The artwork archive
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Artist: Albert Bierstadt
A docent-led visit to Albert Bierstadt's 1868 oil painting Among the Sierra Nevada, California, a vast western landscape made in Rome from earlier travels and now at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The article follows the depicted scene, identifies its elk, waterfowl and hidden trout, and explains what the European exhibition tour and the painting's later life as a glued interior wall reveal about its meaning.
Artist: Gian Lorenzo Bernini
A marble portrait bust of King Louis XIV, carved by Gian Lorenzo Bernini during his 1665 visit to Paris and now displayed at the Palace of Versailles. The sculpture records a rare moment when the king agreed to sit for his portrait and captures his royal presence in stone.
Artist: Gustav Klimt
Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, painted between 1907 and 1908, shows two lovers locked in an embrace, their bodies wrapped in a shimmering gold cloak. In this spoken tour, a docent explains what the painting depicts, how its composition and materials shape the narrative, and how the accepted reading of the work rests on the limited evidence available.
Artist: Johannes Vermeer
A gallery guide to Johannes Vermeer's Allegory of the Catholic Faith, in which a seated woman personifies Faith, her hand pressed to her breast and her face lifted, while a globe, a crushed serpent, an altar, a glass sphere and a painted tapestry build the allegory around her.
Artist: Thomas Cole
Thomas Cole's 1828 painting shows Adam and Eve leaving Paradise, dwarfed by towering rock formations as a brilliant light bursts through a narrow cleft. This gallery visit explores how Cole used scale, light and the meeting of two worlds to make the biblical expulsion legible.
Artist: Rembrandt
Rembrandt shows himself at thirty-four in a fur collar and gold-brocaded shirt, his arm resting on a stone ledge, looking directly back at us. This gallery tour takes that quiet confrontation as its subject: the costly historical dress set against loose, heavy paint, and what the picture does with the distance between wealth and the working hand.
Showing 79 to 84 of 156 artworks.