The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp

~Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn was born on 15 July 1606 in Leiden, the son of the miller Harmen Gerritsz van Rijn.C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Urkunden über Rembrandt (The Hague, 1906), which includes summaries and commentaries on transcriptions of...

THE EARLY years of the 1870s saw radical changes in the fabric of national life. With economic and psychological recovery from the Civil War hardly resolved, Americans were faced with tides of immigrants, employment in factories...

François Sallé’s The Anatomy Class (fig. 1.1) is a large-scale modern history painting celebrating the work at the École des Beaux-Arts of Dr Mathias-Marie Duval, anatomy professor from 1873 to 1903...

ON 18 March 1872, Edmond de Goncourt paid a visit to Fantin-Latour’s studio to see his latest work-in-progress, a group portrait of avant-garde poets arranged around a table after a meal. A quarrel among Fantin’s sit-ters had left him with a noticeable gap in his composition, still unfilled when his...

~The Agnew Clinic (fig. 1) today hangs high on a wall in the foyer of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. The painting cannot be taken in all at once; approximately six feet high by eleven feet long, it is exceptionally large. What first attracts the eye is the white-clad figure standing in isolation in the foreground, left...

ALOIS RIEGL began his career as an art historian by working in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. His early papers included work on oriental carpets and early mediaeval manuscripts. His concern with pattern and applied art took on wider resonances by virtue of two other elements in his education. He was taught philosophical psychology by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann and history by Max Büdiger, who envisaged a general system of world history. The Herbartian element was the more important …