Over the next few weeks, I'll be posting photos taken at Brookgreen Gardens, Murrells Inlet, S.C. Although the gardens are not at their most beautiful in November, the sculptures are…
About the National Gallery Unlike the Louvre and the Prado, whose earliest holdings came from royalty, the National Gallery evolved from a collection of 38 paintings purchased by the British…
About the Uffizi The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is housed in a huge complex whose core was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici from Giorgio Vasari. Vasari (who is today…
The Getty Museum opened Pacific Palisades in 1974. In 1982, with a bequest of $1.2 billion from Getty's will, it became the richest museum in the world. The collection of…
The Fogg Museum at Harvard University opened in 1895 in a Renaissance-style building designed by Richard Morris Hunt, whose Metropolitan Museum Wing D (facing Fifth Avenue) was completed within the…
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a couple dozen essays on the history of painting for BeyondBooks.com, a subscription service that provided online supplementary materials for high-school students. The site’s…
The Art Institute of Chicago was established in 1879, as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1893, its home has been a Beaux Arts building facing Michigan Drive that…
The core of the Prado's holdings came from the collection of the Spanish monarchs, whose taste ran to royal portraits and religious subjects, and whose money could buy the best…
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…
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…