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This vividly colorful painting has a lot going on. As with Preachen’s “Still Life on a Balcony,” space is radically discontinuous here: flowers, table covering, fields, and sky each occupy their own flat plane; the dark brown stoneware pitcher…

In its objects, archictecture, and visual style, this painting gestures back to earlier centuries of allegorical still lifes. On this side of an ornate railing, the seeming bounty is undermined by intimations of suffering (gladiolus), overconsumption…

A vividly colored grouping avoids any appearance of symmetry or regularity of shape—even a painted plate isn’t circular. Likewise, mottling seems part of Preachen’s design as if to demonstrate that beauty can be irregular. Reds and oranges dominate…

At upper left are the flowers of this still life’s putative title, but it still doesn’t account for the majority of Preachen’s composition. Their bright orange petals activate several objects in a similar tone (fruit, a piece of fabric, a painted…

Two overlapping life-routes depict the President's journey from Hodginsville, KY to Washington, DC, and the return trip back to Springfield, IL by funeral train. After stops in New York City and Albany, it passed through upstate New York en route to…

The location of this painting isn’t clear: there’s no identifiable “mid-country highway,” and a “mid-county” highway in Maryland doesn’t seem to fit the landscape. Here, we look at hilly terrain under a cloudy sky that have rendered the mountaintops…

Powell depicts a calm, rural landscape, with a flowing stream that starts in the foreground and curves across the canvas. The colors of the work become hazier, and brushstrokes become more organic as the eye moves from the foreground to the…

Mandala forthrightly asserts that it was “Made by Timoteo Tzun Poros” during a Creative Artists Migrant Program Services (CAMPS) workshop. Its design is based upon a shield created in 1871 that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Guatemalan…

Legal proceedings in the Monroe County Surrogate Court evaluated, for the purposes of taxation, Mr. Harmon's real estate, personal property, and outstanding creditors. This document provides a glimpse into the financial life of a successful farmer of…

In order to handle increasing numbers of telephone calls, switchboards like this model from the 1880s employed operators to make connections between the parties. (Click on the image for diagrams illustrating the difference between single-line wires…