A new exhibition examines the long, colorful history of tattooing in New York.
Praiseworthy Percier at the Bard Graduate Center
The name of Charles Percier has for so long been linked with that of his collaborator and partner, Pierre François Fontaine, most notably for their Recueil de décorations intérieures, that the breadth of his individual accomplishments and talents as revealed in the current exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center is a bit mindboggling.
Missing pieces
Scholars hope to reunite all thirty paintings in Jacob Lawrence’s Struggle series, his epic of early American history. But the whereabouts of several panels is unknown.
The ancien regime’s master of precious metals: Celebrating Pierre Gouthiere at the Frick
This month the Frick opens Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court, the first show devoted to the work in gilded metal—traditionally called bronze d’oré in French—by an artist whose achievements placed him among the finest French masters of the eighteenth century.
Bumper crop: Art and the farm at Reynolda House
Though the United States has been predominantly a nation of city dwellers since the 1920s, the farm still figures large in the American consciousness.
Mr. Boyd and Mr. Miles: A New York State portrait artist deciphered
Early nineteenth-century American portraiture includes a number of small profile likenesses in oil, pastel, and watercolor by artists such as C. B. J. F. de St. Mémin, James Sharples, Gerrit Schipper, and Jacob Eichholtz. All follow the European fashion for profiles, namely emulating those on Greek vases and Roman coinage, and are thus fitting for the neoclassical motifs and styles …
The Victoria and Albert’s new look at “Europe 1600–1815”
By Joan DeJean Neptune and Triton by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 1622– 1623, as installed in the newly reopened Europe 1600–1815 galleries at the V&A. Except as noted, all images © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In December 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum’s European galleries were opened to the public for the first time in nearly …
Superfluity & Excess: Quaker Philadelphia falls for classical splendor
The fruits of extensive research on Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s 1808 house and furniture for William and Mary Waln begin with their impact on the aesthetic of the city itself
Sites along the Schuylkill
The story goes that the Dutch, sailing up the Delaware River, missed the marshy entrance to its largest tributary. Upon discovering their mistake, the Europeans dubbed the waterway the Schuyl Kill, or “Hidden River.” The Dutch were soon squeezed out of Pennsylvania by the Swedes and then the English, but the name somehow stuck, showing up as the “Scool Kill …
Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper: Looking out, Looking Within
Consider Rockwell Kent’s paintings of land and sea as modern American mindscapes—poetic distillations of remote places that probe the mysteries of life. Kent hoped viewers would lose themselves in contemplation before his haunting visions.1 “Essentials only ought to go into painting,” he insisted. “I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”2 He perceived the …