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Portrait by Rembrandt in the Toledo Museum Deanne Bayer |
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Caved cheeks grooved like weathered stone, bristles too sparse for a beard, as if the skeleton of your face could not support its weight, your shoulders slump beneath a fur-collared coat whose richness can never be woven from enough warmth to stream your blood back towards youth, or spark the sockets of your desolate eyes. The coat belongs to the artist, who keeps |
such sumptuous costumes at his studio in the Hebrew Quarter to adorn the derelicts plucked from the streets he pays pennies to pose and delights in painting so much more than the burghers who pay him - the desolation belongs to you. But, here, on this canvas for all of time, you are a nobleman in a fur-collared coat, the stubble on your chin an idiosyncrasy of an aristocrat  |
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