
I and the Village
A green-faced peasant and a cow look at each other, and the houses behind them are upside down. Chagall grew up in Vitebsk.

A green-faced peasant and a cow look at each other, and the houses behind them are upside down. Chagall grew up in Vitebsk.

Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.

Snowbound on a failing Massachusetts farm, Ethan Frome works beside a wife who is perpetually ill and the young cousin he has fallen for. Wharton makes poverty and duty feel like weather.

Orphaned by cholera in India, a sour, unloved child arrives on the Yorkshire moors and finds the key to a walled garden that brings her and her bedridden cousin back to life.

Marc used yellow for whatever was gentle and joyful, and this cow is kicking its legs out across the hills for the pleasure of it.

Stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris in 2010 and never recovered, so it survives here only as a photograph.

A dumpy Catholic priest with an umbrella solves crimes by imagining himself into the criminal until he could have done it. Chesterton answered Sherlock Holmes with conscience rather than forensics.

By Sousa's account he composed it in his head at sea, Christmas Day 1896; that piccolo obbligato does the rest.

Tucker's maid pressed Shelton Brooks's song on her in 1910, and it stayed her signature for the rest of her career.