Mental spaces

Todd Oakley
Table of contents

If you visit the Frick Gallery in New York City and you wander into the Living Hall and address the fireplace from the center of the room, examining the Hans Holbein portraits of Sir Thomas More on your left and Sir Thomas Cromwell on your right, you are likely to get the rather odd sensation that Cromwell is watching More. This was certainly my experience, and its intersubjective nature is born out in comments I overheard during a visit. One person remarked “Cromwell is staring at More”, to which a listener paraphrased the same sentiment to their straggling companion, “He's looking at him”. Learning that Henry Clay Frick himself collected each of these paintings and arranged them in just this way nearly a hundred years ago, I made the following assertion to my companion: “Frick has Cromwell staring at More.” Each of these utterances appears to its speakers as fairly innocuous. None of them, I predict, will be quoted as epigrams of some literary merit in the way one might quote lines from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray:

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