All Essays
The American Wing
For Europeans, access to newly discovered parts of the world produced a culture that marked the unfamiliar and foreign as signifiers of wealth and status.
Emily Casey
April 1, 2018
Early portraits of Shakespeare preserve his appearance for posterity, while copies and variations indicate how perceptions of the poet-playwright shifted across later generations.
Constance C. McPhee
May 1, 2017
By the mid-nineteenth century, art devoted to Shakespeare was an international phenomenon.
Constance C. McPhee
November 1, 2016
For the sculptors whose works were displayed outdoors on the fairgrounds as well as in the Fine Arts Building, the World’s Columbian Exposition was a professional and aesthetic coming of age.
Thayer Tolles
September 1, 2016
Henry Kirke Brown (1814–1886), John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910), and Realism in American Sculpture
Together [Brown and Ward] redefined American sculpture in their choice of aesthetics, subjects, and materials.
Thayer Tolles
August 1, 2016
As early as the first century A.D., the Roman author Pliny the Elder acknowledged the appeal of unfinished works of art, stating that they are often more admired than those that are finished, because in them the artists’ actual thoughts are left visible.
Eva Reifert
August 1, 2016
Among the most influential and best-known American sculptors of the nineteenth century, Hiram Powers enjoyed international recognition for marbles executed in the prevailing Neoclassical style.
Caroline M. Culp and Thayer Tolles
April 1, 2016
Although most of MacMonnies’ works were conceived to be cast in bronze, the artist employed various media to achieve his creative goals.
Whitney Thompson
March 1, 2016
Thousands of women employed paintbrushes and china paints and decorated ceramic objects for their homes, as gifts, and for sale.
Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen and Barbara Wainwright Veith
April 1, 2013
Inness distinguished himself from the Hudson River School in the profound degree to which philosophical and spiritual ideas inspired his work. Ultimately, he became the leading American artist-philosopher of his generation.
Adrienne Baxter Bell
December 1, 2012