1850
Showing 38 works across all media from 1850
A Burial at Ornans
Courbet gave an ordinary village funeral the scale reserved for kings and saints, and the critics were furious about it.
The Scarlet Letter
Puritan Boston fastens a red letter to Hester Prynne's dress for adultery, and she refuses to name the child's father. Hawthorne turns public shame into something you feel in your body.
David Copperfield
Put to work in a warehouse as a boy, David escapes to an aunt he has never met. Dickens gave him his own childhood, and loved this novel above all the others.
Selected Poems
Daffodils, a solitary reaper singing in a field, and a valley revisited after five years: Wordsworth wrote these in ordinary speech and found that remembering keeps remaking the person who remembers.
View of Mount Fuji from Harajuku
Travelers go about their day along the road and Fuji sits pale behind them, near and far balanced with Hiroshige's usual quiet.
Night Scene in the Yoshiwara
Oi was Hokusai's daughter and studio collaborator, and her handling of lantern light against darkness beats anything else in the ukiyo-e of her time.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.