Ego is a rat on the sinking ship of being.

LOOMIS DEAN

Balthus with his model and niece Frederique Tison, 1956.

(Source: less-ismore)

Willy Ronis

Lovers at the Bastille

Paris, 1957

From Willy Ronis

(Source: liquidnight)

View of Umbrella Rock, Lookout Mountain

Chattanooga, Tennessee (vicinity), 1864

[From the Library of Congress]

(Source: liquidnight)

Robert Doisneau

Monsieur Beauvoir, 1950

From Paris

(Source: liquidnight)

Victor Schrager 

Peregrine Falcon

From Bird Hand Book

(Source: liquidnight)

“There are roughly three New Yorks.

There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable.

Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.

Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.”

— E.B. White, Here is New York

(Source: liquidnight)

Jeanloup Sieff

Ambroisine from behind

Paris, 1972

From Jeanloup Sieff 

(Source: liquidnight)

Pere Borrell del Caso, Escaping Criticism, 1874 (via 09912311)

“This del Caso painting is an exemplary exposition of the Trompe-l’œil , a French term meaning ‘deceive the eye’). It is an art technique involving extremely realistic imagery in order to create the optical illusion that the depicted objects appear in three dimensions.”

(via nickkahler)

The Reclining Nude in Portraiture I: Facing Right

1. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus, c. 1510
2. Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Nymph of the Spring, c. 1537
3. Titian, Venus of Urbino, c. 1538
4. Édouard Manet, Olympia, 1863

_

(Source: nickkahler)

The Reclining Nude in Portraiture II: Facing Left

1. Francisco Goya, La Maja Desnuda, 1800
2. Gustave Courbet, Nude Woman Reclining, 1862
3. Alexandre Cabanel, The Birth of Venus, 1863
4. Jules Joseph Lefebvre, Mary Magdalene In The Cave, 1876

_

(Source: nickkahler)