Gallery of the Louvre

Key to the People and Art in Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre​

Histories of the United States often begin with an evocation of the “first” contact made by European explorers with the territories that would become the American nation, but this is at best an imprecise and misleading enterprise. Was it the Norsemen who are thought to have visited New England as early as the eleventh century, or the Spanish military and religious men who first...

The independent picture frame has a neatly definable history. It began in Italy during the early years of the Renaissance, largely as the result of the privatization and secularization of the painting, and it ended during the last decades of the 19th century, as painters began either to ignore the frame or to subsume it into the arena of the picture itself...