In painting Emilie Ambre, Manet may have seized the occasion to foreground mutual concerns shared with the composer Georges Bizet regarding the performativity of their mediums. Both the musician and the artist found themselves castigated for their harshness of tones, their depiction of lower-class figures, and their embrace of realist strategies.

"I tell you, Monsieur, this man is Michelangelo and you don't know him." With those words Octave Mirbeau introduced his readers to Auguste Rodin, and the sculptor became known popularly as France's modern Michelangelo.

As the leading women's journal in Napoleonic France, the Journal des Dames et des Modes provides an excellent case study on the formation of the modern woman artist, critic and spectator. In elaborating the contentious nature of its material, the author reveals how the journal laid out the discursive patterns for future discussions on women in the arts.

During a rare visit to her Russian homeland in 1909, Marianne Werefkin experienced a poignant personal encounter with the life she had chosen to leave behind. The author examines how issues of outsidership, Werefkin's position as a woman artist, and as an aristocrat, all informed her haunting composition, Return Home.

With this commentary by James Rubin we inaugurate a new feature of the journal entitled "New Discoveries." Its purpose is to bring to light unknown works of nineteenth-century art—recent acquisitions by museums, works in private collections, and paintings, sculptures or important pieces of decorative arts that have surfaced on the art market.