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| Jean-Baptiste Corot (France) Portrait of Camille Valléda ca. 1868-70 oil on panel Louvre |
"We will never realize quite clearly enough what a shameful thing death is. In the end, we never try to fight it head on; doctors and scientists merely establish a pact with it, they fight on points of detail, they slow it down by a few months, a few years, but it all amounts to nothing. What we need to do is attack the roots of the problem in a big collective effort in which each of us will work towards his own survival and everyone else's.
That's why – because one of us has to give an example – I decided to harness myself to the project that's been close to my heart for a long time: preserving oneself whole, keeping a trace of all the moments of our lives, all the objects that have surrounded us, everything we've said and what's been said around us, that's my goal. The task is vast, and my means are frail. Why didn't I start before? Almost everything dealing with the period that I first set about saving (6 September 1944 to 24 July 1950) has been lost, thrown away, through culpable negligence. It was only with infinite difficulty that I was able to find the few elements that I am presenting here. To prove their authenticity, to situate them precisely, all this has been possible only as the result of ceaseless questioning and minutely detailed research.
But the effort still to be made is great. So many years will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labelled in a safe place – secure against theft, fire and nuclear war – from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point. Then, being thus assured of never dying, I may finally rest."
– from Research and Presentation of All that Remains of my Childhood by Christian Boltanski, originally published in French in 1969, translated by Shaun Whiteside and republished in Christian Boltanski (Phaidon, 1997)
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| Anonymous painter (England) Portrait of Harriet Taylor Mill, Mrs John Stuart Mill ca. 1834 oil on canvas National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Andrea Appiani (Milan) Portrait of General Desaix 1801 oil on canvas Musée national du Château de Versailles |
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| John Everett Millais (England) Portrait of Kate Dolan as Portia 1886 oil on canvas Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
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| Thomas Sully (USA) Self-portrait 1807 oil on canvas Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Emile Jean Horace Vernet (France) Portrait of a Lady 1831 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Anne-Louis Girodet (France) Portrait of Jacques-Joseph de Cathelineau ca. 1822 oil on canvas private collection |
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| Robert Lefèvre (France) Portrait of a woman holding a pencil and drawing book ca. 1808 oil on canvas Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
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| Tommaso Minardi (Rome) Self-portrait 1803 oil on canvas Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence |
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| Ary Scheffer (Netherlands / France) Death of Géricault 1824 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| James Tissot (France) Study for a portrait of the family of the Marquis de Miramon 1865 oil on paper Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut |
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| Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (Denmark) Seated model 1839 oil on canvas Louvre |
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| Michael Rothenstein (England) Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden 1933 watercolor National Portrait Gallery, London |
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| Lucian Freud (England) Portrait of Baron H.H. Thyssen-Bornemisza 1981-82 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |