Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay.

Leon Bonnat
Rodin, portraits of Victor Hugo


Maria Wiik


Golucho

Flesh and blood, fish and fowl

Van Gogh
Antonio Lopez-Garcia
Andrea Lazarov

Chardin
Gallen-Kallela
Stanhope Forbes

This post following on from the last makes me seem a bit obsessed with carcasses. Maybe I am. I never met a picture of a dead fish I didn't like. But I think the quality that attracts is not the desire for horror or gore but the near sympathetic, clear-sighted observation of small things which were once alive. Of course this is all intermingled with the Dutch passion for showing off the sheer volume of seafood they could afford to pile onto one buffet table, and then the clunkingly metaphorical vanitas genre. But I think there is something truer, a kind of honesty towards life and death without crowing or crying about one or the other.