Death of Sardanapalus

~~After playing a role in visualizing the French Revolution, color was subject to its own upheaval in the nineteenth century, first in materials, then in making. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, chemistry had replaced alchemy. Building on the classification of the elements and using modern experimental scientific methods,...

~They are all there: the black male slave, the white oriental male slave, the oriental despot, the mulatta, the white harem woman. The extremities are there too: violence, mayhem, decapitation, strangulation, fire, and billowing smoke. What is not there is the specificity of place, or the...

WHEN Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix (1864) was exhibited for the second time, at the Society of French Artists in London in 1873, it was hung directly opposite Eugène Delacroix’s Death of...

A black man, large as life, holding the reins of a white horse in one hand while he plunges a dagger into its throat with the other, is given great prominence...

The nineteenth century is characterised in art histories as an era of innovation: in the production of the artist’s materials, in their usage and in the ‘modern’ styles of painting they generated. Science and technology provided painters with a greatly extended range of artists’ materials and pigments, and colour-merchants retailed a burgeoning selection of ready-made...