F&M's Gothic Chair 27 Aug 2013 | 05:51 pm

Few people know (or fully appreciate) that Franklin & Marshall College has one of the earliest academic Gothic Revival buildings in the United States (the third one in my count). Constructed in 1854, ...

Boston Gothic Revival Chairs 25 Aug 2013 | 12:25 am

Two lovely Gothic Revival chairs at Boston MFA in the recently re-installed American galleries. Thanks to the Arts-and-Crafts movement, Frank Lloyd Wright, etc., the Gothic Revival seems to have eclip...

Boston Canaletto 22 Aug 2013 | 06:29 am

Zooming into the windows of Canaletto's Fonteghetto della Farina (one of two Canaletto's in Boston MFA), I see the clear prototype for countless American windows from the 1850s with double brackets be...

Boston Turner 18 Aug 2013 | 07:41 pm

Given to Ruskin as a present by his father in 1843, this painting changed the course of cultural history. According to some, the sky as subject of aesthetic revelation did not exist before Ruskin. And...

Boston Bargeu 16 Aug 2013 | 08:08 pm

I did not known this Turkish Sentinel, or much about Bargeu (who wrote a famous drawing course with Gérôme based on copying plaster casts). Most interesting about this Orientalist sentinel is that he ...

Boston Gérôme 15 Aug 2013 | 07:38 pm

I am surprised that Jean-Léon Gérôme's painting at the MFA Boston, Pigment Seller in North Africa (1891), does not receive more central attention in art-historical coverage. As I see it, Orientalism w...

Boston Købke 14 Aug 2013 | 08:40 pm

I didn't know of Christen Købke, the Danish Neoclassical painter. His painting at the MFA made me realize the affinities between Capri and Greece in the visual imagination of the Grand Tour.

Boston El Greco 12 Aug 2013 | 07:00 pm

Thanks to John Singer Sargeant, the Boston Museum of Fine Art has an amazing portrait by El Greco. Friar Paravicino is enveloped in the black of his cape and chair. The leather chair with the brass st...

Boston Zurbarán 10 Aug 2013 | 04:19 pm

Ruskin's Greek Shadow 29 Jul 2013 | 08:09 pm

Time has come to get serious about a paper that I will be delivering on September 6 at King's College, London. This is a conference I have been most eagerly anticipating on the Byzantine Influence of ...