r/ArtHistory

I follow this page on twitter and I'm always blown away by their posts and how they're able to make connections with art. I really want to be able to recognize different pieces of art like this and connect it with pop culture. I also saw an interview with the guy that runs this page once and he was able to recognize every single piece of art they showed him off the cuff. Is this a skill anyone can cultivate?

(These are all from artbutmakeitsports on twitter and instagram)

On my last few visits this was out on loan somewhere so lovely to see it for the first time in a while and get new things from it. If you visit a second tier place with sought after paintings enough you start to see them move in and out and back to a different spot then they left and see them juxtaposed with different neighbours and that along with the difffences in time of year and in you makes the painting have a slightly different feel than the other times.

Your own personal, across the decades, relationship with a painting.

What a gift to be able to watch him paint this. I feel like this is the closest we will ever come to having film of JS Sargent creating his paintings. Similar style, no?

Film of De Laszlo painting

The Printing Press just made it cheaper to lie to myself,

How did this wonderful chessman end up on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides, hidden away and buried?

The King is hunched forward, sword on his knee and eyes wide open as he listens—to what?

I’ve recently found a set of unbound plates of Gustave Doré’s Don Quixote engravings, with no information available on the wrappers they came in. They seem to follow the style of the original 1863 French edition [1] with a darker paper tone on very crisp, white, ~200 g/m² paper (note the thin border). The print is likewise very crisp, high quality. I have a hard time imagining they are contemporaneous to the book given their pristine appearance, but also I haven’t been able to locate a modern portfolio edition of this work, or similar reproductions. Any ideas?

[1] https://www.livre-rare-book.com/book/5472636/70409

These landscapes were painted only four years apart, yet they feel like different ideas of what painting is for. It’s amazing how quickly painting changed in the first years of the 20^(th) century.

What do you think each artist believes painting is for? What part of inner life does each painting call our attention to? What kind of relation to the world does each painting invite?

My mother (69) inherited this piece from her grandmother (on the bottom) . She said it hung at her grandmother's her whole life. I did a Google image search and it seems to be a copy of "Castles In Spain" (top) by Alexander Harrison.... but it has some differences. Did he make variations or did copycats just take liberties and assume no one would notice? Now I would assume they just took it out with AI but a 70+ year old reproduction, clearly it's not. Any thoughts on history of this practice?

I’m Japanese, born in 1970.
I grew up watching manga, anime, and Japanese fantasy illustration evolve throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
There is something I’ve always wanted to tell people outside Japan.
To many Japanese fans and illustrators of my generation, Alphonse Mucha was never simply an Art Nouveau painter.
He felt like someone who had already discovered part of our visual language nearly a century before us.
I’m not saying that Mucha invented manga or anime.
Japan already had a long artistic tradition of expressive line work and stylization through emakimono (picture scrolls), Choju-giga, ukiyo-e, and many other forms of visual art. Realism has never been the only ideal in Japanese art.
What fascinated us about Mucha was something different.
He transformed hair from realistic anatomy into graphic design.
Hair no longer behaved simply as hair. It became flowing lines that connected with clothing, ornaments, typography, and the entire composition. The whole illustration moved as one visual rhythm.
As young Japanese illustrators and manga fans, this felt surprisingly familiar.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mucha art books were almost essential references among fantasy illustrators and many manga artists.
At the time, saying,
“This looks like Mucha.”
was genuinely a compliment.
Ironically, the style became so popular that by the early 1990s, “Mucha-like” even started to feel cliché.
But something interesting happened.
The obvious imitation disappeared.
The visual grammar remained.
Even today, when I look at artists such as Akihiro Yamada, many of CLAMP’s decorative compositions, or fantasy illustration from that era, I still recognize that visual language.
From my perspective, Mucha became part of the visual vocabulary that shaped Japanese fantasy illustration, and through that, part of manga and anime aesthetics as well.
Interestingly, painters such as Vermeer were greatly admired in Japan, but they never became visual references for manga artists in the way Mucha did.
I’m curious:
Do people in Europe or North America also see Mucha this way?
Or is this mainly how my generation of Japanese fans experienced him?

Several days ago I posted a picture and question about a John Singer Sargent watercolor from the current Monet & Venice exhibit at San Francisco's De Young Museum.

I thought I would do this separate post about an interesting historical aspect of the exhibit.

Monet went to Venice for the first (and only) time in Fall of 1908.

One of the famous scenes /settings / spaces of Venice is the Piasa San Marco and the buildings / structures surrounding it. All painted, watercolored, sketched, etched, uncounted thousands of times.

(Monet's wife in a 1908 letter from Venice, complains that they went to one popular painting point and implied it was hard to find a vantage because at least five other artists were there painting the same prospect. If I remember the exhibit text correctly, she added, with some asperity, that one of the artists presumably getting in the way of Monet was a woman.)

Anyway, the key familiar features of the Piazza San Marco are St. Mark's Basilica, St. Mark's Campanile, the Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale), Pocuratie Vecchie, Marciana Library, the multi-section plazas themselves, and some prominent monuments including the winged Lion of St. Mark on a pedestal near the Grand Canal embankment and four ancient Roman copper horses (that the Venetians looted from Constantinople where they had stood for a millennia, and Napoleon looted hundreds of years later from Venice.)

And Monet, almost always incorporating water into his views of Venice, painted the scene from across the Grand Canal multiple times, emphasizing the canal, Palazzo Ducale, but also including the Piasa to its left and St. Mark's Campanile.

But...there was one temporary defect to this famous vista at the time. St. Mark's Campanile had catastrophically collapsed into a massive pile of bricks in 1902, temporarily removing the most famous tower from the Venetian skyline.

When Monet was there six years after the disaster, the shaft had been rebuilt but the spire of the tower was not yet constructed. So the tower looked like a tall stump, with a flattish top, not a tapering campanile.

And...Monet, in several versions of the same across the water view, painted it that way. But he had the incomplete tower top somewhat merge into haze, rather than showing it in stark relief against a clear sky.

By the time he exhibited his Venice paintings in 1912, the tower rebuild had been completed and, presumably using photos or prints of the new (or old) tower, he added the spire in to at least one of his paintings. But the others were left with an incomplete tower, as he had seen it in person.

Several of these paintings of the same scene (five, I think?) were lined up on one gallery wall in the exhibit giving a rare opportunity to compare and contrast.

Because most of his paintings of Venice were done with a filmy haze, what he did with the tower works pretty well. When I first walked along the wall of paintings I didn't even focus on the missing spire, I just thought, oh, he's partially obscured the tower top in mist and a haze of light. I didn't understand what was going on until I read the caption which discussed the incomplete tower.

Of the three images I've posted, the first two show the tower stump, as Monet would have seen it sitting there on the other side of the Grand Canal. But the third one shows the green copper spire. And the exhibit catalogue says that Monet added it in France, by the time the paintings were going to exhibit, four years later.

Which all leads to a question.

Does anyone know of any other notable painters / artists who included the unfinished tower in their work?

Almost nothing in Emanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is accurate, and once you start counting the errors, it becomes almost funny. The Stars and Stripes flying in the background wouldn't be designed for another nine months. The boat is far too small to hold the twelve men crammed into it. The real crossing happened in the pitch black of a sleeting Christmas night, not this golden cinematic dawn. The Delaware was fairly narrow where Washington's army actually crossed, but Leutze painted the heaving ice floes of the Rhine — the river he knew from his studio in Düsseldorf, Germany, where he'd never once seen the Delaware. And Washington is standing upright in a short-walled rowboat, a posture so precarious it would have been absurd in any real river crossing.

None of this was carelessness. Leutze wasn't trying to document an event. He was building a myth, and accuracy came second to drama.

What actually happened that night

By late December 1776, the American Revolution was close to collapse. Washington's Continental Army had been routed from New York and chased across New Jersey. Enlistments were expiring. Morale was at rock bottom. Thomas Paine was writing The Crisis — "These are the times that try men's souls" — because souls were genuinely being tried.

On the night of December 25–26, Washington gambled everything. He ferried roughly 2,400 men, horses, and artillery across the Delaware River in darkness and sleet, marched nine miles through a nor'easter, and launched a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton — German mercenaries hired by the British crown. The engagement was brief and devastating: about 22 Hessians killed, 98 wounded, over 900 captured. Continental losses were fewer than ten. It was as much a moral victory as a military one. After months of humiliation, proof that the cause could still win.

This is the event Leutze chose to paint — but he painted it 75 years later, and his reasons had as much to do with Europe in 1848 as with America in 1776.

A German-American painting for a European crisis

Emanuel Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, emigrated to the United States as a child, and then returned to Europe as a young painter, settling in the Düsseldorf art scene. He conceived the picture during the Revolutions of 1848, when liberal reformers across Europe — France, Austria, the German states, Hungary — rose up against kings and emperors, and then watched those revolutions fail, one after another.

Leutze's canvas was a message to those defeated revolutionaries. Here, it insisted, is what is possible. A ragged, divided, improbable coalition of people had once overthrown an empire. If they could do it, so could you.

He used American tourists and art students in Düsseldorf as models — among them the painters Worthington Whittredge and Andreas Achenbach. The picture he finished in 1850 was damaged in a studio fire, restored, and sold to what is now the Kunsthalle Bremen. That first version was destroyed on September 5, 1942, in an Allied bombing raid during the Second World War. The painting in the Met today is the full-size replica Leutze began immediately after: the second version, sent to New York in 1851.

The crew as argument

Look past Washington and study the boat carefully, because Leutze packed it with a deliberate cross-section of the Revolutionary cause — and the casting is the real argument of the picture.

At the bow, three men shove ice aside with their oars. One is an African American. Another wears the checkered bonnet of a Scotsman. A third wears a coonskin cap, the mark of the western frontier. Amidships, farmers in broad-brimmed hats hunch against the cold. At the stern sits a man in moccasins, leggings, and the fur-trimmed dress of a Northeast Woodlands Native American — rendered with enough specificity that you can make out the quillwork on the pouch he carries. Behind this lead boat, a whole flotilla struggles across, their bayonets raised against the breaking dawn.

The young man gripping the flag behind Washington is traditionally identified as Lieutenant James Monroe, the future fifth president of the United States.

This wasn't a historical record; there's no evidence the boats held anything like so tidy a sampler of the young nation. Leutze was making a philosophical claim: a revolution is not the work of one great man. It belongs to all of these people — immigrant and native-born, Black and white, soldier and farmer — bound together by a single purpose.

The reception: fifty thousand people lined up

When the painting arrived in New York in October 1851, it was a sensation. More than fifty thousand people came to see it in its first months on view. The New York Daily Times reported that over twenty thousand had already filed past and declared that "the sight of such a splendid work of art will do more for the union of this country than a thousand union speeches."

Consider the timing. This was 1851 — a decade in which the United States was tearing itself apart over slavery and sectional rivalry. The Compromise of 1850 had just temporarily papered over a crisis that would, ten years later, produce the Civil War. Into this atmosphere came a twelve-by-twenty-one-foot image of Americans of every kind rowing together toward a common goal, in the dark, through the ice. It struck a nerve.

The painter Marshall O. Roberts bought it for the then-enormous sum of $10,000. In 1897 it was given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it hangs today in a reproduction of its original trophy-style frame.

The other story in the boat

A painting this beloved inevitably carries contestation alongside it.

Scott Manning Stevens, a cultural historian and citizen of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, has written about seeing the painting as a boy and feeling, briefly, glad to find a Native man included. Then, growing older, he learned what the image leaves out. He credits Leutze with painting "our better angels" — with insisting that the cause belonged to everyone. But he also notes that just three years after the crossing, Washington ordered General Sullivan's campaign to destroy British-allied Indigenous communities across what is now central New York, a campaign so devastating to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy that the Mohawk name for Washington became Hanadahguyus — "destroyer of villages" — a title later extended to the U.S. presidency itself.

The painting's unity is real, and the exclusions it smooths over are also real. The Met now frames both truths simultaneously.

Generations of artists have borrowed Leutze's composition to argue back. Robert Colescott, Jacob Lawrence, and others have recast the boat's crew to tell pointedly different stories of who American history actually belongs to. The surest sign that an image has become truly iconic is how many people feel compelled to argue with it.

Why it endures

By 1950, the Met's curators had grown uneasy with the picture's crowd-pleasing scale and sent it away — first to Dallas, then to a church near the actual crossing site in Pennsylvania — before it finally returned to New York in 1970. In January 2002, a former museum guard glued a photograph of the September 11 attacks to its surface. The painting was not seriously damaged. In 2022, the White House's smaller third version sold at auction for $45 million.

The details in the picture are wrong. The flag, the light, the physics of the boat — none of it holds up. But Leutze was painting something that doesn't submit to fact-checking: the posture of a person who keeps standing up in the dark, who keeps moving forward when every reasonable calculation says to stop.

That's not history. That's mythology. And it turns out mythology is what a nation reaches for when it needs to remember what it thinks it is.

The painting hangs in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Admission to the Met is pay-what-you-wish for New York State residents.

I am currently reading Gombrich's "The Story of Art" and here's what he says about the Colosseum: "Indeed, he has applied all the three styles of building used for Greek Temples. The ground floor is a variation on the Doric style -even the metopes and triglyphs are preserved; the second storey has Ionic, and the third and fourth Corinthian half-columns."

But I can't see any metopes or triglyphs on the ground floor of the Colosseum. Are my eyes failing me, or has Gombrich made a mistake here?

And after doing some research online, I've seen other sources say that the lower floor of the Colosseum has a plain frieze in the Tuscan order and that made more sense to me.