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How to Read Signatures and Inscriptions on Antique Paintings
Before photography, there was exactly one way to own the image of a famous painting. Someone had to paint it again, by hand, in oil. For four centuries, copying was not a shady corner of the art wo...
Relined, Restored, Craquelure, Understanding Condition
Craquelure is not damage and relined is not a defect. What condition terms really mean on a painting that has survived two centuries, and how to judge them.
French Impressionist Portraits Beyond the Famous Names
The man with the pipe in Degas's most famous café scene was a painter, and his own portraits are still in circulation.
Emperors, Officers and the Symbols They Wore
A double-headed eagle, a golden ram on a ribbon, a white coat. Four symbols that tell you what an Austrian portrait is.
Portraits of Unknown Sitters in Old Master Painting
History kept the faces and lost the names. Why anonymous portraits are the smartest buy in Old Master painting, and how to judge one like a specialist.
Rigaud, Tocqué and the French Rococo Portrait
One built the image of absolute monarchy, the other perfected the honest likeness. What after Rigaud and follower of Tocqué really mean on a painting.
Collecting 18th-Century French Portraits
Everyone who mattered in eighteenth-century France needed to be painted, and the great portraitists ran workshops to meet the demand. What the attribution terms mean, how to date a canvas without a...
French Impressionist Landscape Painting Beyond the Famous Names
Thirty painters showed in 1874. Four entered the canon. The others were painting the same rivers in the same years.
Animated Landscapes, Figures in 19th-Century French Painting
A landscape in which figures appear, but in which the figures are not the subject. How to read the French paysage animé — and why the same canvas sells for less catalogued one way than the other.
Haystacks in French Painting, Before and After Monet
Sixty years of French haystacks before Monet made them the whole picture, and the difference between a sheaf and a stack.