Barberini Sleeping Faun

John Singer Sargent’s Roman sketchbook of 1869 contains—besides a pale gray wash of the Colosseum and a drawing of the white oxen of the Campagna—studies by the sixteen-year-old artist of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ...

The notion that it is useful to define a new period of Greek history, the Hellenistic period, with the death of Alexander the Great is a relatively recent one. It owes its acceptance to a general recognition that his conquests drastically changed the circumstances of life, not only for the Greeks, but also for many of their neighbours. From the moment he became king of Macedon at the age of 20 in 336 BC he embarked on a whirlwind career...

With the end of the Civil War in 1865, Americans struggled to find stability after nearly five years of violence and social discord. For Winslow Homer, an artist whose career had been established during the war, the peacetime transition was particularly challenging. In A Game of Croquet, Homer discovered a worthy subject from the world of popular culture, a source previously untapped by American artists...