AS YOU take stock this Mother’s Day, be glad you were not Whistler’s mother. This famous painting of Anna McNeill Whistler by her brilliant son, James, came to symbolize motherhood in the early twentieth century, especially when the U.S. Post Office placed it on a stamp in 1934. But, really, would you want to be remembered by [...]

  VICTORIAN artists painted an extraordinary number of portraits of women reading books.  Despite what feminists say, women were frequently seen in the act of contemplation in the nineteenth century. And painters found it inspiring. They saw something important in the act of feminine contemplation, as if it nourished them. Virginia Woolf claimed intelligent women would never be anything short of [...]

  BRITON RIVIÉRE painted this scene, Compulsory Education, in 1887. Here is an interesting description of the painter’s portraits of animals from the website, Victorian/Edwardian Painting.  Phillip Brown writes: Regarded as the most able successor to the great painter of animals Sir Edwin Landseer, Briton Riviére’s art was highly popular in the later nineteenth century when he exhibited sensitive [...]

  HERE is a brilliant essay by the Catholic artist Daniel Mitsui on mass media and Catholic liturgy. He writes: I have heard many times the claim that the Catholic Church should have great success in her New Evangelization, because Catholicism is a visual religion and contemporary society is also visual. But to call Catholicism a visual [...]