A Burial at Ornans

The nineteenth-century French press was decisively shaped by censorship....

~~Contemporary artists often help us understand how their work is made by revealing their creative process. But this was not always the case, and it can be difficult to reconstruct how a painting was made centuries ago by just looking at it. Other painters could always use their experience to speculate, but it is only with the advent of...

~“WE are each of us celebrating some funeral,” Charles Baudelaire wrote in his “Salon of 1846,” in the oft-cited section “On the Heroism of Modern Life.” The poet and critic was referring to the “uniform livery of affliction” that made...