1880s
Showing 229 works across all media from the 1880s
The Brothers Karamazov
Old Karamazov is murdered and each of his three sons had reason. Around the crime Dostoevsky stages the fiercest argument fiction has ever made about God and the suffering of children.
Starry Night
Van Gogh painted the churning sky and its eleven stars from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, partly from memory.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck runs off down the Mississippi with Jim, who is escaping slavery, and the moment he decides he would rather go to hell than turn him in is the hinge of American fiction.
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
Seurat spent two years building this riverbank out of tiny dots of unmixed color, applying optical theory to a crowd standing oddly still.
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
Manet worked from a real barmaid named Suzon and put her reflection in the wrong place, which people have been arguing about ever since.
The Essential Emily Dickinson
Dickinson wrote nearly eighteen hundred poems in a Massachusetts bedroom, on death, God, and her own mind, and remade the English lyric. Begin with "Because I could not stop for Death."
Luncheon of the Boating Party
Fourteen of Renoir's friends linger over the wreckage of lunch above the Seine, his future wife among them, cooing at a dog on the table.
Beyond Good and Evil
Philosophers smuggle their own prejudices in as truth, Nietzsche says, and the morality they defend was invented by the weak. He writes in short bursts aimed straight at the reader.
Sunflowers
Some blooms burst with petals and others have gone to seed, all yellow on yellow, painted to decorate the house where Gauguin was to come.
Portrait of a Lady
Isabel Archer, an American with opinions and a sudden fortune, turns down good proposals and marries badly in Italy. James stays so close inside her mind that her mistakes feel like your own.
Madame X
The strap fell off her shoulder in the 1884 version, Paris was scandalized, her family demanded it come down, and Sargent repainted the strap.
Bathers at Asnieres
Working men bathe on the bank while factory chimneys smoke across the river, the figures given the weight of a classical frieze.
Self-Portrait (van Gogh)
The background ripples around his head like a current in the same blue-green as his suit, and his beard burns red against it.
East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.