Essays

Public Domain Review

Distortions and Grimaces: Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921)

One wonders how many children might have tugged at a parent’s coattails to cajole a present of Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands when it was first released in 1921. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Charles H. Bennett’s Shadows (ca. 1856)

“Coming events cast their shadows before”, reads the caption for Charles H. Bennett’s frontispiece; it shows a young child dipping into a pot of preserves as a raised hand foreshadows punishment. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Indian Sign Talk (1893)

Upon reading Lieutenant Colonel Garrick Mallery’s 1880 appeal for descriptions of “Indian Sign Talk”, Lewis Francis Hadley abandoned his philological research on Quapaw and Ponca languages. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Chromoliths of Cephalopods (1851)

The subtitle of Jean Baptiste Vérany’s Mollusques méditeranéens: observès, decrits, figurès et chromolithographies d'après le vivant promised something quite extraordinary for 1851: chromolithographs of living sea creatures. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Manhattan’s Last Arcadia (1936)

Scattered amongst the 18,257 watercolor, crayon, chalk, charcoal, and color pencil drawings of folk, decorative, and industrial art executed between 1936 and 1942 for the Index of American Design (IAD) are a handful of aerial views of handsome country estates. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Microscopic Delights (1759-1763)

When first looking upon the untitled frontispiece of Novel and astonishing as they may have been for Enlightenment readers, it is difficult for us to comprehend how the magnifications of lice, fleas, houseflies, and other vermin might have been conceived as amusements for the mind and eyes…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Atlas of the Munsell Color System (1915)

Before publishing his Atlas in 1915, painter and art teacher Albert Henry Munsell (1858–1918) had spent decades seeking to compress the totality of human color experience into a simple and elegant three-dimensional graphical model. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Concealing–Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909)

When first looking upon the untitled frontispiece of Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909), one is not quite sure what the kaleidoscope of color represents. Turning the page to find the title “Peacock in the Woods”,…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Frost Flowers on the Windows (1899)

In Frost Flowers on the Windows, expatriate Swedish actor, theater producer, and writer Albert Alberg (1838–1924) leads us on a fin-de-siècle walkabout across Chicago. His goal is to document a “New, Truly Great Discovery”. . .

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Art Brut: The Scare-Fox (1910)

Uncannily resembling an early work of outsider art, Head Gamekeeper D. Green’s “scare-fox” was an altogether utilitarian contraption, devised to send foxes fleeing from his Herefordshire game preserve’s pheasant field…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Floating Phantoms: A. G. Mayer’s Medusae of the World (1910)

There is something inevitable about Alfred Goldsborough Mayer’s attraction to jellyfish. Like Ernst Haeckel before him, Mayer could never “remain insensible to the rare grace of form and delicate beauty of color of these creatures of the sea”.…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Playing Indian: Cummings’ Indian Congress at Coney Island (1903)

This recording of Colonel Frederick T. Cummins’ Wild West Show held in Brooklyn’s Steeplechase Park is one grand audio sleight-of-hand…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Synaesthesia’s Colour Debut (1883)

Victorian polymath Francis Galton is known as the inventor of many things: the world’s first weather and isochronal climate maps; the statistical concepts of correlation and regression toward the mean; the ultrasonic whistle…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Etteilla’s Livre de Thot Tarot (ca. 1789)

Great revolutions were stirring in Paris during January 1789…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Turns of the Turnverein: Heinrich Hamann’s Gymnastic Photographs (1902)

Despite their best efforts to keep still and straight-faced, the young, uniformed bodies in Heinrich Hamann’s turn-of-the-century photographs of Hamburg’s St. Pauli gymnastics society (Turnverein) remain in motion. …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

The Kumatologist: Vaughan Cornish’s Wave Studies (1910–14)

Walking along the Devon coast at low tide in the autumn of 1895, geographer Vaughan Cornish (1862–1948) watched two sets of waves interact on the shore. …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Howard Pyle’s The Mermaid (1910)

There is something profoundly haunting about a master artist’s last painting left unfinished upon its easel, especially when that work has had such a powerful hold on the modern world’s imagination. …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898)

On a frosty East Midlands morning, when Agnes Giberne was but seven or eight years old, she asked her father why it wasn’t warmer. She already knew, …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Unai no tomo: Catalogues of Japanese Toys (1891–1923)

When Brooklyn Museum Curator of Ethnology Stewart Culin visited Japan for the first time in the fall of 1909, he escaped from the harangues of curio dealers by asking them …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

“A Sword was Seen in the Sky”: A True and Wonderful Narrative (1763)

We hear with the greatest Astonishment that near Riga in Livonia, has been seen in the open Sky, a fiery Rod, which struck about it, and the Points of the Rod were ...

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

A Vanishing Nova: Uranographia Britannica (ca. 1749)

In 1748, scientific instrument maker John Neale advertised the sale by subscription of a new “exact Survey of the Heavens.” It would offer not only “all the fix’d …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Knowledge by the Pound: The Renowned History of Giles Gingerbread (1768)

This stepwise saga of a rowdy youth’s progress toward Georgian bourgeois gentility is widely hailed as the paragon exemplar of Delectando monemus …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Philipp Hainhofer’s Große Stammbuch (1596–1633)

Art dealer and diplomat Philipp Hainhofer's 227-page volume collects the signatures of over seventy-five of Europe’s most notable seventeenth-century nobles.

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

A Hall of Mirrors: Cabala, Spiegel Der Kunst Und Natur, In Alchymia

Public Domain Review

Featuring four alchemical engravings by Raphael Custos — much reproduced since Carl Jung included the third as “The Mountain of the Adepts” in Psychology and Alchemy (1968) — Cabala’s leading symbol is the looking glass, which the author offers as a tool for penetrating the mysteries of alchemy and divinity.

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Cycling Art, Energy, and Locomotion (1889)

Innovations in transportation are “the most powerful factor in the evolution of man,” wrote the inventor and industrialist Robert Pittis Scott in the introduction to his treatise …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Arthur Wesley Dow’s Floating World: Composition (1905 edition)

Widely celebrated by art historians as the first design text of the American Arts & Crafts movement, Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition: A Series of Exercises Selected From a New System of Art Education revolutionized the American…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

A Renaissance Riddle: The Sola Busca Tarot Deck (1491)

The Latin motto TRAHOR FATIS (I am drawn by Fate) appears but four times in the Tarot masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, the Sola Busca deck, and yet it hangs unmistakably over the cards’ entire colorful procession …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Hieroglyphics of a Rope-Dancer: The Book of Fate (1822)

On July 4, 1822, in the midst of London’s most pronounced season of both Egypto - and Napoleonomania, there appeared in bookshops on the Strand, Piccadilly, and Fleet Street a most curious artifact: The Book of Fate: …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

The Spiralist

One halcyon spring day in 1903, the sixty-nine-year-old anatomist and naturalist Dr. James Bell Pettigrew sat at the top of a sloping street on the outskirts of St. Andrews, Scotland, perched inside a petrol-powered aëroplane of his own design…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Public Domain Review

Dr. Mitchill and the Mathematical Tetrodon

On the streets of lower Manhattan in the early nineteenth century, the “Nestor of American science,” Dr Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764–1831) was the commonest of sights, going about in his blue coat, buff-colored vest, …

Read the full essay.

Back to top >

Lit Hub

Why Did Everyone in the 19th Century Think They Could Talk to the Dead?

From about the last week of May through mid-July 1850, a steady stream of visitors made their way to a parlor in Barnum’s Hotel on Broadway…

Read the full essay.

Back to top >