
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1

A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.

Circus people stand together in an empty landscape without looking at each other. The Rose Period at its largest and most wistful.

Goya put himself at an easel in the shadows, as Velázquez had, and painted the royal family looking vacant, pompous or merely plain.

Eleven of the painter's family on a shaded terrace near Montpellier. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight.

President, wife, child, bishop and general, all inflated into balloons and posed with great solemnity in front of a volcano.