Or were they a mediocre painter's failed attempt at the limning of a ghost?

And the dance turned out to be a pretty telling limning of a complex man-woman relationship, from violence to teasing to tenderness.

There's some pretty efficient limning of the historical context, but some linguistic and reporting overkill too.

"Limning: or Why Tillie Writes."

Mr. Persico cites that as a formative lesson in the rewards of honesty, not the conscious limning of a campaigner's profile.

She waved her hands, and the faintest limning of blue fire a fingertip wide started above their heads and ran down before them like a burning fuse.

He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids.

He was the author of an important treatise on miniature painting, now called The Art of Limning (c. 1600), preserved in the Bodleian Library.

John Hoskins painted a limning of Hayls, a drawing of which was made by George Vertue (now in the British Museum)

The 19th-century scholar George Scharf argued on the basis of the inconsistencies in the lights and shadows that the original image would have been "either a limning or a crayon drawing".

For all its evocative force and poignant candor, Ms. Cofer's limning of the worlds the Viventes move in, with which each new generation must variously contend, is blemished by frequent exoticism.

Has he forgotten the Elizabethan miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, in "The Art of Limning" (c. 1600), gently warning against falling in love with the smile he so minutely and precisely describes?

But the quiet urgency of Ms. Hynes's production derives more from the limning of the small strains tugging at the tight fabric of a community of individuals, each bedeviled by a private struggle.

The masters mentioned in The Art of Limning are Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII's court painter, and Albrecht Dürer, who he probably only knew from his prints.

But for clarity of vision, nothing in the speech matched Mr. Clinton's limning of Washington as a "place of intrigue and calculation" where the public interest gets ground into the midway dust of a circus of greed.

After the ambition and emotional amplitude of Ms. Minot's last novel ("Evening," 1998), "Rapture" feels like a throwback to her early, miniaturistic work but minus even that work's limning of emotional states with economical precision.

His take on the complications in Dade's life is sophisticated and thoughtful, especially on the ambiguities of that 'relationship' with Pablo, while his limning of the growing friendship with Alex is deeply satisfying, never striking a discordant emotional note."

Ultimately, as historian Wallace Stegner and other Brooks allies had prophesied, Brooks's scrupulously-researched book proved a boon to the LDS church through her careful limning of the challenges facing the church in its earliest days, as well as showing the toll the Massacre took on church members themselves.

I looked at my hands and saw them glowing, limned in blue light.

He saw himself through their eyes, a figure limned with brilliance.

There was something about them, limned by the green water and the bright sun.

A tall, thin figure stood limned against the light inside.

I knew no one in the dale who had the talent for limning.

As the light grew, a spark limned it here and there.

Life, as she limns it, is too brutal to enjoy.

Figures appeared, limned against the light, pouring out from inside.

And at last it was time for the marquist to start limning.

He could see a figure limned against the magenta sky.

In the new world limned by the report, ethnicity and race are moving categories.

A fire started up somewhere, limning them all in orange and yellow.

She turned toward him, and her features were limned in the firelight.

At the end a light limned a closed door.

The fire had burned down, and the lines of his body were limned with shadow.

He was limned by light from the company mess.

A figure rose from the rubble, stood limned against the glow.

At one end, the neon limned the reclining body of a woman.

The risk is that by trying to limn something called white culture, you make a fetish of it.

Sunlight limned her legs against the white dress she wore.

One moment, all were statues, limned in the different headlamps' light.

There had to be some new territory to be limned.

The servant girl stood limned in the hole through the panel.

The sun was setting, limning the distant town in sharp relief.

She saw three figures silhouetted in the light from the open door, red hair limned with gold.