This study began with a question: In 1866, how could an educated Bostonian have purchased as an original Raphael the painting of the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist that now belongs to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College? Through archival research on the provenance of the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist and anthropologist Igor Kopytoff’s “biography of things” theory, this article reconstructs the biography of the painting, made in mid- to late eighteenth-century Verona, Italy, by Giuseppe or Giambettino Cignaroli. In the successive stages of its biography, the painting acquired new cultural “status” and was sold as a masterpiece of celebrated authorship in the nineteenth century. The biography of the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist sheds new light on the art world of nineteenth-century Boston, leading to the conclusion that Bostonians lacked the visual resources to study Raphael’s oeuvre and to attribute a painting to this Renaissance master.

This article is the first to explore the commission and exhibition of British sculptor John Gibson’s Portrait Statue of the Hon. Mrs. Murray, Later Countess Beauchamp (1842–46), a work still owned by descendants of the sitter’s family at Stanford Hall in Leicestershire, England. Drawing on unpublished archival resources and contemporaneous reviews, this article reconsiders one of Gibson’s most overlooked statues both in the context of his oeuvre and polychrome sculpture, and as an example of co-creative agency in the history of nineteenth-century sculpture.

This article places John Singer Sargent’s Madame X (1883–84) within the discourse of classical reception. It argues that as a “living statue,” Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau performed a role in society that observers found fashionable and alluring; however, critics panned the painting as displeasing and unnatural. This study contends that Gautreau claimed cultural agency within the social spaces of Parisian and Breton soirées, but her carefully constructed image became the object of scrutiny when displayed in the hallowed artistic space of the Paris Salon. The article further claims that conceptions about race and exoticism underlay the reaction, disallowing viewers of Madame X to regard her whiteness as embodying ideal purity.

This article examines how Edgar Degas challenged the compositional and communicative integrity of the artwork by pinning together pieces of paper, pasting them on card, and developing motifs over joins between the segments. Through a close reading of Degas’s late bather pastels, the article locates Degas’s accretive working method within debates about the role of the “fragment” in mid- to late nineteenth-century art critical discourses. It is argued that focusing on Degas’s decision to create works “in pieces” is important for understanding both his place in nineteenth-century art history and the legacy of his oeuvre in European modernism.

This article revolves around Fernand Pelez’s monumental work Grimaces et misère—Les Saltimbanques (Grimaces and Misery—The Entertainers; 1888), which has often been positioned as the stable “double” to Georges Seurat’s work, Parade de cirque (Circus Sideshow), from the same year. Both works depict the sideshow used to advertise the Cirque Corvi, and yet—as this study argues—it is Seurat’s Parade that can be said to make sense aesthetically, while Pelez’s Grimaces remains incoherent and enigmatic, bound up with questions about modernity, alienation, freedom, and the individual.

This article argues for deep formal, material, morphological, and philosophical connections between a series of experimental syphilis studies conducted on simian research subjects at the Institut Pasteur by Émile Roux and Élie Metchnikoff and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). It positions three caricatures of the Institut Pasteur studies published in the illustrated anarchist weekly L’Assiette au beurre (1905–11), which alternately depict Roux and Metchnikoff’s monkeys as prostitutes or as Moroccans enduring the brutality of colonial medicine, at the crux of this relationship. This study contends that these images’ pictorial blending of human and animal bodies illuminates shared logics of exploitation and professionalization structuring research in experimental medicine, colonial medicine, and venereology. The invocation of these shared logics by both L’Assiette au beurre and Picasso evince the ways medical discourses of raced, gendered, diseased, and animal bodies permeated spheres of knowledge and visual culture production.