Prowling through my database of art recommendations past, present, and future, I noticed that quite a few of the artworks come from the first 15 years of the nineteenth century.…
From February 2017 until the end of the year, I sent 157 items to my Sunday Recommendations list. For recurring supporters, I recommended 31 more. The items in this post…
“The Bird,” by Victor Hugo Be like the bird, who Pausing in his flight On limb too slight Feels it give way beneath him Yet sings Knowing he has wings.…
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a few blocks from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Isabella Stewart (b. 1840), daughter of a wealthy New York merchant, grew up in Manhattan…
King Lear opens with Lear demanding that his daughters tell him how much they love him, before he divides his kingdom between them. In this ten-foot-wide painting of that scene,…
Elijah Boardman (1760-1823) In 1790, when Elijah was thirty years old, John Ramage painted his two-inch high portrait on ivory. From it, you'd probably recognize Elijah if you met him on…
In college, I had a poster of Autumn Landscape on my wall. It's much better on a computer screen, which provides some of the glow that the back-lighting does at the…
On my one and only, very brief visit to Rome, I didn't have time to visit the Borghese. Here's why I mind. Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633) and the Borghese Collection…
The first part of this essay includes an introduction and a section on drawings for study. The second part is the beginning of the discussion of drawings as compositional studies…
The Musee d'Orsay opened in 1986, in the former Gare d'Orsay in Paris - a Beaux Arts stone-and-steel railway terminal. The museum mostly houses French painting, sculpture, furniture, and photographs…