Paintings of extraordinary beauty and variety were made for the many royal courts of India during a golden age that unfolded in the sixteenth century and lasted well into the British period. In India, two artistic traditions converged. The indigenous Rajput culture produced exuberant, vibrantly colored, boldly patterned illustrations of Hindu myths and epics. The entirely different art of the Islamic Mughal invaders, subtle and naturalistic, mainly presented elegant scenes of court life and history. From the cross-fertilization of these two traditions, a multiplicity of highly original painting styles blossomed and flourished. While works of art originating in Mughal and Rajput courts are often treated separately, in this book paintings made in the major Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, and Pahari workshops are presented together, chronologically. Eighty-three exceptionally fine paintings are reproduced in full color. Each is accompanied by a paragraph explaining the subject illustrated and pointing out particular qualities of style. Interrelations between the various court traditions are explored in the essay, a lucid and comprehensive overview of the development of Indian painting. The author vividly describes the vicissitudes of political power, royal personality, and the movement of artists from place to place that constituted the historical and social context in which each regional court evolved its distinctive artistic vocabulary. The rich, remarkable court paintings of India are splendidly offered to the reader's eye and mind in this book, which also includes a map, enlarged detail photographs, and a selected bibliography.

"Everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all becomes Romantic." With these words, the German poet Novalis anticipated the appeal of one of the richest motifs in the visual arts: the open window. Beginning with two sepia drawings by Caspar David Friedrich, images of windows—with or without human figures, starkly bare or draped with billowing fabric—filled up artists' sketchbooks and portfolios and resonated through the art academies and annual exhibitions of Germany, Denmark, France, Russia, and the other northern countries. In contrast to examples from earlier centuries, such as the celebrated works of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, the early nineteenth-century pictures usually show the windows straight on, with views seen through them—pastoral and alpine views, views of sea and sky or moon and clouds, and urban views of rooftops, steeples, shipyards, or the skyline of Rome, where so many northern artists went to complete their studies, Sabine Rewald's informative and perceptive texts set these works in the context of their creators' lives and careers, apartments and studios, families and professional circles. Following the motif from Friedrich's sepias in the early 1800s through the flowering of Romanticism to the mid-century emergence of Realism in the works of Adolph Menzel, Rewald provides a much-needed perspective on this important period in Europe even as the works themselves, gathered together here for the first time, offer pure visual pleasure.

Dress of the eighteenth century is not without anachronisms and exoticisms of its own, but that singular, changing, revolutionizing century has become an icon in the history of fashion.

Join a Met curator for an exploration of French and Portuguese Palissy ware, named for the Renaissance master Bernard Palissy, whose ceramics were ornamented with reptiles, shells, and amphibians cast from life.

Collections Management Assistant Rebekah Burgess Abramovich profiles Omene, a notorious figure in late 19th-century American dance, whose portrait is included on 13 tobacco cards in The Met's Jefferson R. Burdick Collection of Printed Ephemera.

Silver had long been associated with ceremony and achievement, but during the nineteenth century the preponderance of presentation vessels became even greater.