minute.”
She did not say anything about a drink so Basil said, “May I go and look for the

Fabian Perez Full Moon Empty Heart painting

Fabian Perez Full Moon Empty Heart paintingFabian Perez For a Better Life III paintingFabian Perez Brunette painting
There was little of spring to be seen here. The two plane trees were bare; under the sooty laurels last year’s leaves lay rotting. It was never a of any character. Once, before the flats came, we used to dine there sometimes, in extreme discomfort under the catalpa tree; for years now it had been a no-man’s-land isolating the studio at the further end; on one side, behind a trellis, were some neglected frames and beds where my father had once tried to raise French vegetables. The mottled concrete of the flats, with its soil pipes and fire escapes and its rash of iron-framed casement windows, shut out half the sky. The tenants of these flats were forbidden, in their leases, to do their laundry, but the owners had long since despaired of a genteel appearance, and you could tell which of the rooms were occupied by the stockings hanging to dry along the windowsills.
In his death my father’s privacy was still respected and no one had laid dust-sheets in the studio. “Too Big?” stood as he had left it on the easel. More than half was finished. My father made copious and elaborate studies for his pictures and worked quickly when

Paul Cezanne Mount Sainte Victoire painting

Paul Cezanne Mount Sainte Victoire paintingPaul Cezanne Leda with Swan paintingPaul Cezanne House and Trees painting
Then she looked at the label more closely. “But how foolish of him. He’s put Tom’s name on it.”
“There was this book for Master Gervase,” said the nurse, producing a volume labelled “Gervase with best wishes from Uncle Ted.”
“Of course the parcels have been confused at the shop,” said Mrs. Kent-Cumberland. “This can’t have been meant for Tom. Why, it must have cost six or seven pounds.”
She changed the labels and went downstairs to supervise the decoration of the Christmas tree, glad to have rectified an obvious error of justice.
Next morning the presents were revealed.
“Oh, Ger. You are lucky,” said Tom, inspecting the motor-car. “May I ride in it?”
“Yes, only be careful. Nanny says it was awfully expensive.”
Tom rode it twice round the room. “May I take it in the sometimes?”
“Yes. You can have it when I’m hunting.”
Later in the week they wrote to thank their uncle for his presents.
Gervase wrote: “Dear Uncle Ted, Thank you for the lovely present. It’s lovely. The

Rembrandt The Return of the Prodigal Son painting

Rembrandt The Return of the Prodigal Son painting
Thomas Gainsborough The Blue Boy painting
Edvard Munch The Scream painting
that Etty was back at Cornphillip and about to have a baby. It was a son. Billy was very pleased about it and I don’t believe that the boy ever knew, until quite lately, at luncheon with Lady Metroland, when my nephew Simon told him, in a rather ill-natured way. Millicent Blade had a notable head of naturally fair hair; she had a docile and affectionate disposition, and an expression of face which changed with lightning rapidity from amiability to laughter and from laughter to respectful interest. But the feature which, more than any other, endeared her to sentimental Anglo-Saxon manhood was her nose.
“As for poor Ralph’s boy, I am afraid he has come to very little good. He must be middle-aged by now. No one ever seems to hear anything of him. Perhaps he was killed in war. I cannot remember.
“And here comes Ross with the tray; and I see that Mrs. Samson has made more of those little scones which you always seem to enjoy so much. I am sure, dear Miss Myers, you would suffer much less from your migraine if you avoided them. But you take so little care of yourself, dear Miss Myers ... Give one to Manchu.”

Paul Cezanne Table Corner painting

Paul Cezanne Table Corner paintingWilliam Bouguereau Innocence paintingBill Brauer The Gold Dress painting
yes, ever so much more. Quite a different thing altogether.”
“Very well, then. I do not propose to do anything about a divorce for a year. You shall have time to think it over. I am leaving next week for the Uraricoera.”
“Golly, where’s that?”
“I am not perfectly sure. Somewhere in Brazil, I think. , I mean, and all that.”
“You have obviously already discovered that I am a very ordinary person.”
“Now, Paul, don’t be disagreeable—oh, there’s the telephone. It’s probably Tony. If it is, d’you mind terribly if I talk to him alone for a bit?”
But in the ten days of preparation that followed she showed greater tenderness, putting off her soldier twice in order to accompany Henty to the shops where he was choosing his equipment and insisting on his purchasing a worsted cummerbund. On his last evening

Thomas Kinkade Paris City of Lights painting

Thomas Kinkade Paris City of Lights paintingThomas Kinkade New Horizons paintingThomas Kinkade Mountain Paradise painting
Eventually they arrived in Japanese territory. Here all Russians were suspect, and it devolved on the Frenchman to get them safe conduct to the nearest French Consulate.
Boris’s chief aim now was to join his mother in America. His friend had to return to report himself in Paris, so here they parted.
They took an affectionate farewell, promising to see each other again when their various affairs were settled. But each in his heart doubted whether chance would ever bring them together again.
Two years elapsed, and then one day in spring a poorly-dressed young Russian found himself in Paris, with three hundred francs in his pocket and all his worldly possessions in a kitbag.
He was very different from the debonair Boris who had left the military academy for Kolchak’s army. America had proved to be something very different from the Land of Opportunity he had imagined.
His mother sold the jewels and a few personal possessions she had

Raphael The Holy Family painting

Raphael The Holy Family paintingWilliam Bouguereau The Broken Pitcher paintingWilliam Bouguereau Love Takes Flight painting
Didn’t he do those pictures in Richard’s room? Richard, will you invite me to meet him one day?”
“No, Imogen, really I couldn’t.”
“Then someone must—Gabriel, you will, please. I insist on meeting him.”
Dear children, so young, so chic. “Called Ernest Vaughan, you wouldn’t have met him. Just the most awful person in the world. Gabriel was perfectly sweet to him.”
Dear boys, so young, really, he’s getting rather impossible.”
“I can’t tell you what
“Well, I think it’s perfectly beastly of you all. But I will meet him all the same. I’ll get Adam to arrange it.”
The table was ruined.
“Edwards, I think it’s almost fine enough to have

Mary Cassatt Tea painting

Mary Cassatt Tea paintingEdward Hopper Gas paintingEdward Hopper Ground Swell painting
near the Shaft turned to look.
"Go to him now," I bade My Ladyship. I might have added certain further directions, thanking her too for having fetched me where I had to go; but she agreed this time so readily, and with so knowing a smile, I said no more. Triple-T, once out of the crowd, browsed placidly; I handed his leash to Anastasia and stepped past the guard.
"Achtung, Stinkkäfer!"he cried. He referred of course to the goat-dip on me, mighty indeed the perfume whereof; but his epithet was so exactly inapposite, I laughed aloud. He swung his billy; I parried with my stick and hoofed him a clean one in the balls. Before he could let go of himself to shoot, a pair of white helmets came over from the dignitaries' stand. One intervened in the names of the Chancellor and Harold Bray, both of whom he declared had authorized my admission -- murmurs went through the near bystanders at this news, and the fallen guard put by his pistol with a curse.
"You call that Grand-Tutoring?" Stoker shouted. He had started for My

Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life painting

Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life paintingGustav Klimt Expectation (gold foil) paintingGustav Klimt Death and Life painting
dead! Stick in hand I stood, as years before, transfixed this time as much by wonder as by fright. I had retraced my way; had I also, in some wise, rewound the very tape of time? The buck was young and full of juice, despite his leanness -- younger than R.'s Tom had been on the day I slew him, or Tommy's Thomas when I'd set out for Great Mall. In the instant before he was upon me I guessed he was no ghost, but Tommy's Tommy's Tom: that Triple-T who saw the light not long before my departure! Joyfully I sprang aside; he cracked the fence-rail -- splendid son of splendid sires! -- and neither dazed by the collision nor tempted to escape through the broken fence, spun about and recharged me at once. Anastasia squealed. Out of practice as I was, slackened by my terms in Main Detention and the of human studentdom, I durstn't try to pin him; I parried, passed, and fended as I could, calling him all the while by name and giving him to smell, between charges, my wrapper and the amulet-of-Freddie. These intrigued him, and when at last I stripped myself (retying the a.-of-F. about my loins) and flung the wrapper over his head, its scent stirred in him some deep ancestral memory. His mood changed altogether; he permitted me to scratch his head,

Winslow Homer The Red Canoe painting

Winslow Homer The Red Canoe paintingDaniel Ridgway Knight Daniel Ridgway Knight paintingHorace Vernet The lion hunter painting
I was too sobered by the dilation of the iris-shuttered port, like a great black pupil, to reply. I tried to think of My Ladyship, as appropriate to what might be my last moments on campus -- but my mind and heart were blank as my ID-card; if Anastasia's image appeared there at all, I regarded it without emotion. Nothing happened. Bray handed me my card, which had been returned into the console-cup in lieu of reply-cards, I presumed, we having made no inquiries. He pointed out as I pursed it that the exit-port was likewise impregnable; I had, alas, no choice but to reply to WESCAC's questions -- always assuming I was not EATen before they were posed. Naturally I was free to make deliberately "false" replies, to demonstrate either my contempt for the examiner or my conviction that Failure is Passage; he supposed too I might choose to push no buttons at all. He could not but imagine, however, that in that event I would remain in the Belly forever.
If I felt chagrin at this hitch in my plans, or suspected Bray of tricking me after all into changing them, or wondered how he himself would leave the Belly, if I chose not to -- I can't recall it. Neither did I care, as before, whether he came with me or escaped by some

John Singer Sargent The Rialto

John Singer Sargent The RialtoThe Daughters of Edward Darley BoitThe Chess Game
him, I could not say what. And while it was true that I no longer regarded myself as a Grand Tutor, I was not blind to the possibility that this opinion, like others I'd held, was erroneous, or that in my heart of hearts I might be holding it alongside the conviction that Failure is Passage.
"Ah," he said. "To the Belly, then, by all means!"
I then explained that while I had no fear of WESCAC's EATing me -- which it well might do -- I would not acknowledge its right to examine me, or anyone else's save my own, for reasons that I'd readily set forth to him, but did not regard as the affair of the popular press. To the chagrin therefore of the reporters (some of whom intimated openly that they would "get even" with me) we made our way to the main lobby of Tower Hall, where, as on that fateful night some terms before, a crowd was collecting in the flickerish light, their anxiety nourished by alarums and rumors. Them too Bray urged to wait at the Belly-exit; he and I then took the special lift to WESCAC's Mouth -- a lift guarded now by a squad of ROTC cadets in riot-uniform on account of the general emergency.

Allan R.Banks paintings

Allan R.Banks paintings
Andrea Mantegna paintings
Arthur Hughes paintings
The aide chuckled lazily, not at all the brisk chap I'd lunched with last time around. "At least you've got fuel in your tank; that's more than the Chief has."
I advised Stoker not to accompany me inside, as I thought it fitter his brother come out to him. He yawned and scratched his armpit.
"Forget it."
"Nobody's allowed in while X is there," the aide explained. No use, I knew, to try Laertides's trick on them. "Unless you happen to know the password," he added with a smile. "Which you don't."
I considered. "Could it beNothing in excess?"
Stoker frowned. "What kind of talk is that?"
"How aboutPass All Fail All?"
The brown man shook his head slightly, not very interested.
"E pluribus unum? Failure is Passage?"
"Those sound like flunkwords to me," Stoker said.
I searched my memory for Maxims."Veritas vos liberabit? Gnothi seauton? Don't burn your bridges at both ends?"
"Give it up," the aide advised.
A little angrily I said, "I don't think thereis any password!"
He shrugged and laid his hand on the gate-latch as a party issued from the

Thomas Cole paintings

Thomas Cole paintings
Theodore Robinson paintings
Titian paintings
and he tumbled head-first to the floor, breaking his eyeglass-frames and, I feared, his skull. I sprang down. Tears stood in Dr. Eierkopf's eyes; he rubbed his cranium and spat out a sunflower seed.
"Ech,"he said weakly. "Be glad you're not a bird, Goat-Boy."
I propped him against a lab-stool and wiped guano off his head with a page of old graph-paper. At sight of it he wept. It was not Croaker's rampage that had undone him and his great research, he managed to declare, but my parting remark about chicken and egg. He had, incredibly, forgot to deal with that ancient question in his otherwise exhaustive treatise, and though stunned by my reminder, he'd been so confident of reasoning out the answer on the basis of his other findings that he'd bid Croaker proceed with the application of the Infinite Divisor. Not to miss the triumphant sight of its operation, he'd donned his high-resolution lenses and had Croaker balance him atop the escapement; as the Divisor's twin milling-heads shaved towards him, ever-halving the thickness of the fulcrum's edge, he had

Titian paintings

Titian paintings
Theodore Chasseriau paintings
Ted Seth Jacobs paintings
was set to EAT anybody that even came near its Riot-storage. I don't know who your parents are, but I bet WESCAC does: you must have got the same Prenatal Aptitude-Tests that all New Tammany babies get, because when George opened the Belly door and fetched you out, there was this official PAT-card hung around your neck -- the only thing you had on. No name was on it, and no IQ; just in the place where it usually says what a kid should major in, WESCAC had printed the wordsPass All Fail All . . ."
"By George!" I exclaimed.
Max gestured with his open palms. "By George it didn't mean a thing, or by me either when I saw it. It don't make sense how one student could pass everything and flunk everything too. But if it meant you were going to do one or the other, like be acum laude Graduate or flunk out altogether, there were plenty students like that in the old days, and nobody put them out to die on account of it."
The only likely hypothesis, he declared, was that my birth had been a threat of

Titian Bacchus and Ariadne painting

Titian Bacchus and Ariadne paintingLorenzo Lotto St Catherine of Alexandria paintingCaravaggio The Supper at Emmaus painting
property. Neither would Graduate ifhe were Grand Tutor; none save the generous should pass. "Butnyet!" he would then avow further. Had he called her a mere rapee? Insufficienthood! There was no merit in being robbed; that mischance befell miser and philanthropist alike. Anastasia, he maintained, was like a man who not only gives alms to the poor and greedy but bestows his whole among them, share and share alike, lest they be led to steal it: "A Reginald Hector of sexness!"
I smiled at this analogy, ironically more telling than he knew, but declined to argue the point or disabuse him of his esteem for the former chancellor. It was between him and Greene that the argument raged, as it had since their first encounter at Stoker's Randy-Thursday party; only now, thanks to Greene's disillusionment, it was flunkèd versus passèd promiscuity rather than the latter versus passèd maidenhood. Otherwise they were the cordialest companions -- except when Greene's bitter hallucinations and Leonid's epileptoid fits made one or the other unapproachable

Edvard Munch The Scream painting

Edvard Munch The Scream paintingGustav Klimt Mother and Child detail from The Three Ages of Woman paintingRembrandt Samson And Delilah painting
Once we were alone in the little compartment her self-consciousness returned: she let go my elbow and turned her eyes from the poked-out front of my gown. To put her at ease I said, "Pardon my erection," and assured her that despite my obvious desire, to which Love must positively now be added, I did not intend to mount her.
"Don'ttalk that way!" she pleaded.
"There's no help for it," I declared sadly; "in fact, I doubt very much that we'll ever mate again. Not because you're married -- I haven't decided quitewhat to make of yet. But I think we might be brother and sister, so we probably shouldn't copulate."
I had been going to recommend in addition that she forsake all other bedmates as well, in order to remove any doubts about the motives of her famous sympathy; but she paled so at mention of our possible relation that I judged it prudenter