Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)

~THE SLAVE SHIP ICON circulated in many different versions between 1790 and 1860, a seventy-year period bounded on one side by the French Revolution and on the other by the American Civil War. Although the icon’s popularity fluctuated during these decades, marked by a sustained and unprecedented international social movement calling for the end of the...

~~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,...

A black silhouetted against the sky has a place of key importance in Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, one of the greatest and most enigmatic paintings of the early nineteenth century ...

We know as much about the time Winslow Homer spent in England as we do about any portion of his life, which is to say not very much (see figure 1). He never spoke about the trip to the press, and any letters describing what he saw or did there have apparently vanished. Nevertheless, this episode is particularly intriguing because it marks a turning point in his work and career, changing his art in important ways and also preparing him to change his own life, for soon after he returned to …