Emily C. Casey Did the American Revolution End in 1783? In an unfinished oil sketch from 1783, the final year of the American Revolution, Benjamin West gathers the American commissioners who were present to negotiate the Treaty of Paris (Fig. 1). While they crowd the left side of the composition, the space…
Matthew Gin On 20 Brumaire Year II (November 10, 1793), the Convention Nationale met in the Salle des Machines in Paris. Once used for royal entertainments, the hall had recently been converted into a meeting chamber for the new revolutionary legislature. An otherwise ordinary session took a spectacular turn when a delegation…
Monica Anke Hahn The instructions directed the young reader to be “on the Stage facing the Audience.” In front of those gathered—siblings, parents, friends—the child began to move the cut-out figures in Act I Scene 1 of Three Fingered Jack, a paper theater published c. 1850 (Fig. 1). The printed…
Zara Anishanslin Now ensconced in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Trumbull’s double portrait George Washington and William Lee has been reproduced time and again to illustrate both men (Fig. 1).[1] When Trumbull painted his now iconic piece in 1780, its subjects were already famous for…
Daniella Berman A cacophonous, celebratory scene marks the historic event of 16 Pluviôse Year II (4 February 1794), when the French National Convention abolished slavery in the French colonies. A lively pen, ink, and wash drawing in the collection of the Musée Carnavalet in Paris attempts to convey the monumentality…
J. Cabelle Ahn Firelei Báez is a New York–based artist of Dominican and Haitian descent whose practice excavates the ideological histories and material legacies that shape the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Her paintings layer hand-painted, enlarged versions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and French geographic games, maps, and charts—artefacts of the European Enlightenment that were themselves reliant on…
Thomas Crow Jacques-Louis David, sous la direction de Sébastien Allard (Paris, musée du Louvre), 15 October 2025-26 January 2026 Retrospective exhibitions devoted to Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) have recurred at the Louvre on a roughly regular pattern. The modern cycle commenced in 1948 on the bicentennial of the artist’s birth, just four…