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On June 24, 1826, eighty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson responded to Thomas Weightman's invitation to attend the celebration in Washington, D.C., of the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This is…
Henry Van Dyke, Jr. (1852-1933) was sent as United States ambassador to Holland and Luxemburg in 1913, just before the Great War (World War I) erupted. Perhaps it was that…
NIneteenth-century poetry and exploding Looney Tunes villains. Thomas Moore set foot on the road to fame and a regular income in 1808, with the publication of the first of ten…
Years ago I bought this poster of an exuberant bouquet by Jan van Huysum (1682-1749), which was at the time on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It's…
Athens Square (corner of 30th Avenue and 30th St.) is in Astoria, a New York City neighborhood with a sizable Greek-American population. Over the past twenty-five years, residents have partnered…
There's a joke that all the famous paintings whose location you can't remember are in the Museo di Capodimonte, a palace built in 1738 atop a hill in Naples. Among many…
Frederick Church and Albert Bierstadt painted huge, magnificent canvases of the American West and other exotic locales: people paid just to look at them. The Metropolitan Museum's site describes the viewing…
Because I’m a mom who writes about painting and sculpture, friends often ask me how I’d introduce a kid to art. The suggestions below are a combination of what I…
The (relatively) new Staten Island Ferry Terminal is decorated with excerpts from Edna St. Vincent Millay's 1922 poem "Recuerdo" ("I remember" or "souvenir"). The views from the terminal and the…
On July 14, 2017, a sculpture of Clarence Darrow will be dedicated on the lawn of the Rhea County Courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. It will join a sculpture of William Jennings…
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