The Orient – including present-day Turkey, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa— inspired Western artists for centuries. But it was Napoleon’s conquest of Egypt in 1798 that prompted a fervor for exotic distant lands that would shape the aesthetic sensibilities of Europe for decades. The exhibition Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy traces Islamic works… Continue reading

I just completed the first semester of a Masters in Art History at The Courtauld in London. The second-to-last week before the end of term, our High Middle Ages group visited several sites around Paris: Notre-Dame de Paris, The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Saint-Denis, the Sainte-Chapelle, and the Musée de Cluny. I took the Eurostar… Continue reading

During summer 2024 I traveled with family on a month-long study trip to Greece. I wanted to see the ancient sites with their art treasures and better understand the context and life of Greek people, and how it shaped their art and still shapes their worldview today. After reading so many texts and listening to… Continue reading

Artists created some of the most enduring memorials of major events in the American Revolution. These iconic works are evidence of the training, scholarship, and patriotic fervor these painters and sculptors possessed. But for some of the creators, they were not simply inventing from imagination – they themselves witnessed and lived through the events they… Continue reading

The first memory I have of J.C. Leyendecker’s work was on a calendar in my mother’s kitchen. I loved the humor, the elegance, and the symbolism in his work. I also remember being struck by how vivid, confident, and fresh his paintings looked, even in reproduction. They looked at once from another era, and yet,… Continue reading