Philosophy in the Bedroom

I have given in & finally included an image with a poem at Series Magritte rather than just linking to it.

I have always been reluctant to do so, for three reasons. The first is that I am afraid of infringing someone's copyright, & so have preferred to point to rather than provide. Secondly, lots of jpegs mean a slow download. But, most importantly, I have preferred to have the poems stand on their own, with the painting something to be looked at after the poem, even though I position the link alongside the title.

Magritte produced maybe a thousand paintings during his life. I have one book, The Portable Magritte, that contains 400 reproductions of his paintings, painted objects & sculptures. I have a couple of other books which probably, between them, contain another 100 or so paintings that are not in the Portable. Plus, in my wanderings & searches on the net, I've come across a large number of works that are not in any of my books. But to complicate matters, he did several variations of a significant number, using the same title, some, I'm guessing, in response to commissioned requests, others because he wanted to revisit a theme. Some of these are years apart, some done in the same year.

So I write a poem based around one of his paintings that I have a reproduction of, go looking for a link to it, find the title, the year's correct, but the painting is different to the one I've based the poem on. Occasionally they can be quite suitable as a substitute, but at other times it's like they're different paintings. Or, you find the actual painting that you want, but it's three-quarters of the way down a page containing 50 paintings.

Which is why I've extracted & pasted / posted this painting. There are three of the same name - plus a Homage to Mack Sennett that is sometimes reproduced under the Philosophy title - but this one is the pubic one that prompted the poem. So rather than link to a site where the painting appears only after a couple of minutes, way down the page, I have included Magritte's homage to Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade.