A sparse, sombre portrait of lonely lives in the English countryside, blighted by drugs, phobia, boredom and loneliness.
The sombre portrait of the British monarchy's public and private response to the wave of grief that followed Princess Diana's death takes its place among a diverse roster of world premieres set to play in competition.
This wide stylistic reach was drawn together in Adès's first opera, Powder Her Face, an outwardly contentious, inwardly sombre portrait of the later lifestyle of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, after her sensational divorce in 1963.
Amid the sombre portraits and the crucifixion scenes, there are many delirious pleasures.
In Karel Škréta Šotnovoský, Bohemia possessed a painter of European stature; his sombre portraits and religious scenes are filled with a deeply serious mystical fervour.
Degas's principal subject was the human especially the female figure, which he explored in works ranging from the sombre portraits of his early years to the studies of laundresses, cabaret singers, milliners, and prostitutes of his Impressionist period.
While non-Khmer-reading visitors presume that the sombre portraits that coat the old prison's walls are all of victims, he points out that there is a whole section given over to photographs of the guards, differentiated only by the uniformity of their hairstyles.
Derek Cianfrance's film is a sombre, painful portrait of a toxic marriage, often touching and sometimes moving, though occasionally contrived and self-conscious in its effects.
There are perhaps echoes of Zurbaran in Courbet's sombre Self-Portrait of 1845-6 (Musée d'Orsay) and Manet's The Dead Toreador (1863-5, National Gallery of Art, Washington).
"Look at that face," she said, staring up at a sombre self-portrait by Sickert on the wall of her library, half of his face lighted, the other half in shadow.
Series like "Shadows" (enigmatic images from an illegible photo), "Oxidation Paintings" (Apollonian beauty achieved with piss on copper emulsion), "Camouflage" pictures (marvels of color), dashing collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and sombre self-portraits stand up to the strongest art made by anyone else, anywhere, at the time.
