One of the most important practitioners of Neoclassicism, John Flaxman identified himself first and foremost as a sculptor, and yet his greatest fame and most lasting influence rest with his drawings. While many of his drawings were preliminary studies for sculpture, decorative arts, or illustrations to Classical texts, some cannot be linked to other projects and are finished, independent works of art. This article discusses a drawing made in Rome in 1791 whose singularity purity, elegance of line, delicacy of washes, and degree of detail encapsulate Flaxman's artistic philosophy and style. The drawing's iconography and early provenance also are addressed.

Although William Henry Vanderbilt's art collection, his cultural legacy, played a pivotal role in the history of art collecting in the United States, scholars have underestimated its significance. A fresh examination of the Vanderbilt collection reveals that his gallery, catalogs, and altruistic intentions set him apart from others and inspired later collectors, such as Henry Clay Frick, who once housed his burgeoning collection of old master paintings in Vanderbilt's splendid art gallery.

While traditional allegories, long used as devices in art to make abstract ideas tangible, fell out of favor in the late nineteenth century, new allegorical forms, for innovative technologies and newly-harnessed powers, such as electricity, light, and sound, began to be created by contemporary artists of the era. Louis Ernest Barrias (1841–1905) was at the forefront of this development at the fin-de-siècle, and his sculptures, Electricity (1889) and Nature Unveiling Herself before Science (1899), bring together the traditional allegorical system with a new interest in glorifying modern technologies. In this article, modern allegories of the fin-de-siècle are linked to the emphasis on technology and the machine seen in later Art Deco sculpture.

Painter and printmaker Bolton Coit Brown, one of the founders of the Woodstock Art Colony, was among the boldest climbers in the history of nineteenth-century American mountaineering. Brown's ground-breaking ascents of some of the Sierra Nevada's most difficult peaks were, later in life, matched by his technical innovations in lithography, a medium whose reliance on stone and physical exertion nurtured his nostalgia for mountaineering. This article explores the intersection of Brown's mountain climbing, his art, and his expansive writings, a tripartite creative project merging physical, visual, and literary expression.

In June 1830, only days before the rioting that led to the collapse of the reign of Charles X, a sequence of Mariophanic events set in motion what would become a new iconographic symbol for the figure of the Virgin Mary, marking a feminine personification of spiritual agency new in Catholic art. Political, social, and ecclesial circumstances converged to stimulate a contemporary design for the figure of the Virgin Mary of the Miraculous Medal while new lithographic technologies insured its propagation.

Two articles from a long-running series on visits to the artist's studio published in L'Illustration in the 1850s are examined against the background of the journal's political and artistic ideology and the art world of the Second Empire. The artists Diaz and Delaroche are shown to stand for two different conceptions of the artist and art making and differing attitudes towards the commercialization and spectacularization of the Salon in this crucial period.