I recently took in an exhibition of classical Dutch art at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. At the beginning of the exhibition, titled “Saints and Sinners,”  I encountered a painting of the patron [...]

Over much of America around this time of the year, the familiar “v” formations of southerly migrating Canada Geese pass noisily overhead as they have for thousands of years.  Their untranslatable calls make us stop [...]

A silverpoint drawing is literally a drawing done in pure silver. Its primary tool is a pen or stylus with a soft metal point that leaves a metallic trace on a pigmented ground. It’s sort of [...]

“All art is quite useless,” wrote Oscar Wilde, by which I think he meant that art is one of the few things in a society in love with “productivity” and “being practical” that can still [...]

1. The Sublime and the Picturesque (Romanticism) Understanding the Hudson River School starts with recognizing the European influence. The artist and early environmentalist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) founded the influential 19th-century art movement known as the [...]

A Rose is a Rose is …. potentially so much more. Georgia O’Keefe was a master at observing the abstract forms in nature and translating them into fascinating combinations of modernist abstraction and natural forms [...]

Few artists in history have had such a wide-ranging impact on art and culture as Henri Matisse. What a bold, exuberant spirit of an artist! We’re fortunate that Matisse was also a thoughtful and prolific writer who often reflected [...]

Who, with any feeling for the depths of humanity, can resist that bottomless gaze peering across the centuries from the self-portraits Rembrandt painted in old age?  Great works of art, according to Susan Sontag, provide [...]

This striking painting by Georgia O’Keeffe strikes one as a near-total abstraction. It’s severe, mysterious, threatening – one thinks of the skin of some prehistoric creature, a spine and ribcage, a whale ballet, heaps and [...]