Greek Slave

WHEN ARTISTS after the Civil War faced the great challenge of representing a society recently emancipated from slavery, they brought to the task various assumptions and images that had been deeply ingrained by the system of slavery and by the long campaign to abolish it. Most of the artists working on public monuments in the first years after the war had...

No nineteenth-century artwork tells us more about the cultural construction of gender than Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave of 1844 (fig. 16). This life-sized standing nude woman...

~In September 1886, as the Animal Locomotion proofs were being prepared, Edward Coates issued a warning to William Pepper regarding the Muybridge project: “The human figure series should I think be carefully examined...

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 ...

~~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.