‘Girl with Dead Canary’ Postcard revised by Ruth Claxton (2007) At the Galleria Paolo Curti / Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co. for the Caprice exhibition In the field of the figurative arts “Caprice” was a term used to indicate certain oddities, jests enjoyed by society as things permitted by “license”. These were works in which a taste for the ribald disrupted norms, mingling the profane and the sacred, the profane through which the body blooms or withers, a dimension in which elements blend, roles are swapped, and signs appear precisely where we never expected to find them
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Gustav Klimt Beethoven Frieze by griffinlb on Flickr.section from Gustav Klimt’s ‘The Beethoven Frieze’ at the Secessionist House in Vienna
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‘Silence is Golden’ series by Martha Rich I think this is the most relevant piece of illustration ever xoxo
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The Allegory of the Four Seasons - Bartolomeo Manfredi (1882-1622) Manfredi’s picture has been interpreted as an allegory of the Four Seasons, linked to the iconography of the Five Senses and explained as the four ages of man exemplified by various phases of love. There can be little doubt that its primary theme is the Four Seasons. The four figures, crowded behind a stone slab laden with fruit, are clearly identifiable as Spring (a young woman crowned with roses and playing a lute), Autumn (the young man adorned with a Bacchic crown of grapes), Summer (a bare-breasted woman who turns and stares directly at the viewer) and Winter (a shivering old man in a fur hat who is wrapped in a blanket). Nevertheless, their arrangement does not suggest the normal progression of the year and their interaction suggests a second level of meaning. The rich array of fruit carefully placed before the figures is composed entirely of autumnal produce: grapes, pears, apples, figs, a pomegranate and a squash. This is clearly the domain of Autumn, who kisses the lute-playing Spring but at the same time embraces Summer, who wears a sprig of his wheat in her hair. Summer holds a small round transparent mirror as a symbol of the Origin of Love. Autumn’s kiss and embrace signify that music is born of love, while Winter’s exclusion is a sad reminder that in old age one is less inclined towards amorous sentiments. Manfredi’s facial features and tightly compressed composition find close parallels in Caravaggio’s Musicians. The brightly illuminated fruit, so carefully displayed on cold, grey stone, and Summer’s frank confrontation of the viewer over her bare shoulder seem to recall Caravaggio’s Sick Bacchus explicitly. 
In the Wild North by Ivan Shishkin (1891)  (Russian: Ива́н Ива́нович Ши́шкин; 25 January 1832 – 20 March 1898) was a Russian landscape painter closely associated with the Peredvizhniki movement. Ivan Shishkin owned a dacha in Vyra, south of St. Petersburg. There he painted some of his finest landscapes. His works are notable for poetic depiction of seasons in the woods, wild nature, animals and birds. He died in 1898, in St. Petersburg, Russia, while working on his new painting. A minor planet 3558 Shishkin, discovered by Soviet astronomer Lyudmila Zhuravlyova in 1978 is named after him
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Almeida Junior, Jose Ferraz de (1850-1899) - O descanso da modelo, 1882, Museu Nacional de Belas
Winter by Ivan Shishkin (1890)
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The struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words to regain his genuine self, has been man’s principal occupation ever since he first grew this enormous surplus of brain. But to do it for themselves, they have invented art.  —Ted Hughes, Words and Experience (1967)
‘Nocturne in Black and Gold - The Falling Rocket’ (1877)  - J.A.M. Whistler, selected from ‘London Nocturnes’ The painting depicts a fireworks show in the night sky over Battersea Bridge in an industrial London city park. The gold flecks and splatters represent the exploded fireworks in the night sky. The fireworks light up the sky, producing a glow in the thick air and billowing smoke. The artist was more interested in conveying atmospheric effects than he was in providing details of the actual scene.
The Vision of Faust (1878) - Luis Ricardo Falero