A closer look at Jean-François Millet's re-use of a popular image from his home region of Normandy complicates the identity of "peasant-painter" claimed for him by his supporters and by his own assertions of "authentic" peasant experience.

The formalist rhetoric in Owen Jones's The Grammar of Ornament—a seminal text in the dissemination of ideas about decoration—was fatally undermined by the chromolithographic medium used to print the book's color plates, as well as by the radical perceptual effects unleashed by this new and visually exciting print technology.

Albert Bierstadt's Roman Fish Market, Arch of Octavius (1858) depicts a Yankee tourist couple surrounded by poor Romans, yet the picture can be read as an allegory of the sentiment against Irish Catholic immigrants felt by its primarily Protestant, and decidedly elite, audiences in Boston.

Empress Eugénie's determination to erect a mausoleum for Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial led her to Farnborough, England, where her patronage created the only significant monument to the French Second Empire.

Introduced in Paris in 1843, the drawing method of Amaranthe Rouillet (1810-1888) challenged longstanding attitudes about draftsmanship, visual experience, and the objectives of art education itself.