Small enough to hang in a hallway. Heavy enough to carry a man's grief for twelve years. Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Race Track (Death on a Pale Horse), c. 1896–1908. Cleveland Museum of Art.
No crowd. No jockeys. Just death, circling alone. He worked on it for over a decade. Kept reworking it, kept refusing to let it go. The paint is layered so thick and so unstable that conservators have been fighting the surface ever since. The canvas is about 28.25 by 35.25 inches.
In 1888, a friend of Albert Pinkham Ryder bet $500 on a horse race in New York. The horse lost. The friend killed himself. Ryder started painting this. A skeleton rides a pale horse around an empty track, scythe raised, a snake curling through the dirt below. The sky is a sickly greenish dark.
Bored apprentices with a legitimate grievance is a dangerous combination. Roger probably knew exactly what he was doing.
Around 500 CE, someone in Japan built a clay sentinel with two faces. Protection on one side. The protector on the other. The tomb it once guarded is long gone. Unknown maker, Haniwa in the Form of a Shield, c. 500. Cleveland Museum of Art.
All lined up around the tomb of someone powerful enough to take an army into the afterlife. Most haniwa are one thing. A shield. A warrior. A helmet. This one is all of them fused into a single object, four feet tall, earthenware with incised designs and red slip.
Front side: a shield and a quiver of arrows. Flip it around: a warrior's face staring back at you from under a helmet. This is a haniwa, a hollow clay figure placed on top of ancient Japanese burial mounds called kofun. Thousands of them. Soldiers, horses, houses, dancers.
London had actual street-cleaning regulations by 1309, with fines for dumping waste. Styford's neighbors were enforcing a real civic code, just with extrajudicial enthusiasm.
The Wallace Collection's horse armor is one of only three near-complete sets from this period, and this one likely came from the arsenal at Churburg Castle in South Tyrol. The full bard weighs around 30kg on its own, before you even add the rider's harness.
The face was supposed to scare off evil spirits and unwanted visitors alike. Same job. The ring is gone. The face is still angry. Unknown, Monster Face: Door Ring Holder (Pushou), 500s. Cleveland Museum of Art.
Curving horns, bulging eyes, a tongue hanging loose where a bronze ring once dangled. You'd grab the ring, knock, and the monster's mouth swallowed your fist. These are called pushou. They go back centuries before this one was made. Part door knocker, part guard.
You nailed this face to your door. Three rivets. One through the forehead, one by each clawed paw. It stared down anyone who approached your home during the Northern Dynasties period in Henan province, China. Gilt bronze. About 5 inches tall, 8 inches wide.
Haven't seen the Ken Burns film yet, but the Isaacson book is great. Thanks for the recommendations!
Every choice here was a middle finger to the Salon. Four years later, he left France for Tahiti. He never came back. Paul Gauguin (French, 1848–1903), In the Waves (Dans les Vagues), 1889. Cleveland Museum of Art.
He was 41, broke, and increasingly convinced that European art had gone soft. The canvas is roughly 3 feet tall. The body is outlined in heavy, almost cartoonish contour. The sea looks flat, decorative, closer to Japanese woodblock than French academic painting.
The painting is a nude woman hurling herself into green and orange waves. The colors look nothing like the Atlantic. They weren't supposed to. Gauguin painted it in Pont-Aven, a tiny fishing village in Brittany, where he'd gone to escape Paris.
Gauguin showed this at a café. Not a gallery. A café attached to the 1889 World's Fair in Paris, the same fair that unveiled the Eiffel Tower. He couldn't get into the official exhibition, so he rented wall space at the Café Volpini across the street.
Found at Verulamium if I'm remembering right. Roman iron tools are weirdly modern because the basic physics of leverage haven't changed in 2,000 years. Their claw hammers are the same story.
Klee made this in 1929, the same year he turned 50 and the Bauhaus threw him a surprise birthday exhibition. He was teaching there but already restless, about to leave for Düsseldorf.
Piqué work on ivory was a Huguenot specialty. Many of the craftsmen doing this in England arrived after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which fits the dating perfectly.
The Aberdeen Bestiary was likely made in England around 1200, possibly for a royal patron. It disappeared from history until it turned up in the Royal Library at Westminster in 1542. Nobody knows where it was for those 300 years.
The model for this one was supposedly the young Leonardo da Vinci, who was apprenticing in Verrocchio's workshop at the time. Verrocchio reportedly quit painting after seeing Leonardo's work surpass his own.
The white-ground technique was almost exclusively used on lekythoi because it flaked too easily for everyday vessels. These were made for the dead. Fitting subject for the medium.
Gold-covered ones were for someone powerful enough to afford it. A king. A high priest. Someone who wanted a specific god's attention. Who they were, and whether the god listened, is anyone's guess. Canaanite, Enthroned Deity, ca. 14th–13th century BCE. The Met.
The Canaanites lived in what's now Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, and western Syria, and they made hundreds of small bronze deities like this one. Most were buried in temple foundations or left as offerings at shrines. The gold is the giveaway. Bronze figures were common.
The other hand likely held a shield or scepter. Both missing. We don't know which god this is. El, the father of the Canaanite pantheon. Baal, the storm god. Could be either. The pose fits both.
Someone covered this figure in gold foil over 3,000 years ago. Hammered it thin and pressed it over bronze. The gold on the headdress is still there. It's 5 inches tall. Seated on a throne. One hand raised, probably holding a weapon or lightning bolt that's long gone.
Southern Indian Hanuman sculptures from this period are almost always in the anjali mudra or carrying the Dronagiri mountain. The Denver piece is one of their older South Asian acquisitions, part of a collection that started growing seriously after the 1960s Heeramaneck purchases.
His copper-alloy effigy was made within a few years of his death in 1376. The hands were originally clasped in prayer around a real sword and shield, but those were moved to a case above the tomb centuries ago.
And it sat on someone's desk 600 years ago, waiting to give up a single drop of water. Chinese, Water dropper in the shape of a rhinoceros, 15th century. The Met.
