Maud Taber-Thomas's 2014 show at Susan Calloway Fine art in Washington, DC took its name from a line from the Tennyson Poem Maud: A Monodrama. The show featured fourteen large portrait paintings and one charcoal drawing, which were all inspired by literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The artworks were displayed with quotations from the books and poems that inspired them.
And the musk of the rose is blown.
To faint in his light, and to die.
What does it see that we do not see?
We have lived our lives in a land of dreams!
The taxi drew up at a wonderful shop—the sort of shop I would never dare to walk through without a reason. We went in by way of the glove and stocking department, but there were things from other departments just dotted about; bottles of scent and a little glass tree with cherries on it and a piece of white branched coral on a sea-green chiffon scarf. Oh, it was an artful place—it must make people who have money want to spend it madly!
The pale grey carpets were as springy as moss and the air was scented; it smelled a bit like bluebells but richer, deeper.
'T is you that are the music, not your song.
Or single notes amid a glorious throng.
The Love which moves the Sun and all the stars!
Directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize.
What can the biographer do when his subject has put him in the predicament in which Orlando has now put us? Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore—since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now—there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one's beads, blow one's nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done. Orlando sat so still that you could have heard a pin drop. Would, indeed, that a pin had dropped! That would have been life of a kind.
Yes, but where leaves the Rose of Yesterday?
And a hush with the setting moon.