The so-called Manila Galleon (“Nao de China” or “Nao de Acapulco”) brought porcelain, silk, ivory, spices, and myriad other exotic goods from China to Mexico in exchange for New World silver.

The terrible contest proceeded erratically; just as the soldiers learned to fight this war in the field, so the photographers improvised their reports.

With his talent for design and promotion, Charles Frederick Worth built his design house into a huge business during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The powerful expressivity of his art made him the greatest sculptor of the early Renaissance.

In Japan’s self-imposed isolation, traditions of the past were revived and refined, and ultimately parodied and transformed in the flourishing urban societies of Kyoto and Edo.

Wealthy and powerful daimyô ordered magnificent wedding trousseaus for their daughters, and these trousseaus became symbolic of the social rank and the political alliances upon which the marriages were founded.

In 1825 the Erie Canal, connecting the Atlantic with the American heartland via the Great Lakes, was completed, and in 1861 the Civil War, disrupting American unity, began. This volume examines the exhilarating period between these two far-reaching events. The Erie Canal turned the port of New York into the gateway to the United States, ushering in a time of enormous growth and change for the city of New York. Still very much a work in progress, New York became both an international economic and cultural center: it was transformed into what contemporary observers variously termed the Empire City, the Great Emporium, and the Empress City of the West. The cultural component of this transformation was as significant as its economic aspect. Highly skilled artists and craftsmen working in New York, both native born and immigrant, grew in number, and institutions devoted to the arts emerged and flourished. With Broadway at its heart, the Great Emporium developed into the nation's major manufacturing and retailing center, the depot for luxury goods made in and around the city and imported from Europe. The complex story of the proliferation of the arts in New York and the evolution of an increasingly discerning audience for those arts during the antebellum period is the focus of this book, which accompanies a major exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In essays that will interest scholars as well as a more general audience, specialists from the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the University of California at Berkeley bring new research and insights to bear on a broad range of subjects. Their texts offer both historical and cultural contexts and explore the city's development as a nexus for the marketing and display of art, as well as private collecting; landscape painting viewed against the background of tourism; new departures in sculpture, architecture, and printmaking; the birth of photography; New York as a fashion center; shopping for home decorations; changing styles in furniture; and the evolution of the ceramics, glass, and silver industries. This volume is lavishly illustrated in color and black and white, providing reproductions of the more than three hundred works in the exhibition as well as comparative material. A checklist of works in the exhibition, a bibliography, and an index are included.

Breaking with traditional approaches to historical subjects and portraiture, Carpeaux infused his sculpture with a previously unseen freedom and immediacy.

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.

Revolutionary conquests were echoed in the fine and decorative arts, in which figures of Fame and Victory abounded.