Atala at the tomb

~~In 1800, before the Battle of Nazareth competition began the cycle of Napoleonic military subjects, the artistic requirements of the new order were much less clear than they would become by the middle of the new decade. Gérard,...

~Mourning rings, brooches, and lockets convey, in a different way from the written word, how much our understanding of death and our relationship to those who have died have changed over time. In mourning rings...

~~John Vanderlyn had the world ahead of him. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the young American who was living in Paris had already won acclaim for two powerful history paintings that had proven him to be not only up-to-date in his pictorial aesthetics but also strikingly political.