Using found objects gathered in and around New York City and composing them carefully in a box of his own construction, Joseph Cornell followed the Surrealist principle of irrational juxtaposition. Cornell’s balls, bracelets, butterfly imagery, and broken goblets evoke a nostalgia that softens their unsettling combination. Here, the phrase Ligne Ostende-Douvres implies travel across the English Channel between Ostend, Belgium and Dover, England. Cornell’s friend Robert Motherwell mused, “What kind of man is this, who…has reconstructed the 19th-century ‘grand tour’ of Europe for his mind’s eye more vividly than those who took it, who was not born then and has never been abroad…?” Recalling Cornell’s familiarity with multiple modernist movements, Motherwell marveled at his ability to “incorporate this sense of the past in something that could only have been conceived of at present.”